Body of Evidence

11

A freezing rain began to fall past midnight, and by morning the world was glass. I stayed in my house Saturday, my conversation with Al Hunt replaying in my mind, startling the solitude of my private thoughts like the thawing ice suddenly crackling to the earth beyond my window. I felt guilty. Like every other mortal who has ever been touched by suicide, I had the fallacious belief that I could have done something to stop it.

Numbly, I added him to the list. Four people were dead. Two deaths were blatant, vicious homicides, two of them were not, and yet all of the cases were somehow connected. Perhaps connected by a bright orange thread. Saturday and Sunday I worked in my home office because my downtown office would only remind me that I no longer felt in charge-for that matter, I no longer felt needed. The work went on without me. People reached out to me and then were dead. Respected colleagues like the attorney general asked for answers, and I did not have anything to offer.

I fought back in the only feeble way I knew how. I stayed in front of my home computer typing out notes about the cases and poring over reference books. And I made a lot of phone calls.

I did not see Marino again until we met at the Amtrak station on Staples Mill Road Monday morning. We passed between two waiting trains, the dark, wintry air warmed by engines and smelling of oil. We found seats in the back of our train and resumed a conversation we had started inside the station.

"Dr. Masterson wasn't exactly chatty," I said about Hunt's psychiatrist as I carefully set down the shopping bag I was carrying. "But I'm suspicious he remembers Hunt a lot more clearly than he's letting on."

Why was it I always got a seat with a footrest that didn't work?

Marino yawned voraciously as he pulled down his, which worked just fine. He didn't offer to exchange seats with me. If be had, I would have accepted.

He answered, "So Hunt would've been eighteen, nineteen when he was in the bin."

"Yes. He was treated for severe depression," I said.

"Yeah, well, I guess so."

"And what's that supposed to mean?" I asked.

"His type's always depressed."

"What is his type, Marino? "'Let's just say the word fag went through my mind more'n once when I talked to him," he said.

The word fag went through Marino's mind more than once when he talked to anybody who was different.

The train glided forward, silently, like a boat from a pier.

"I wish you'd taped that conversation," Marino went on, yawning again.

"With Dr. Masterson?"

"No, the one with Hunt. When he dropped by your crib," he said.

"It's moot and it doesn't matter," I replied uncomfortably.

"I don't know. Seems to me like the squirrel knew an awful lot. Wish like hell he'd hung around a little longer, so to speak."

What Hunt had said in my living room would have been significant were he still alive and not armored in alibis. The police had taken apart his parents' house. Nothing was found that might have linked Hunt to the murders of Beryl Madison and Gary Harper. More to the point, Hunt was eating dinner with his parents at their country club the night of Beryl's death, and he was with his parents at the opera when Harper was murdered. The stories had been checked out. Hunt's parents were telling the truth.

We bumped, swayed, and rumbled northbound, the train whistle hooting balefully.

"The stuff with Beryl pushed him over the edge," Marino was saying. "You want my opinion, he related to her killer to the point he freaked, took himself out of circulation, kissed off before he cracked."

"I think it's more likely Beryl reopened the old wound," I answered. "It reminded him of his inability to have relationships."

"Sounds like he and the killer are cut from the same cloth. Both of them unable to relate to women. Both of them losers'."

"Hunt wasn't violent."

"Maybe he was leaning that way and couldn't live with it," Marino said.

"We don't know who killed Beryl and Harper," I reminded him. "We don't know if it was someone like Hunt. We don't know that at all, and we still have no idea about the motive. The killer could just as easily be someone like Jeb Price. Or someone called Jim Jim."

"Jim Jim my ass," he said snidely.

"I don't think we should dismiss anything at this point, Marino."

"Be my guest. You run across a Jim Jim who graduated from Valhalla Hospital and now's a part-time terrorist carrying around orange acrylic fibers on his person, give me a buzz."

Settling down in his seat and shutting his eyes, he mumbled, "I need a vacation."

"So do I," I said. "I need a vacation from you."

Last night Benton Wesley had called to talk about Hunt, and I mentioned where I was going and why. He was adamant that it was unwise for me to go alone, visions of terrorists, Uzis, and Glasers dancing in his head. He wanted Marino with me, and I might not have minded had it not turned out to be such an ordeal. There were no other seats available on the six-thirty-five morning train, so Marino had booked both of us on the one leaving at four-forty-eight A.M. I ventured into my downtown office at three A.M. to pick up the Styrofoam box now inside my shopping bag. I was feeling physically punished, my sleep deficit climbing out of sight. The Jeb Prices of the world wouldn't need to do me in. My guardian angel Marino would spare them the trouble.

Other passengers were dozing, their overhead lamps switched off. Soon we were creaking slowly through the middle of Ashland and I wondered about the people living in the prim white frame homes facing the tracks. Windows were dark, bare flagpoles greeting us with stark salutes from porches. We passed sleepy storefronts-a barbershop, a stationery store, a bank-then picked up speed as we curved around the campus of Randolph-Macon College with its Georgian buildings and its frosted athletic field peopled at this early moonlit hour by a row of varicolored football sleds. Beyond the town were woods and raw red clay banks. I was leaning back in the seat, entranced by the rhythm of the train. The farther we got from Richmond the more I relaxed, and quite without intending to I drifted off to sleep.

I did not dream but was unconscious for an hour, and when I opened my eyes the dawn was blue beyond the glass and we were passing over Quantico Creek. The water was polished pewter catching light in laps and ruffles, and there were boats out. I thought of Mark. I thought of our night in New York and of times long past. I had not heard a word from him since the last cryptic message on my answering machine. I wondered what he was doing, and yet I was afraid to know.

Marino sat up, squinting groggily at me. It was time for breakfast and cigarettes, not necessarily in that order.

The dining car was half filled with semicomatose clientele who could have been sitting in any bus station in America and looked very much at home. A young man dozed to the beat of whatever was playing inside the headphones he wore. A tired woman held a squirming baby. An older couple was playing cards. We found an empty table in a corner, and I lit up while Marino went to see about food. The only positive thing I could say about the prepackaged ham and egg sandwich he came back with was that it was hot. The coffee wasn't bad.

He tore open cellophane with his teeth and eyed the shopping bag I had placed next to me on the seat. Inside it was the Styrofoam box containing samples of Sterling Harper's liver, tubes of her blood, and her gastric contents, packed in dry ice.

"How long before it thaws?" he asked.

"We'll get there in plenty of time, providing we don't make any detours/' I replied.

"Speaking of plenty of time, that's exactly what we got on our hands. You mind going over it again, the bit about this cough syrup shit? I was half asleep when you were rattling on about it last night."

"Yes, half asleep just like you are this morning."

"Don't you ever get tired?"

"I'm so tired, Marino, I'm not sure I'm going to live."

"Well, you better live. I sure as hell ain't delivering those pieces an' parts by myself," he said, reaching for his coffee.

I explained with the deliberation of a taped lecture. 'The active ingredient in the cough suppressant we found in Miss Harper's bathroom is dextromethorphan, an analogue of codeine. Dextromethorphan is benign unless you ingest a tremendous dose. It's the d-isomer of a compound, the name of which won't mean anything to you-"

"Oh, yeah? How do you know it won't mean nothing to me?"

"Three-methoxy-N-methylmorphinan."

"You're right. Don't mean a damn thing to me."

I went on, "There's another drug which is the 1-isomer of this same compound that dextromethorphan is the d-isomer of. The 1-isomer compound is levomethorphan, a potent narcotic about five times stronger than morphine. And the only difference between the two drugs as far as detection goes is that, when viewed through an optical rotatory device called a polarimeter, dextromethorphan rotates light to the right, and levomethorphan rotates light to the left."

"In other words, without this contraption you can't tell the difference between the two drugs," Marino concluded.

"Not in tox tests routinely done," I answered. "Levomethorphan comes up as dextromethorphan because the compounds are the same. The only discernible difference is they bend light in opposite directions, just as d-sucrose and 1-sucrose bend light in opposite directions even though they're both structurally the same disaccharide. D-sucrose is table sugar. L-sucrose has no nutritional value to humans."

"I'm not sure I get it," Marino said, rubbing his eyes. "How can compounds be the same but different?"

"Think of dextromethorphan and levomethorphan as identical twins," I said. "They're not the same people, so to speak, but they look the same-except one is right-handed, the other left-handed. One is benign, the other strong enough to kill. Does that help?"

"Yeah, I guess. So how much of this levomethorphan stuff would it take for Miss Harper to snuff herself?"

"Thirty milligrams would probably do it. Fifteen two-milligram tablets, in other words," I answered. "What then, saying she did?"

"She would very quickly slip into a deep narcosis and die."

— *

"You think she would've known about this isomer stuff?"

"She might have," I replied. "We know she had cancer, and we also suspect she wanted to disguise her suicide, perhaps explaining the melted plastic in the fireplace and the ashes of whatever else it was she burned right before she died. It's possible she deliberately left the bottle of cough syrup out to throw us off track. After seeing that, I wasn't surprised when dextromethorphan came up in her tox."

Miss Harper had no living relatives, very few friends -if any-and she didn't strike me as someone who traveled very often. After discovering she had recently made a trip to Baltimore, the first thing that came to mind was Johns Hopkins, which has one of the finest oncology clinics in the world. A couple of quick calls confirmed that Miss Harper had made periodic visits to Hopkins for blood and bone marrow workups, a routine relating to a disease she obviously had been quite secretive about. When I was informed of her medication, the pieces suddenly snapped together in my mind. The labs in my building did not have a polarimeter or any way to test for levomethorphan. Dr. Ismail at Hopkins had promised to assist if I could supply him with the necessary samples.

It was not quite seven now, and we were on the outer fringes of D.C. Woods and swamps streamed past until the city was suddenly there, the Jefferson Memorial flashing white through a break in the trees. Tall office buildings were so close I could see plants and lampshades through spotless windows before the train plunged underground like a mole and burrowed blindly beneath the Mall.

We found Dr. Ismail inside the pharmacology lab of the oncology clinic. Opening the shopping bag, I set the small Styrofoam box on his desk.

"Are these the samples we talked about?" he asked with a smile.

"Yes," I replied. "They should still be frozen. We came here straight from the train station."

"If the concentrations are good, I can have an answer for you in a day or so," he said.

"What exactly will you do with the stuff?" Marino inquired as he looked around the lab, which looked like every lab I have ever seen.

"It's very simple, really," Dr. Ismail replied patiently. "First I will make an extract of the gastric sample. That will be the longest, most painstaking part of the test. When that is done I place the extract into the polarimeter, which looks very much like a telescope. But it has rotatory lenses. I look through the eyepiece and rotate the lenses to the left and right. If the drug in question is dextromethorphan, then it will bend light to the right, meaning the light in my field will get brighter as I rotate the lenses to the right. For levomethorphan the opposite is true."

He went on to explain that levomethorphan is a very effective pain reliever prescribed almost exclusively for people terminally ill with cancer. Because the drug had been developed here, he kept a list of all Hopkins patients who were on it. The purpose was to establish the therapeutic range. The bonus for us was he had a record of Miss Harper's treatments.

"She would come in every two months for her blood and bone marrow workups and on each visit was given a supply, about two hundred fifty two-milligram tablets," Dr. Ismail was saying as he smoothed open the pages of a thick monitoring book. "Let's see… Her last visit was October twenty-eighth. She should have had at least seventy-five, if not a hundred tablets left."

"We didn't find them," I said.

"A shame." He lifted dark, saddened eyes. "She was doing so well. A very lovely woman. I was always pleased to see her and her daughter."

After a moment of startled silence, I asked, "Her daughter?"

"I assume so. A young woman. Blond…"

Marino cut in, "She with Miss Harper last time, the last weekend in October?"

Dr. Ismail frowned and said, "No. I don't recall seeing her then. Miss Harper was alone."

"How many years had Miss Harper been coming here?" I asked.

"I'll have to pull her chart. But I know it has been several. At least two years."

"Was her daughter, the young blond woman, always with her?" I asked.

"Not so often in the early days," he answered. "But during the past year she was with Miss Harper on every visit, except for this last one in October, and possibly the one before that. I was impressed. Being so ill, well, it is nice when one has the support of family."

"Where did Miss Harper stay when she was here?" Marino's jaw muscles were flexing again.

"Most of the patients stay in hotels located nearby. But Miss Harper was fond of the harbor," Dr. Ismail said.

My reactions were slowed by tension and lack of sleep.

"You don't know what hotel?" Marino persisted.

"No. I have no idea…"

Suddenly I began seeing images of the fragmented typed words on filmy white ash.

I interrupted both of them. "May I see your telephone directory, please?"

Fifteen minutes later Marino and I were standing out on the street looking for a cab. The sun was bright, but it was quite cold.

"Damn," he said again. "I hope you're right."

"We'll find out soon enough," I said tensely.

In the business listings of the telephone directory was a hotel called Harbor Court, bor Co, bor C. I kept seeing the miniature black letters on the wisps of burned paper. The hotel was one of the most luxurious in the city, and it was directly across the street from Harbor Place.

"I tell you what I can't figure," Marino went on as another taxi passed us by. "Why all the bother? So Miss Harper kills herself, right? Why go to all the trouble to do it in such a mysterious way? Make any sense to you?"

"She was a proud woman. Suicide was probably a shameful act to her. She may not have wanted anyone to figure it out, and she may have chosen to take her life while I was inside her house."

"Why?"

"Perhaps because she didn't want her body found a week later."

Traffic was terrible, and I was beginning to wonder if we were going to have to walk to the harbor.

"And you really think she knew about this isomer business?"

"I think she did," I said.

"How come?"

"Because she would wish for death with dignity, Marino. It's possible she'd premeditated suicide for quite a long time, in the event her leukemia became acute and she didn't want to suffer or make others suffer any longer. Levomethorphan was a perfect choice. In most instances, it never would have been detected-providing a cough suppressant containing dextromethorphan was found inside her house."

"No shit?" he marveled as a taxi, thank God, pulled out of traffic and headed our way. "I'm impressed. You know, I really am."

"It's tragic."

"I don't know."

He peeled open a stick of gum and began to chew with vigor. "Me, I wouldn't want to be tied down to no hospital bed with tubes in my nose. Maybe I would've thought like she did."

"She didn't kill herself because of her cancer."

"I know," he said as we ventured off the curb. "But it's related. Gotta be. She's not long for this world anyway. Then Beryl gets whacked. Next, her brother gets whacked."

He shrugged. "Why hang around?"

We got into the taxi and I gave the driver the address. For ten minutes we rode in silence. Then the taxi crept almost to a stop and threaded through a narrow arch leading into a brick courtyard bright with beds of ornamental cabbages and small trees. A doorman dressed in tails and a top hat was immediately at my elbow, and I found myself escorted inside a splendid light-filled lobby of rose and cream. Everything was new and clean and highly polished, with fresh flowers arranged on fine furniture, and crisp members of the hotel staff alighting where needed but not obtrusive.

We were shown to a well-appointed office, where the well-dressed manager was talking on the telephone. T. M. Bland, according to the brass nameplate on his desk, glanced up at us and quickly completed his call. Marino wasted no time telling him what we wanted.

"The list of our guests is confidential," Mr. Bland replied, smiling benignly.

Marino helped himself to a leather chair and lit a cigarette, despite the THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING sign in plain view on the wall, then reached for his wallet and flashed his badge.

"Name's Pete Marino," he said laconically. "Richmond P.O., Homicide. This here's Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia. We sure as hell understand your insistence on confidentiality, and respect your hotel for that, Mr. Bland. But you see, Sterling Harper's dead. Her brother Gary Harper's dead. And Beryl Madison's dead, too. Gary Harper and Beryl was murdered. We're not too sure yet what happened to Miss Harper. That's what we're here for."

"I read the newspapers, Detective Marino," Mr. Bland said, his composure beginning to waver. "Certainly the hotel will cooperate with the authorities in any way possible."

"Then you're telling me they was guests here," Marino said.

"Gary Harper was never a guest here."

"But his sister and Beryl Madison was."

"That is correct," Mr. Bland said.

"How often, and when was the last time?"

"I'll have to pull Miss Harper's account," Mr. Bland answered. "Will you please excuse me for a moment?"

He left us for no more than fifteen minutes, and when he returned he handed us a computer printout.

"As you can see," he said, reseating himself, "Miss Harper and Beryl Madison stayed with us six times during the past year and a half."

"Approximately every two months," I thought out loud, scanning the dates on the printout, "except for the last week in August and the last few days of October. Then it appears Miss Harper stayed here alone."

He nodded.

"What was the purpose of their visits?"

Marino asked.

"Business, possibly. Shopping. Simply relaxation. I really don't know. It isn't the practice of the hotel to monitor our guests."

"And it ain't my practice to care about what your guests is up to unless they turn up dead," Marino said. "Tell me what you observed when the two ladies was here."

Mr. Eland's smile disappeared, and he nervously plucked a gold ballpoint pen off a notepad and then seemed at a loss as to what purpose the action served. Tucking the pen in the breast pocket of his starched pink shirt, he cleared his throat.

"I can only tell you what I noted," he said.

"Please do," Marino said.

"The two women made separate travel arrangements. Usually Miss Harper checked in the night before Beryl Madison did, and they often didn't leave at the same time, or, uh, together."

"What do you mean, they didn't leave at the same time?"

"I mean that they may have checked out on the same day, but not necessarily at the same time, and they didn't necessarily choose the same means of transportation. Not in the same cab, for example."

"Were they both headed for the train station?" I inquired.

"It seems to me Miss Madison frequently took the limo to the airport," Mr. Bland replied. "But yes. I think Miss Harper's habit was to take the train."

"What about their accommodations?" I asked, studying the printout.

"Yeah," Marino butted in. "It don't say nothing about their room on this thing."

He tapped the printout with his index finger. "They stay in a double or a single? You know, one bed or two?"

His cheeks coloring at the implication, Mr. Bland replied, "They always stayed in a double room facing the water. They were guests of the hotel, Detective Marino, if you really need to know that detail, and certainly it isn't for publication."

"Hey, what do I look like, a damn reporter?"

"You're saying they stayed in your hotel free of charge?" I asked, confused.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You mind explaining that?" Marino said.

"It was the desire of Joseph McTigue," Mr. Bland answered.

"I beg your pardon?" I leaned forward and stared hard at him. "The contractor from Richmond? You're referring to that Joseph McTigue?"

"The late Mr. McTigue was one of the developers of much of the waterfront. His holdings include substantial interests in this hotel," Mr. Bland replied. "It was his request that we accommodate Miss Harper in any way possible, and we continued to honor this after his death "

Minutes later I was slipping a dollar bill to the doorman and Marino and I were getting into a cab.

"You mind telling me who the hell Joseph McTigue is?" Marino asked as we took off into traffic. "I got a feeling you know."

"I visited his wife in Richmond. At Chamberlayne Gardens. I told you about it."

"Ho-ly shit."

"Yes, it's rather thrown me for a loop, too," I agreed.

"You want to tell me what the hell you make of that?"

I didn't know, but I was beginning to formulate a suspicion about it.

"Sounds pretty weird to me," he went on. "For starters, the bit about Miss Harper's taking the train while Beryl usually flew, when both of them was heading in the same direction."

"It's not so strange," I said. "Certainly they couldn't travel together, Marino. Miss Harper, Beryl, couldn't risk that. They weren't supposed to have anything to do with each other, remember? If Gary Harper routinely picked up his sister at the train station, there wouldn't be a way for Beryl to suddenly disappear if she and Miss Harper were traveling together."

I paused as it came to mind. "It may also be that Miss Harper was assisting with Beryl's book, giving her background information about the Harper family."

Marino was staring out his side window.

He said, "You want my opinion, I think the two ladies was closet lesbians."

I saw the driver's curious eyes in the rearview mirror.

"I think they loved each other," I said simply.

"So maybe the two of them was having a little affair, getting together every two months here in Baltimore where nobody knew 'em or paid 'em any mind.

"You know," Marino persisted, "maybe that's why Beryl decided to run to Key West. She was a fag-ette, would've felt at home there."

'Tour homophobia really is rabid, not to mention tiresome, Marino. You should be careful. People might wonder about you."

"Yeah, right," he said, not the least bit amused. I was silent.

He went on, "Point is, maybe Beryl found herself a little girlfriend while she was down there."

"Maybe you ought to check into that."

"No way, Jose. No way I'm getting bit by no goddamn mosquito in the AIDS capital of America. And talking to a bunch of queers ain't my idea of a good time."

"Have you gotten the Florida police to check out her contacts down there?" I asked seriously.

"A couple of them said they poked around. Talk about a sorry assignment. They was afraid to eat anything, drink the water. One of the queerbaits from the restaurant she wrote about in her letters is dying of AIDS even as we speak. The cops had to wear gloves the entire time."

"During the interviews?"

"Oh, yeah. Surgical masks, too-at least when they was talking to the guy dying. Didn't come up with nothing helpful, none of the information worth a damn."

"I guess not," I commented. "You treat people like lepers and they're not likely to open up to you."

"You ask me, they ought to saw off that part of Florida and send it drifting out to sea."

"Well, fortunately," I said, "nobody asked you."

There were numerous messages waiting on my answering machine when I returned home midevening.

I hoped one would be from Mark. I sat on the edge of my bed drinking a glass of wine and half-heartedly listening to the voices drifting out of the machine.

Bertha, my housekeeper, had the flu and announced she would not be able to come the next day. The attorney general wanted to meet me for breakfast tomorrow morning and went on to report that Beryl Madison's estate was suing over the missing manuscript. Three reporters had called demanding comment, and my mother wanted to know if I would prefer turkey or ham for Christmas- her not-so-subtle way of finding out if she could count on me for at least one holiday this year.

I did not recognize the breathy voice that followed.

"… You have such pretty blond hair. Is it real or do you bleach it, Kay?"

I rewound the tape. I frantically opened the drawer of my bedside table.

"… Is it real or do you bleach it, Kay? I left a little gift for you on your back porch."

Stunned and with Ruger in hand, I rewound the tape one more time. The voice was almost a whisper, very quiet and deliberate. A white male. I could determine no accent, sense no emotion in the tone. The sound of my feet on the stairs unnerved me, and I turned on the lights in each room I passed through. The back porch was off the kitchen, and my heart was pounding as I stepped to one side of the picture window overlooking the bird feeder and barely parted the curtains, the revolver held high, barrel pointed at the ceiling.

Light seeped from the porch, pushing back the darkness from the lawn and etching the shapes of trees in the wooded blackness at the edge of my property. The brick stoop was bare. I saw nothing on it or the steps. I curled my fingers around the doorknob and stood very still, my heart hammering as I unfastened the dead bolt.

A scraping against the wooden exterior of the door was barely perceptible as it opened, and when I saw what was looped over the outer knob I slammed the door so hard the windows shook.

Marino sounded as if I had gotten him out of bed.

"Get here now!"

I exclaimed into the phone, my voice an octave higher than usual.

"Stay put," he said firmly. "Don't open the door for nobody until I get there. You got that? I'm on my way."

Four cruisers lined the street in front of my house, and in the darkness officers probed the woods and shrubbery with long fingers of light.

"The K-nine unit's on the way," Marino said, setting his portable radio upright on my kitchen table. "Seriously doubt the drone hung around, but we'll make damn sure he didn't before we book on out of here."

It was the first time I had ever seen Marino in jeans, and he might have looked casually stylish were it not for the pair of white athletic socks and penny loafers, and the gray sweatshirt one size too small. The smell of fresh coffee filled the kitchen. I was percolating a pot big enough to accommodate half the neighborhood. My eyes were darting around, looking for things to do.

"Tell it to me again real slow," Marino said as he lit a cigarette.

"I was playing back the messages on my answering machine," I repeated. "When I got to the last one it was this voice, a white male, young. You'll have to hear it for yourself. He said something about my hair, wanting to know whether I bleach it."

Marino's eyes annoyingly shifted to my roots. "Then he said he'd left a present on my back porch. I came down here, looked out the window and didn't see anything. I don't know what I was expecting. I don't know. Something awful in a box, gift wrapped. When I opened the door, I heard something scraping against the wood. It was looped over the outer knob."

Inside a plastic evidence envelope in the center of the table was an unusual gold medallion attached to a thick gold chain.

"You're sure it's what Harper was wearing at the tavern?" I asked again.

"Oh, yeah," Marino replied, his face tight. "No question about it. No question where the thing's been all this time either. The squirrel took it from Harper's body and now you're getting an early Christmas present. Looks like our friend's gotten sweet on you."

"Please," I said impatiently.

"Hey. I'm taking it serious, okay?"

He wasn't smiling as he slid the envelope closer and examined the necklace through the plastic. "You notice the clasp's bent, so's the little ring at the end. Looks to me like maybe it got broke when he yanked it off Harper's neck. Then he maybe fixes it with pliers. He's probably been wearin' it. Shit."

He tapped an ash. "Find any injury on Harper's neck from the chain?"

"There wasn't much of his neck left," I said dully.

"Ever seen a medallion like this before?"

"No."

It looked like a coat of arms in eighteen-karat gold, but there was nothing engraved on it except the date 1906 on the back.

"Based on the four jeweler's marks stamped on the back, I think its origin is English," I said. "The marks are a universal code indicating when the medallion was made, where, and by whom. A jeweler could interpret them. I know it's not Italian-"

"Doc-"

"It would have a seven-fifty stamped on the back for eighteen-karat gold, five hundred for the equivalent of fourteen - karat-"

"Doc…"

"I have a jeweler consultant at Schwarzschild's-"

"Hey," Marino said loudly. "It don't matter, all right?"

I was prattling on like a hysterical old woman.

"A friggin' family tree of everybody who ever owned this necklace ain't going to tell us the most important thing-the name of the squirrel who hung it on your door."

His eyes softened a little and he lowered his voice. "What you got to drink in this crib? Brandy. You got any brandy?"

"You're on the job."

"Not for me," he said, laughing. "For you. Go pour yourself this much."

Touching his thumb to the middle knuckle of his index finger, he marked off two inches. "Then we'll talk."

I went to the bar and returned with a small snifter. The brandy burned going down and instantly began to spread warmth through my blood. I stopped shivering inside. I stopped shaking. Marino eyed me curiously. His attentiveness began to make me conscious of many things. I was wearing the same rumpled suit I had worn on the train back from Baltimore. My pantyhose were biting into my waist and bagging around my knees. I was aware of a maddening compulsion to wash my face and brush my teeth. My scalp itched. I was certain I looked awful.

"This guy ain't into empty threats," Marino said quietly as I sipped.

"He's probably just jerking me around because I'm involved in the case. Taunting. It's not unusual for psychopaths to taunt investigators or even send them souvenirs."

I didn't really believe it. Certainly Marino didn't.

"I'm going to keep a unit or two staked out. We'll watch your house," he said. "And I got a couple rules for you. Follow them to the letter. No fooling around."

He met my eyes. "For starters, whatever your normal routines are, I want you to scramble them up as much as possible. If you usually go to the grocery store on Friday afternoon, go on Wednesday next time and pick a different store. Don't ever set foot outside your house or car without looking around. You see anything that catches your eye, like a strange car parked on the street or evidence anybody's been on your property, you haul ass out of there or keep yourself locked up tight in here and call the police. When you walk inside your house, if you sense anything - I mean if you so much as get a creepy feeling-get out of here, find a phone and call the police, ask an officer to accompany you inside to make sure everything's okay."

"I've got a burglar alarm," I said.

"So did Beryl."

"She let the bastard in."

"You don't let nobody in you're not sure about."

"What's he going to do, bypass my alarm system?" I persisted.

"Anything's possible."

I remembered Wesley saying that.

"No leaving your office after dark or when nobody else is around. The same applies to your coming in. If you usually come in when it's still pretty dark, the parking lot empty, start coming in a little later. Keep your answering machine on. Tape everything. You get another call, get hold of me immediately. A couple more and we'll put a trap on your line-"

"Like you did with Beryl?" I was beginning to get angry.

He didn't respond.

"What, Marino? Will my rights be honored in the breach, too? When it's too damn late to do me any damn good?"

"You want me to sleep on your couch tonight?" he asked calmly.

Facing the morning was hard enough. I envisioned Marino in boxer shorts, a T-shirt stretched taut over his big belly as he padded barefooted in the general direction of the bathroom. He probably still left the seat up.

"I'll be fine," I said.

"You've got a license for carrying a gun, don't you?"

"Carrying a concealed weapon?" I asked.

"No."

He pushed back his chair, deciding. "I'll have a little chat with Judge Reinhard in the morning. We'll get you one."

That was all. It was almost midnight.

Moments later I was alone and unable to sleep. I downed another shot of brandy, then one more, and lay in bed staring up at the dark ceiling. If you have enough bad things happen to you in life, others begin to privately question if you invite them, are a magnet that attracts misfortune or danger or dysfunction. I was beginning to wonder. Maybe Ethridge was right, I got too involved in my cases and placed myself at risk. I'd had close calls before that could have sent me spinning off into eternity.

When I finally faded into sleep, I dreamed nonsensical things. Ethridge burned a hole in his vest with a cigar ash. Fielding was working on a body that was beginning to look like a pin cushion because he couldn't find an artery that had any blood. Marino was riding a pogo stick up a steep hill and I knew he was going to fall.