Trace

9

Lucy touches the paddle shift with her left index finger and the engine kicks up a thousand rpm with a roar as she slows down. Her sonaradar chirps and the front alert flashes red, indicating police radar somewhere up ahead.

"I'm not speeding," she says to Rudy Musil, who sits in the passenger's seat, near the fire extinguisher, and he is looking at the speedometer. "Only going six miles over."

"I didn't say anything," he replies, glancing in his side-view mirror.

"Let me see if I'm right." She keeps the car in third and just a little over forty miles per hour. "The cop car's going to be at the next intersection looking for us yahoos who can't wait to hit the coast and haul ass."

"What's going on with Marino? Let me guess," Rudy says. "I need to pack a suitcase."

Both of them keep up their constant scans, checking mirrors, noting other cars, aware of every palm tree, pedestrian, and building on this flat stretch of strip malls. Traffic is moderate and relatively polite at the

74 * moment on Atlantic Boulevard in Pompano Beach, just north of Fort

Lauderdale.

"Yup," Lucy says. "Tally ho." Her sunglasses are fixed straight ahead as she passes a dark blue Ford LTD that has just turned right off Powerline Road, an intersection with an Eckerd's drugstore and the Discount Meat Market. The unmarked Ford slides in behind her in the left lane.

"You got him curious," Rudy says

"Well, he's not paid to be curious," she says aggressively as the unmarked Ford follows her, and she knows damn well the cop is hoping she'll do something that gives him cause to turn on his lights and check out the car and the young couple in it. "Look at that. People passing me in the right lane, and that guy over there's got an expired inspection sticker." She points. "And the cop's more interested in me."

She stops checking on him in the rearview mirror and wishes that Rudy would lighten his mood. Ever since she opened an office in Los Angeles, he has been out of sorts. She's not sure how, but clearly she's miscalculated his ambitions and needs in life. She assumed that Rudy would love a highrise on "Wilshire Boulevard with a view so immense that on a clear day one can see Catalina Island. She was wrong, terribly wrong, as wrong as she has ever been about anything she has ever assumed about him.

A front is rolling in from the south, the sky divided into layers that vary between thick smoke to sunlit pearly gray. Cooler air pushes away rain that at times today was pounding, leaving puddles that blast the undercarriage of Lucy's low-slung car. Just ahead, a flock of migrating seagulls swirl over the road, flying low and in crazy directions, and Lucy drives on, the unmarked car dogging her rear.

"Marino doesn't have much to say," she answers Rudy's question from a moment ago. "Just that something's up in Richmond. As usual, my aunt is stepping into a mess."

I heard you volunteer our services. I thought she was just going to consult about something. What's up?"

"I don't know if we need to do anything. We'll see. What's up is the chief, I can't remember his name, asked her help in a case, some kid, a girl, who suddenly died and he can't figure out why. His office can't, so no big surprise. He's not even been there four months, and he washes his hands of the first big problem and calls my aunt. Hey, how about you coming on up and stepping in this shit so I don't have to. Right? I told her not to touch it and now it seems there are other problems. Huge surprise. I don't know. I told her not to go back to Richmond, but she doesn't listen to me."

"Listens to you about like you listen to her," Rudy says.

"You know something, Rudy. I don't like this guy." Lucy looks in her rearview mirror, at the unmarked Ford.

It is still on her bumper, and its driver is a dark-skinned person, perhaps a man, but Lucy can't tell and she doesn't want to seem interested in him or even aware of him, and then something else occurs to her.

"Damn, I'm stupid," she says, incredulous. "My radar's not going off. What am I thinking? It hasn't made a chirp since that car pulled in behind us. It's not a police car with radar. It can't be. And he's following us."

"Easy," Rudy says. "Just drive and ignore him. Let's see what he does. Probably just some dude looking at your car. That's what you get for driving cars like this. I've told you and told you. Shit."

Rudy didn't used to lecture her. When they first met years ago at the FBI Academy, they became colleagues, then partners, then friends, and then he thought enough of her personally and professionally to leave law enforcement not long after she did and come work for her company, which might be described as an international private investigation firm for lack of a better definition of what The Last Precinct or its employees do. Even some of the people who work for TLP don't know what it does and have never met its founder and owner, Lucy. Some employees have never met Rudy, or if they have, they don't know who he is or what he does.

"Run the plate," Lucy says.

Rudy has his palm-size computer out and he is logging on, but he can't run the plate number because he can't see it. The car has no license plate in front, and Lucy feels stupid for ordering him to run a number he can't see.

"Let him get in front of you," Rudy says. "I can't see his plate unless he trets in front."

She touches the left paddle and drops to second gear. Now she is going five miles below the speed limit, and the driver stays behind her. He doesn't seem interested in passing her.

"Okay, let the games begin," she savs. "You're fucking with the wrong chicken, asshole." She suddenly turns a hard right into a strip mall parking lot.

"Oh shit. What the hell…? Now he knows you're messing with him," Rudy says in annoyance.

"Get the plate now. You should be able to see it."

Rudy twists around in the seat, but he's not going to get the plate because the Ford LTD has turned off too, and is still on their tail, following them through the parking lot.

"Stop," Rudy says to Lucy. He is disgusted with her, completely disgusted with her. "Stop the car right now."

She eases on the brake and shifts the car into neutral, and the Ford stops right behind her. Rudy gets out and walks toward it as the driver's window rolls down. Lucy has her window open, her pistol in her lap, and she watches the activity in her side-view mirror and tries to chase away her feelings. She feels stupid and embarrassed and angry and slightly afraid.

"You got a problem?" she hears Rudy say to the driver, definitely a Hispanic male, a young one.

The have a problem? I was just looking." iMaybe we don't want you looking."

Its a free country. I can fucking look. You have the problem, fuck you!"

"Go look somewhere else. Now get the hell out of here," Rudy says without raising his voice. "You follow us one more time, you're going to jail, you fucking piece of shit."

Lucy has the bizarre urge to laugh out loud as Rudy flashes his fake credentials. She is sweating and her heart is beating wildly, and she wants to laugh and gel out of the car and kill the young Hispanic male, and she wants to cry, and because she understands nothing about her feelings, she sits behind the wheel of her Ferrari and doesn't move. The driver says something else that she can't make out and angrily drives off, squealing rubber. Rudy walks back to the Ferrari and climbs in.

"Way to go," he says as she slips back into the traffic on Atlantic. "Just some punk interested in your car, and you have to turn it into an international incident. First you think some cop's following you because the car's a black Crown Vic. Then you notice that your radar detector isn't detecting a damn thing, so next you think… what? What did you think? The Mafia? Some hit man who's going to take us out in the middle of a busy highway?"

She doesn't blame Rudy for losing his temper with her, but she can't allow it. "Don't yell at me," she says.

"You know what? You're out of control. You're unsafe."

"This is about something else," she says, trying to sound sure of herself.

"You're damn right it is," he retorts. "It's about her. You let someone stay in your house and look what happens. You could be dead. She sure as hell should be dead. And something worse is going to happen if you don't get a grip."

"She was being stalked, Rudy. Don't make it my fault. It's not my fault."

"Stalked, you're damn right. She sure as hell was being stalked, and it sure as hell is your fault. If you would drive something like a Jeep… or drive the Hummer. We have company Hummers. Why don't you drive one of those once in a while? If you hadn't let her drive your damn Ferrari. Showing off, Miss Hollywood. Jesus. In your damn Ferrari."

"Don't get jealous. I hate…"

"I'm not jealous!" he yells.

"You've been acting jealous since we hired her."

"This isn't about your hiring her! Hired her to do what? She's going to protect our L.A. clients? What a joke! So you hired her to do what? To do what?"

"You can't talk to me like this," Lucy says quietly, and she is surprisingly calm, but she has no choice. If she fires back at him, then they'll really have a fight and he might do something terrible like quit.

"The won't be run out of my own life. I'll drive what I want and live where I want." She stares fiercely straight ahead, at the road, at the cars turning off on side streets and into parking places. "I'll be generous to whoever I want. She wasn't allowed to drive my black Ferrari. You know that. But she took it out and that's what started everything. He saw her, followed her, and then look what happens. It's nobody's fault. Not even hers. She didn't invite him to vandalize my car and follow her and try to kill her."

"Good. You live your life the way you want," Rudy replies. "And we'll just keep pulling into parking lots and maybe next time I'll beat up some innocent stranger who was just looking at your damn Ferrari. Hell, maybe I'll get to shoot someone. Or maybe I'll get shot. That would be even better, right? Me get shot over a stupid car."

"Calm down," Lucy says as she stops at a red light. "Please, calm down. I could have handled that better. I agree."

'Handled? I didn't notice you handling anything. You just reacted like an idiot."

"Rudy, stop it. Please." She doesn't want to get so angry with him that she makes a mistake. "You can't talk to me like this. You can't. Don't make me pull rank."

She turns left on A1A, driving slowly along the beach, and several teenaged boys almost fall off their bicycles as they turn around to stare at her car. Rudy shakes his head and shrugs, as if to say, I rest my case. But talk about the Ferrari is no longer about the Ferrari. For Lucy to change the way she lives is to allow him to win, and she thinks of the beast as a him. Henri called him a beast, and he is a male beast, Lucy believes that. She has no doubt of that. The hell with science, the hell with evidence, the hell with everything. She knows damn well the beast is a him.

Me is either a cocky beast or a stupid beast because he left two partial fingerprints on the glass-covered bedside table. He was stupid or careless to leave prints, or maybe he doesn't care. So far, the partial prints aren't matching up with any prints in any Automated Fingerprint Identification

he's never been arrested or his prints have never been taken for some other reason. Maybe he didn't care when he left three hairs on the bed, three black head hairs, and why should he care? Even when a case is high priority, mitochondrial DNA analysis can take thirty to ninety days. There is no certainty that the results will be worth a damn because there is no such thing as a centralized and statistically significant mitochondrial DNA database, and unlike the nuclear DNA of blood and tissue, the mitochondrial DNA of hair and bones isn't going to tattle on the perpetrator's gender. The evidence the beast left doesn't matter. It may never matter unless he becomes a suspect and direct comparisons can be made.

"All right. I'm rattled. I'm not myself. I'm letting it get to me," Lucy says, concentrating hard on her driving, worried that maybe she is losing control, that maybe Rudy is right. "What I did back there shouldn't have happened. Never. I'm too careful for that kind of shit."

"You are. She's not." Rudy's jaw is set stubbornly, his eyes blacked out by nonpolarized sunglasses that have a mirrored finish. Right now he refuses to give Lucy his eyes, and that bothers her.

"I thought we were talking about the Hispanic guy back there," Lucy replies.

"You know what I told you from day one," Rudy says. "The danger of someone living in your house. Someone using your car, your stuff. Someone flying solo in your airspace. Someone who doesn't know the same rules you and I do and sure as hell doesn't have our training. Or care about the same things we do, including us."

"Not everything in life should be about training," Lucy says, and it is easier to talk about training than whether someone you love really cares. It's easier talking about the Hispanic than Henri. "I should never have handled it like that back there, and I'm sorry."

"Maybe you've forgotten what life is really like," Rudy replies.

"Oh, please don't go into your Boy Scout Be Prepared shit," she snaps at him and speeds up, going north, getting close to the Hillsboro neighborhood where her salmon-colored stucco Mediterranean mansion overlooks an inlet that connects the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean. "I don't think you can be objective. You can't even say her name. Someone-this and Someone-that."

"Ha! Objective? Ha! You should talk." His tone is dangerously approaching cruel. "That stupid bitch has ruined absolutely everything. And you didn't have a right to do that. You didn't have a right to drag me along for the ride. You didn't have a right."

"Rudy, we've got to stop fighting like this," Lucy says. "Why do we fight like this?" She looks at him. "Everything isn't ruined."

He doesn't answer her.

"Why do we fight like this? It's making me sick," she says.

They didn't used to fight. Now and then he sulked but he never turned on her until she opened the office in Los Angeles and recruited Henri from the LAPD. A deep horn blares out a warning that the drawbridge is about to go up, and Lucy downshifts and stops again, this time getting a thumbs-up from a man in a Corvette.

She smiles sadly and shakes her head. "Yeah, I can be stupid," she says. Genetic wiring, bad wiring. From my crazy Latino biological father. Hopefully, not from my mother, although it would be worse to be like her. Much worse."

Rudy says nothing, staring at the rising bridge giving way to a yacht.

"Let's don't fight," she says. "Everything isn't ruined. Come on." She reaches over and squeezes his hand. "A truce? Start all over? Do we need to call in Benton for hostage negotiation? Because you're not just my friend and partner these days. You're my hostage, and I guess I'm yours, right? Here because you need the job or at least want the job, and I need you. That's just the way it is."

"I don't have to be anywhere," he says, and his hand doesn't move. His hand is dead under hers, and she lets go of it and moves away.

"How well I know," she replies, hurt that he wouldn't touch her, and she places her rejected hand back on the steering wheel. "I live with that fear all the time these days. You're going to say, I quit. Good-bye. Good riddance. Have a good life."

He stares at the yacht sailing through the open bridge, heading out to sea. The people on the deck of the yacht are dressed in Bermuda shorts and loose shirts, and move with the ease of the rare very rich. Lucy is very rich. But she has never believed it. When she looks at the yacht, she still feels poor. When she looks at Rudy, she feels poorer.

"Coffee?" she asks. "Will you have a coffee with me? We can sit out by that pool I never use and look out at the water I never notice in that house I wish I didn't have. I can be stupid," she says. "Have a coffee with me."

"Yeah, I guess." He stares out the window like a sulking little boy as Lucy's mailbox comes into view. "I thought we were taking that thing down," he says, indicating the mailbox. "You don't get mail at your house. The only thing you might get in that thing is something you don't want. Especially these days."

"I'll get the landscaper to take it down next time he comes," she says. "I haven't been here much. Opening the office down here and everything else. I feel like the other Lucy. The Lucy of I Love Lucy. Remember that one when she's working in the candy factory and can't keep up because the candy's coming off the belt so fast?"

"No."

"You probably never watched I Love Lucy even once in your entire life,"

Lucy says. "My aunt and I used to sit around watching Jackie Gleason, Bonanza, I Love Lucy, the shows she watched when she was growing up down here in Miami." She slows almost to a stop at the offending mailbox at the end of her driveway. Scarpetta lives simply compared with how Lucy lives, and she warned Lucy about tlje house.

For one thing, it's too opulent for the neighborhood, Scarpetta told her. It was a foolish decision to buy the house and Lucy has turned on the house and calls the three-story eleven-thousand-square-foot mansion her nine-million-dollar townhouse because it is built on a third of an acre. There isn't enough grass to feed a rabbit, just stonework and a small disappearing-edge pool, a fountain and a few palms and plants. Didn't her aunt Kay nag her about moving here? No privacy or security, and accessible to boaters, Scarpetta said when Lucy was too busy and preoccupied to give a part-time domain the appropriate attention, when she was obsessed with making Henri happy. You'll be sorry, Scarpetta said. Lucy moved here not even three months ago and she's as sorry as she's ever been in her life.

Lucy presses one remote control to open her gate and another one to open her garage.

"Why bother?" Rudy is talking about her gate. "The damn driveway's ten feet long."

"Tell me about it," Lucy says angrily. "I hate this goddamn place."

"Before you know it, someone's on your ass and inside your garage," Rudy says.

"Then I have to kill them." "This isn't a joke."

I'm not joking," Lucy says as the garage door slowly shuts behind them.