Trace - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 45

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"He always denies it and gets away with it," she adds. "You know he has a sister in the Air Force. I've always wondered if it has to do with that. She's quite a lot older than him."

It is at this precise moment that Dr. Marcus walks into the conference room. He wears another white cotton shirt, a sleeveless undershirt showing through it, and his tie is dark blue and narrow. His eyes drift past Scarpetta and fix on Mrs. Paulsson.

"I don't believe we've met," he says to her in an authoritative but cordial tone.

"Mrs. Paulsson," Dr. Scarpetta says, "this is the chief medical examiner, Dr. Marcus."

"Did one of you invite Mrs. Paulsson?" He looks at Scarpetta, then at Special Agent Weber. "I'm afraid I'm confused."

Mrs. Paulsson gets up from the table, her movements slow and muddled as if her limbs are communicating different messages to each other. "I don't know what's happened. I just came for the paperwork and her little gold heart earrings and the bracelet."

"I'm afraid it's my fault," Scarpetta says, getting up too. "I saw her waiting and made an assumption. I apologize."

"That's right," Dr. Marcus says to Mrs. Paulsson. "I heard you might come by this morning. Please let me express my sympathy." He smiles his condescending smile. "Your daughter is a very high priority here."

"Oh," Mrs. Paulsson replies.

"I'll walk you out." Scarpetta opens the door for her. "I'm truly sorry," she says as they walk along the gray-blue carpet, past the coffee machine, and into the main corridor. "I hope I haven't embarrassed or upset you."

"Tel! me where Gilly is," she says, stopping in the middle of the corridor. "I have to know. Please tell me exactly where she is."

Scarpetta hesitates. Such questions are not unusual for her but they are never simple to answer. "Gilly is on the other side of those doors." She turns around and points down the length of the corridor to a set of doors. Beyond them is another set of doors, then the morgue and its coolers and freezers.

"I suppose she's in a coffin. I've heard about the pine boxes places like this have," Mrs. Paulsson says, her eyes filling with tears.

"No, she's not in a coffin. There are no pine boxes here. Your daughter's body is in a cooler."

"My poor baby must be so cold," she cries.

"Gilly doesn't feel the cold, Mrs. Paulsson," Scarpetta says kindly. "She's not feeling any discomfort or pain. I promise."

"You've seen her?"

"Yes, I have," Scarpetta replies. "I examined her."

"Tell me she didn't suffer. Please tell me she didn't."

But Scarpetta can't tell her that. To tell her that would be a lie. "There are a lot of tests still to be done," she replies. "The labs will be doing tests for quite some time. Everybody's working very hard to find out exactly what happened to Gilly."

Mrs. Paulsson cries quietly as Scarpetta leads her down the corridor, back to the administrative offices, and asks one of the clerks to leave her cubicle to give Mrs. Paulsson copies of the reports she has requested and to release Gilly's personal effects, which are a pair of gold heart earrings and a leather bracelet, nothing more. Her pajamas and bedding and whatever else the police gathered are considered evidence and aren't going anywhere right now. Scarpetta is just walking back to the conference room when Marino appears, walking quickly along the corridor, his head bent and face flushed.

"Not a good morning so far," she comments when he walks up. "Not for you either, it appears. I've been trying to get hold of you. I guess you got my message."

"What's she doing here?" he blurts out, referring to Mrs. Paulsson and visibly upset.

"Picking up Gilly's personal effects, copies of reports."

"She can do that when they can't even decide who gets her body?"

"She's next of kin. I'm not sure what reports they're releasing to her. I'm not sure of anything that goes on around here," she says. "The FBI's shown up for the meeting. I don't know who else has or will. The latest twist is that Frank Paulsson allegedly sexually harasses female pilots."

"Huh." Marino is in a hurry and acting perfectly bizarre, and he smells like booze and looks like hell.

"Are you all right?" she asks. "What am I saying? Of course you're not."

"It's no big deal," he says.

Marino heaps sugar into his coffee. He must be in very bad shape to take refined white sugar, because it is off-limits in his diet, absolutely the worst thing he can put into his mouth right now.

"You sure you want to do that to yourself?" Scarpetta asks. "You're going to be sorry."

"What the hell was she doing here?" He stirs in another spoonful of sugar. "I walk in the morgue and there's the kid's mother walking down the hallway. Don't tell me she was viewing Gilly, because I know she isn't viewable. So what in the hell was she doing here?"

Marino is dressed in the same black cargo pants and windbreaker and LAPD baseball cap, and he hasn't shaved and his eyes are exhausted and wild. Maybe after the FOP lounge, he went out to see one of his women, one of those lowlife women he used to meet in the bowling alley and get drunk with and sleep with.

"If you're going to be in a mood, maybe it's better you don't go into the meeting with me," Scarpetta says. "They didn't invite you. So I don't need to make matters worse by showing up with you when you're in a mood. You know how you get when you eat sugar these days."

"Huh," he says, looking at the closed conference room door. "Yeah, well, I'll show those assholes a mood."

"What's happened?"

"There's talk going around," he says in a low, angry voice. "About you."

"Talk going around where?" She hates the kind of talk he means and usually pays little attention to it.

"Talk about you moving back here, and that's really why you're here." He looks accusingly at her, sipping his poisonously sweet coffee. "What the hell are you holding back from me, huh?"

"I wouldn't move back here," she says. "I'm surprised you would listen to baseless, idle talk."

"I ain't coming back here," he says, as if the talk is about him and not her. "No way. Don't even think about it."

"I wouldn't think about it. Let's don't think about it at all right now." She walks on to the conference room and opens the dark wooden door.

Marino can follow her if he wants, or he can stand out by the coffee machine, eating sugar all day. She isn't going to coax or cajole him. She'll have to find out more about what's bothering him, but not now. Now she has a meeting with Dr. Marcus, the FBI, and Jack Fielding, who stood her up last night, and whose skin is more inflamed than when she saw him last. No one speaks to her as she finds a chair. No one speaks to Marino as he follows her and pulls out a chair next to hers. Well, this is an inquisition, she thinks.

"Let's get started," Dr. Marcus begins. "I guess you've been introduced to Special Agent Weber from the FBI Profiling Unit," he says to Scarpetta, calling the unit by the wrong name. It is the Behavioral Science LInit, not the Profiling Unit. "We have a real problem on our hands, as if we didn't have enough problems." His face is grim, his small eyes glittering coldly behind his glasses. "Dr. Scarpetta," he says loudly. "You reautopsied Gilly Paulsson. But you also examined Mr. Whitby, the tractor driver, did you not?"

Fielding stares down at a file folder and says nothing, his face raw and red.

"I wouldn't say I examined him," she replies, giving Fielding a look. "Nor do I have any idea what this is about."

"Did you touch him?" asks Special Agent Karen Weber.

"I'm sorry. But is the FBI also involved in the tractor drivers death?" Scarpetta asks.

"Possibly. We'll hope not, but quite possibly," says Special Agent Weber, who seems to enjoy questioning Scarpetta, the former chief.

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