Blow Fly

25

DELRAY BEACH, FLORIDA, is hot at six o'clock p.m., and Kay Scarpetta turns away from her kitchen window, deciding she will work another hour before venturing outside.

She has become an expert in judging shadows and light, monitoring them in her scientific manner before heading out to check on her fruit trees or walk on the beach. Making rather useless decisions based on analysis and calculations of how the sun moves across the sky helps her feel as though she has not lost complete control of her life.

Her two-story yellow stucco house is modest by her standards, just an old place with wobbly white railings, failing plumbing and wiring, and air-conditioning that seems to have a mean-spirited will of its own. Tiles sometimes fall out of the backsplash behind the electric stove, and yesterday the bathtubs cold-water handle pulled loose from the wall. For the sake of survival, she has read home-repair books and manages to keep her surroundings from falling on her head as she tries not to remember what days were like before she relocated hundreds of miles south of her former career, and barely an hour's drive north of Miami, where she was born. The past is dead, and death is just one more phase of existence. This is her creed. Most of the rime she believes it.

Time on Earth is an opportunity to become more highly evolved, and then people move on or cross over-a concept that by no means is original to her, but she is not one to accept what isn't obvious without dissecting it first. After much contemplation, her findings about eternity are simple: No one good or evil ceases to exist; life is energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed; it is recycled. Therefore, it is possible that the pure of heart and the purely evil have been here before and will be here again. Scarpetta doesn't believe in heaven or hell, and she no longer goes to Mass, not even on religious holidays.

"What happened to your Catholic guilt?" Lucy asked her several Christmases ago when they were mixing a strong batch of eggnog and church was not on the agenda.

"I can't participate in something I no longer believe in," Scarpetta replied, reaching for freshly ground nutmeg. "Especially if I am at odds with it, which is worse than having a complete loss of faith in it."

"The question is, what is it? Are you talking about Catholicism or God?"

"Politics and power. They have an unmistakable stench, rather much like the inside of the morgue fridge. I can close my eyes and know what's there. Nothing alive."

"Thanks for sharing," Lucy said. "Maybe I'll just drink a little straight rum on the rocks. Raw eggs suddenly don't seem very appealing."

"You're not the least bit squeamish." Scarpetta poured Lucy a glass of eggnog, adding a sprinkle of nutmeg. "Drink up before Marino gets here and there's none left."

Lucy smiled. The only thing that makes her gag is walking into a ladies' room and finding someone in the middle of changing a baby's diaper. To Lucy, that stench is worse than a decomposing body buzzing with blow flies, and she has experienced her share of offensive horrors because of her and her aunt's unusual occupations.

"This mean you no longer believe in eternity?" Lucy challenged her.

"I believe in it more than ever."

Scarpetta has made the dead speak most of her life, but always through the silent language of injuries, trace evidence, diseases and investigative details that can be interpreted with medicine, science, experience and deduction that borders on the intuitive, a gift that cannot be learned or taught. But people change. She is no longer entirely clinical. She has come to accept that the dead continue to exist and intervene in the lives of their earthbound loved ones and enemies. It is a conviction that she conceals from her detractors and certainly never mentions in professional presentations or in journal articles or in court.

"I've seen psychics on TV talking about people dying and crossing over-I believe that's the term," Lucy observed, sipping her eggnog. "I don't know. It's pretty interesting. The older I get, the less certain I am of most things."

"I've noticed your advanced aging process," Scarpetta replied. "When you turn thirty, you will begin to have visions and see auras. Let's hope you don't get arthritis."

This conversation took place in Scarpetta's former home in Richmond, a fortress of stone she designed with love and an abandonment of financial reason, sparing no expense in her insistence on old woods, exposed beams, solid doors and plaster walls, and a kitchen and office that were perfect for her precise way of going about her business, whether it was over a microscope or a Viking gas stove.

Life was good. Then it wasn't and never would be again. So much went wrong. So much was spoiled and lost and could never be restored. Three years ago, she was well along her journey to disaster. She had resigned as president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. The governor of Virginia was about to fire her. One day, she cleared her office walls of scores of commendations, certifications and degrees that are now packed up somewhere in cardboard boxes. The pre-crash Scarpetta was impeccably, if not rigidly, intellectual, completely confident of her knowledge, her truthfulness and her ability to excavate for answers. She was a legend in law enforcement and criminal justice, and to some people unapproachable and cold. Now she has no staff except her secretary, Rose, who followed her to Florida with the excuse that it would be nice to "retire" near West Palm Beach.

Scarpetta can't get over Benton Wesley. She has tried. Several times she has dated perfectly acceptable men, only to recoil at their touch. A simple touch, and it isn't Benton's, and then she is reminded. Then she reviews her last images of him, burned, mutilated. She still regrets reading his autopsy report, and yet she doesn't. She regrets touching his ashes and scattering them, and yet she doesn't. It was crucial, it really was, she constantly tells herself when she remembers the feel of the silky, lumpy cremains, when she remembers returning him to the pure air and sea he loved.

She wanders out of the kitchen, clutching the same mug of coffee she has warmed up in the microwave at least four times since noon.

"Dr. Scarpetta, can I get you anything?" Rose calls out from a spare bedroom that serves as her office.

"Nothing would help," Scarpetta replies, halfway joking, as she heads in the direction of Rose's voice.

"Nonsense." It is her secretary's favorite rebuttal. "I told you if you went to work for yourself, you'd only be busier, if that was possible. And worn-out and overextended."

"And what did I tell you about retirement?"

Rose looks up from the autopsy report she is proofreading on her computer. She tabs to the space for brain and types 1,200 grams. Within normal limits and corrects a typo.

Nails click across the wooden floor like Morse code as Scarpettas bulldog hears voices and walks rather lazily, then pauses, then walks some more toward them, then sits.

"Come here, Billy-Billy," Scarpetta affectionately calls out.

He looks at her with drooping eyes.

"His name is Billy," Rose reminds her, although there is no point in doing so. "If you keep calling him Billy-Billy, he'll think he lives with an echo or has a split personality."

"Come here, Billy-Billy."

He gets up, takes his time. Click-click.

Rose is wearing a peach pantsuit. It is wool, as are all of Rose's suits. The house is on the beach. It is bloody hot and humid, and Rose doesn't hesitate to walk outside in a skirt and long-sleeved blouse and water the hibiscus, climb a ladder to pick bananas or key limes, or save baby frogs from drowning in the trap of the pool. It's a wonder that moths haven't carried off every bit of clothing Rose owns, but she is a proud woman, her dignity masking a fragile, gentle nature, and it is out of her respect for herself and her boss that she takes time each morning to make sure her choice of outfit for the day is pressed and clean.

If anything, she seems secretly pleased that her sense of style is dated, some of her suits so old that she was wearing them more than a decade ago when she first started working for Scarpetta. Rose hasn't changed her hair, either, still pinning it up in a fussbudget French twist and refusing to get rid of the gray. Good structure makes the building, and her bones are exquisite. At the age of sixty-seven, men find her attractive, but she hasn't dated since her husband died. The only man Scarpetta has ever seen her flirt with is Pete Marino, and she doesn't mean it and he knows it, but they have tormented each other since Scarpetta was appointed chief medical examiner of Virginia, what now seems as though it were another incarnation.

Billy is panting as he appears at the desk. He is not quite a year old, white with a large brown spot on the middle of his back, and his under-bite reminds Scarpetta of a backhoe. He sits at her feet, looking up.

"I don't have any…"

"Don't say that word!" Rose exclaims.

"I wasn't going to. I was going to spell it."

"He can spell now."

Billy suffers no language barrier with the words bye-bye and treat. He also recognizes no and sit but pretends he doesn't, stubbornness the right of his breed.

"You better not have been chewing on anything back there," Scarpetta warns him.

In the last month, Billy has taken a fancy to gnawing and ripping molding off doorframes and around the base of the walls, especially in Scarpetta's bedroom.

"This isn't your house, and I will have to pay for all repairs when I move out." She wags her finger at him.

"It would be worse if it was your house," Rose remarks as the dog continues to stare up at Scarpetta and wag his tail, which looks like a croissant.

She picks up a slim stack of mail from her desk and offers it to her boss.

"I've dealt with the bills. There are a couple personal letters. And the usual journals and so forth. And this, from Lucy."

She directs Scarpettas attention to a large manila envelope, her name and address neatly written in black Magic Marker, the return address Lucy's New York office, also written in Magic Marker. The envelope is marked Personal in large letters and underlined twice. It is a die-hard habit for Scarpetta to look at postmarks, and this one is puzzling.

"The postal code isn't for her part of the city," Scarpetta says. "Lucy always mails things from her office, and as a matter of fact, she always overnights mail to me. I can't remember a single time she's ever sent me anything by regular mail, not since she was in college."

Rose doesn't seem concerned. " A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,'" she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, it is her favorite quote.

Rose shakes the envelope. "Doesn't sound like anything dangerous in there," she teases. "If you're feeling one of your bouts of paranoia coming on, I'll open it for you, but it's marked Personal… "

"Never mind." Scarpetta takes it and her other mail from Rose.

"And Dr. Lanier from Baton Rouge left a message." Rose pecks at the keyboard and corrects another typo. "It's regarding the Charlotte Dard case. He says you'll get it Monday, his reports and all that. He sounded stressed. He wants to know what you find, immediately."

She gives her boss a look that always reminds Scarpetta of a schoolteacher about to single out some unsuspecting student and put him or her on the spot. "I think somethings going on in this case, something worse than a drug overdose."

Scarpetta massages Billys soft, speckled ears. "Her cause of death isn't straightforward. That's plenty bad. What's worse, the case is eight years old."

"I don't understand why it's such a big deal right now, as if they don't have enough unsolved murders and suspicious deaths down there. Those abducted women. Lord."

"I don't know why it's suddenly become a priority, either," Scarpetta replies. "But the fact is, it has, and I feel obliged to do what I can."

"Because nobody else can be bothered."

"I can be bothered, can't I, Billy-Billy?"

"Well, let me tell you a thing or two, Dr. Echo. I think there's something the coroner down there has no intention of telling you."

"There had better not be," Scarpetta remarks as she walks off.