Chapter One
DR. KAY SCARPETTA moves the tiny glass vial close to candle-light, illuminating a maggot drifting in a poisonous bath of ethanol.
At a glance, she knows the exact stage of metamorphosis before the creamy carcass, no larger than a grain of rice, was preserved in a specimen vessel fitted with a black screw cap. Had the larva lived, it would have matured into a bluebottle Calliphora vicina, a blow fly. It might have laid its eggs in a dead human body's mouth or eyes, or in a living person's malodorous wounds.
"Thank you very much," Scarpetta says, looking around the table at the fourteen cops and crime-scene technicians of the National Forensic Academy's class of 2003. Her eyes linger on Nic Robillard's innocent face. "I don't know who collected this from a location best not to contemplate at the dinner table, and preserved it with me in mind ... but ..."
Blank looks and shrugs.
"I have to say that this is the first time I've been given a maggot as a gift."
No one claims responsibility but if there is a fact Scarpetta has never doubted, it is a cops ability to bluff and, when necessary outright lie. Having noticed a tug at the corner of Nic Robillard's mouth before anyone else realized that a maggot had joined them at the dinner table, Scarpetta has a suspect in mind.
The light of the flame moves over the vial in Scarpetta's fingertips, her nails neatly filed short and square, her hand steady and elegant but strong from years of manipulating the unwilling dead and cutting through their stubborn tissue and bone.
Unfortunately for Nic, her classmates aren't laughing, and humiliation finds her like a frigid draft. After ten weeks with cops she should now count as comrades and friends, she is still Nic the Hick from Zachary, Louisiana, a town of twelve thousand, where, until recently, murder was an almost unheard-of atrocity. It was not unusual for Zachary to go for years without one.
Most of Nic's classmates are so jaded by working homicides that they have come up with their own categories for them: real murders, misdemeanor murders, even urban renewal. Nic doesn't have her own pet categories. Murder is murder. So far in her eight-year career, she has worked only two, both of them domestic shootings. It was awful the first day of class when an instructor went from one cop to another, asking how many homicides each of their departments averaged a year. None, Nic said. Then he asked the size of each cop's department. Thirty-five, Nic said. Or smaller than my eighth-grade class, as one of her new classmates put it. From the beginning of what was supposed to be the greatest opportunity of her life, Nic quit trying to fit in, accepting that in the police way of defining the universe, she was a them, not an us.
Her rather whimsical maggot mischief, she realizes with regret, was a breach of something (she's not sure what), but without a doubt she should never have decided to give a gift, serious or otherwise, to the legendary forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Nic's face heats up, and a cold sweat dampens her armpits as she watches for her hero's reaction, unable to read it, probably because Nic is stunned stupid by insecurity and embarrassment.
"So I'll call her Maggie, although we really can't determine gender yet," Scarpetta decides, her wire-rim glasses reflecting shifting candlelight. "But a good enough name for a maggot, I think." A ceiling fan snaps and whips the candle flame inside its glass globe as she holds up the vial. "Who's going to tell me which instar Maggie is? What life stage was she in before someone"-she scans the faces at the table, pausing on Nic's again-"dropped her in this little bottle of ethanol? And by the way, I suspect Maggie aspirated and drowned. Maggots need air the same way we do."
"What asshole drowned a maggot?" one of the cops snipes.
"Yeah. Imagine inhaling alcohol ..."
"What'cha talking about, Joey? You been inhaling it all night."
A dark, ominous humor begins to rumble like a distant storm, and Nic doesn't know how to duck out of it. She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms at her chest, doing her best to look indifferent as her mind unexpectedly plays one of her father's worn-out storm warnings: Now, Nic, honey, when there's lightning, don't stand alone or think you'll be protected by hiding in the trees. Find the nearest ditch and lie as low in it as you can. At the moment, she has no place to hide but in her own silence.
"Hey Doc, we already took our last test."
"Who brought homework to our party?"
"Yeah, we're off duty."
"Off duty; I see," Scarpetta muses. "So if you're off duty when the dead body of a missing person has just been found, you're not going to respond. Is that what you're saying?"
"I'd have to wait until my bourbon wears off," says a cop whose shaved head is so shiny it looks waxed.
"That's a thought," she says.
Now the cops are laughing-everyone but Nic.
"It can happen." Scarpetta sets the vial next to her wineglass. "At any given moment, we can get a call. It may prove to be the worst call of our careers, and here we are, slightly buzzed from a few drinks on our time off, or maybe sick, or in the middle of a fight with a lover, a friend, one of the kids."
She pushes away her half-eaten yellowfin tuna and folds her hands on top of the checkered tablecloth.
"But cases can't wait," she adds.
"Seriously. Isn't it true that some can?" asks a Chicago detective his classmates call Popeye because of the anchor tattooed on his left forearm. "Like bones in a well or buried in a basement. Or a body under a slab of concrete. I mean, they ain't going anywhere."
"The dead are impatient," Scarpetta says.
Chapter Two
Night on the bayou reminds Jay Talley of a Cajun band of bullfrogs playing bass, and peepers screaming on electric guitars, and cicadas and crickets rasping washboards and sawing fiddles.
He shines a flashlight near the dark, arthritic shape of an old cypress tree, and alligator eyes flash and vanish beneath black water. The light simmers with the ominous soft sound of mosquitoes as the BayStealth drifts, the outboard motor cut. Jay sits in the captain's chair and idly surveys the woman in the fish box not far below his feet. When he was boat shopping several years ago, this particular BayStealth excited him. The fish box beneath the floor is long and deep enough to hold more than a hundred and twenty pounds of ice and fish, or a woman built the way he likes.
Her wide, panicked eyes shine in the dark. In daylight, they are blue, a deep, beautiful blue. She painfully screws them shut as Jay caresses her with the beam of the flashlight, starting with her mature, pretty face, all the way down to her red painted toenails. She is blonde, probably in her early- to mid-forties, but looks younger than that, petite but curvaceous. The fiberglass fish box is lined with orange boat cushions, dirty and stained black from old blood. Jay was thoughtful, even sweet when he bound her wrists and ankles loosely so the yellow nylon rope wouldn't cut off her circulation. He told her that the rope wouldn't abrade her soft flesh as long as she didn't struggle.
"No point in struggling, anyway," he said in a baritone voice that goes perfectly with his blond-god good looks. "And I'm not going to gag you. No point in screaming, either, right?"
She nodded her head, which made him laugh, because she was nodding as if answering yes when, of course, she meant no. But he understands how haywire people think and act when they are terrified, a word that has always struck him as so completely inadequate. He supposes that when Samuel Johnson was toiling at the many editions of his dictionary, he had no idea what a human being feels when he or she anticipates horror and death. The anticipation creates a frenzy of panic in every neuron, in every cell of the body, that goes far, far beyond mere terror, but even Jay, who is fluent in many languages, has no better word to describe what his victims suffer.
A frisson of horror.
No.
He studies the woman. She is a lamb. In life, there are only two types of people: wolves and lambs.
Jay's determination to perfectly describe the way his lambs feel has become a relentless, obsessive quest. The hormone epinephrine-adrenaline-is the alchemy that turns a normal person into a lower form of life with no more control or logic than a gigged frog. Added to the physiological response that precipitates what criminologists, psychologists and other so-called experts refer to as fight-or-flight are the additional elements of the lamb's past experiences and imagination. The more violence a lamb has experienced through books, television, movies or the news, for example, the more the lamb can imagine the nightmare of what might happen.
But the word. The perfect word. It eludes him tonight.
He gets down on the boat floor and listens to his lamb's rapid, shallow breaths. She trembles as the earthquake of horror (for lack of the perfect word) shifts her every molecule, creating unbearable havoc. He reaches down into the fish box and touches her hand. It is as cold as death. He presses two fingers against the side of her neck, finding her carotid artery and using the luminescent dial of his watch to take her pulse.
"One-eighty, more or less," he tells her. "Don't have a heart attack. I had one who did."
She stares at him with eyes bigger than a full moon, her lower lip twitching.
"I mean it. Don't have a heart attack." He is serious.
It is an order.
"Take a deep breath."
She does, her lungs shaky.
"Better?"
"Yes. Please ..."
"Why is it that all of you little lambs are so fucking polite?"
Her dirty magenta cotton shirt had been torn open days ago, and he spreads the ripped front, exposing her more than ample breasts. They tremble and shimmer in the faint light, and he follows their round slopes down to her heaving rib cage, to the hollow of her flat abdomen, down to the unzipped fly of her jeans.
"I'm sorry," she tries to whisper as a tear rolls down her dirt-streaked face.
"Now, there you go again." He sits back in his throne of the captain's chair. "Do you really, really believe that being polite is going to change my plans?" The politeness sets off a slow burning rage. "Do you know what politeness means to me?"
He expects an answer.
She tries to wet her lips, her tongue as dry as paper. Her pulse visibly pounds in her neck, as if a tiny bird is trapped in them.
"No." She chokes on the word, tears flowing into her ears and hair.
"Weakness," he says.
Several frogs strike up the band. Jay studies his prisoner's nakedness, her pale skin shiny with bug repellent, a small humane act on his part, motivated by his distaste for red welts. Mosquitoes are a gray; chaotic storm around her but do not land. He gets down from his chair again and gives her a sip of bottled water. Most of it runs down her chin. Touching her sexually is of no interest to him. Three nights now he has brought her out here in his boat, because he wants the privacy to talk and stare at her nakedness, hoping that somehow her body will become Kay Scarpetta's, and finally becomes furious because it can't, furious because Scarpetta wouldn't be polite, furious because Scarpetta isn't weak. A rabid part of him fears he is a failure because Scarpetta is a wolf and he captures only lambs, and he can't find the perfect word, the word.
He realizes the word will not come to him with this lamb in the fish box, just as it hasn't come with the others.
"I'm getting bored," he tells his lamb. "I'll ask you again. One last chance. What is the word?"
She swallows hard, her voice reminding him of a broken axle as she tries to move her tongue to speak. He can hear it sticking to her upper palate.
"I don't understand. I'm sorry ..."
"Fuck the politeness, do you hear me? How many times do I have to say it?"
The tiny bird inside her neck beats frantically, and her tears flow faster.
"What is the word? Tell me what you feel. And don't say scared. You're a goddamn schoolteacher. You must have a vocabulary with more than five words in it."
"I feel ... I feel acceptance," she says, sobbing.
"You feel what?"
"You're not going to let me go," she says. "I know it now."
Chapter Three
Scarpetta's subtle wit reminds Nic of heat lightning. It doesn't rip and crack and show off like regular lightning but is a quiet, shimmering flash that her mother used to tell her meant God was taking pictures.
He takes pictures of everything you're doing, Nic, so you'd better behave yourself because one day there will be the Final Judgment, and those pictures are going to be passed around for all to see.
Nic stopped believing such nonsense by the time she reached high school, but her silent partner, as she thinks of her conscience, will probably never stop warning her that her sins will find her out. And Nic believes her sins are many.
"Investigator Robillard?" Scarpetta is saying.
Nic is startled by the sound of her own name. Her focus returns to the cozy, dark dining room and the cops who fill it.
"Tell us what you'd do if your phone rang at two a.m. and you'd had a few drinks but were needed at a bad, really bad, crime scene," Scarpetta presents to her. "Let me preface this by saying that no one wants to be left out when there's a bad, really bad, crime scene. Maybe we don't like to admit that, but it's true."
"I don't drink very much." Nic instantly regrets the remark as her classmates groan.
"Lordy, where'd you grow up, girlfriend, Sunday school?"
"What I mean is, I really can't because I have a five-year-old son ..." Nic's voice trails off, and she feels like crying. This is the longest she's ever been away from him.
The table falls silent. Shame and awkwardness flatten the mood.
"Hey, Nic," Popeye says, "you got his picture with you? His name's Buddy," he tells Scarpetta. "You gotta see his picture. A really ass-kicking little hombre sitting on a pony ..."
Nic is in no mood to pass around the wallet-size photograph that by now is worn soft, the writing on the back faded and smeared from her taking it out and looking at it all the time. She wishes Popeye would change the subject or give her the silent treatment again.
"How many of you have children?" Scarpetta asks the table.
About a dozen hands go up.
"One of the painful aspects of this work," she points out, "maybe the worst thing about this work-or shall I call it a mission-is what it does to the people we love, no matter how hard we try to protect them."
No heat lightning at all.
Continues...
Continues...
Excerpted from Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell Copyright © 2004 by Patricia Cornwell. Excerpted by permission.
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