The Last Precinct

Chapter 17

IT IS ALMOST TEN WHEN I TURN OFF 9TH STREET into Capitol Square, cruising past the up-lit statue of George Washington astride his horse, and winding around the south portico of the building Thomas Jefferson designed, where a thirty-foot lighted tree decorated with glass balls rises behind thick white columns. I recall that the governor's party was a drop-in and not a dinner and am relieved at signs that his guests have left. I find not a single car in spaces designated for legislators and visitors.

The early-nineteenth-century executive mansion is pale yellow stucco with white trim and columns. According to legend, it was saved by a bucket brigade when Richmonders burned their own city at the end of the Civil War. In the understated tradition of Virginia Christmases, candles glow and fresh wreaths hang in every window, and evergreen swags decorate black iron gates. I roll down my window as a capitol police officer steps up to my car.

"May I help you?" he asks with an air of suspicion. "I'm here to see Governor Mitchell." I have been to the mansion a number of times, but not at this hour or in a big Lincoln SUV. "I'm Dr. Scarpetta. I'm a little late. If it's too late, I'll understand. Please tell him I'm sorry. "

The officer brightens. "Didn't recognize you in that car. You get rid of your Mercedes? If you could just wait right here for a minute."

He gets on the phone inside his booth as I look out at Capitol Square and am touched by ambivalence, then sadness. I have lost this city. I can't go back. I can blame it on Chan-donne, but that isn't all of it, if I am honest with myself. It is time to do the harder thing. Change. Lucy has inspired courage, or maybe she has made me see myself for what I have become, which is entrenched, static, institutionalized. I have been the chief medical examiner of Virginia for more than a decade. I am edging close to fifty. I don't like my only sister. My mother is difficult and her health is bad. Lucy is moving to New York. Benton is dead. I am alone.

"Merry Christmas, Dr. Scarpetta." The capital police officer leans close to my winnow and lowers his voice. The name on his brass tag is Renquist. "Just want you to know I hate what happened, but I'm glad you got that S.O.B. That was real quick thinking on your part."

"I appreciate that, Officer Renquist."

"You won't be seeing me down here anymore after the first of the year," he goes on. "They've switched me to plainclothes investigations."

"I hope that's good."

"Oh, yes ma'am."

"We'll miss you."

"Maybe I'll see you on a case."

I hope not. If he sees me on a case, that means someone else is dead. He gives me a crisp wave, directing me through the gates. "You can park right in front."

Change. Yes, change. Suddenly, I am surrounded by it. In thirteen months, Governor Mitchell will be gone, too, and that is unsettling. I like him. I especially like his wife, Edith. In Virginia, governors have a one-term limit, and every four years the world gets turned on end. Hundreds of employees are moved, fired and hired. Phone numbers are changed. Computers get formatted. Job descriptions no longer apply even if the jobs themselves do. Files disappear or are de- stroyed. Mansion menus are redone or shredded. The only constancy is the mansion staff itself. The same prison inmates do the gardening and small outside tasks, and the same people cook and clean, or at least if they are rotated, it has nothing to do with politics. Aaron, for example, has been the butler for as long as I have lived in Virginia. He is a tall, handsome African American, lean and graceful in a long, spotless white coat and snappy black bow tie.

"Aaron, how are you?" I inquire as I step inside an entry hall that is dazzling with crystal lighting that passes its torch, chandelier to chandelier, through sweeping archways all the way to the back of the house. Between the two ballrooms is the Christmas tree decorated in red balls and white lights. Walls and plaster friezes and trim have been recently restored to their original gray and white and look like Wedgwood. Aaron takes my coat. He indicates he is fine and pleased to see me, using few words because he has mastered the art of being gracious with little noise.

Just off the entry hall, on either side, are two rather stiff parlors of Brussels carpet and formidable antiques. Wallpaper in the men's parlor has a Greco-Roman border. A floral border is in the women's. The psychology of these sitting areas is simple. They allow the governor to receive guests without ever really letting them inside the mansion. People are granted an audience at the front door and are not destined to stay long. Aaron guides me past these impersonal historic rooms and up a stairway carpeted in a Federal design of black stars against deep red that leads to the first family's personal quarters. I emerge in a sitting area of fir hardwood floors and accessible chairs and couches, where Edith Mitchell waits for me in a flowing red silk pants suit. She smells faintly exotic as she gives me a hug.

"When are we playing tennis again?" she asks dryly, staring at my cast.

"It's a very unforgiving sport if you haven't done it in a year, have a fractured arm and are doing battle with cigarettes again," I say.

My reference to the past year is not lost on her. Those who know me are aware that after Benton's murder, I vanished into a dark vortex of frantic, perpetual motion. I stopped seeing friends. I didn't go out or have people in. I rarely exercised. All I did was work. I saw nothing that went on around me. I didn't hear what people said to me. I didn't feel. Food had no taste. I scarcely noticed the weather. In Anna's words, I became sensory deprived. Somehow through it all, I didn't make mistakes in my cases. If anything, I was more obsessive about them. But my absenteeism as a human being was detrimental in the office. I wasn't a good administrator and it began to show. Certainly, I have been a shitty friend to everyone I know.

"How are you?" she asks, kindly.

"About as well as can be expected."

"Please sit. Mike's getting off the phone," Edith tells me. "I guess he didn't talk to enough people at the party." She smiles and rolls her eyes as if she is talking about a naughty boy.

Edith has never really assumed the role of first lady, not in any tradition the Commonwealth of Virginia has ever seen, and although she may have her detractors, she has also become celebrated as a strong, modern woman. She is a historical archaeologist who didn't give up her career when her husband took office and avoids official events she considers frivolous or a poor use of her time. Yet she is her husband's devoted partner and has raised three children, now grown or in college. In her late forties, she has deep brown hair that she wears one length, at her collar and brushed straight back. Her eyes are almost amber, and in them thoughts and questions stir. She has something on her mind. "I was going to take you aside at the party. Kay, I'm glad you called. Thank you for dropping by. You know it's not like me to pry into your cases," she goes on, "but I have to say I'm really unsettled by the one I just read about in the paper_the man found in that awful motel near Jamestown. Mike and I are both very concerned, well, obviously, because of the Jamestown connection."

"I'm not aware of a Jamestown connection." I am puzzled, and my first thought is that information has come in that she knows and I don't. "No connection to the archaeological excavation. Not that I'm aware of."

"Perceptions," she says simply. "If nothing else."

Jamestown is Edith Mitchell's passion. Her own profession drew her to the site years ago, and then she became an advocate for it in her present political position. She has unearthed pestholes and human bones and tirelessly courted the interest of potential financial backers and the media. "I've driven past that motel just about every time I go down there because it's closer to downtown to take Route Five instead of Sixty-four." A shadow passes over her face. "A real dump. Can't say it would surprise me if something bad happened there. Looks like the sort of place drug dealers and hookers would hang out. Did you go to the scene?"

"Not yet."

"Can I get you anything to drink, Kay? I have some very good whisky I bootlegged back from Ireland last month. I know you like Irish whisky."

"Only if you're having some."

She reaches for the phone and asks Aaron to bring up the bottle of Black Bush and three glasses.

"What's going on at Jamestown these days?" The air is tainted by a patina of cigar smoke that awakens my frustrating hunger for cigarettes. "I think the last time I was there was three or four years ago," I tell her.

"When we found JR.," she recalls.

"Yes."

"It's been that long since you were there?"

"Nineteen ninety-six, I think."

"Well, you must come see what we're doing. It's amazing how the footprint of the fort has changed, and the artifacts, hundreds of thousands of them, as you probably know from the news. We've been doing isotopic studies on some of the bones, which I should think you would find interesting, Kay. JR continues to be our biggest mystery. His isotopic profile wasn't at all consistent with a diet of either corn or wheat, so we didn't know what to make of that, except that maybe he wasn't English. So we sent one of his teeth to a lab in England, for DNA."

JR stands for Jamestown Rediscovery. It is the prefix given every feature discovered at the excavation site, but in this instance, Edith refers specifically to the one-hundred-and-second feature unearthed in the third or C layer of soil. JR102C is a grave. It has become the most celebrated grave of the excavation because the skeleton inside it is thought to be that of a young man who arrived at Jamestown with John Smith in May 1607 and was shot to death that fall. At the first hint of violence inside the coffin-stained clay, Edith and the chief archaeologist called me to the site, where together we brushed back dirt from a sixty-caliber musket ball and twenty-one shot that had fractured the tibia and rotated it one hundred and eighty degrees, so that the foot was pointing backward. The injury would have torn if not severed the popliteal artery behind the knee, and JR, as he has since become affectionately known, would have bled to death quickly.

Of course, there was acute interest in what was immediately dubbed the first murder in America, a rather presumptuous claim since we can't say for a fact it is a murder or the first one and the New World was hardly America yet. We did prove from forensic testing that JR was shot with a combat load fired from a European weapon called a matchlock musket and that, based on the spread of the shot, the gun was fired from a distance of approximately fifteen feet. He could not possibly have shot himself accidentally. One might deduce that a fellow settler was to blame, leading to the not so far-fetched notion that America's karma, sadly, seems to be for us to kill each other.

"Everything's moved indoors for the winter." Edith slips out of her jacket and drapes it over the back of the sofa. "Cataloging artifacts, writing up the findings, all the things we can't get around to while we're working on the site. And of course, fund-raising. That awful part of life that tends to fall in my lap more and more these days. Bringing me to my point. I got a rather disturbing phone call from one of our legislators who read about the motel death. He's in an uproar, which is unfortunate, because he's only going to end up doing the very thing he says he doesn't want, which is to draw attention to the case."

"Uproar over what?" I frown. "There was very little information in the newspaper."

Edith's expression stiffens. Whoever this legislator is, she obviously has no use for him. "He's from the Jamestown area," she tells me. "He seems to think the case might be a hate crime, that the victim was gay."

Footsteps sound softly on the carpeted stairs and Aaron appears with a tray, a bottle and three tumblers etched with the seal of the commonwealth.

"Needless to say, such a thing could severely compromise what we're doing out there." She chooses her words carefully as Aaron pours Black Bush. A door off the sitting area opens and the governor emerges from his private office in a draft of cigar smoke, his tuxedo jacket and tie off.

"Kay, I'm sorry to keep you waiting," he says to me with a hug. "Brushfires. Maybe Edith has given you the hint."

"She was just getting around to it," I reply.