Black Notice

23

I'd been home only long enough to hang up my coat and drop my briefcase by the door when the telephone rang. It was twenty minutes past eight, and my first thought was Lucy. The only update I'd gotten was that Jo would be transferred to MCV sometime this weekend.

I was frightened and becoming resentful. No matter what policies, protocols or judgment dictated, Lucy could contact me. She could let me know she and Jo were all right. She could tell me where she was.

I quickly grabbed the phone and was both surprised and uneasy when former Deputy Chief Al Carson's voice came over the line. I knew he would not contact me, especially at home, unless it was very important, the news very bad.

"I'm not supposed to be doing this but someone has to," he said right off. "There's been a homicide at the Quik Cary. That convenience store off Cary, near Libbie. You know which one I mean? Kind of a neighborhood market?"

He was talking rapidly and nervously. He sounded scared.

"Yes," I said. "It's close to my house."

I picked up a clipboard and began writing notes on a call sheet.

"An apparent robbery. Somebody came in, cleaned out the drawer and shot the clerk. A female."

I thought of the videotape I had looked at yesterday.

"When did this happen?" I asked.

"We think she got shot not more than an hour ago. I'm calling you myself because your office doesn't know yet."

I paused, not quite sure what he meant. In fact, what he'd just said couldn't possibly be right.

"I called Marino, too," he went on. "I guess there's nothing more they can do to me anymore."

"What do you mean my office doesn't know yet?" I asked.

"Police aren't supposed to be calling the M.E. anymore until we finish with the scene. Until the crime techs do, and they're just now getting there. So it could be hours…"

"Where the hell is this coming from?" I asked, although I knew.

"Dr. Scarpetta, I was pretty much forced to resign, but I would have anyway," Carson told me. "There are changes I can't live with. You know my guys have always gotten along really well with your office. But Bray's put in all these new people-what she did to Marino, that was enough to make me quit right there. But what matters right now is this makes two convenience store killings in a month. I don't want anything messed up. If it's the same guy, he's gonna do it again."

I called Fielding at home and told him what was going on.

"You want me to…?" he started to say.

"No," I cut him off. "I'm going right now. We're getting goddamn screwed, Jack."

I drove fast. Bruce Springsteen was singing "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and I thought of Bray. I had never really hated anyone before. Hate was poison. I had always resisted it. To hate was to lose, and it was all I could do right now to resist the heat of its flames.

The news came on, the homicide the lead story, covered live at the scene.

"… in what is the second convenience store murder in three weeks. Deputy Chief Bray, what can you tell us?"

"Details are sketchy at this time," her voice sounded inside my car. "We do know that several hours earlier, an unknown suspect entered the Quik Cary here and robbed it and shot the clerk."

My car phone rang.

"Where are you?" Marino said.

"Getting close to Libbie.°' "I'm going to pull into the Cary Town parking lot. I need to tell you what's going on because nobody's gonna tell you the time of day when you get there."

"We'll see about that."

Minutes later, I turned into the small shopping center and parked in front of Schwarzchild Jewelers, where Marino was sitting in his truck. Then he was inside my car, wearing jeans and boots, and a scuffed leather coat with a broken zipper and fleece lining as bald as his head. He had splashed on a lot of cologne, meaning he had been drinking beer. He tossed a cigarette butt and red ashes sailed through the night.

"Everything's under control;" he sardonically said. "Anderson's at the scene."

"And Bray."

"She's holding a goddamn press conference outside the convenience store," Marino said with disgust. "Let's go."

I drove back out to Cary Street.

"Start with this, Doc," he began. "The asshole shoots her at the counter, in the head. Then it's looking like he puts out the closed, sign, locks the door and drags her to the back, into the storeroom, and beats the holy shit out of her."

"He shot her and then beat her up?' :Yeah:" 'How were the police notified?" I asked.

"At seven-sixteen the burglar alarm went off," he replied. "The back door's armed even when the joint's open for business. Cops get there and find the front door locked, closed sign out, like I said. They go around back, find that door wide open. They go in, she's on the floor, blood everywhere. Tentatively identified as Kim Luong, thirty-year-old Asian female."

Bray continued to dominate the news.

"You said something earlier about a witness," a reporter was asking her.

"Only that a citizen reported seeing a male in dark clothing in the area around the time we believe the homicide took place," Bray replied. "He was ducking into an alleyway right down the block there. The person who reported this did not get a good look. We're hoping if someone else did, he'll call us. No detail is too small. It takes all of us to protect our community."

"What's she doing? Running for office?" Marino said.

"Is there a safe somewhere inside the store?" I asked him.

"In the back where her body was found. It hadn't been opened. So I've been told."

"Video camera?" I asked.

"Nope. Maybe he learned after whacking Gant and is hitting joints that aren't doing the Candid Camera number on him."

"Maybe."

He and I both knew he was making assumptions, pushing hard because he wasn't about to let go of his job.

"Carson tell you all this?" I asked.

"It ain't the cops who've suspended me," he answered. "And already I know you're thinking the M.O.'s a little different. But it ain't a science, Doc. You know that"

Benton used to toss that line at us with that wry smile of his. He was a profiler, an expert in modus operandi and patterns and predicting. But each crime had its own special choreography because every victim was different. Circumstances and moods were different, even the weather was different, and the killer often modified his routine. Benton used to complain about Hollywood renditions of what behavioral scientists could do. He wasn't clairvoyant, and violent people weren't driven by software.

"Maybe she pissed him off or something," Marino went on. "Maybe he'd just had a bad conversation with his mother, who the hell knows?"

"What's going to happen when people like Al Carson don't call you anymore?"

"It's my damn case," he said as if he hadn't heard me. "Gant was my case, and this one is too, any way you look at it. Even if it's not the same killer, who's gonna figure that out before I do, since I'm the one who knows everything there is about it?"

"You can't always barge in with both barrels going," I said. "That's not going to work with Bray. You've got to find a way to make it worth her while to tolerate you, and you better figure that out in the next five minutes."

He was silent as I turned onto Libbie Avenue.

"You're smart, Marino," I added. "Use your head. This isn't about turf or egos. This is about a woman who's dead:' "Shit," he said. "What the fuck's wrong with people?"

The Quik Cary was a small market that had neither a plate-glass front nor gas pumps. It wasn't brightly lit up or located in a spot that attracted customers either coming off or getting on heavily traveled roads. Except during the holidays, it stayed open only until six.

The parking lot throbbed red and blue, and in the midst of rumbling engines, cops and an awaiting rescue crew, Bray gloried in an aura of television lights that floated around her like a flotilla of small suns. She. was dressed in a long red wool cape, heels, and diamond earrings that flashed with each turn of her beautiful, head. By all appearances she had just rushed out of a black-tie party.

It was beginning to sleet as I lifted my crime case out of the trunk. Bray spotted me before the media did, and then her eyes found Marino and anger touched her face.

"… will not release that until her family has been notified," she was saying to the press.

"Watch this," Marino said under his breath.

He walked with a sense of urgency toward the store and did something I'd never seen him do before. He left himself wide open for a media ambush. He even went so far as to get on his portable radio as he tensely cast about, sending out every signal imaginable that he was in charge and knew many secrets.

"You in there, two-oh-two?" his voice carried to me as I locked up my car.

"Ten-four," a voice came back.

"In front, comin' in," Marino mumbled.

"Meet ya."

At least ten reporters and cameramen instantly surrounded him. It was amazing how fast they moved.

"Captain Marino?"

"Captain Marino!"

"How much money was stolen?"

Marino didn't shoo them off. Bray's eyes dragged across his face like claws as all attention shifted to him, this man whose neck her foot was on.

"Did they keep less than sixty dollars in the drawer like other convenience stores do?"

"Do you think convenience stores should have security guards this time of year?"

Marino, unshaven and full of beer, looked into the cameras and said, "If it was my store, I sure as hell would." - I locked my car. Bray was walking toward me.

"So you attribute these two robbery-homicides to the Christmas season?" another reporter said to Marino.

"I attribute them to some squirrel who's cold-blooded and got no conscience. He'll do it again," Marino answered. "And we've got to stop him and that's what we're trying to do."

Bray confronted me as I made my way around police cars. She had her cape pulled tightly around her, and she was as cold and stinging as the weather.

"Why do you let him do this?" she asked me.

I stopped in my tracks and looked her in the eye, my frosted breath puffing like a coal train about to run her over.

"Let is not a word I use with Marino," I said. "I suspect you're finding that out the hard way."

A reporter for a local gossip magazine raised his voice above the others and said, "Captain Marino! Talk on the street is you're not a detective anymore. What are you doing here"

"Deputy Chief Bray has me on special assignment," Marino grimly replied into microphones. "I'll be heading up this investigation."

"He's finished;" Bray said to me.

"He won't go quietly. You'll never hear so much noise in your life;" I promised her as I walked off.