My blue eyes and short blond hair, the strong shape of my face and figure, aren’t so different, I decide, are remarkably the same, considering my age. I have held up well in my windowless places of concrete and stainless steel, and much of it is genetic, an inherited will to thrive in a family as tragic as a Verdi opera. The Scarpettas are from hearty Northern Italian stock, with prominent features, fair skin and hair, and well-defined muscle and bone that stubbornly weather hardship and the abuses of self-indulgence most people wouldn’t associate with me. But the inclinations are there, a passion for food, for drink, for all things desired by the flesh, no matter how destructive. I crave beauty and feel deeply, but I’m an aberration, too. I can be unflinching and impervious. I can be immutable and unrelenting, and these behaviors are learned. I believe they are necessary. They aren’t natural to me, not to anyone in my volatile, dramatic family, and that much I know is true about what I come from. The rest I’m not so sure about.
My ancestors were farmers and worked for the railroads, but in recent years my mother has added artists, philosophers, martyrs, and God knows what to the mix as she has set about to research our genealogy. According to her, I’m descended from artisans who built the high altar and choir stalls and made the mosaics at Saint Mark’s Basilica and created the fresco ceiling of the Chiesa dell’Angelo San Raffaele. Somehow I have a number of friars and monks in my past, and most recently—based on what I don’t know—I share blood with the painter Caravaggio, who was a murderer, and have some tenuous link to the mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy during the Roman Inquisition.
My mother still lives in her small house in Miami and is pre-possessed with her efforts to explain me. I’m the only physician in the family tree that she knows of, and she doesn’t understand why I’ve chosen patients who are dead. Neither my mother nor my only sibling, Dorothy, could possibly fathom that I might be partly defined by the terrors of a childhood consumed by tending to my terminally ill father before I became the head of the household at the age of twelve. By intuition and training, I’m an expert in violence and death. I’m at war with suffering and pain. Somehow I always end up in charge or to blame. It never fails.
I shut the door on what has been my home not just for six months but more than that, really. Briggs has managed to remind me where I’m from and headed. It’s a course that was set long before this past July, as long ago as 1987, when I knew my destiny was public service and didn’t know how I could repay my medical-school debt. I allowed something as mundane as money, something as shameful as ambition, to change everything irrevocably and not in a good way—indeed, in the worst way. But I was young and idealistic. I was proud and wanted more, not understanding then that more is always less if you can’t be sated.
Having gotten full rides through parochial school and Cornell and Georgetown Law, I could have begun my professional life unburdened by the obligations of debt. But I’d turned down Bowman Gray Medical School because I wanted Johns Hopkins badly. I wanted it as badly as I’d ever wanted anything, and I went there without benefit of financial aid, and what I ended up owing was impossible. My only recourse was to accept a military scholarship as some of my peers had done, including Briggs, who I was acquainted with in the earliest stage of my profession, when I was assigned to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the AFIP, the parent organization of the AFME. A quiet stint of reviewing military autopsy reports at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Briggs led me to believe, and once my debt was paid, I’d move on to a solid position in civilian legal medicine.
What I didn’t plan on was South Africa in December of ‘87, what was summertime on that distant continent. Noonie Pieste and Joanne Rule were filming a documentary and about my same age when they were tied up in chairs, beaten, and hacked, broken bottle glass shoved up their vaginas, their windpipes torn out. Racially motivated crimes against two young Americans. “You’re going to Cape Town,” Briggs said to me. “To investigate and bring them home.” Apartheid propaganda. Lies and more lies. Why them and why me?
As I take the stairs down to the lobby, I tell myself not to think about this right now. Why am I thinking about it at all? But I know why. I was yelled at over the phone this morning. I was called names, and what happened more than two decades ago is now before me again. I remember autopsy reports that vanished and my luggage gone through. I remember being certain I would turn up dead, a convenient accident or suicide, or staged murder, like those two women I still see in my head. I see them as clearly as I did then, pale and stiff on steel tables, their blood washing through drains in the floor of a morgue so primitive we used handsaws to open their skulls, and there was no x-ray machine, and I had to bring my own camera.
I drop off my key at the front desk and replay the conversation I just had with Briggs, and I have clarity. I don’t know why I didn’t see the truth instantly, and I think of his remote tone, his chilly deliberateness, as I watched him through glass. I’ve heard him talk this way before, but usually it is directed at others when there is a problem of a magnitude that places it out of his hands. This is about more than his personal opinion of me. This is about something beyond his typical calculations and our conflicted past.
Someone has gotten to him, and it wasn’t the press secretary, not anyone at Dover but higher up than that. I feel certain Briggs conferred with Washington after Marino divulged information, running his mouth and spinning his wild speculations before I’d had the chance to say a word. Marino shouldn’t have discussed the Cambridge case or me. He’s set something into motion he doesn’t understand, because there’s a lot he doesn’t understand. He’s never been military. He’s never worked for the federal government and is clueless about international affairs. His idea of bureaucracy and intrigue is local police department policies, what he rubber-stamps as bullshit. He has no concept of power, the kind of power that can tilt a presidential election or start a war.
Briggs would not have suggested sending a military plane to Massachusetts for the transfer of a body to Dover unless he’s gotten clearance from the Department of Defense, the DoD—in other words, the Pentagon. A decision has been made and I’m not part of it. Outside, in the parking lot, I climb into the van and won’t look at Marino, I’m so angry.
“Tell me more about the satellite radio,” I say to Lucy, because I intend to get to the bottom of this. I intend to find out what Briggs knows or has been led to believe.
“A Sirius Stiletto,” Lucy says from the dark backseat as I turn up the heat because Marino is always hot while the rest of us freeze. “It’s basically nothing more than storage for files, plus a power source. Of course, it also works as a portable XM radio, just as it’s designed to, but it’s the headphones that are creative. Not ingenious but technically clever.”
“They’ve got a pinhole camera and a microphone built in,” Marino offers as he drives. “Which is why I think the dead guy was the one doing the spying. How could he not know he had an audiovisual recording system built into his headphones?”
“He might not have known. It’s possible someone was spying on him and he had no idea,” Lucy says to me, and I sense she and Marino have been arguing about it. “The pinhole is on top of the headband but in the edge of it and hard to see. Even if you noticed, it wouldn’t necessarily cross your mind that built inside is a wireless camera smaller than a grain of rice, an audio transmitter that’s no bigger, and a motion sensor that goes to sleep after ninety seconds if nothing’s moving. This guy was walking around with a micro-webcam that was recording onto the radio’s hard drive and an additional eight-gig SD card. It’s too soon for me to tell you if he knew it—in other words, if he rigged this up himself. I know that’s what Marino thinks, but I’m not at all sure.”