Red Mist

8

He invites me in as if it’s his apartment, and the seriousness of his eyes behind his unstylish wire-rim glasses and the hard set of his mouth completely unnerve me at first.

“Jaime should be back any minute.” He shuts the door.

My shocked response just as suddenly turns to anger as I take him in from the top of his shiny shaved head and big weathered face to the rubber-soled canvas shoes he wears with no socks. I note his Hawaiian shirt and the drape of it over shoulders that seem more massive and a belly that seems flatter than I remember. Baggy green fishing shorts with cargo pockets hang low on his hips, and he’s darkly tanned except for under his chin, where the sun has spared him. He’s been out in a boat or on a beach, out somewhere in the summer weather, his skin bronzed with a ruddy hue. Even his bare pate and the tops of his ears are the color of cognac, but he is pale around his eyes. He’s been wearing sunglasses and no cap, and I envision the white cargo van and the charter-boat brochures in the glove box. I think of the fast-food napkins.

Marino craves Bojangles’ and Popeyes fried chicken and biscuits, and often complains that fried food isn’t a “food group” in New England like it is in the South. There were the comments he made not long ago about preowned gas-guzzling trucks and boats selling for a song, and how much he misses warm weather, and I recall being somewhat bothered by his last-minute notice when he stopped by my office earlier this month. He said he’d been offered an opportunity for some great vacation package. He wanted to go fishing, and his calendar was clear. His last day on duty for the CFC was June 15.

Marino vanished in the middle of this month, and other things happened almost simultaneously. Kathleen Lawler’s e-mails to me stopped. She was transferred to Bravo Pod. Suddenly she wanted me to visit the GPFW, to talk to me about Jack Fielding. Leonard Brazzo thought it was a good idea for me to agree, and then I discovered Jaime Berger is here. Now that I have the luxury of looking back, it’s plain what occurred. Marino lied to me.

“She’s picking up dinner,” he says, taking the bag of take-out sushi from me. “Real food. I don’t eat fish bait.”

I notice a desk, a small table, and two chairs arranged near the far wall, with two laptops and a printer, and books and legal pads, and on the floor stacks of expansion file folders.

“The three of us talking in a restaurant isn’t exactly a good idea,” he adds, setting the take-out bag on the kitchen counter.

“I wouldn’t know if it’s a good idea or not, since I have no idea why you’re here. Or, more to the point, why I am,” I reply.

“You want something to drink?”

“Not now.”

I move past the closed-circuit monitor mounted on the wall, past a coat rack, and for an instant I smell cigarettes.

“I don’t blame you for wondering what the hell,” Marino says, and paper rattles as he opens the bag. “I probably should stick this in the fridge. Don’t be pissed, Doc….”

“Don’t tell me what to be. Are you smoking again?”

“Hell, no.”

“I smell cigarettes. Someone was smoking in the rental van I didn’t reserve, which also stinks like dead fish and stale fast food and has suspicious brochures in the glove box. I hope you’re not smoking again, for God’s sake.”

“No way I’d get hooked on cigarettes after all I went through to quit.”

“Who is Captain Link Michaels?” I refer to one of the brochures in the glove box. “Year-round fishing with Captain Link Michaels,”I quote.

“A charter boat out of Beaufort. A nice guy. Been out with him a few times.”

“You weren’t wearing a cap, probably not sunblock, either. What about skin cancer?”

“I don’t have it anymore.” He self-consciously touches the top of his ruddy bald head where he had several basal cell carcinomas removed some months ago.

“Just because spots have been removed doesn’t mean you don’t wear sunblock. You should always wear a hat.”

“Blew off when we had the boat full throttle. I got a little burned.” He touches the top of his head again.

“I guess we don’t need to run the plate of that van I’ve been driving today. I guess we know it won’t come back to Lowcountry Concierge Connection,” I then say. “Who was smoking in it, if not you?”

“You weren’t followed here, that’s what matters,” he says. “No one was going to follow you in the van. I forgot to clean out the glove box. Should have known you’d look.”

“The kid who dropped it off to me, who was that? Because I don’t believe he really works for some VIP rental-car company called Low-country Concierge Connection. Is that your rental van, and you got some charter-boat captain’s kid to drop it off to me?”

“It’s not a rental,” Marino says.

“Well, I guess I know why Bryce hasn’t returned my phone calls today. I have a feeling he got influenced, not that it hasn’t happened before when you sneak around behind my back and get him to cooperate by telling him you have my best interests in mind. Did you instruct him to cancel my hotel room, too?”

“It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s turned out okay.”

“Good God, Marino,” I mutter. “Why would you have Bryce cancel my room? What the hell is the matter with you? What if they hadn’t had another room available?”

“I knew they would.”

“I could have been killed in that damn van. It’s not drivable.”

“It was fine the other day.” He frowns. “What was it doing? I wouldn’t put you in something that’s not safe. And I would have known if you broke down.”

“ Not safeis an understatement,” I reply. “Speeds up, slows down, lurching all over the road as if it’s having a grand mal seizure.”

“We had a lot of rain last night, a huge storm in South Carolina, even worse than here. It rained like hell, and it was sitting out. It needs a new hood seal.”

“South Carolina?”

“Maybe the spark plugs got wet. Then maybe they got even more wet when you had it parked out there at the prison, and maybe Joey hit potholes or something and the tires are out of alignment. A nice kid but dumb as a box of hair. He should have called me if it was driving like shit. Well, I’m sorry about that. Yeah, I got a little place I just started renting. In Charleston, a condo near the aquarium, with a pier and boat slips, an easy drive or motorcycle ride from here. I was going to tell you about it, but things have happened.”

I look around and try to make sense of what things Marino might mean. What has happened? What on earth?

“I had to make sure you weren’t followed, Doc,” he then says. “Let’s be honest, Benton knows your plans and has your itinerary because Bryce copies him on the e-mails. They’re on the CFC computer.”

What he’s saying is the rental car Bryce reserved for me is on my itinerary but a malfunctioning cargo van with a bad hood seal wouldn’t be, and my room at the Hyatt is moot because it was canceled. But I’m not sure what Marino is implying about Benton.

“Put it this way,” Marino says, “there’s a Toyota Camry sitting in the lot at Lowcountry Concierge Connection with the name Dr. Kay Scarpetta on it. If anybody was hanging around, waiting for you to get in it because maybe they got access to your itinerary, your e-mails, or found out your schedule some other way, you would have been a no-show. And if they called your hotel, they would have found out you’d canceled your room because you missed your connection in Atlanta.”

“Why would Benton have me followed?”

“Maybe he wouldn’t. But maybe someone would see the itinerary that went from your e-mail to his. Maybe he knows the possibility or likelihood of that happening, and that’s why he didn’t want you coming down here.”

“How do you know he didn’t want me coming down here?”

“Because he wouldn’t.”

I don’t reply or look Marino in the eye. Instead I look around. I take in the details of Jaime’s charming loft of exposed old brick, pine floors, and high white plaster ceilings with rough oak beams, very much to my liking but definitely not to hers. The living area, simply furnished with a leather couch, a matching armchair, and a slate coffee table, flows into a large kitchen with a stone peninsula and the stainless-steel appliances of an industrious cook, which Berger most decidedly isn’t.

There is no art, and I happen to know that she is a collector. I see no evidence of anything personal beyond what’s on the desk and floor against the far wall under a big window filled with the night, the moon distant now, small and bone-white. I don’t see any furniture or rugs that might be hers, and I know her taste. Contemporary and minimalist, predominantly high-end Italian and Scandinavian, a lot of light woods, such as maple and birch. Jaime’s taste is uncomplicated because her life is its antithesis, and I’m reminded of how much she disliked Lucy’s loft in Greenwich Village, a fabulous building that once was a candle factory. I remember being offended when Jaime used to refer to it as “Lucy’s drafty old barn.”

“She’s renting this,” I say to Marino. “Why?” I sit on the brown leather couch that is a reproduction, not at all Jaime’s style. “And how do you fit into the equation? How do I fit into it? Why are you convinced someone would follow me, given the chance? You could have called me if you were so worried. What is it? Are you thinking of changing jobs? Or have you gone back to work for Jaime and forgot to let me know.”

“I’m not exactly changing jobs, Doc.”

“Not exactly? Well, she’s pulled you into something. You should know that about her by now.”

Jaime Berger is calculating, almost frighteningly so, and Marino is no match for her. He wasn’t when he was an investigator with NYPD and was assigned to her office, and he’s no match for her now and never will be. Whatever reason she’s given him for his being here and maneuvering me into what feels like nothing less than a calculated machination, it isn’t the whole truth or even close.

“You are working for her de facto because you’re here at her bidding,” I add. “You’re certainly not working for me when you swap my car and cancel my hotel and scheme with her behind my back.”

“I’m working for you but helping her, too. I haven’t walked off the job, Doc,” he says, with surprising gentleness for Marino. “I wouldn’t do something shitty like that to you.”

I don’t reply that he has done plenty of shitty things to me over the twenty-plus years I’ve known him and worked with him, and I can’t help thinking about what Kathleen Lawler said. Every other minute it enters my mind. Jack Fielding wrote to her in the early nineties, wrote to her on lined notebook paper, like a schoolboy — an immature, sophomoric, mean-spirited schoolboy who resented me. He and Marino thought I needed to be warmed up, humanized, fucked but good, and for an instant the Marino standing before me is the Marino from back then.

I envision him inside his dark blue unmarked Crown Vic, with all of its antennas and emergency lights and crumpled fast-food bags, its overflowing ashtray, the air shellacked with a stale stench of cigarettes that air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror couldn’t begin to crack. I remember the defiance in his eyes, the way he blatantly stared, making sure he reminded me that I might be the first female chief medical examiner of Virginia, but I was tits and ass to him. I remember going home at the end of each day in the Capital of the Confederacy, where I certainly didn’t belong.

“Doc?”

Richmond. Where I knew no one.

“What is it?”

I remember how alone I was.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

I focus on the Marino who has lived some twenty years since then, towering above me, as bald as a baseball and weathered by the sun.

“And if Kathleen Lawler had declined to play whatever this game is?” I say to him. “What if she hadn’t given me the piece of paper with Jaime’s phone number on it? What then?”

“I worried about that.” He walks over to a window and stares out at the night. “But Jaime knew for a fact Kathleen would give you the note,” he says, with his back to me, as he looks out and down, possibly looking for Jaime.

“She knew it for a fact. I see,” I reply. “I’m not happy about this.”

“I know you’re not, but there are reasons.” He wanders closer to me and stops. “Jaime couldn’t reach out to you directly at this stage of things. The safe thing was to have you make the first call and do it in a way that couldn’t be detected.”

“Is this a legal strategy, or is she protecting herself for some reason?”

“There can’t be a trail of Jaime initiating this meeting, of her reaching out to you at this point, plain and simple,” he says. “You’ll hook up with her tomorrow, officially, at the ME’s office in the course of doing business, but you were never here. Not here and not now.”

“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. I’m supposed to pretend I’m not here now and that I didn’t see Jaime tonight.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m supposed to go along with whatever lie the two of you have concocted.”

“It’s necessary and for your own good.”

“I have no plans for hooking up with anyone and have no idea what business you’re referring to.” But I have a feeling I do know, as I think of the autopsy records of the slain Jordan family and any of the evidence from those cases stored at the local medical examiner’s office and crime labs. “I’m leaving in the morning,” I add, as my attention returns to the expansion files stacked on the floor by the desk. Each has a different-colored gusset and is labeled with initials or abbreviations that I don’t recognize.

“I’ll be picking you up at eight a.m.” Marino is standing in the middle of the room as if he doesn’t know what do to with himself, and his large physical presence seems to shrink everything around him.

“Maybe it would be helpful if you’d tell me what I’m meeting about.”

“It’s hard to talk to you when you’re this pissed.” He stares down at me, and when I’m sitting and he’s not, I don’t like it.

“Last I checked, you worked for me, not Jaime. Your loyalty is supposed to be to me, not to her or anyone else.” I sound angry, but what I am is hurt. “I wish you’d sit down.”

“If I’d said I want to help out Jaime, that I want to do some things a little different from the way I’ve been doing them, you would have told me no.” Leather creaks loudly as he settles in the deep armchair.

“I don’t know what you’re referring to or how you could know what I might say.” I feel he’s accusing me of being difficult.

“You don’t have the slightest idea what all is going on, because nobody’s in a position to outright tell you.” He leans forward, his big arms on his bare knees, which are the size of small hubcaps. “Some people want you destroyed.”

“I think it’s been established that there are—” I start to say, but he won’t let me talk.

“Nope.” He shakes his bald head, and stubble on his tan, heavy jaw looks like sand. “You may think you know, but you don’t. Maybe Dawn Kincaid can’t touch you while she’s locked up in the cuckoo’s nest, but there are other ways and other people. She has plans to bring you down.”

“I can’t imagine how she would communicate illegal or violent intentions without the staff at Butler knowing, without the police knowing, without the FBI knowing,” I say logically, coolly, trying to get the emotion and heat out of my mood, trying not to feel wounded to my core about what Jack and Marino joked about twenty years ago, about how they really felt about me, how they ridiculed and isolated me.

“That’s easy.” His eyes are locked on mine. “Her scum-bucket lawyers, for starters. They can communicate with her in private the same way Jaime has with Kathleen Lawler. If you’re worried about being monitored or recorded, you communicate in writing. You pass notes. You write it on a legal pad, and your client reads it and doesn’t say anything.”

“I seriously doubt Dawn Kincaid’s lawyers have hired a hit man, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“I don’t know if they’d hire a hit man,” he considers. “But they want you destroyed and in prison. You’re in a lot of danger any way you slice it.”

I can tell he completely believes what he just said, and I wonder how much of it came from Jaime. What has she contrived and why?

“I suspect I was at graver risk driving that van of yours than being taken out by a hit man,” I retort. “What if I’d broken down out in the middle of nowhere?”

“I would have known if you were broke down. I know exactly where you were all day, right down to the gun store one-point-four miles north of Dean Forest Road. I have a GPS tracking device on my van and can see where it is on a Google map.”

“This is ridiculous. Who orchestrated all this, and what’s the real reason?” I ask. “Because I don’t believe it was your idea. Jaime’s down here talking to Lola Daggette? What could that possibly have to do with me? Or with you? What is it she really wants?”

“About two months ago, Jaime called the CFC,” he says. “I happened to be in Bryce’s office and got on the phone with her, and she said she was following up on information relating to Lola Daggette, who happens to be in the same prison as Kathleen Lawler. All Jaime was interested in, supposedly, was if I happened to know anything about Lola Daggette, if there was any reason her name has come up during the Dawn Kincaid investigation—”

“And you never passed this on to me,” I interrupt him.

“She asked to talk to me, not you,” he said, as if Jaime Berger is the director of the CFC, or maybe Marino is. “It didn’t take me long to figure out that her calling wasn’t what it appeared to be. For one thing, caller ID didn’t come up as the DA’s office. It came up as unknown.She was calling from her apartment in the middle of the day, which I thought was unusual. Then she said, ‘Things are so deep I need to decompress before I come up for air.’ When I used to work for her, that was our code, meaning she needed to talk to me in private and not over the phone. So I went straight to South Station and took the Acela to New York.”

Marino’s not apologetic, he’s so sure of what he’s doing and saying. He has no qualms about what he’s withheld from me for two months because the skillful, shrewd Jaime Berger has moved him around like a plastic pawn. She knew exactly what she was doing when she called him and spoke in code.

“It just amazes me,” he then says, “that you live in the same damn house as the FBI and you don’t know your phones are being tapped.”

He settles deeper in the leather chair and crosses his thick legs, and I can see remnants of a past strength in them that had to be formidable. I remember photographs I’ve seen of him when he was a boxer. A heavyweight and a brute, nothing civilized about him. How many people are walking around with concussive head injuries because of him, how many people did he brain-damage, how many faces did he smash?

“They’re going through your e-mail,” he says, as I notice pale scars on his big knees and wonder how he got them. “They may be tracking you, tailing you.”

I get up from the couch.

“You know how it works.” His voice follows me into Jaime Berger’s well-appointed kitchen, which looks unused. “They obtain a court order to spy on you and then let you know after the fact.”