"Virginia would want to fry his ass," Marino argues. "After what he done."
"He killed a store clerk. He killed a cop. He almost killed the chief medical examiner. The governor at that time is now a senator and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He didn't piss off Washington because he wasn't about to piss off the French. The governor of Texas, now in his second term and a trigger-happy Republican, by the way, doesn't give a damn who he pisses off."
"The chief medical examiner? You just can't bring yourself to say her name, can you?" Marino exclaims, incredulous.
19
A FEW YEARS BACK, Lucy Farinelli's Aunt Kay recalled an anecdote about the decapitated head of a German soldier who died in World War II.
His body was discovered buried in sand somewhere in Poland, she recounted to Lucy, and arid conditions remarkably preserved his Aryan short blond hair, attractive features and even the stubble on his chin. When Scarpetta saw the head in a Polish forensic medical institute showcase while visiting as a forensic lecturer, she thought of Madame Tussaud s, she said. "His front teeth are broken," Scarpetta went on with the story, explaining that she didn't think the damaged teeth were a postmortem artifact or due to an antemortem injury that had occurred at or around the boyish Nazi's death. He simply had poor dental care. "Loose-contact gunshot wound to the right temple," she cited the Nazi's cause of death. "The angle of the wound points the way the gun was directed-in this case, downward. Often in a suicide, the muzzle will be straight on or directed upward. There's no soot in this case, because the wound was cleaned, the hair around it shaved at the morgue, where the mummified remains were sent to make certain the death wasn't recent, or so I was told when I was lecturing at the Pomorska Akademia Medyczna."
The only reason Lucy is reminded of the decapitated Nazi as her car is being searched at Germany's northeast border is that the German guard is a handsome, blue-eyed blond and seems much too young to be infected with ennui as he leans inside her black rental Mercedes and sweeps the leather seats with a flashlight. Next he sweeps the black carpeted floor, the strong beam illuminating Lucy's scuffed leather briefcase and red Nike duffel bags in back. He makes several bright stabs at the front passenger seat, then moves around to the trunk, popping it open. He shuts it with scarcely a glance.
Had he bothered to unzip those two duffelbags and dig through clothing, he would have discovered a tactical baton. It looks rather much like a black rubber fishing pole handle, but with a quick flip of the wrist extends into a two-foot-long thin rod of carbonized steel capable of shattering bone and shearing soft tissue, including the internal organs of the belly.
Lucy is prepared to explain the weapon, which is relatively unknown and unused except by law enforcement. She would claim that her overly protective boyfriend gave her the baton for self-defense because she is a businesswoman and often travels alone. She really isn't quite sure how to use the thing, she would sheepishly explain, but he insisted and promised it was perfectly all right to pack it. If police confiscated the baton, so what? But Lucy is relieved that it is not discovered and that the officer in his pale green uniform checking her passport from inside his booth does not seem curious about this young American woman driving alone late at night in a Mercedes.
"What is the purpose of your visit?" he asks in awkward English.
"Geschдft." She doesn't tell him what kind of business, but has an answer prepared, if necessary.
He picks up the phone and says something Lucy is unable to decipher, but she senses he isn't talking about her or, if he is, it is nothing. She expected her belongings to be riffled through and was ready for it. She expected to be quizzed. But the guard who reminds her of the decapitated head returns her passport.
"Danke, "she politely says as she silently labels him a trag Narr.
The world is full of lazy fools like him.
He waves her on.
She creeps forward, crossing the border into Poland, and now another guard, this one Polish, puts her through the same routine. There is no ordeal, no thorough search, not a hint of anything but sleepiness and boredom. This is too easy. Paranoia sets in. She remembers she should never trust anything that is too easy, and she imagines the Gestapo and SS soldiers, cruel specters from the past. Fear rises like body odor, a fear that is baseless and irrational. Sweat rolls down her sides, beneath her wind-breaker, as she thinks of Poles overpowered and disenfranchised from their own names and lives during a war she knows about only from history books.
It is not so different from the way Benton Wesley exists, and Lucy wonders what he would think and feel if he knew she was in Poland and why. Not a day goes by when he doesn't shadow her life.
20
HER CAREER EXPERIENCE does not show unless she intentionally displays it like a weapon.
She was still in high school when she began interning for the FBI and designed their Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, known as CAIN. When she graduated from the University of Virginia, she became an FBI special agent and was given free rein as a computer and technical expert. She learned to fly helicopters and became the first female member of the FBI Special Forces Hostage Rescue Team. Hostility, harassment and crude innuendos followed her on every deployment, raid and punishing training session. Rarely was she invited to join the men for a beer in the Academy bar called the Boardroom. They did not confide in her about raids gone wrong or their wives and children or girlfriends. But they watched her. There was talk about her in the showers.
Her career with the FBI was aborted on a dewy October morning when she and her HRT partner, Rudy Musil, were shooting live nine-millimeter rounds inside the FBI Academy's Tire House. As its name implies, the highly dangerous indoor range was filled with old tires that tactical agents could dive over, duck under, dart around and hide behind as they practiced maniacal maneuvers. Rudy was breathing hard and sweating as he crouched behind a mound of tires and smacked another magazine into his Glock, peeking around a threadbare Michelin as he looked for Lucy, his partner.
"All right. Come clean," he yelled at her through gun smoke. "What's your sexual preference?"
"To have it as often as possible.1" She reloaded and snapped back the slide while rolling between stacks of tires before firing five rounds at a pop-up target thirty feet away. The cluster of head shots was so tight, it looked like a small flower.
"Oh yeah?" Two bullets loudly clinked a pop-up thug holding a machine gun. "Me and the guys got bets on it." Rudy's voice came closer as he crawled on his belly across the filthy concrete floor.
He pounced through towers of sooty tires and grabbed an unsuspecting Lucy by her steel-reinforced Red Wing boots.
"Gotcha!" He laughed, setting his pistol on top of a tire.
"Are you fucking crazy?" Lucy cleared a round from the chamber of her pistol, the ejected cartridge bouncing off the floor. "We're using live ammo, you fucking idiot.'"
"Let me see that thing." Rudy got serious. "It doesn't sound right."
He took the pistol from her, dropped out the magazine. "Loose spring." He shook the pistol before setting it next to his gun on the tire. "Aha. Rule number one: Never lose your weapon."
He got on top of her, laughing as he wrestled with her, somehow believing this was what she had been waiting for, and that she was excited and didn't mean it when she continued screaming, "Get off of me, asshole!"