else moves inside the garage near the open window, and I turn around to see what it is, but it is too dark to see anything.
“Sock? Is that you over there?”
The dark, frigid air moves around me, and the blow to my back feels like a hammer hitting me between my shoulder blades, as if a loud hissing dragon is attacking me, and I lose my balance.
A piercing scream and hissing, and a warm, wet mist spatters my face as I fall hard against the SUV and swing with all my might at whatever it is. The Maglite cracks like a bat against something hard that gives beneath the weight of the blow and then moves, and I swing again and hit something again, something that feels different. I smell the iron smell of blood and taste it on my lips and in my mouth as I swing again and again at air, and then the lights are on and the glare is blinding and I’m covered with a fine film of blood as if I’ve been spray-painted with it. Benton is inside the garage, pointing a pistol at the woman in a huge black coat facedown on the rubberized floor. I notice blood pooling under her right bloody hand, and near it, a severed fingertip with a glittery white French nail, and near that, a knife with a thin steel blade and a thick black handle with a release button on the shiny metal guard.
“Kay? Kay? Are you all right? Kay! Are you all right?”
I realize Benton is shouting at me as I crouch by the woman and touch the side of her neck and find her pulse. I make sure she is breathing and turn her over to check her pupils. Neither of them is fixed. Her face is bloody from the Maglite smashing into it, and I am startled by the resemblance, the dark blond hair cut very short, the strong features, and the full lower lip that look like Jack Fielding’s. Even the small ears close to the sides of her head look like his, and I feel the strength in her upper body, her shoulders, although she isn’t a large person, maybe five-foot-six or -seven and slender but with large bones like her dead father. All this is flooding my senses as I tell Benton to rush into the house and call 911, and to bring a container of ice.
23
A warm front moved in during the night and brought more snow, this time a gentle snow that falls silently, muting all sound, covering everything that is ugly, softly rounding whatever is sharp and hard.
I sit up in bed inside the master bedroom on the second floor of the house in Cambridge, and snow is coming down, piling in the bare branches of an oak tree on the other side of the big window nearest me. A moment ago a fat gray squirrel was there, perfectly balanced on the smallest twig, and we were eye to eye, his cheeks moving as he stared through the window at me while I sifted through the paperwork and photographs in my lap. I smell old paper and dust and the medicine smell of the wipes I used on Sock, who I suspect hadn’t had his ears cleaned in recent memory, maybe not ever, not the way I cleaned them. He didn’t like it at first, but I talked him into it with a soft voice and a sweet-potato treat that Lucy brought by when she gave me a container of the same wipes she uses on her bulldog. The miconazole-chlorhexidine is good for pachydermatis, I made the mistake of mentioning to my niece very early this morning when she stopped by to check on me.
Jet Ranger wouldn’t appreciate being called a pachyderm, Lucy retorted. He’s not an elephant or a hippopotamus, and there’s only so much one can do about his weight. She has him on a new diet for seniors, but he can’t exercise because of his bad hips, and the snow gives him a rash on his paws for some reason, and his legs are too short for snow this deep, so he can’t go on even the briefest walk this time of year, she went on and on, and I’d truly offended her. But that’s the way Lucy can get when she’s worried and scared, and most of all she’s upset she wasn’t here last night. She’s angry she wasn’t here to deal with Dawn Kincaid, but I’m not sorry in the least. I can’t say I’m proud of myself for giving someone a linear skull fracture and a concussion, but if Lucy had been in the garage instead of me, there would be one more person dead. My niece would have killed Dawn Kincaid for sure, probably shot her, and there are enough people dead.
It’s also possible that Lucy wouldn’t have survived the encounter, I don’t care what she says. It depends on two details that made the difference in my still being here and Dawn Kincaid being locked up on the forensic ward of an area hospital. I don’t think she was expecting me to walk into the garage. I think she was lurking on the other side of the gaping window, waiting for me to take Sock into the dark backyard. But I surprised her by entering the garage first to get what I’d left in the car, and by the time she slipped through the big space where the window was supposed to be, I’d already opened the box and slung the level-4-A tactical vest over my shoulder. When she stabbed at my back with the injection knife, it hit a nylon-covered ceramic-Kevlar plate, and the terrific jolt caused by that absolute stopping action caused her fingers to slide along the blade. She cut three fingers to the bone and severed the tip of her pinkie at the same time she was releasing the CO2, and a mist of her blood sprayed all over me.
My point to Lucy was that unless she’d caused Dawn to lose the surprise element for the attack and unless Lucy also just happened to have on body armor or at least have it draped over her torso, she might not have been as fortunate as I was. So my niece should stop saying it’s a damn shame she wasn’t here last night, claiming that she sure as hell would have taken care of things, as if I didn’t, because I did, even though it was luck. I think I took care of things just fine and only hope I can take care of a far more important matter that hasn’t killed me yet but at times has certainly felt like it might.
“She’d told me there had been catcalls and ugly comments,” Mrs. Pieste is telling me over the phone as I go over her daughter’s case with her. “Calling her a Boer. Telling the Boers to go home, and as you know, that’s Afrikaans for farmer but really meant to disparage all white South Africans. And I kept telling the man from the Pentagon that I didn’t care about the reason, whether it was Noonie and Joanne being white or American or assumed to be South African. And, of course, they weren’t South African. I didn’t care why. I just didn’t want to believe the suffering he described.”
“Do you remember who that man from the Pentagon was?” I ask.
“A lawyer.”
“It wasn’t a colonel in the army,” I hope out loud.
“It was some young lawyer at the Pentagon who worked for the secretary of defense. I don’t remember his name.”
Then it wasn’t Briggs.
“A fast-talking one,” Mrs. Pieste adds disdainfully. “I remember I didn’t like him. But I wouldn’t have liked anybody who told me the things he did.”
“The only comfort I can offer out of all of this,” I repeat, “is Noonie and Joanne didn’t suffer the way you’ve been led to believe. I can’t say with absolute certainty that they weren’t aware of being smothered, but it is extremely likely they weren’t aware because they were drugged.”
“But that would have been tested for,” Mrs. Pieste’s voice says, and she has a Massachusetts accent, can’t pronounce R’s, and I didn’t realize she’s originally from Andover. After Noonie’s murder, the Piestes moved to New Hampshire, I just found out.
“Mrs. Pieste, I think you understand nothing was tested as it was supposed to be,” I reply.
“Why didn’t you?”
“The medical examiner in Cape Town—”
“But you signed the death certificate, Dr. Scarpetta. And the autopsy report. I have copies that lawyer from the Pentagon sent me.”
“I didn’t sign them.” I refused to sign documents that I knew were a lie, but knowing they were a lie made me guilty of it anyway. “I don’t have copies, as hard as that probably is for you to believe,” I then say. “They weren’t supplied to me. What I have are my own notes, my own records, which I mailed back to the US before I left South Africa because I worried my luggage would be gone through, and it was.”
“But you signed what I have.”
“I promise I didn’t,” I reply calmly but firmly. “My guess is certain people made certain my signature was forged on those falsified documents in the event I decided to do what I’m doing now.”
“If you decided to tell the truth.”
It’s so hard to hear it stated so bluntly. The truth. Implying what I’ve told or not told over the years makes me a liar.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her again. “You had a right to know the truth back then, at the time of your daughter’s death. And the death of her friend.”
“I can see why you didn’t say anything back then, though,” Mrs. Pieste says, and she sounds only slightly
