Autopsy(Kay Scarpetta #25)(100)

Then she’s walking in with her birthday guests. She got to ask whomever she liked, and Benton, Dorothy, Tron, Lucy’s copilot Clare, and Blaise Fruge have invaded. They’re talking a mile a minute, getting on with the business of tequila. Everybody is dressed casually, and having fun, my niece included, at least superficially.

Lucy has killed before, and if need be would kill again, and that’s not what’s eating at her right now. She’s having a hard time coming to grips with Janet’s avatar dropping the ball. The algorithm didn’t include that someone might use spray paint on the camera lenses, and Boone Cotton had the lay of the land.

He’d talked to all of us at one time or other, and I remember he had lively eyes, a flirtatious smile. He was attractive and funny, and I’m pretty sure that on one particularly humid hot day, I brought him an iced tea while he was pulling up periwinkle and other creepers. He’d been on our property multiple times, most recently five days ago to paint the new trellis.

There are images of his Honda minivan parked on our driveway, and later on he must have coaxed Merlin close enough to take his collar. Cotton knew exactly where the cameras were located and planned accordingly. When he returned and entered the property with the collar and his can of spray paint, Lucy was busy making tacos.

She wasn’t looking at security live feeds, and Janet didn’t alert her there was a problem until Cotton opened the cat door with the stolen collar. The serial number isn’t the same one that’s on Merlin’s RFID-implanted replacement, and the algorithm caught it. Lucy got an alert on her phone, and realizing what that meant, she was out the door with the shotgun.

LATER, MY NIECE WOULD tell us that Cotton was clutching his broken arm when she raced up in the dark, crashing the butt of her shotgun into the back of his head. Rather much like he did to Gwen with the kettlebell.

“If you’ll get the secret sauce out of the microwave, please,” I instruct Lucy as Benton sets a margarita next to where I’m working at the butcher block.

“Just the way you like it,” he says. “Just the barest breath of agave nectar, fresh lime juice, shaken, never stirred.”

“Thank you, Secret Agent Man.” Opening a drawer, I find the pastry brush as Lucy sets the glass bowl of melted butter, cheese, garlic and other ingredients I won’t discuss.

“It’s to die for,” Lucy tells Tron, and they seem to be getting along. “You won’t believe how good her garlic bread is,” my niece says to her, no one else, and it would be good if she could care about someone again.

“What’s in it? Come on,” Clare badgers me. “No fair, you got to tell us.”

“It will never happen.” Dorothy fills the margarita shaker with ice. “I’ve eaten enough of her garlic bread to be the size of Mount Rushmore. Thankfully, Pete and I are faithful about working out or neither of us would look like this. Anyhow, Kay won’t tell anyone how she makes it.”

“Not even me,” Lucy says.

“She won’t give it up,” Marino concurs. “I’ve gotten her drunk, and she won’t spill the beans.”

“I’m good at getting things out of people,” Fruge taunts.

“You can cut out the busybody act,” Marino says to her. “It won’t work. Not with the doc.”

“You can forget it,” everyone says in chorus.

I paint my secret sauce over the split focaccia loaves, and into the oven they go, as Benton’s phone rings. Glancing at the display to see who it is, he walks away from us, answering, and he does nothing but listen at first.

“That’s good news, at least,” he finally says, turning around, locking eyes with me and smiling a little. “She’s right here.” He hands me the phone. “The Russians have turned over Jared Horton to us. And someone wants to say hello.”

“He’s now claiming that the two Thor scientists killed each other,” Gabriella Honoré informs me over the phone. “And he escaped, not knowing what else to do.”

“What about the space debris story?” I ask.

“Yes, indeed. What about it?”

“Of course, we know what really happened,” I reply.

“We’ve been flooded with information about their activities over the years,” Gabriella says. “No question what they were up to, and it will take a long time to undo the damage. Well, some of it will never be undone. His plan was for Gwen Hainey to join him in Argentina, where he has a getaway. She’d already moved a lot of her things there.”

“Explaining why she had so little in the way of belongings here,” I reply.

“They had an apartment ready and waiting in Buenos Aires. It’s quite apparent they were more than just comrades in their espionage. But enough of that for now. How are you, Kay? It’s good to hear you alive and well after what happened. I want to thank you for tasting the wine instead of me,” she quips.

“Anytime,” I quip right back at her, and now Merlin has appeared, rubbing against my ankles again.

“As it turns out, it was tampered with by a very rich disgruntled winemaker who wanted to destroy his competitor’s business,” she informs me.

I ask a few questions about this disgruntled winemaker, and he lives in a sixteenth-century chateau in France that’s filled with rare art, and landscaped with sumptuous gardens. That makes sense when I recall the trace evidence we found in the bottle of Bordeaux.