Blow Fly

20

HER CAREER EXPERIENCE does not show unless she intentionally displays it like a weapon.

She was still in high school when she began interning for the FBI and designed their Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, known as CAIN. When she graduated from the University of Virginia, she became an FBI special agent and was given free rein as a computer and technical expert. She learned to fly helicopters and became the first female member of the FBI Special Forces Hostage Rescue Team. Hostility, harassment and crude innuendos followed her on every deployment, raid and punishing training session. Rarely was she invited to join the men for a beer in the Academy bar called the Boardroom. They did not confide in her about raids gone wrong or their wives and children or girlfriends. But they watched her. There was talk about her in the showers.

Her career with the FBI was aborted on a dewy October morning when she and her HRT partner, Rudy Musil, were shooting live nine-millimeter rounds inside the FBI Academy's Tire House. As its name implies, the highly dangerous indoor range was filled with old tires that tactical agents could dive over, duck under, dart around and hide behind as they practiced maniacal maneuvers. Rudy was breathing hard and sweating as he crouched behind a mound of tires and smacked another magazine into his Glock, peeking around a threadbare Michelin as he looked for Lucy, his partner.

"All right. Come clean," he yelled at her through gun smoke. "What's your sexual preference?"

"To have it as often as possible.¹" She reloaded and snapped back the slide while rolling between stacks of tires before firing five rounds at a pop-up target thirty feet away. The cluster of head shots was so tight, it looked like a small flower.

"Oh yeah?" Two bullets loudly clinked a pop-up thug holding a machine gun. "Me and the guys got bets on it." Rudy's voice came closer as he crawled on his belly across the filthy concrete floor.

He pounced through towers of sooty tires and grabbed an unsuspecting Lucy by her steel-reinforced Red Wing boots.

"Gotcha!" He laughed, setting his pistol on top of a tire.

"Are you fucking crazy?" Lucy cleared a round from the chamber of her pistol, the ejected cartridge bouncing off the floor. "We're using live ammo, you fucking idiot.'"

"Let me see that thing." Rudy got serious. "It doesn't sound right."

He took the pistol from her, dropped out the magazine. "Loose spring." He shook the pistol before setting it next to his gun on the tire. "Aha. Rule number one: Never lose your weapon."

He got on top of her, laughing as he wrestled with her, somehow believing this was what she had been waiting for, and that she was excited and didn't mean it when she continued screaming, "Get off of me, asshole!"

Finally, he restrained both her wrists in one of his powerful hands. He plunged the other inside her shirt and shoved his tongue inside her mouth as he pushed up her bra. "The guys only say," he panted, "you're a dyke 'cause"-he fumbled with her belt buckle-"they can't have you…"

Lucy bit through Rudy's bottom lip and knocked her forehead hard against the bridge of his nose. He spent the rest of the day in the emergency room.

FBI attorneys reminded her that litigation benefitted no one, especially since Rudy believed that she "wanted it" and had probable cause to believe it. Lucy told Rudy she wanted it "as often as possible," he reluctantly stated in the forms he was forced to complete for Internal Affairs.

"It's true," Lucy calmly agreed during a sworn statement before a panel of five lawyers, not one of whom represented her. "I said that, but I didn't say I wanted it with him or with anyone right then in the middle of live fire in the middle of the Tire House in the middle of a maneuver in the middle of my period."

"But you'd led him on in the past. You'd given Agent Musil reason to think you were attracted to him."

"What reason?" Lucy was baffled under oath. "Offering him a stick of gum now and then, helping him clean his guns, hanging with him to run the Yellow Brick Road and other obstacle courses, the worst one at the Marine Corps base, joking around, that sort of thing?"

"Quite a bit of togetherness," the lawyers agreed with one another.

"He's my partner. Partners have quite a bit of togetherness."

"Nonetheless, you seemed to devote quite a lot of your time and attention to Agent Musil, including personal attention, such as asking him about his weekends and holidays, and calling him at home when he was out sick."

"Perhaps joking around, as you put it, might have been interpreted as flirting. Some people joke around when they flirt."

The lawyers agreed once again, and what was worse, two of them were women-women in masculine skirt suits and high-heel shoes, women whose eyes reflected an identification with the aggressor, as if their irises were glued on to their eyeballs backward and were dull instead of bright, and blind to what was in front of them. The women lawyers had the dead eyes of people who kill themselves off to get what they want or to become what they fear.

"I'm sorry," Lucy said as her attention sharpened and she avoided the dead eyes. "You stepped on me. Please repeat," she muttered aviation jargon.

"I'm sorry? Who stepped on you?" Frowns.

"You interfered with my transmission to the tower. Oops, there is no tower. This is uncontrolled air space and you get to do whatever you want. Right?"

More frowns. The lawyers glanced at one another as if Lucy was very weird.

"Never mind," she added.

"You're an attractive single woman. Can you see how Agent Musil might have misinterpreted joking around, phone calls at home, et cetera, as your being sexually interested in him, Agent Farinelli?"

"It has also been stated that you often referred to Agent Musil and yourself as yin and ylang.'"

"I've told Rudy a hundred times that ylang is a Malayan tree. Ylang-ylang, to be more precise. A tree with yellow flowers that perfume is distilled from… but he doesn't always tune his ears to the right frequency." Lucy fought a smile.

The lawyers were taking notes.

"I never called Rudy ylang.' Now and then I did call him yang' and he called me ying,' no matter how many times I told him the word was yin, "Lucy explained further.

Silence, pens poised.

"It has to do with Chinese philosophy." Lucy might as well have been talking to a chalkboard. "Balance, counterparts."

"Why did you call each other… whatever?"

"Because we're two peas in a pod. Do you know that expression?"

"I think we're familiar with the term two peas in a pod. Again, such nicknames suggest a relationship…"

"Not the kind you're talking about," Lucy replied without rancor, because she did not hate Rudy in the least. "He and I are two peas in a pod because neither of us fit in. He's Austrian and the other guys call him Musili because he's, quote, full of shit, which he doesn't think is the least bit funny. And I'm a lesbian, a man-hater, because no normal woman who likes men would want to be HRT and make the cut. According to the laws of machismo."

Lucy scanned the women's dead eyes and decided the male attorneys' eyes were dead, too. The only sign of life in them was the glint of small, miserable creatures who hated someone like Lucy because she dared to resist being overpowered and frightened by them.

"This interview, deposition, inquisition, whatever the hell it is, is bullshit," Lucy told them. "I have no interest in suing the Fucking Bureau of Investigation. I took care of myself in the Tire House. I didn't report the incident. Rudy did. He had to explain his injuries. He claimed responsibility. He could have lied. But he didn't, and the two of us are eye to eye." She used the word eye to remind the lawyers of their dead eyes, as if somehow the lawyers knew their eyes were dead and incapable of seeing a reality that flexed with truth and possibilities and begged humans to partake of it and war against the dead-eyed people who were ruining the world.

"Rudy and I have acted as our own mediator," Lucy went on, calmly. "We have reestablished that we are partners, and one partner doesn't do what the other doesn't want or commit any act that might betray the other partner or place him or her in harm's way. And he told me he was sorry. And he meant it. He was crying."

"Spies say they are sorry. They also cry." A flush was climbing up the throat of a hostile woman attorney in pinstripes and skinny high heels that reminded Lucy of bound feet. "And your accepting his apology isn't an option, Agent Farinelli. He attempted to rape you." She emphasized the point, assuming it would humiliate and victimize Lucy again by inviting the male attorneys to envision her naked and sexually assaulted on the sooty concrete floor of the Tire House.

"I didn't know Rudy was accused of being a spy," Lucy replied.

She resigned from the FBI and was hired by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which the FBI unfairly considers a collection of backwoods boys who bust up moonshine stills and wear tool belts and guns.

She became an expert fire investigator in Philadelphia, where she helped stage Benton Wesley's murder, which included procuring the body of an anatomical donation bound for dissection at a medical school. The dead man was elderly, with thick silver hair, and after he was incinerated inside a torched building, a visual identification was unreliable if not impossible. All a shocked Scarpetta saw at the filthy, water-soaked, smoking scene was a charred body and a faceless skull with silver hair and a titanium wristwatch that had belonged to Benton Wesley. Under secret orders from Washington, the chief medical examiner in Philadelphia was ordered to falsify all reports. On paper, Benton was dead, just one more homicide added to the FBI's crime statistics for 1997.

After he vanished into the black hole of the witness protection program, ATF immediately transferred Lucy to the Miami Field Office where she volunteered for dangerous undercover work and talked her way into it, despite reservations on the part of the Special Agent in Charge. Lucy had an attitude. She was volatile. No one close to her except Pete Marino understood why. Scarpetta didn't know or remotely suspect the truth. She assumed Lucy was going through a terrible phase because she couldn't cope with Benton being dead, when the truth was that Lucy couldn't cope with Benton being alive. Within a year of her new post in Miami, she shot and killed two drug dealers in a takedown that went bad.

Despite video surveillance tapes that clearly showed she had saved herself and the life of her undercover partner, there was talk. There was ugly gossip and disinformation, and one administrative investigation after another. Lucy quit ATF. She quit the feds. She cashed in her dot-com stocks before the economy destabilized and crashed after 9-11. She invested a portion of her wealth, along with her law enforcement experience and talent, into creating a private investigative agency she calls The Last Precinct. It's where you go when there's no place left. It isn't advertised or listed in any directory.