Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(34)
He is joking, it goes without saying that Lucy will not park at the Radisson.
25
DELRAY BEACH, FLORIDA, is hot at six o'clock p.m., and Kay Scarpetta turns away from her kitchen window, deciding she will work another hour before venturing outside.
She has become an expert in judging shadows and light, monitoring them in her scientific manner before heading out to check on her fruit trees or walk on the beach. Making rather useless decisions based on analysis and calculations of how the sun moves across the sky helps her feel as though she has not lost complete control of her life.
Her two-story yellow stucco house is modest by her standards, just an old place with wobbly white railings, failing plumbing and wiring, and air-conditioning that seems to have a mean-spirited will of its own. Tiles sometimes fall out of the backsplash behind the electric stove, and yesterday the bathtubs cold-water handle pulled loose from the wall. For the sake of survival, she has read home-repair books and manages to keep her surroundings from falling on her head as she tries not to remember what days were like before she relocated hundreds of miles south of her former career, and barely an hour's drive north of Miami, where she was born. The past is dead, and death is just one more phase of existence. This is her creed. Most of the rime she believes it.
Time on Earth is an opportunity to become more highly evolved, and then people move on or cross over-a concept that by no means is original to her, but she is not one to accept what isn't obvious without dissecting it first. After much contemplation, her findings about eternity are simple: No one good or evil ceases to exist; life is energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed; it is recycled. Therefore, it is possible that the pure of heart and the purely evil have been here before and will be here again. Scarpetta doesn't believe in heaven or hell, and she no longer goes to Mass, not even on religious holidays.
"What happened to your Catholic guilt?" Lucy asked her several Christmases ago when they were mixing a strong batch of eggnog and church was not on the agenda.
"I can't participate in something I no longer believe in," Scarpetta replied, reaching for freshly ground nutmeg. "Especially if I am at odds with it, which is worse than having a complete loss of faith in it."
"The question is, what is it? Are you talking about Catholicism or God?"
"Politics and power. They have an unmistakable stench, rather much like the inside of the morgue fridge. I can close my eyes and know what's there. Nothing alive."
"Thanks for sharing," Lucy said. "Maybe I'll just drink a little straight rum on the rocks. Raw eggs suddenly don't seem very appealing."
"You're not the least bit squeamish." Scarpetta poured Lucy a glass of eggnog, adding a sprinkle of nutmeg. "Drink up before Marino gets here and there's none left."
Lucy smiled. The only thing that makes her gag is walking into a ladies' room and finding someone in the middle of changing a baby's diaper. To Lucy, that stench is worse than a decomposing body buzzing with blow flies, and she has experienced her share of offensive horrors because of her and her aunt's unusual occupations.
"This mean you no longer believe in eternity?" Lucy challenged her.
"I believe in it more than ever."
Scarpetta has made the dead speak most of her life, but always through the silent language of injuries, trace evidence, diseases and investigative details that can be interpreted with medicine, science, experience and deduction that borders on the intuitive, a gift that cannot be learned or taught. But people change. She is no longer entirely clinical. She has come to accept that the dead continue to exist and intervene in the lives of their earthbound loved ones and enemies. It is a conviction that she conceals from her detractors and certainly never mentions in professional presentations or in journal articles or in court.
"I've seen psychics on TV talking about people dying and crossing over-I believe that's the term," Lucy observed, sipping her eggnog. "I don't know. It's pretty interesting. The older I get, the less certain I am of most things."
"I've noticed your advanced aging process," Scarpetta replied. "When you turn thirty, you will begin to have visions and see auras. Let's hope you don't get arthritis."
This conversation took place in Scarpetta's former home in Richmond, a fortress of stone she designed with love and an abandonment of financial reason, sparing no expense in her insistence on old woods, exposed beams, solid doors and plaster walls, and a kitchen and office that were perfect for her precise way of going about her business, whether it was over a microscope or a Viking gas stove.
Life was good. Then it wasn't and never would be again. So much went wrong. So much was spoiled and lost and could never be restored. Three years ago, she was well along her journey to disaster. She had resigned as president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. The governor of Virginia was about to fire her. One day, she cleared her office walls of scores of commendations, certifications and degrees that are now packed up somewhere in cardboard boxes. The pre-crash Scarpetta was impeccably, if not rigidly, intellectual, completely confident of her knowledge, her truthfulness and her ability to excavate for answers. She was a legend in law enforcement and criminal justice, and to some people unapproachable and cold. Now she has no staff except her secretary, Rose, who followed her to Florida with the excuse that it would be nice to "retire" near West Palm Beach.