The Last Precinct

Chapter 2

DR. ANNA ZENNER'S IMPOSING GREEK REVIVAL house soars up-lit into the night on the southern bank of the James River. Her mansion, as the neighbors call it, has large Corinthian columns and is a local example of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington's belief that the new nation's architecture should express the grandeur and dignity of the ancient world. Anna is from the ancient world, a German of the first order. I believe she is from Germany. Now that I think about it, I do not recall her ever telling me where she was born.

White holiday lights wink from trees, and candles in Anna's many windows glow warmly, reminding me of Christ-mases in Miami during the late fifties, when I was a child. On the rare occasion when my father's leukemia was in remission, he loved to drive us through Coral Gables to gawk at houses he called villas, as if somehow his ability to show us such places made him part of that world. I remember fantasizing about the privileged people who lived inside those homes with their graceful walls and Bentleys and their feasts of steak or shrimp seven days a week. No one who lived like that could possibly be poor or sick or regarded as trash by people who did not like Italians or Catholics or immigrants called Scar-petta.

It is an unusual name of a lineage I really don't know much about. The Scarpettas have lived in this country for two generations, or so my mother claims, but I don't know who these other Scarpettas are. I have never met them. I have been told we are traced back to Verona, that my ancestors were farmers and railway workers. I do know for a fact that I have only one sibling, a younger sister named Dorothy. She was briefly married to a Brazilian twice her age who supposedly fathered Lucy. I say supposedly, because when it comes to Dorothy, only DNA would convince me of who she happened to be in bed with on the occasion my niece was conceived. My sister's fourth marriage was to a Farinelli, and after that Lucy stopped changing her name. Except for my mother, I am the only Scar-petta left, as far as I know.

Marino brakes at formidable black iron gates and his big arm stretches out to stab an intercom button. An electronic buzz and a loud click, and the gates slowly open like a raven's wings. I don't know why Anna left her homeland for Virginia and never married. I have never asked her why she set up a psychiatric practice in this modest southern city when she could have gone anywhere. I don't know why I am suddenly wondering about her life. Thoughts are odd misfires. I carefully get out of Marino's truck and step down on granite pavers. It is as if I am having software problems. All sorts of files are being opened and closed unprovoked, and system messages are flashing. I am not sure of Anna's exact age, only that she is in her mid-seventies. As far as I know, she has never told me where she went to college or medical school. We have shared opinions and information for years, but rarely our vulnerabilities and intimate facts.

It suddenly bothers me considerably that I know so little about Anna, and I feel ashamed as I make my way up her neatly swept front steps, one at a time, sliding my good hand along the frigid iron railing. She opens the front door and her keen face softens, She looks at my thick, crooked cast and blue sling, and meets my eyes. "Kay, I am so glad to see you," she says, greeting me the same way she always does.

"How'ya doin', Dr. Zenner!" Marino announces. His en- thusiasm is overblown as he goes out of his way to show how popular and charming he is and how little I matter to him. "Something sure smells mmm-mmm-good. You cooking for me again?"

"Not tonight, Captain." Anna has no interest in him or his bluster. She kisses both of my cheeks, careful of my injury and not hugging me hard, but I feel her heart in the light touch of her fingers. Marino sets my bags inside the foyer on a splendid silk rug beneath a crystal chandelier that sparkles like ice forming in space.

"You can take some soup with you," she tells Marino. "There is plenty. Very healthy. No fat."

"If it don't got fat, it's against my religion. I'm gonna head out." He avoids looking at me.

"Where is Lucy?" Anna helps me off with my coat, and I struggle to pull the sleeve over the cast, and then am dismayed to realize I still have my old lab coat on. "You have no autographs on it," she says to me, because no one has signed my plaster and no one ever will. Anna has an arid, elitist sense of humor. She can be very funny without so much as a hint of a smile, and if one is not attentive and quick-witted, he will completely miss the joke.

"Yeur joint ain't nice enough so she's at the Jefferson," Marino ironically comments.

Anna goes inside the hall closet to hang up my coat. My nervous energy is dissipating fast. Depression tightens its grip on my chest and increases pressure around my heart. Marino continues to pretend I don't exist.

"Of course, she can stay here. She is always welcome and I would very much like to see her," Anna says to me. Her German accent has not softened over the decades. She still talks in square meals, going to awkward angles to get a thought from her brain to her tongue and rarely using contractions. I have always believed she prefers German and speaks English because she has no choice.

Through the open doorway I watch Marino leave. "Why did you move here, Anna?" Now I am talking in non se-quiturs.

"Here? You mean this house?" She studies me.

"Richmond. Why Richmond?"

"That is easy. Love." She says this flatly with no trace of feeling one way or another about it.

The temperature has dropped as the night deepens, and Marino's big, booted feet crunch through crusty snow.

"What love?" I ask her.

"A person who proved to be a waste of time."

Marino kicks the running board to knock snow loose before climbing inside his throbbing track, engine rumbling like the bowels of a great ship, exhaust rushing out. He senses I am looking and puts on a bigger act of pretending he is unaware or doesn't care as he pulls his door shut and shoves his behemoth into gear. Snow spits out from huge tires as he drives off. Anna shuts the front door while I stand before it, lost in a vortex of spiraling thoughts and feelings.

"We must get you settled," she says to me, touching my arm and motioning for me to follow her.

I come to. "He's angry with me."

"If he were not angry about something_or rude_I would think he is ill."

"He's angry at me because I almost got murdered." I sound very tired. "Everybody's angry with me."

"You are exhausted." She pauses in the entrance hallway to hear what I have to say.

"I'm supposed to apologize because someone tried to kill me?" The protests tumble out. "I asked for it? I did something wrong? So I opened my door. I wasn't perfect, but I'm here, aren't I? I'm alive, aren't I? We're all alive and well, aren't we? Why is everybody angry with me?"

"Everybody isn't," Anna replies.

"Why is it my fault?"

"Do you think it is your fault?" She studies me with an expression that can only be described as radiological. Anna sees

right through to my bones.

"Of course not," I reply. "I know it's not my fault." She deadbolts the door, then sets the alarm and takes me into the kitchen. I try to remember the last time I ate or what day of the week it is. Then it glimmers. Saturday. I have already asked that several times now. Twenty hours have passed since I almost died. The table is set for two, and a large pot of soup simmers on the stove. I smell baking bread and am suddenly nauseous and starved at the same time, and despite all this, a detail registers. If Anna was expecting Lucy, why isn't the table set for three?

"When will Lucy go back to Miami?" Anna seems to read my thoughts as she lifts the lid off the pot and stirs with a long wooden spoon. "What would you like? Scotch?"

"A strong one."

She pulls the cork out of a bottle of Glenmorangie Sherry Wood Finish single malt whisky and pours its precious rosy essence over ice in cut crystal tumblers.

"I don't know when Lucy will go back. Have no idea, really." I begin to fill in the blanks for her. "ATF was involved in a takedown in Miami that turned bad, very bad. There was a shooting. Lucy…"

"Yes, yes, Kay, I know that part." Anna hands me my drink. She can sound impatient even when she is very calm. "It was all over the news. And I called you. Remember? We talked about Lucy."

"Oh, that's right," I mutter.

Anna takes the chair across from me, elbows on the table, leaning into our conversation. She is an amazingly intense, fit woman, tall and firm, a Leni Riefenstahl enlightened beyond her time and undaunted by the years. Her blue warm-up suit turns her eyes the same startling shade of cornflowers, and her silver hair is pulled back in a neat pony tail held by a black velvet band. I don't know for a fact that she had a face-lift or any other cosmetic work, but I suspect modern medicine has something to do with the way she looks. Anna could easily pass for a woman in her fifties.

"I assume Lucy came to stay with you while the incident is investigated," she comments, "I can only imagine the red tape."

The takedown had gone about as badly as one could. Lucy killed two members of an international gun smuggling cartel that we now believe is connected to Chandonne's crime family. She inadvertently wounded Jo, a DBA agent who at the time was her lover. Red tape is not the word for it.

"But I'm not sure you know the part about Jo," I tell Anna. "Her HIDTA partner."

"I do not know what HIDTA is."

"High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. A squad made up of different law enforcement agencies working violent crimes. ATF, DBA, FBI, Miami-Dade," I tell her. "When the takedown went to hell two weeks ago, Jo got shot in the leg. It turned out the bullet was fired from Lucy's own gun."

Anna listens, sipping Scotch.

"So Lucy accidentally shot Jo, and then, of course, what comes out next is their personal relationship," I continue. "Which has been very strained. I don't know what's going on with them now, to tell you the truth. But Lucy is here. I guess she'll stay through the holidays, and then who knows?"

"I did not know she and Janet had broken up," Anna observes.

"Quite a while ago."

"I am very sorry." She is sincerely bothered by the news. "I liked Janet very much."

It has been a long time since Janet was a topic of conversation. Lucy never says a word about her. I realize I miss Janet very much and still think she was a very stabilizing, mature influence on my niece. If I am honest, I really don't like Jo. I am not sure why. Maybe, I consider as I reach for my drink, it is simply because she isn't Janet.

"And Jo's in Richmond?" Anna digs for more of the story.

"Ironically, she's from here, even though that's not how she and Lucy ended up together. They met in Miami through work. Jo will be recovering for a while, staying in Richmond with her parents, I guess. Don't ask me how that's going to work. They're fundamentalist Christians and not exactly sup-portive of their daughter's lifestyle."

"Lucy never picks anything easy," Anna says, and she is right. "Shootings and more shootings. What is it with her and shooting people? Thank goodness she did not kill again."

The weight in my chest presses down harder. My blood seems to have turned into a heavy metal.

"What is it with her and killing?" Anna pushes. "What happened this time worries me. If what I've heard on TV is to be believed."

"I haven't turned on the TV. I don't know what they're saying." I sip my drink and think about cigarettes again. I have quit so many times in my life.

"She almost killed him, that Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. She had the gun pointed at him but you stopped her." Anna's eyes bore through my skull, probing for secrets. "You tell me."

I describe to her what happened. Lucy had gone to the Medical College of Virginia to bring Jo home from the hospital, and when they pulled up to my house after midnight, Chandonne and I were in the front yard. The Lucy I conjure up in my memory seems a stranger, a violent person I don't know, her face unrecognizably twisted by rage as she pointed the pistol at him, finger on the trigger, and I pleaded with her not to shoot. She was screaming at him, cursing him as I called out to her, no, no, Lucy, no! Chandonne was in unspeakable pain, blind and thrashing, rubbing snow into his chemically burned eyes, howling and begging for someone to help him. At this point, Anna interrupts my story.

"Was he speaking French?" she asks.

The question catches me off guard. I try to remember. "I think so."

"Then you understand French."

I pause again. "Well, I took it in high school. I just know it seemed at the time he was screaming for me to help him. I seemed to understand what he was saying."

"Did you try to help him?"

"I was trying to save his life, trying to stop Lucy from killing him."

"But that was for Lucy, not for him. You weren't really trying to save his life. You were trying to stop Lucy from ruining her own."

Thoughts collide, canceling each other out. I don't reply.

"She wanted to kill him," Anna goes on. "This was clearly her intention."

I nod, staring off, reliving it. Lucy, Lucy. I repeatedly called out her name, trying to shatter the homicidal spell she was under. Lucy. I crawled closer to her in the snowy front yard. Put the gun down. Lucy, you don't want to do this. Please. Put the gun down. Chandonne rolled and writhed, making the horrible sounds of a wounded animal, and Lucy was on her knees, in combat position, gun shaking in both hands as she pointed it at his head. Then feet and legs were all around us. ATF agents and police in dark battle dress clutching rifles and pistols had swarmed into my yard. Not one of them knew what to do as I begged my niece not to kill Chandonne in cold blood. There's been enough killing, I pled with Lucy as I pulled myself within inches of her, my left arm fractured and useless. Don't do this. Don't do this, please. We love you.

"You are quite certain it was Lucy's intention to kill him, even though it wasn't self-defense?" Anna asks again.

"Yes," I reply. "I'm certain."

"Then should we reconsider that perhaps it was not necessary for her to kill those men down in Miami?"

"That was totally different, Anna," I reply. "And I can't blame Lucy for the way she reacted when she saw him in front of my house_saw him and me on the ground in the snow, not even ten feet from each other. She knew about the other cases here, the murders of Kim Luong and Diane Bray. She knew damn well why he had come to my house, what he planned for me. How would you feel if you had been Lucy?"

"I cannot imagine."

"That's right," I reply. "I don't think anyone can imagine something like that until it happens. I know if I were the one driving up and it was Lucy in the yard, and he had tried to murder her, then…" I pause, analyzing, not really able to complete the thought.

"You would have killed him," Anna finishes what she must suspect I was going to say.

"Well, I might have."

"Even though he was no threat? He was in terrible pain, blind and helpless?"

"It's hard to know the other person is helpless, Anna. What did I know outside in the snow, in the dark, with a broken arm, terrorized?"

"Ah. But you knew enough to talk Lucy out of killing him." She gets up and I watch as she unhooks a ladle from the iron rack of pots and pans suspended overhead and fills big earthenware bowls, steam rising in aromatic clouds. She sets the soup on the table, giving me time to think about what she just said. "Have you ever considered that your life reads like one of your more complicated death certificates." Anna then says, "Due to, due to, due to, due to." She motions with her hands, conducting her own orchestra of emphasis. "Where you find yourself now is due to this and that and due to on and on, and it all goes back to the original injury. Your father's death."

I search to remember what I have told her about my past.

"You are who you are in life because you became a student of death at a very young age," she continues. "Most of your childhood you lived with your father's dying."

The soup is chicken vegetable and I detect bay leaves and sherry. I am not sure I can eat. Anna slips mitts over her hands and slides sourdough rolls out of the oven. She serves hot bread on small plates with butter and honey. "It seems to be your karma to return to the scene, so to speak, over and over," she analyzes. "The scene of your father's death, of that original loss. As if somehow you will undo it. But all you do is repeat it. The oldest pattern in human nature. I see it daily."

"This isn't about my father." I pick up my spoon. "This isn't about my childhood, and to tell you the truth, the last thing I care about right now is my childhood."

"It is about not feeling." She pulls out her chair and sits back down. "About learning not to feel because it was too painful to feel." The soup is too hot to eat and she idly stirs it with a heavy, engraved silver spoon. "When you were a child, you could not live with the impending doom in your house, the fear, the grief, the anger. You shut down."

"Sometimes you have to do that."

"It is never good to do that." She shakes her head.

"Sometimes it's survival to do that," I disagree.

"Shutting down is denial. When you deny the past, you will repeat it. You are living proof. Your life has been one loss after another ever since that original loss. Ironically, you have turned loss into a profession, the doctor who hears the dead, the doctor who sits at the bedside of the dead. Your divorce from Tony. Mark's death. Then last year, Benton's murder. Then Lucy in a shoot-out and you almost lose her. And now, finally, you. This terrible man comes to your house and you almost lost you. Losses and more losses."

The pain from Benton's murder is frighteningly fresh. I fear it will always be fresh, that I will never escape the hol-lowness, the echo of empty rooms in my soul and the anguish in my heart. I am outraged all over again as I think of the police in my house unwittingly touching items that belonged to Benton, brushing past his paintings, tracking mud over the fine rug in the dining room he gave me for Christmas one year. No one knowing. No one caring.

"A pattern like this," Anna comments, "if it isn't arrested, takes on an unstoppable energy and sucks everything into its black hole."

I tell her my life is not in a black hole. I don't deny there is a pattern. I would have to be as dense as dirt not to see it. But on one point I am in adamant disagreement. "It bothers me considerably to hear you imply I brought him to my door," I tell her, referring again to Chandonne, whom I can scarcely bear to call by name. "That somehow I set everything into motion to bring a killer to my house. If that's what I hear you saying. If that is what you're saying."

"It is what I am asking." She butters a roll. "It is what I am asking you, Kay," she somberly repeats.

"Anna, how in God's name can you think I would some-how bring about my own murder?"

"Because you would not be the first or last person to do something like that. It is not conscious."

"Not me. Not subconsciously or unconsciously," I claim.

"There is much self-fulfilled prophecy here. You. Then Lucy. She almost became what she fights. Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that is who you become most like," Anna tosses Nietzsche's quote up into the air. She serves up words she has heard me say in the past.

"I didn't will him to come to my house," I repeat slowly and flatly. I continue to avoid saying Chandonne's name because I don't want to give him the power of being a real person to me.

"How did he know where you live?" Anna continues her questioning.

"It's been in the news numerous times over the years, unfortunately," I conjecture. "I don't know how he knew."

"What? He went to the library and looked up your address on microfilm? This creature so hideously deformed who rarely went out in the light of day? This dog-faced congenital anomaly, almost every inch of his face, his body covered with long lanugo hair, pale baby-fine hair? He went to the public library?" She lets the absurdity of this hover over us.

"I don't know how he knew," I repeat. "Where he was hiding isn't far from my house." I am getting upset. "Don't blame me. No one has a right to blame me for what he did. Why are you blaming me?"

"We create our own worlds. We destroy our own worlds. It is that simple, Kay," she answers me.

"I can't believe you think for a minute I wanted him coming after me. I, of all people." An image of Kim Luong flashes. I remember fractured facial bones crunching beneath my latex-gloved fingers. I remember the pungent sweet odor of coagulating blood in the airless, hot storeroom where Chandonne dragged her dying body so he could release his frenzied lust, beating and biting and smearing her blood. "Those women didn't bring this upon themselves, either," I say with emotion.

"I did not know those women," Anna says. "I cannot speak

to what they did or did not do."

An image of Diane Bray flashes, her arrogant beauty savaged, destroyed and crudely displayed on the bare mattress in- side her bedroom. She was completely unrecognizable by the time he finished with her, seeming to hate her more completely than he did Kim Luong_more completely than the women we believe he murdered in Paris before he came to Richmond. I wonder out loud to Anna if Chandonne recognized himself in Bray and it excited his self-hate to its highest level. Diane Bray was cunning and cold. She was cruel and abused power as readily as she breathed air.

"You had every good reason to hate her," is Anna's reply.

This stops me in my mental tracks. I don't respond right away. I try to remember if I have ever said I hate someone, or worse, if I have actually been guilty of it. To hate another person is wrong. It is never right. Hate is a crime of the spirit that leads to crimes of the flesh. Hate is what brings so many of my patients to my door. I tell Anna that I didn't hate Diane Bray, even though she made it her mission to overpower me and almost succeeded in getting me fired. Bray was pathologically jealous and ambitious. But no, I tell Anna, I didn't hate Diane Bray. She was evil, I conclude. But she didn't deserve what he did to her. Certainly, she didn't invite it.

"You don't think so?" Anna questions all of it. "You do not think he did to her, symbolically, what she was doing to you? Obsession. Forcing her way into your life when you were vulnerable. Attacking, degrading, destroying_an overpowering that aroused her, perhaps even sexually. What is it you have told me so many times? People die the way they lived."

"Many of them do."

"Did she?"

"Symbolically, as you put it?" I reply. "Maybe."

"And you, Kay? Did you almost die the way you lived?"

"I didn't die, Anna."

"But you almost did," she says again. "And before he came to your door, you had almost given up. You almost stopped living when Benton did."

Tears touch my eyes.

"What do you think might have happened to you had Diane Bray not died?" Anna then asks.

Bray ran the Richmond police department and fooled peo- pie who mattered. In a very short time, she made a name for herself throughout Virginia, and ironically, her narcissism, her lust for power and recognition, it appears, may be what lured Chandonne to her. I wonder if he stalked her first. I wonder if he stalked me, and suppose the answer to both questions is that he must have.

"Do you think you'd still be the chief medical examiner if Diane Bray were alive?" Anna's stare is unwavering.

"I wouldn't have let her win." I taste my soup and my stomach flops. "I don't care how diabolical she was, I wouldn't have allowed it. My life is up to me. It was never up to her. My life is mine to make or ruin."

"Perhaps you are glad she is dead," Anna says.

"The world's better off without her." I push the place mat and everything on it well away from me. "That's the truth. The world is better off without people like her. The world would be better off without him."

"Better off without Chandonne?"

I nod.

"Then perhaps you wish Lucy had killed him after all?" she quietly suggests, and Anna has a way of demanding truth without being aggressive or judging. "Maybe you would pull the switch, as they say?"

"No." I shake my head. "No, I would not pull the switch on anyone. I can't eat. I'm sorry you went to so much trouble. I hope I'm not coming down with something."

"We have talked enough for now." Anna is suddenly the parent deciding it is time for bed. "Tomorrow is Sunday, a good day to stay in and be quiet and rest. I am clearing my calendar, canceling all my appointments for Monday. And then I'll cancel Tuesday and Wednesday and the rest of the week, if need be."

I try to object but she won't hear it.

"The good thing about being my age is I can do whatever the hell I want," she adds, "I am on call for emergencies. But that is all. And right now, you are my biggest emergency, Kay."

"I'm not an emergency." I get up from the table.

Anna helps me with my luggage and takes me down a long hallway that leads to the west wing of her majestic home. The guest room where I am to stay for an undetermined period of time is dominated by a large yew wood bed that, like much of the furniture in her house, is pale gold Biedermeier. Her decor is restrained, with straight and simple lines, but cumulus down-filled duvets and pillows and heavy draperies that flow in champagne silk waterfalls to the hardwood floor hint at her true nature. Anna's motivation in life is the comfort of others, to heal and to banish pain and celebrate pure beauty.

"What else do you need?" She hangs up my clothes.

I help put away other items in dresser drawers and realize I am trembling again.

"Do you need something to sleep?" She lines up my shoes on the closet floor.

Taking an Ativan or some other sedative is a tempting proposition that I resist. "I've always been afraid to make it a habit," I vaguely respond. "You can see how I am with cigarettes. I can't be trusted."

Anna looks at me. "It is very important you get sleep, Kay. No better friend to depression."

I am not sure what she is saying, but I know what she means. I am depressed. I am probably going to be depressed, and sleep deprivation makes everything so much worse. Throughout my life, insomnia has flared up like arthritis, and when I became a physician I had to resist the easy habit of indulging in one's own candy store. Prescription drugs have always been there. I have always stayed away from them.

Anna leaves me and I sit up in bed with the lights off, staring into the dark, halfway believing that when morning comes, I will find what has happened is just another one of my bad dreams, another horror that crept out from my deeper layers when I was not quite conscious. My rational voice probes my interior like a flashlight but dispels nothing. I can't illuminate any meaning to my almost being mutilated and killed and how that fact will affect the rest of my life. I can't feel it. I can't make sense of it. God, help me. I turn over on my side and shut my eyes. Now I lay me down to sleep, my mother used to pray with me, but I always thought the words were really more for my father in his sickbed down the hall. Sometimes when my mother would leave my room I would insert masculine pronouns into the verses. If he should die before he wakes, I pray the Lord his soul to take, and I would cry myself to sleep.