Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(38)
Bev can't believe she almost drove off and left her shotgun. She's not thinking clearly tonight, and her knee hurts.
"Last thing you do before you leave," she adds as he steps down into the boat, "is fill the fish box with ice."
"How much?" He fetches the shotgun, climbs back up on the dock and carefully places it on the backseat of the Cherokee.
"A hundred pounds will do."
"Must be doing a lot of shopping to need all that ice." He stuffs the rag in a back pocket of his old, soiled work pants.
"Stuff spoils quick out here."
"That'll be another twenty. I'm givin' you three bucks off."
She hands him two tens and doesn't thank him for the discount.
"I'm gone by nine." He looks past her, inside the beat-up Cherokee. "So if you ain't back by then..."
"Won't be," Bev tells him, shifting the SUV into reverse.
She never is and doesn't need the reminder.
He stares past her at the front passenger's door, at the rolled-up window and the missing crank and push-in lock.
"You know, girl, I could fix that if you're ever of a mind to leave the keys."
Bev glances at the door. "Don't matter," she says. "Nobody rides in this thing but me."
29
UPSTAIRS IN THE NORTH WING of the house is a guest bedroom overlooking the ocean, and in front of the bay window is Scarpetta's large desk, not an antique or anything special, just an inexpensive computer desk with a matching return.
Bookcases fill the walls so tightly that some light switches and electrical outlets are behind them, out of reach, and she has to get by with power strips. Her furniture is a light maple veneer, in depressing contrast to the beautiful antiques and artistic pieces, including Oriental rugs, fine stemware and china, that she spent most of her career collecting. Scarpetta's former life is locked up in a Connecticut storage warehouse, one secure enough for museum pieces.
She has not gone to see what she owns since Lucy took care of her aunt's chattel more than two years ago, choosing the location because of its proximity to New York, where Lucy has her headquarters and apartment. Scarpetta doesn't miss the furniture from her past. It is useless to care about it. Just the thought of it makes her tired for reasons she doesn't completely comprehend.
The office in her Delray rental house is a comfortable size, although nowhere near as spacious and organized as what she was accustomed to in her Richmond house, where she had cabinets of hanging files, miles of workspace and a massive desk custom-built of Brazilian cherry. Her house there was modern Italian country, put together stone by stone, the walls antiqued plaster, the exposed beams nineteenth-century black jarrah railroad ties from South Africa. If the house she built in Richmond wasn't beautiful before, it was spectacular by the time she remodeled it in an attempt to eradicate the past-a past haunted by Benton and Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. But she felt no better. The ghosts followed her from room to room.
Her denial of unbearable loss and her own near murder were fragmented dreams of horror that chilled her, no matter the temperature inside the house. Every creak of old wood and utterance of wind sends her hand reaching for the pistol she carried as her heart beat hard. One day she walked out of her magnificent home and never went back, not even to retrieve her belongings. Lucy handled that.
For one who had always walled her soul from a wicked world and un-reachable pain, she found herself a wanderer, skipping from one hotel to another like a stone across water, making phone calls to set up private consulting, and quickly became so bound in the snarled chains of evidence, of investigative incompetence and carelessness of police and medical examiners all over the place, that she had no choice but to settle in another house because she had to settle somewhere. She could no longer review cases while sitting on a hotel bed.
"Go south, far south," Lucy told her quietly, lovingly, one afternoon in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Scarpetta was in hiding at the Homestead Inn. "You aren't ready for New York yet, Aunt Kay, and you sure as hell aren't ready to work for me."
"I'll never work for you." Scarpetta meant it, shame pulling her eyes away from her niece.
"Well, you don't have to be insulting about it." Lucy was stung too, and within a minute, the two of them were arguing and fighting.
"I raised you," Scarpetta blurted out from the bed, where she sat rigidly and enraged. "My goddamn sister, the admired author of children's books who doesn't have a clue about raising her own goddamn child, dumped me on your doorstep... I mean, the other way around."
"Freudian slip! You needed me worse than I needed you."
"Not hardly. You were a monster. At ten, when you rolled into my life like the Trojan Horse, I was stupid enough to let you park, and then what? Then what?" The great Chief, the logical doctor-lawyer, was sputtering, tears rolling down her face. "You had to be a genius, didn't you? The worst brat on Earth..." Scarpetta's voice quavered. "And I couldn't give you up, you awful child." She could hardly speak. "If Dorothy had wanted you back, I would have taken the bitch to court and proved she wasn't a fit mother."
"She wasn't a fit mother and she isn't." Lucy was beginning to cry, too. "A bitch? That's charging her with a misdemeanor when she's a felon. A felon! A character disorder. For God's sake, how did you end up with a psycho for a sister?" Lucy weeps, sitting next to her aunt on the bed, their shoulders touching.