Book of the Dead

Chapter 4

Coastal Forensic Pathology Associates, on the fringes of the College of Charleston.

The two-story brick building antedates the Civil War, and it slants a little, having shifted on its foundation during the earthquake of 1886. Or this is what the Realtor told Scarpetta when she bought the place for reasons Pete Marino still doesn’t understand.

There were nicer buildings, brand-new ones she could have afforded. But for some reason, she, Lucy, and Rose decided on a place that demanded more work than Marino had in mind when he took the job here. For months, they stripped away layers of paint and varnish, knocked out walls, replaced windows and slate tiles on the roof. They scavenged for salvage, most of it from funeral homes, hospitals, and restaurants, eventually ending up with a more-than-adequate morgue that includes a special ventilation system, chemical hoods, a backup generator, a walk-in cooler and a walk-in freezer, a decomposition room, surgical carts, gurneys. The walls and floor are sealed with epoxy paint that can be hosed down, and Lucy installed a wireless security and computer system as mysterious to Marino as the da Vinci Code.

“I mean, who the hell would want to break into this joint?” he says to Shandy Snook as he punches in a code that deactivates the alarm for the door leading from the bay into the morgue.

“I bet a lot of people would,” she says. “Let’s roam around.”

“Nope. Not down here.” He steers her to another alarmed door.

“I want to see a dead body or two.”

“Nope.”

“What you afraid of? Amazing how scared you are of her,” Shandy says, one creaking step at a time. “It’s like you’re her slave.”

Shandy says that constantly, and each time it angers Marino more. “If I was afraid of her, I wouldn’t let you in here, now would I, no matter how much you’ve been driving me crazy about it. There’s cameras all the hell over the place, so why the hell would I do this if I’m scared of her?”

She looks up at a camera, smiles, and waves.

“Quit it,” he says.

“Like, who’s gonna see it? No one here but us chickens, and no reason for the Big Chief to look at the tapes, right? Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in here, right? You’re afraid of her as shit. It makes me sick, a big man like you. Only reason you let me in is because that numbnut funeral-home guy had a flat tire. And the Big Chief won’t be in for a while, and nobody’s ever going to look at the tapes.” She waves at a camera again. “You wouldn’t have the guts to give me a tour if anybody might find out and tell the Big Chief.” She smiles and waves at another camera. “I look good on camera. You ever been on TV? My daddy used to be on TV all the time, made his own commercials. I’ve been in some of them, could probably make a career of being on TV, but who wants people staring at them all the time?”

“Besides you?” He swats her ass.

The offices are on the first floor, Marino’s the classiest he’s ever had, with heart-of-pine floors, chair rails, and fancy molding. “See, back in the eighteen hundreds,” he tells Shandy as they walk in, “my office was probably the dining room.”

“Our dining room in Charlotte was ten times this big,” she says, looking around and chewing gum.

She’s never been in his office, never inside the building. Marino wouldn’t dare ask permission, and Scarpetta wouldn’t give it. But after a late decadent night with Shandy, she ripped into him again about being Scarpetta’s slave and his mood turned spiteful. Then Scarpetta called to tell him Lucious Meddick had a flat tire and would be late, and then Shandy had to rag on him about that, too, go on and on about Marino’s rushing around for nothing and he may as well give her a tour like she’s been asking him to do all week. After all, she’s his girlfriend and should at least see where he works. So he told her to follow him on her motorcycle north on Meeting Street.

“These are genuine antiques,” he brags. “From junk shops. The Doc refinished them herself. Something, huh? The first time in my life I ever sat at a desk older than me.”

Shandy settles in the leather chair behind his desk, starts opening the dovetailed drawers.

“Me and Rose have spent a lot of time wandering around, trying to figure out what’s what, and pretty much decided her office was once the master bedroom. And the biggest space, the Doc’s office, was what they called the sitting room.”

“Kinda stupid.” Shandy stares inside a desk drawer. “How can you find anything in here? Looks like you just cram shit in your drawers because you can’t be bothered filing.”

“I know exactly where everything is. Got my own filing system, stuff sorted according to drawers. Sort of like the Dewey decibel system.”

“Well, where’s your card catalogue then, big fella?”

“Up here.” He taps his shiny shaved head.

“Don’t you have any good murder cases in here? Maybe some pictures?”

“Nope.”

She gets up, readjusts her leather pants. “So the Big Chief’s got the sitting room. I want to see it.”

“Nope.”

“I got a right to see where she works, since she seems to own you.”

“She don’t own me, and we’re not going in there. Nothing for you to see in there anyway, except books and a microscope.”

“Bet she’s got some good murder cases in that sitting room of hers.”

“Nope. We keep sensitive cases locked up. In another words, ones you’d think was good.”

“Every room’s for sitting, isn’t it? So why was it called a sitting room?” She won’t shut up about it. “That’s stupid.”

“Back in the old days, it was called a sitting room to differentiate it from the parlor,” Marino explains, proudly looking a round his office, at his certificates on the paneled walls, at the big dictionary he never uses, at all the other untouched reference books Scarpetta has passed down to him when she gets the newest revised editions. And, of course, his bowling trophies — all neatly arranged and brassy-bright on built-in shelves. “The parlor was this real formal room right inside the front door, where you stuck people you didn’t want staying around very long, whereas the opposite is true of the sitting room, which is the same thing as a living room.”

“Sounds to me like you’re glad she got this place. No matter how much you complain about it.”

“Not half bad for an old joint. I’d rather have something new.”

“Your old joint’s not half bad, either.” She grabs him until he aches. “Fact, feels new to me. Show me her office. Show me where the Big Chief works.” She grabs him again. “You having a hard time because of her or me?”

“Shut up,” he says, moving her hand away, annoyed by her puns.

“Show me where she works.”

“I told you no.”

“Then show me the morgue.”

“No can do.”

“Why? Because you’re so fucking scared of her? What’s she gonna do? Call the morgue police? Show it to me,” she demands.

He glances up at a tiny camera in a corner of the hallway. No one will see the tapes. Shandy’s right. Who would bother? No reason. He gets that feeling again — a cocktail of spitefulness, aggression, and vengefulness that makes him want to do something awful.

Dr. Self’s fingers click-click on her laptop, new e-mails constantly landing (agents, lawyers, business managers, network executives, and special patients and very select fans).

But nothing new from him. The Sandman. She can scarcely stand it. He wants her to think he’s done the unthinkable, to torment her with anxiety, with terror, by making her think the unthinkable. When she opened his last e-mail on that fated Friday during her midmorning break at the studio, what he’d sent to her, the last thing he sent, was life-altering. At least temporarily.

Don’t let it be true.

How foolish and gullible she was to answer him when he sent the first e-mail to her personal address last fall, but she was intrigued. How was it possible he got her personal and very, very private e-mail address? She had to know. She wrote him back and asked. He wouldn’t tell her. They began a correspondence. He is unusual, special. Home from Iraq, where he had been profoundly traumatized. Bearing in mind that he would make a fabulous guest on one of her shows, she developed a therapeutic relationship with him online, having no idea he might be capable of the unthinkable.

Please don’t let it be true.

If only she could undo it. If only she’d never answered him. If only she hadn’t tried to help him. He’s insane, a word she rarely uses. Her claim to fame is that everyone is capable of change. Not him. Not if he did the unthinkable.

Please don’t let it be true.

If he did the unthinkable, he’s a hideous human being beyond repair. The Sandman. What does that mean, and why didn’t she demand he tell her, threaten that if he refused she’d have no further contact with him?

Because she’s a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists don’t threaten their patients.

Please don’t let the unthinkable be true.

Whoever he really is, he can’t be helped by her or anyone else on earth, and now he may have done what she never expected. He may have done the unthinkable! If he has, there’s only one way for Dr. Self to save her-SELF. She decided this at her studio on a day she’ll never forget when she saw the photograph he sent her and realized she could be in serious danger for a multitude of reasons, and this necessitated her telling her producers she had a family emergency she couldn’t divulge. She would be off the air, hopefully no longer than several weeks. They would have to fill in with her usual replacement (a mildly entertaining psychologist who is no competition but deludes himself into thinking he is). Which is why she can’t afford to be away longer than several weeks. Everyone wants to take her place. Dr. Self called Paulo Maroni (said it was another referral and was put straight through) and (in disguise) climbed into a limousine (couldn’t possibly use one of her own drivers) and (still disguised) boarded a private jet, and secretly checked herself into McLean, where she is safe, is hidden, and, she hopes, will find out soon enough that the unthinkable hasn’t happened.

It’s all a sick ruse. He didn’t do it. Crazy people make false confessions all the time.

(What if it’s not?)

She has to consider the worst-case scenario: People will blame her. They’ll say it’s because of her that the madman fixated on Drew Martin after she won the U.S. Open last fall and appeared on Dr. Self’s shows. Incredible shows and exclusive interviews. What remarkable hours she and Drew shared on the air, talking about positive thinking, about empowering oneself with the proper tools, about actually making a decision to win or lose and how this enabled Drew, at barely sixteen, to pull off one of the biggest upsets in tennis history. Dr. Self’s award-winning series When to Win was a phenomenal success.

Her pulse picks up as she returns to the other side of horror. She opens the Sandman’s e-mail again, as if looking at it again, as if looking at it enough, will somehow change it. There’s no text message, only an attachment, a horrifying high-resolution image of Drew naked and sitting in a gray mosaic tile tub sunk deep into a terra-cotta floor. The water level is up to her waist, and when Dr. Self enlarges the image, as she has so many times, she can make out the goose bumps on Drew’s arms, and her blue lips and fingernails, suggesting the water running out of an old brass spout is cold. Her hair is wet, the expression on her pretty face hard to describe. Stunned? Pitiful? In shock? She looks drugged.

The Sandman told Dr. Self in earlier e-mails that it was routine to dunk naked prisoners in Iraq. Beat them, humiliate them, force them to urinate on each other. You do what you got to do, he wrote. After a while it’s normal, and he didn’t mind taking pictures. He didn’t mind much until that one thing he did, and he has never told her what that one thing is, and she’s convinced it began his transformation into a monster. Assuming he’s done the unthinkable, if what he sent her isn’t a ruse.

(Even if it’s a ruse, he’s a monster for doing this to her!)

She studies the image for any sign of fakery, enlarging and reducing it, reorienting it, staring. No, no, no, she continues reassuring herself. Of course it’s not real.

(What if it is?)

Her mind chews on itself. If she’s held accountable, her career will be shot out of the air. At least temporarily. Her millions of followers will say it’s her fault because she should have seen it coming, should never have discussed Drew in e-mails with this anonymous patient who calls himself the Sandman and who claimed to watch Drew on TV and read about her and thought she seemed like a sweet girl but unbearably isolated, and was sure he would meet her and she would love him and have no more pain.

If the public finds out, it will be Florida all over again, only worse. Blamed. Unfairly. At least temporarily.

“I saw Drew on your show and could feel her unbearable suffering,” the Sandman wrote. “She will thank me.”

Dr. Self stares at the image on her screen. She’ll be castigated for not calling the police immediately when she got the e-mail exactly nine days ago, and no one will accept her reasoning, which is perfectly logical: If what the Sandman sent is real, it’s too late for her to do anything about it; if it’s all a sick ruse (something put together with one of those photo-enhancement software packages), what’s the point in divulging it and perhaps putting the idea in some other deranged person’s head?

Darkly, her thoughts turn to Marino. To Benton.

To Scarpetta.

And Scarpetta walks into her mind.

Black suit with wide pale blue pinstripes and a matching blue blouse that makes her eyes even bluer. Her blond hair short; she wears very little makeup. Striking and strong, sitting straight but at ease in the witness stand, facing the jurors. They were mesmerized by her as she answered questions and explained. She never looked at her notes.

“But isn’t it true almost all hangings are suicidal, therefore suggesting it’s possible she actually took her own life?” One of Dr. Self’s attorneys paced the Florida courtroom.

She’d finished testifying, had been released as a witness, and was unable to resist watching the proceedings. Watching her. Scarpetta. Waiting for her to misspeak or make a mistake.

“Statistically, in modern times, it’s true that most hangings — as far as we know — are suicides,” Scarpetta replies to the jurors, refusing to look at Dr. Self’s attorney, answering him as if he’s talking over an intercom from some other room.

“‘As far as we know’? Are you saying, Mrs. Scarpetta, that…”

“Dr. Scarpetta.” Smiling at the jurors.

They smile back, riveted, so obviously enamored. Smitten with her while she hammers away at Dr. Self’s credibility and decency without anybody realizing it’s all manipulation and untruths. Oh, yes, lies. A murder, not a suicide. Dr. Self indirectly is to blame for murder! It isn’t her fault. She couldn’t have known those people would be murdered. Just because they disappeared from their home didn’t mean anything bad had happened to them.

And when Scarpetta called her with questions after finding a prescription bottle with Dr. Self’s name on it as the prescribing physician, she was completely right to refuse to discuss any patient or former patient. How could she have known that anyone would end up dead? Dead in an unspeakable way. It wasn’t her fault. Had it been, there would have been a criminal case, not just a lawsuit filed by greedy relatives. It wasn’t her fault, and Scarpetta deliberately made the jury believe otherwise.

(The courtroom scene fills her head.)

“You mean, you can’t determine whether a hanging was a suicide or a homicide?” Dr. Self’s attorney gets louder.

Scarpetta says, “Not without witnesses or circumstances that make it clear what happened….”

“Which was?”

“That a person couldn’t possibly have done this to himself.”

“Such as?”

“Such as being found hanging from a tall light post in a parking lot, no ladder. Hands tightly bound behind the back,” she says.

“A real case, or are you just making this up as you go along?” Snidely.

“Nineteen sixty-two. A lynching in Birmingham, Alabama,” she says to the jurors, seven of whom are black.

Dr. Self returns from the other side of horror and closes the image on her screen. She reaches for the phone and calls Benton Wesley’s office, and her instincts immediately tell her that the unfamiliar woman who answers is young, overestimates her importance, has an entitlement attitude, and therefore is probably from a wealthy family and was hired by the hospital as a favor and is a thorn in Benton’s side.

“And your first name, Dr. Self?” the woman asks, as if she doesn’t know who Dr. Self is, when everyone at the hospital knows.

“I’m hoping Dr. Wesley has finally gotten in,” Dr. Self says. “He’s expecting my call.”

“He won’t be in until about eleven.” As if Dr. Self is no one special. “May I ask what you’re calling about?”

“That’s quite all right. And you are? I don’t believe we’ve met. Last time I called, it was someone else.”

“No longer here.”

“Your name?”

“Jackie Minor. His new research assistant.” Her tone turns grand. She probably hasn’t finished her Ph.D. yet, assuming she ever will.

Dr. Self charmingly says, “Well, thank you very much, Jackie. And I assume you took the job so you could assist in his research study, what is it they call it? Dorsolateral Activation in Maternal Nagging?”

“DAMN?” Jackie says in surprise. “Who calls it that?”

“Why, I believe you just did,” Dr. Self says. “The acronym hadn’t occurred to me. You’re the one who just said it. You’re quite witty. Who was the great poet…Let me see if I can quote it: ‘Wit is the genius to perceive and the metaphor to express.’ Or something like that. Alexander Pope, I believe. We’ll meet soon enough. Very soon, Jackie. As you probably know, I’m part of the study. The one you call DAMN.”

“I knew it was someone important. Which is why Dr. Wesley ended up staying here this weekend and asked me to come in. All they put is VIP on the schedule.”

“It must be quite demanding working for him.”

“Absolutely.”

“With his worldwide reputation.”

“That’s why I wanted to be his RA. I’m interning to be a forensic psychologist.”

“Brava! Very good. Perhaps I’ll have you on my show someday.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, you should, Jackie. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about expanding my horizons into The Other Side of Horror. The other side of crime that people don’t see — the criminal mind.”

“That’s all anybody’s interested in anymore,” Jackie agrees. “Just turn on the TV. Every single show is about crime.”

“So, I’m just at the brink of thinking about production consultants.”

“I’d be happy to accommodate a conversation with you about that anytime.”

“Have you interviewed a violent offender yet? Or perhaps sat in on one of Dr. Wesley’s interviews?”

“Not yet. But I absolutely will.”

“We’ll meet again, Dr. Minor. It is Dr. Minor?”

“As soon as I take my quals and find time to really focus on my dissertation. We’re already planning my hooding ceremony.”

“Of course you are. One of the finest moments in our lives.”

In centuries past, the stucco computer lab behind the old brick morgue was a quarters for horses and grooms.

Fortunately, before there was an architectural review board that could put a stop to it, the building was converted into a garage/storage facility that is now, as Lucy calls it, her make-do computer lab. It’s brick. It’s small. It’s minimal. Construction is well in the works on a massive facility on the other side of the Cooper River, where land is plentiful and zoning laws are toothless, as Lucy puts it. Her new forensic labs, when completed, will have every instrument and scientific capability imaginable. So far they manage fairly well with fingerprint analysis, toxicology, firearms, some trace evidence, and DNA. The Feds haven’t seen anything yet. She will put them to shame.

Inside her lab of old brick walls and fir-wood flooring is her computer domain, which is secured from the outside world by bullet-and hurricane-proof windows, the shades always drawn. Lucy sits before a work station that is connected to a sixty-four-gigabyte server with a chassis built of six U mountable racks. The kernel — or operating system interfacing the software with the hardware — is of her own design, built with the lowest assembly language so she could talk to the motherboard herself when she was creating her cyberworld — or what she calls the Infinity of Inner Space (IIS), pronounced IS, the prototype of which she sold for a staggering sum that’s indecent to mention. Lucy doesn’t talk about money.

Along the top of the walls are flat video screens constantly displaying every angle and sound captured by a wireless system of cameras and embedded microphones, and what she’s witnessing is unbelievable.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” she says loudly to the flat screen in front of her.

Marino is giving Shandy Snook a tour of the morgue, different angles of them on the screens, their voices as clear as if Lucy is with them.

Boston, the fifth floor of a mid-nineteenth-century brownstone on Beacon Street. Benton Wesley sits at his desk gazing out his window at a hot-air balloon drifting above the common, above Scotch elms as old as America. The white balloon slowly rises like a huge moon against the downtown skyline.

His cell phone rings. He puts on his wireless earpiece, says, “Wesley,” and hopes like hell it’s not some emergency that has to do with Dr. Self, the current hospital scourge, perhaps the most dangerous one ever.

“It’s me,” Lucy says in his ear. “Log on now. I’m conferencing you.”

Benton doesn’t ask why. He logs on to Lucy’s wireless network, which transfers video, audio, and data in real time. Her face fills the video screen of the laptop on his desk. She looks fresh and dynamically pretty, as usual, but her eyes are sparking with fury.

“Trying something different,” she says. “Connecting you to security access so you can see what I’m seeing right now. Okay? Your screen should split into four quadrants to pick up four angles or locations. Depending on what I choose. That should be enough for you to see what our so-called friend Marino is doing.”

“Got it,” Benton says as his screen splits, allowing him to view, simultaneously, four areas of Scarpetta’s building scanned by cameras.

The buzzer in the morgue bay.

In the upper-left corner of the screen, Marino and some young, sexy but cheap-looking woman in motorcycle leather are in the upstairs hallway of Scarpetta’s office, and he’s saying to her, “You stay right here until she gets signed in.”

“Why can’t I go with you? I’m not afraid.” Her voice — husky, a heavy southern accent — is transmitted clearly through the speakers on Benton’s desk.

“What the hell?” Benton says to Lucy over the phone.

“Just watch,” she comes back. “His latest girl wonder.”

“Since when?”

“Oh, let’s see. I think they started sleeping together this past Monday night. The same night they met and got drunk together.”

Marino and Shandy board the elevator, and another camera picks them up as he says to her, “Okay. But if he tells the Doc, I’m cooked.”

“Hickory-dick-or-y-Doc, she’s got you by the cock,” she says in a mocking singsong.

“We’ll get a gown to hide all your leather, but keep your mouth shut and don’t do nothing. Don’t freak out or do nothing, and I mean it.”

“It’s not like I’ve never seen a dead body before,” she says.

The elevator doors open and they step out.

“My father choked on a piece of steak right in front of me and my family,” Shandy says.

“The locker room’s back there. The one on the left.” Marino points.

“Left? Like when I’m facing which way?”

“The first one when you go around the corner. Grab a gown and do it quick!”

Shandy runs. In one section of the screen, Benton can see her inside the locker room — Scarpetta’s locker room — grabbing a blue gown out of a locker — Scarpetta’s gown and locker — and hastily putting the gown on — backward. Marino waits down the hall. She runs back to him, the gown untied and flapping.

Another door. This leading into the bay where Marino’s and Shandy’s motorcycles are parked in a corner, barricaded by traffic cones. A hearse is inside, the engine’s rumbling echoing off old brick walls. A funeral home attendant climbs out, lanky and gawky in a suit and tie as black and shiny as his hearse. He unfolds his skinny self like a stretcher, as if he’s turning into what he does for a living. Benton notices something weird about his hands, the way they’re clenched like claws.

“I’m Lucious Meddick.” He opens the tailgate. “We met the other day when they fished that dead little boy out of the marsh.” He pulls on a pair of latex gloves, and Lucy zooms in on him. Benton notices a plastic orthodontic retainer on his teeth, and a rubber band around his right wrist.

“Closer on his hands,” Benton tells Lucy.

She zooms in more as Marino says, as if he can’t stand the man, “Yeah, I remember.”

Benton notices Lucious Meddick’s raw fingertips, says to Lucy, “Severe nail biting. A form of self-mutilation.”

“Anything new on that one?” Lucious is asking about the murdered little boy who Benton knows is still unidentified in the morgue.

“None of your business,” Marino says. “If it was for public semination, it would be in the news.”

“Jesus,” Lucy says in Benton’s ear. “He sounds like Tony Soprano.”

“Looks like you lost a hubcap.” Marino points to the back left tire of the hearse.

“It’s a spare.” Lucious is snippy about it.

“Kinda ruins the effect, don’t it,” Marino says. “Tricked out with all that shine, then a wheel with ugly lug nuts.”

Lucious huffily opens the tailgate and slides the stretcher over rollers in back of the hearse. Collapsible aluminum legs clack open and lock in place. Marino doesn’t offer assistance as Lucious rolls the stretcher and its black-pouched body up the ramp, bangs it against the door frame, cusses.

Marino winks at Shandy, who looks bizarre in her open surgical gown and black leather motorcycle boots. Lucious impatiently abandons the pouched body in the middle of the hall, snaps the rubber band on his wrist, and says in an irritable raised voice, “Got to take care of her paperwork.”

“Keep it down,” Marino says. “You might wake somebody up.”

“I don’t got time for your comedy club.” Lucious starts to walk off.

“You ain’t going nowhere until you help me transfer her from your stretcher to one of our state-of-the-art gurneys.”

“Showing off.” Lucy’s voice sounds in Benton’s earpiece. “Trying to impress his potato-chip tramp.”

Marino rolls a gurney out of the cooler, scratched up and rather bandy-legged, one of the wheels slightly cockeyed like a bedraggled grocery store buggy. He and an angry Lucious lift the pouched body from the stretcher, place it on the gurney.

“That lady boss of yours is a piece of work,” Lucious says. “The b-word comes to mind.”

“Nobody asked your opinion. You hear anybody ask his opinion?” To Shandy.

She stares at the pouch, as if she didn’t hear him.

“It’s not my fault she’s got her addresses mixed up on the Internet. She acted like it was my problem showing up, trying to do my job. Not that I can’t get along with anybody. You got a particular funeral home you recommend to your clients?”

“Get a fucking ad in the Yellow Pages.”

Lucious heads to the small morgue office, walking fast, hardly bending his knees, reminding Benton of a pair of scissors.

One quadrant of the screen shows Lucious inside the morgue office, fussing with paperwork, opening drawers, rummaging, finding a pen.

Another quadrant of the screen shows Marino saying to Shandy, “Didn’t anyone know the Hinelick maneuver?”

“I’ll learn anything, baby,” she says. “Any maneuver you want to show me.”

“Seriously. When your father was choking on—” Marino starts to explain.

“We thought he was having a heart attack or a stroke or a seizure,” she interrupts him. “It was so awful, grabbing himself, falling to the floor and cracking his head, his face turning blue. No one knew what to do, had no idea he was choking. Even if we had, we couldn’t have done anything except what we did, call nine-one-one.” She suddenly looks as if she might start crying.

“Sorry to tell you, but you could have done something,” Marino says. “I’m gonna show you. Here, turn around.”

Done with his paperwork, Lucious hurries out of the morgue office, walks right past Marino and Shandy. They pay him no mind as he enters the autopsy suite unattended. Marino wraps his huge arms around her waist, makes a fist, his thumb against her upper abdomen, just above her navel. He grasps his fist with his other hand and gives a gentle upward thrust, just enough to show her. He slides his hands up and fondles her.

“Good God,” Lucy says in Benton’s ear. “He’s got a hard-on in the fucking morgue.”

In the autopsy suite, the camera picks up Lucious walking to the large black log on a countertop, the Book of the Dead, as Rose politely calls it. He starts signing in the body with the pen he took from the morgue office desk.

“He’s not supposed to do that.” Lucy’s voice in Benton’s ear. “Only Aunt Kay is supposed to touch that log. It’s a legal document.”

Shandy says to Marino, “See, it’s not hard being in here. Well, maybe it is.” Reaching back, grabbing him. “You sure know how to cheer a girl up. And I do mean up. Whoa!”

Benton says to Lucy, “This is unbelievable.”

Shandy turns around in Marino’s arms and kisses him — kissing him on the mouth right there in the morgue — and for an instant, Benton thinks they might have sex in the hallway.

Then, “Here, you try it on me,” Marino says.

In another quadrant of his screen, Benton watches Lucious thumbing through the morgue log.

When Marino turns around, his arousal is apparent. Shandy can barely get her arms all the way around him, starts to laugh. He puts his huge hands over hers, helps her push, says, “No kidding. You ever see me choking, you push just like this. Hard!” He shows her. “Point is to force the air out so whatever’s caught in there flies out, too.” She slides her hands down and grabs him again, and he pushes her away and turns his back to Lucious as he emerges from the autopsy suite.

“She figured out anything about that dead little boy?” Lucious snaps the rubber band around his wrist. “Well, I guess not, since he’s entered in the Dead Log as ‘undetermined.’”

“He was undetermined when he was brought in. What you been doing, snooping through the book?” Marino looks ridiculous, his back to Lucious.

“Obviously, she can’t handle such a complicated case. Too bad I didn’t bring him in here. I could have been of assistance. I know more about the human body than any doctor.” Lucious moves to one side and stares down in the direction of Marino’s crotch. “Well, hello,” he says.

“You don’t know shit and can shut up about that dead boy,” Marino says nastily. “And you can shut up about the Doc. And you can get the hell out of here.”

“You mean that little boy from the other day?” Shandy says.

Lucious rattles off with his stretcher, leaving the body he just delivered on the gurney in the middle of the hall, in front of the stainless-steel cooler door. Marino opens it and pushes the uncooperative gurney inside, his arousal still obvious.

“Christ,” Benton says to Lucy.

“He on Viagra or something?” Her voice in his ear.

“Why the hell don’t you get a new cart or whatever you call that thing?” Shandy says.

“The Doc don’t waste money.”

“So she’s cheap, too. Bet she doesn’t pay you shit.”

“If we need something, she gets it, but she don’t waste money. Not like Lucy, who could buy China.”

“You always stick up for the Big Chief, don’t you? But not like you stick up for me, baby.” Shandy fondles him.

“I think I’m going to throw up.” Lucy’s voice.

And Shandy walks inside the cooler to get a good look at what’s inside. The cold air blowing is audible through Benton’s speakers.

And a camera in the bay picks up Lucious sliding behind the wheel of his hearse.

“She a murder?” Shandy asks about the latest delivery, then looks at another pouched body in a corner. “I want to know about the kid.”

Lucious rumbles away in his hearse, the bay door loudly clanking shut behind him, sounding like a car wreck.

“Natural causes,” Marino says. “Old Oriental woman. Eighty-five or something.”

“How come she got sent here if she died of natural causes?”

“Because the coroner wanted to send her in. Why? Hell if I know. The Doc just said for me to be here. Hell if I know. Sounds like a cut-and-dried heart attack to me. I’m getting a whiff of something.” He makes a face.

“Let’s look,” Shandy says. “Come on. Just a quick peek.”

Benton watches them on-screen, watches Marino unzip the pouch and Shandy recoil in disgust, jump back, cover her nose and mouth.

“What you deserve.” Lucy’s voice as she zooms in on the body: decomposing, bloated by gases, the abdomen turning green. Benton knows that odor all too well, a putrid stench unlike any other that clings to the air and the roof of your mouth.

“Shit,” Marino complains, zipping up the pouch. “She’s probably been lying around for days and the damn Beaufort County coroner didn’t want to fool with her. Got a noseful, did you?” He laughs at Shandy. “And you thought my job was a piece of cake.”

Shandy moves closer to the small black pouched body parked in a corner all by itself. She stands very still, staring down at it.

“Don’t do it.” Lucy sounds in Benton’s ear, but she’s talking to Marino’s image on the screen.

“Bet I knows what’s in this little bag,” Shandy says, and it’s hard to hear her.

Marino steps outside the cooler. “Out, Shandy. Now.”

“Whatcha gonna do? Lock me in here? Come on, Pete. Open up this little bag. I know it’s that dead boy you and that funeral creep were just talking about. I heard all about that boy on the news. So he’s still here. How come? Poor little thing all alone and cold in a refrigerator.”

“He’s lost it,” Benton says. “Completely lost it.”

“You don’t want to see that,” Marino says to her, walking back inside the cooler.

“Why not? That little boy found at Hilton Head. The one all over the news,” she repeats herself. “I knew it. Why’s he still here? They know who did it?” She holds her position by the little black pouch on its gurney.

“We don’t know a damn thing. That’s why he’s still here. Come on.” He motions to her, and it’s difficult to hear both of them.

“Let me see him.”

“Don’t do it.” Lucy’s voice, talking to Marino’s image on the screen. “Don’t fuck yourself, Marino.”

“You don’t want to,” he says to Shandy.

“I can handle it. I got a right to see him, because you’re not supposed to have secrets. That’s our rule. So prove right now you don’t keep secrets from me.” She can’t take her eyes off the pouch.

“Nope. With stuff like this, the secret rule don’t count.”

“Oh, yes it does. Better hurry, I’m turning as cold as a dead body in here.”

“Because if the Doc ever found out…”

“There you go again. Scared of her like she fucking owns you. What’s so bad you don’t think I can handle it?” Shandy says furiously, almost screaming as she holds herself because of the cold. “I bet he doesn’t stink as bad as that old lady.”

“He’s been skinned and his eyeballs are gone,” Marino tells her.

“Oh, no,” Benton says, rubbing his face.

Shandy exclaims, “Don’t mess with me! Don’t you dare joke with me! You let me see him right now! I’m sick and tired of you always turning into a damn wimp when she tells you something!”

“Nothing funny about it, you got that right. What goes on in this place ain’t no joke. I keep trying to tell you that. You got no idea what I deal with.”

“Well, isn’t that something. To think your Big Chief would do something like that. Skinning a little kid and cutting out his eyes. You always said she treats the dead real nice.” Hatefully. “Sounds like a Nazi to me. They used to skin people and make lampshades.”

“Sometimes the only way you can tell if darkish or reddish areas are really bruises is to look at the underside of the skin so you can make sure what you’re looking at is broken blood vessels — in other words, bruises or what we call contusions — instead of it being from livor mortis,” Marino pontificates.

“This is unreal.” Lucy sounds in Benton’s ear. “So now he’s the chief medical examiner.”

“Not unreal,” Benton says. “Massively insecure. Threatened. Resentful. Overcompensating and decompensating. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

“You and Aunt Kay are what’s going on with him.”

“From what?” Shandy stares at the little black pouch.

“From when your circulation stops, and the blood settles and can make your skin look red in places. Can look a whole lot like fresh bruises. And there can be other reasons for things that look like injuries, what we call postmortem artifacts. It’s complicated,” Marino says with self-importance. “So to make sure, you peel back the skin, you know, with a scalpel”—he makes swift cutting motions in the air—“to see the underside of it, and in this case, they were bruises, all right. The little guy’s covered with them from head to toe.”

“But why would you take out his eyeballs?”

“Further study, looking for more hemorrhages like you find in shaking baby syndrome, things like that. Same with his brain. It’s fixed in formalin in a bucket, not here but at a medical school where they do special studies.”

“Oh my God. His brain’s in a bucket?”

“It’s just what we do. Fixing it in this chemical so it don’t decompose and can be looked at better. Sort of like embalming.”

“You sure know a lot. You should be the doctor around here, not her. Let me look.”

All this inside the cooler, the door wide open.

“I’ve been doing this practically longer than you’re old,” Marino says. “Sure, I could’ve been a doctor, but who the hell wants to go to school that long? Who’d want to be her, either? She’s got no life. Nobody but dead people.”

“I want to see him,” Shandy demands.

“Damn, don’t know what it is,” Marino says. “Can’t be inside a damn cooler without dying for a cigarette.”

She digs in a pocket of the leather vest under her gown, pulls out a pack, a lighter. “I can’t believe someone would do that to a little kid. I have to see him. I’m here, so show me.” She lights up two cigarettes and they smoke.

“Manipulative, borderline,” Benton says. “He’s picked real trouble this time.”

Marino rolls out the tray, rolls it out of the cooler.

Unzipping the pouch. Plastic rustling. Lucy zooms in tight on Shandy blowing out smoke, staring wide-eyed at the dead little boy.

An emaciated little body sliced in neat straight lines from chin to genitals, from shoulders to hands, from hips to toes, his chest open like a hollowed-out watermelon. His organs are gone. His skin is reflected back from his body and spread out in flaps that reveal scores of dark purple hemorrhages of varying ages and severity, and tears and fractures to cartilage and bone. His eyes are empty holes, and through them is the inside of his skull.

Shandy screams, “I hate that woman! I hate her! How could she do this to him! Gutted and skinned like a shot deer! How can you work for that psycho bitch!”

“Calm down. Quit yelling.” Marino zips up the pouch and rolls it back inside the cooler. He shuts the door. “I warned you. There’s some things people don’t need to see. They can get a post-trauma stress condition from stuff like this.”

“Now I’ll see him forever in my head, looking just like that. Sicko bitch. Damn Nazi.”

“You keep your mouth shut about this, you hear me?” Marino says.

“How can you work for someone like that?”

“Shut up. I mean it,” Marino says. “I helped with the autopsy, and I’m sure as hell no Nazi. That’s what happens. People get fucked over twice when they get murdered.” He takes Shandy’s surgical gown, hastily folds it. “That little kid was probably murdered the day he was born. No one giving a rat’s ass about him, and this is the result.”

“What do you know about life? You people think you know everything about everyone when all you see is what’s left when you cut them up like a butcher.”

“You’re the one who wanted to come in here.” Marino is getting angry. “So shut up about it, and don’t call me a butcher.”

He leaves Shandy in the hallway, returns the gown to Scarpetta’s locker. He sets the alarm. The camera in the bay captures them, the huge bay door screeching and clanking up.

Lucy’s voice. Benton will have to be the one to inform Scarpetta about Marino’s tour, about a betrayal that could destroy her if the media ever found out. Lucy’s headed to the airport, won’t be back until late tomorrow. Benton doesn’t ask. He’s pretty sure she already knows, even if she hasn’t told him. Then she tells him about Dr. Self, about her e-mails to Marino.

Benton doesn’t comment. He can’t. On his video screen, Marino and Shandy Snook ride off on their motorcycles.