Trace

54

Lights dance over cinder-block walls and beige-painted concrete steps, and their feet make scuffing sounds as they go down to where Edgar Allan Pogue worked when Scarpetta was chief. There are no windows in the first two levels of the building because the level they entered the building from was where the morgue used to be, and there shouldn't be windows in morgues and usually aren't, and there aren't windows below ground. The darkness in the stairwell is complete, and the air is sharp and damp and thick with dust. "When they gave me a tour of this place," Joe is saying as he goes down the steps ahead of her, his flashlight bobbing with each step, "they didn't take me down here. All I did was do a walk-through upstairs. I thought this was a basement. They didn't take me down here," he says, and he sounds uneasy.

"They should have," she replies, and dust tickles her throat and prickles her skin. "There are two floor vats down here, about twenty feet by twenty feet and ten feet deep. You wouldn't want to roll a tractor into one or fall in, for that matter."

"Now that really makes me mad," he says, and he sounds mad. "They should have at least showed me pictures. Twenty by twenty feet. Damn! Now that really pisses me off. This is the last step. Be careful." He sweeps his light around.

"We should he in a hallway. Turn left."

"Looks like that's the only way we can turn." He starts moving again, slowly. "Why the hell didn't they tell us about those vats?" He just can't believe it.

"I don't know. Depends on who showed you around."

"Some guy, oh hell, what was his name. All 1 remember is he was with General Services and didn't like being in here worth a damn. I'm not sure he even knew much about the building."

"Probably didn't," Scarpetta says, looking at the filthy white tile floor shining dully in her light. "They just wanted it torn down. The guy from GSA probably didn't even know about the floor vats. He may not ever have been down here in the Anatomical Division. Not many people have been down here. They're right over there." She points her light ahead of them, and the beam of light pushes back the dense darkness of a huge empty room and dimly illuminates the dark iron rectangular covers of the vats in the floor. "Well, the covers are on. I don't know if that's good or not," she says. "But this is a terrible biological hazard down here. Be sure you're aware of what you're dealing with when you start knocking down this part of the building."

"Oh don't you worry. I just can't believe it," he says angry and nervous as he shines his light around.

She moves away from the vats, back to an area of the Anatomical Division that's on the other side of the big space, passing the small room where the embalming used to be done, and she shines her light in it. A steel table attached to thick pipes in the floor gleams in her light, and a steel sink and cabinets flow by in her light. Parked against the wall in that room is a rusting gurney with a wadded plastic shroud on top. To the left of that room is an alcove, and she imagines the crematorium built into cinder block before she sees it. Then her light shines on the long dark iron door in the wall and she remembers seeing fire in the crack of the door, remembers the dusty steel trays that got shoved in with a body on them and pulled out when there was nothing much on them but ashes and chunks of chalky bone, and she thinks of the baseball bats used to pulverize the chunks. She feels shame when she thinks of the bats.

Her light moves over the floor. It is still white with dust and small bits of bone that look like chalk, and she can feel grit under her shoes as she moves. Joe hasn't come in here with her. He waits just beyond the alcove and helps from his distance by shining his light around the floor and in the corners, and the shape of her in the coat and hard hat is huge and black on the cinder-block wall. Then the light flashes over the eye. It is spray-painted in black on beige cinder block, a big black staring eye with eyelashes.

"What the hell is that?" Joe asks. He is looking at the eye on the wall, even though she can't see him looking. "Jesus Christ. What is it?"

Scarpetta doesn't answer him as her light moves around. The baseball bats are gone from the corner where they were propped when she was chief, but there is a lot of dust and bits of bone, quite a lot, she thinks. Her light finds a spray can of black paint, and two touch-up paint bottles, one red enamel paint and the other blue enamel paint, both empty, and she places them inside a plastic bag and the can of spray paint in a separate bag. She finds a few old cigar boxes that have a residue of ashes inside and she notices cigar butts on the floor and a crumpled brown paper bag. Her gloved hands enter her beam of light and pick up the bag. Paper crackles as she opens it, and she can tell the bag hasn't been down here eight years, not even one year.

She vaguely smells cigars as she opens the bag, and it isn't smoked cigars she thinks she smells but unburnt cigar tobacco, and she shines her light inside the bag and sees bits of tobacco and a receipt. Joe is watching her and has steadied his light on the bag in her hands. She looks at the receipt and feels a sense of disconnection and unreality as she reads the date of this past September fourteenth, when Edgar Allan Pogue, and she feels sure it was Pogue, spent more than a hundred dollars at a tobacco store just down the street at the James Center for ten Romeo y Julieta cigars.