Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(39)
"She's the dragon you always fight, have spent your life fighting," Scarpetta said. "You're really fighting Mom. She's too small a quarry for me. She's nothing more than a rabbit with sharp teeth that goes after your ankles. I don't waste my time on rabbits. I don't have time."
"Please go south," Lucy begged her, getting up from the bed and facing her with wet eyes and a red nose. "For now. Please. Go back to where you came from and start all over."
"I'm too old to start over."
"Shit!" Lucy laughed. "You're only forty-six, and men and women stare at you everywhere you go. And you don't even notice. You're one hell of a package."
The only time Scarpetta was ever called a package was when she was in worse trouble than usual and required off-duty police for security. On their radios, they referred to her as the package. Scarpetta wasn't entirely sure what they meant.
She moved south to Delray Beach, not exactly returning to her roots, but to an area near where her mother and sister live, yet safely far away.
Inside her weather-beaten 1950s rented house, her office is piled with paperwork and stiff cardboard slide folders, so much of it stacked on the floor that she has to make an effort not to trip over her work, making it impossible for her to be her usual prepossessed self when she walks in. Bookcases are crammed, some medical and legal tomes are double-shelved, while her rare antique books are protected from the sun and humidity in a tiny room next door that was probably intended to be the nursery.
She picks at Rose's fresh tuna salad as she goes through her mail, her letter opener a scalpel. She slices open the manila envelope first, apparently from her niece or perhaps someone else in her office, and is baffled to discover another envelope inside, this one plain white and addressed by hand in calligraphy to Madame Kay Scarpetta, LLB.
She drops the manila envelope on the table and hurries out of her office, rushing past Rose without speaking and into the kitchen for freezer paper.
30
TAXICABS REMIND BENTON OF INSECTS. And during his exile, he has grown fond of certain insects. Stick bugs look remarkably like twigs. Benton often loses himself in parks and along sidewalks, patiently searching shrubbery for a stick bug or, better yet, a praying mantis, which is extremely rare and a good omen, although he has never experienced a positive change in fortune directly after spotting a praying mantis. Maybe someday he will. Ladybugs are good luck. Everybody knows that. If one ends up wherever he is staying, he gently coaxes it onto his finger and takes it outside, no matter how many flights of stairs, and deposits it on a bush.
One week he did this ten times and enjoyed the thought that it was the same ladybug flirting with him. He believes that all kindnesses will be repaid. He also believes that evil will get its ugly reward, and until he began his nonexistence, he argued about that with Scarpetta often, because he didn't believe it at all back then. And she did.
We often don't know the reason for things, Benton. But I believe there is one, always.
He hears Scarpetta's voice in a remote cavern of his brain as he sits in the dark backseat of a southbound taxi.
How can you say that?
He hears his own voice answering her.
Because I've seen enough to say it. What reason can there possibly be for a sister or a daughter or a brother or a son or a parent or a significant other to be raped, tortured and murdered?
Silence. The taxi driver is listening to hip-hop.
"Turn that down, please," Benton calmly says, this time out loud.
Or what about the old woman struck by lightning because her umbrella frame was metal?
Scarpetta doesn't answer him.
Okay, then what about the entire family killed by carbon monoxide because no one told them not to cook with charcoal in the fireplace, especially with the windows closed? What reason, Kay?
His sense of her continues to linger like her favorite perfume.
So there's a reason I was murdered and am gone from your life forever?
The conversation has turned one-sided and won't stop. What reason has she assigned to what she believes happened to him, he asks, convinced she has come up with a reason, certainly by now.
You're rationalizing, Kay. You have forgotten our talks about denial.
Benton's facile mind moves on to another point as he rides in the taxi shortly after dark, en route to Manhattan, the trunk and every other space in the car piled with his belongings. The driver did not disguise his disgust when he realized that his fare came with a substantial pile of baggage. But Benton was clever. He hailed the cab from the street, and the driver didn't see the pile of luggage in the thick shadows of the sidewalk until he was faced with the choice of speeding off or accepting the lucrative job of driving a fare to New York.
The drivers name is Robert Leary, a white male with brown hair, brown eyes, approximately five-foot-ten and one hundred and eighty pounds. Those details and others, including the identification number on the photo ID clamped to the visor, are written in a ref?llable wallet-size leather notebook that Benton carries wherever he goes. As soon as he gets to his hotel room, he will, as is customary for him, transfer the notes to his laptop computer. Since he entered the witness protection program, Benton has recorded his every activity, his every location and every person he has met-especially if it is more than once-and even the weather and where he worked out and what he ate.
Several times now, Robert Leary has attempted to initiate a conversation, but Benton stares out the window and says nothing, the driver, of course, having no idea that the man with the tan, chiseled, bearded face and shaved head is silently making points and examining tactical requirements and possibilities and probabilities from every tilt imaginable. No doubt, the cabbie is thinking it is his sorry luck to have picked up a weirdo, who, based on the shabbiness of his luggage, has fallen on hard times, very hard times.