Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(28)
"Quite a bit of togetherness," the lawyers agreed with one another.
"He's my partner. Partners have quite a bit of togetherness."
"Nonetheless, you seemed to devote quite a lot of your time and attention to Agent Musil, including personal attention, such as asking him about his weekends and holidays, and calling him at home when he was out sick."
"Perhaps joking around, as you put it, might have been interpreted as flirting. Some people joke around when they flirt."
The lawyers agreed once again, and what was worse, two of them were women-women in masculine skirt suits and high-heel shoes, women whose eyes reflected an identification with the aggressor, as if their irises were glued on to their eyeballs backward and were dull instead of bright, and blind to what was in front of them. The women lawyers had the dead eyes of people who kill themselves off to get what they want or to become what they fear.
"I'm sorry," Lucy said as her attention sharpened and she avoided the dead eyes. "You stepped on me. Please repeat," she muttered aviation jargon.
"I'm sorry? Who stepped on you?" Frowns.
"You interfered with my transmission to the tower. Oops, there is no tower. This is uncontrolled air space and you get to do whatever you want. Right?"
More frowns. The lawyers glanced at one another as if Lucy was very weird.
"Never mind," she added.
"You're an attractive single woman. Can you see how Agent Musil might have misinterpreted joking around, phone calls at home, et cetera, as your being sexually interested in him, Agent Farinelli?"
"It has also been stated that you often referred to Agent Musil and yourself as yin and ylang.'"
"I've told Rudy a hundred times that ylang is a Malayan tree. Ylang-ylang, to be more precise. A tree with yellow flowers that perfume is distilled from... but he doesn't always tune his ears to the right frequency." Lucy fought a smile.
The lawyers were taking notes.
"I never called Rudy ylang.' Now and then I did call him yang' and he called me ying,' no matter how many times I told him the word was yin, "Lucy explained further.
Silence, pens poised.
"It has to do with Chinese philosophy." Lucy might as well have been talking to a chalkboard. "Balance, counterparts."
"Why did you call each other... whatever?"
"Because we're two peas in a pod. Do you know that expression?"
"I think we're familiar with the term two peas in a pod. Again, such nicknames suggest a relationship..."
"Not the kind you're talking about," Lucy replied without rancor, because she did not hate Rudy in the least. "He and I are two peas in a pod because neither of us fit in. He's Austrian and the other guys call him Musili because he's, quote, full of shit, which he doesn't think is the least bit funny. And I'm a lesbian, a man-hater, because no normal woman who likes men would want to be HRT and make the cut. According to the laws of machismo."
Lucy scanned the women's dead eyes and decided the male attorneys' eyes were dead, too. The only sign of life in them was the glint of small, miserable creatures who hated someone like Lucy because she dared to resist being overpowered and frightened by them.
"This interview, deposition, inquisition, whatever the hell it is, is bullshit," Lucy told them. "I have no interest in suing the Fucking Bureau of Investigation. I took care of myself in the Tire House. I didn't report the incident. Rudy did. He had to explain his injuries. He claimed responsibility. He could have lied. But he didn't, and the two of us are eye to eye." She used the word eye to remind the lawyers of their dead eyes, as if somehow the lawyers knew their eyes were dead and incapable of seeing a reality that flexed with truth and possibilities and begged humans to partake of it and war against the dead-eyed people who were ruining the world.
"Rudy and I have acted as our own mediator," Lucy went on, calmly. "We have reestablished that we are partners, and one partner doesn't do what the other doesn't want or commit any act that might betray the other partner or place him or her in harm's way. And he told me he was sorry. And he meant it. He was crying."
"Spies say they are sorry. They also cry." A flush was climbing up the throat of a hostile woman attorney in pinstripes and skinny high heels that reminded Lucy of bound feet. "And your accepting his apology isn't an option, Agent Farinelli. He attempted to rape you." She emphasized the point, assuming it would humiliate and victimize Lucy again by inviting the male attorneys to envision her naked and sexually assaulted on the sooty concrete floor of the Tire House.
"I didn't know Rudy was accused of being a spy," Lucy replied.
She resigned from the FBI and was hired by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which the FBI unfairly considers a collection of backwoods boys who bust up moonshine stills and wear tool belts and guns.
She became an expert fire investigator in Philadelphia, where she helped stage Benton Wesley's murder, which included procuring the body of an anatomical donation bound for dissection at a medical school. The dead man was elderly, with thick silver hair, and after he was incinerated inside a torched building, a visual identification was unreliable if not impossible. All a shocked Scarpetta saw at the filthy, water-soaked, smoking scene was a charred body and a faceless skull with silver hair and a titanium wristwatch that had belonged to Benton Wesley. Under secret orders from Washington, the chief medical examiner in Philadelphia was ordered to falsify all reports. On paper, Benton was dead, just one more homicide added to the FBI's crime statistics for 1997.