Book of the Dead

Chapter 23

Bull holds his cap in his hands.

He is stooped over a little in the front seat, mindful that his head touches the roof if he sits up straight, which is what he’s prone to do. Bull carries himself with pride, even when he’s just been bailed out of the city jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

“I sure thank you for the ride, Dr. Kay,” he says as she parks in front of her house. “I’m sorry for your trouble.”

“Don’t keep saying that, Bull. I’m really angry right now.”

“I know you are, and I sure am sorry, because it’s nothing you did.” He opens his door and is slow working his way out of the front seat. “I tried to get the dirt off my boots, but it looks like I messed up your mat a little, so I think I best clean it or at least shake it out.”

“Don’t apologize anymore, Bull. You’ve been doing it since we left the jail, and I’m so mad I could spit, and next time something like this happens, if you don’t call me right away, I’m going to be mad at you, too.”

“Wouldn’t want that.” He shakes out his mat, and she’s getting the idea that he’s about as stubborn as she is.

It’s been a long day full of painful images, and near misses, and bad smells, and then Rose called. Scarpetta was up to her elbows in Lydia Webster’s decomposed body when Hollings appeared at the autopsy table and said he had news and she needed to hear it. How Rose found out, exactly, isn’t exactly clear, but a neighbor of hers who knows a neighbor of a neighbor of Scarpetta’s — someone she’s never met — heard a rumor that the neighbor Scarpetta has met — Mrs. Grimball — had Bull arrested for trespassing and attempted burglary.

He was hiding behind a pittosporum to the left of Scarpetta’s front porch, and Mrs. Grimball happened to spot him while she was looking out her upstairs window. It was nighttime. Scarpetta can’t blame a neighbor for being alarmed by such a sight, unless that neighbor happens to be Mrs. Grimball. Calling nine-one-one to report a prowler wasn’t enough. She had to embellish her story and claim Bull was hiding on her property, not Scarpetta’s, and the long and short of it is Bull — who has been arrested before — went to jail, where he’s been since the middle of the week, and where he’d likely still be, had Rose not interrupted an autopsy. After Scarpetta was attacked in a parking garage.

Now Will Rambo is in the city jail, not Bull.

Now Bull’s mother can relax. Doesn’t have to keep lying, saying he’s out picking oysters or just out, period, because the last thing she wants is for him to get fired again.

“I’ve thawed stew,” Scarpetta says, unlocking her front door. “There’s plenty of it, and I can only imagine what you’ve had to eat for the last few days.”

Bull follows her into the foyer, and the umbrella stand grabs her attention and she stops and feels terrible. She reaches inside it and pulls out Marino’s motorcycle key and the magazine from his Glock, then the Glock itself from a drawer. She feels so unsettled, she almost feels sick. Bull doesn’t say anything, but she can feel him wondering about what she just retrieved from the umbrella stand, why those items were in there. It’s a moment before she can talk. She locks the key, the magazine, and the pistol inside the same metal box where she keeps the bottle of chloroform.

She warms up stew and homemade bread, and sets a place at the table, and pours a big glass of peach-flavored iced tea and drops in a sprig of fresh mint. She tells Bull to sit down and eat, that she’ll be on the upstairs porch with Benton, and to call up to them if Bull needs anything. She reminds him that too much water and the daphne will curl up and die in a week and the pansies need deadheading, and he sits down and she serves him.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she says. “You know more about gardening than I do.”

“Never hurts to be reminded,” he says.

“Maybe we should plant some daphne by the front gate so Mrs. Grimball can smell its lovely fragrance. Maybe it will make her more pleasant.”

“She was trying to do the right thing.” Bull opens his napkin and tucks it into his shirt. “I shouldn’t have been hiding, but after that man on the chopper showed up in the alley with a gun, I’ve been keeping my eye out. It was a feeling I had.”

“I believe in trusting feelings.”

“I know I do. There’s a reason for them,” Bull says, tasting his tea. “And something told me to wait in the bushes that night. I was watching your door, but the funny thing about it is I should have been watching the alley. Since you told me that’s where the hearse probably was when Lucious got killed, meaning that killer was back there.”

“I’m glad you weren’t.” She thinks of Morris Island and what they found there.

“Well, I wish I had been.”

“It would have been nice if Mrs. Grimball had bothered to call the police about the hearse,” Scarpetta says. “She has you thrown in jail and doesn’t bother reporting a hearse in my alley late at night.”

“I saw him brought into lockup,” Bull says. “They locked him up, and he was fussing his ear hurt, and one of the guards asked him what happened to his ear, and he said he got bit by a dog and it’s infected and he needs a doctor. There was a lot of talk about him, about his Cadillac with a stolen tag, and I heard a policeman say that man cooked some lady on a grill.” Bull drinks his tea. “Been thinking Mrs. Grimball could’ve seen his Cadillac, and she didn’t tell about it any more than she did the hearse. Not to the police, she didn’t. Funny how people think one thing they see’s important, and something else isn’t. You might think to ask if a hearse in the alley at night means somebody died and maybe you should look into it. What if it’s somebody you know? She won’t like going to court.”

“None of us will like it.”

“Well, she won’t like it the most,” Bull says, lifting his spoon but too polite to eat while they’re talking. “She’ll think she can smart off at the judge. I’d buy me a ticket to see that. Some years back, I was working in this very garden, and I seen her throw a bucket of water on a cat hiding under her house because it just had kittens.”

“Don’t say anything more, Bull. I can’t stand it.”

She goes up the stairs, and walks through the bedroom to the small porch that overlooks the garden. Benton is talking on the phone and probably has been ever since she saw him last. He’s changed into khakis and a polo shirt, and he smells clean and his hair is damp, and behind him is a trellis of copper pipes she constructed so passionflowers could climb like a lover up to her window. Below is the flagstone patio, and then the shallow pond she fills with an old, leaky hose. Depending on the time of year, her garden is a symphony. Crepe myrtles, camellias, canna lilies, hyacinths, hydrangea, daffodils, and dahlias. She can’t plant enough pittosporum and daphne, because anything that has a lovely scent is her friend.

The sun is out, and suddenly she’s so tired, her vision is blurry.

“That was the captain,” Benton says, putting the phone down on a glass-top table.

“Are you hungry? Can I get you some tea?” she asks.

“How about I get you something?” Benton looks at her.

“Take off your glasses so I can see your eyes,” Scarpetta says. “I don’t feel like looking into your dark glasses right now. I’m so tired. I don’t know why I’m so tired. I didn’t used to get this tired.”

He takes off his glasses, folds them, and sets them on the table. “Paulo’s resigned and not coming back from Italy, and I don’t think anything’s going to happen to him. The hospital president is doing nothing but damage control because our friend Dr. Self was just on Howard Stern, talking about experiments straight out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I hope he asks her how big her breasts are and if they’re real. Forget it. She’d tell him. She’d probably show him.”

“I guess there’s nothing about Marino.”

“Look. Give me time, Kay. And I don’t fault you. We’ll work our way past this. I want to touch you again and not think of him. There, I’ve said it. Yes, it bothers the hell out of me.” He reaches for her hand. “Because I feel partly to blame. Maybe more than partly. Nothing would have happened if I’d been here. I’m going to change that. Unless you don’t want me to.”

“Of course I do.”

“I’d be happy if Marino stays away,” Benton says. “But I don’t wish any harm to him, and I hope nothing has happened to him. I’m trying to accept that you defend him, worry about him, still care about him.”

“The plant pathologist is coming in an hour. We have spider mites.”

“And I thought what I have is a headache.”

“If something’s happened to him, especially if he did it to himself, I won’t get over it,” Scarpetta says. “Maybe my worst flaw. I forgive people I care about, and then maybe they do it all over again. Please find him.”

“Everybody’s trying to find him, Kay.”

A long silence, nothing but birds. Bull appears in the garden. He starts uncoiling the hose.

“I need to take a shower,” Scarpetta says. “I’m a disgrace, didn’t take a shower over there. Wasn’t the most private locker room, and I had nothing to change into, why you put up with me I’ll never know. Don’t worry about Dr. Self. A few months in prison would be good for her.”

“She’ll film her shows there and make more millions. Some woman inmate will become her slave and knit her a shawl.”

Bull waters a bed of pansies, and there’s a rainbow in the spray of the hose.

The phone rings again. Benton says, “Oh, God,” and answers it. He listens because he’s skilled at listening, and, if anything, he doesn’t talk enough, and Scarpetta tells him so when she feels lonely.

“No,” Benton says. “I appreciate it, but I agree there’s no reason for us to be there. I won’t speak for Kay, but I don’t think we’d do anything but get in the way.”

He ends the call and says to her. “The captain. Your knight in shining armor.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t be so cynical. He hasn’t earned your wrath. You should be grateful.”

“He’s on his way to New York. They’re going to search Dr. Self’s penthouse apartment.”

“To find what?”

“Drew was there the night before she flew to Rome. Who else was there? Possibly Dr. Self’s son. Probably the man Hollings suggested was the chef. The most mundane answer is often the right one,” Benton says. “I had the flight checked. Alitalia. Guess who was on the same flight Drew was?”

“Are you saying she was waiting for him at the Spanish Steps?”

“It wasn’t the gold-painted mime. That was a ruse, because she was waiting for Will and she didn’t want her friends to know. My theory.”

“She’d just ended it with her coach.” Scarpetta watches Bull fill the shallow pond. “After Dr. Self brainwashed her to do it. Another theory? Will wanted to meet Drew, and his mother didn’t put two and two together and realize he was the one sending the obsessive e-mails signed the Sandman. Inadvertently, she matchmade Drew with her killer.”

“One of those details we may never know,” Benton says. “People don’t tell the truth. After a while, they don’t even know it.”

Bull stoops down to deadhead pansies. He looks up at the same time Mrs. Grimball is looking down from her upstairs window. Bull pulls a leaf bag close and minds his own business. Scarpetta can see her nosy neighbor lifting a phone to her ear.

“That’s it,” Scarpetta says as she gets up, smiles, and waves.

Mrs. Grimball looks their way and slides up the window while Benton watches with no expression on his face, and Scarpetta keeps waving as if she has something urgent to say.

“He just got out of jail,” Scarpetta calls out. “And if you send him back, I’ll burn your house down.”

The window quickly shuts. Mrs. Grimball’s face disappears from the glass.

“You didn’t just say that,” Benton says.

“I’ll say whatever the hell I want,” Scarpetta says. “I live here.”