Blow Fly

120

SCARPETTA CANT RELEASE Albert Dard from her mind. She imagines the scars on his little body and is well aware that self-mutilation is an addiction, and if he continues hurting himself it seems likely that he will be committed to psychiatric hospitals again and again until he becomes as mentally ill as those patients whose diagnoses justify their being institutionalized.

Albert Dard doesn't need to be committed. He needs help. He needs for someone to at least attempt to find out why his anxiety increased so severely a year ago that he shut down, repressed his feelings and perhaps memories to such an extreme that now he needs self-inflicted pain to experience control, a brief release and an affirmation of his own existence. Scarpetta recalls the boy's almost dissociated state on the plane while he played with trading cards, violent ones relating to an ax. She envisions his extreme distress at the thought of no one meeting him, of an abandonment that she doubts is anything new.

With each passing moment, she becomes increasingly angry at those who are supposed to take care of him and frightened for his safety.

Digging inside her pocketbook as she drinks coffee in Dr. Laniers guest house, she finds the telephone number she wrote down when Albert waited for an aunt who did not intend to pick him up, but orchestrated events so that Scarpetta would take care of him. It no longer matters what manipulations or conspiracies were on Mrs. Guidon's mind. Perhaps it was all a lure to get Scarpetta to that house to see what she knows about Charlotte Dard's death. Perhaps Mrs. Guidon is now satisfied that Scarpetta knows nothing more about the death than has ever been known.

She dials the number and is startled when Albert answers the phone.

"It's the lady who sat next to you on the plane," she says.

"Hi!" he greets her, surprised and very pleased. "How come you're calling me? My aunt said you wouldn't."

"Where is she?"

"I don't know. She went outside."

"Did she leave the house in her car?"

"No."

"I've been thinking about you, Albert," Scarpetta says. "I'm still in town, but I'm leaving soon, and wondered if I could come by for a visit."

"Now?" The thought seems to make him happy. "You'd come see just me?"

"Would that be all right?"

He eagerly says it would.