Scarpetta hesitates. "I have a niece."
"Oh yeah! Now I 'member. Lucy. She's been in the news a lot. Or was, I mean…"
Stupid, drunk idiot, Nic silently protests with a flash of anger.
"Yes, Lucy is my niece," Scarpetta replies.
"FBI. Computer whiz." Reba won't stop. "Then what? Let me think. Something about flying helicopters and AFT."
ATF, you stupid drunk. Thunder cracks in the back of Nic's mind.
"I dunno. Wasn't there a big fire or something and someone got killed? So what's she doing now?" She drains her whiskey sour and looks for the waitress.
"That was a long time ago." Scarpetta doesn't answer her questions, and Nic detects a weariness, a sadness as immutable and maimed as the stumps and knees of cypress trees in the swamps and bayous of her South Louisiana home.
"Isn't that something, I forgot all about her being your niece. Now she's something, all right. Or was," Reba rudely says again, shoving her short dark hair out of her bloodshot eyes. "Got into some trouble, didn't she?"
Fucking dyke. Shut up.
Lightning rips the black curtain of night, and for an instant, Nic can see the white daylight on the other side. That's how her father always explained it. You see, Nic, he would say as they gazed out the window during angry storms, and lightning suddenly and without warning cut zigzags like a bright blade. There's tomorrow, see? You got to look quick, Nic. There's tomorrow on the other side, that bright white light. And see how quick it heals. God heals just that fast.
"Reba, go back to the hotel," Nic tells her in the same firm, controlled voice she uses when Buddy throws a tantrum. "You've had enough whiskey for one night."
"Well, 'scuse me, Miss Teacher's Pet." Reba is careening toward unconsciousness, and she talks as if she has rubber bands in her mouth.
Nic feels Scarpettas eyes on her and wishes she could send her a signal that might be reassuring or serve as an apology for Reba's outrageous display.
Lucy has entered the room like a hologram, and Scarpettas subtle but deeply emotional response shocks Nic with jealousy, with envy she didn't know she had. She feels inferior to her hero's super-cop niece, whose talents and world are enormous compared to Nic's. Her heart aches like a frozen joint that is finally unbent, the way her mother gently straightened out Nic's healing broken arm every time the splint came off.
Hurting's good, baby. If you didn't feel something, this little arm of yours would be dead and fall right off. You wouldn't want that, would you?
No, Mama. I'm sorry for what I did.
Why, Nicci, that's the silliest thing. You didn't hurt yourself on purpose!
But I didn't do what Papa said. I ran right into the woods and that's when I tripped…
We all make mistakes when we're scared, baby. Maybe it's a good thing you fell down-you were low to the ground when the lightning was flying all around.
4
NIC'S MEMORIES OF HER childhood in the Deep South are full of storms.
It seems the heavens threw terrible fits every week, exploding in rageful thunder and trying to drown or electrocute every living creature on the Earth. Whenever thunderheads raised their ugly warnings and boomed their threats, her papa preached about safety, and her pretty blonde mother stood at the screen door, motioning for Nic to hurry into the house, hurry into a warm, dry place, hurry into her arms.
Papa always turned off the lights, and the three of them sat in the dark, telling Bible stories and seeing how many verses and psalms they could quote from memory. A perfect recitation was worth a quarter, but her father wouldn't pay out until the storm passed, because quarters are made of metal, and metal attracts lightning.
Thou shalt not covet.
Nic's excitement had been almost unbearable when she learned that one of the Academy's visiting lecturers was Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who would teach death investigation the tenth and final week of training. Nic counted the days. She felt as though the first nine weeks would never pass. Then Scarpetta arrived here in Knoxville, and to Nic's acute embarrassment, she met her for the first time in the ladies room, right after Nic flushed the toilet and emerged from a stall, zipping up the dark navy cargo pants of her Battle Dress Uniform.
Scarpetta was washing her hands at a sink, and Nic recalled the first time she had seen a photograph of her and how surprised she had been that Scarpetta wasn't of dark Spanish stock. That was about eight years ago, when Nic knew only Scarpetta's name and had no reason to expect that she would be a blue-eyed blonde whose ancestors came from Northern Italy, some of them farmers along the Austrian border and as Aryan in appearance as Germans.
"Hi, I'm Dr. Scarpetta," her hero said, as if oblivious that the flushing toilet and Nic were related. "And let me guess, you're Nicole Robillard."
Nic turned into a mute, her face bright red. "How…"
Before she could sputter the rest of the question, Scarpetta explained, "I requested copies of everyone's application, including photographs."
"You did?" Not only was Nic stunned that Scarpetta would have asked for their applications, but she couldn't fathom why she would have had the time or interest in looking at them. "Guess that means you know my Social Security number," Nic tried to be funny.
"Now, I don't remember that," Scarpetta said, drying her hands on paper towels. "But I know enough."
5
"SECOND INSTAR." Nic shows off by answering the forgotten question about Maggie the maggot.
The cops around the table shake their heads and cut their eyes at one another. Nic has the capacity to irritate her comrades and has done so on and off for the past two and a half months. In some ways, she reminds Scarpetta of Lucy, who spent the first twenty years of her young life accusing people of slights they hadn't quite committed and flexing her gifts to the extreme of exhibitionism.
"That's very good, Nic," Scarpetta commends her.
"Who invited smarty pants?" Reba, who refuses to return to the Holiday Inn, is just plain obnoxious when she isn't nodding off into her plate.
"I think Nic hasn't been drinking enough and is having the D.T. s and seeing maggots crawling everywhere," says the detective with the shiny shaved head.
The way he looks at Nic is pretty obvious. Despite her being the class nerd, he is attracted to her.
"And you probably think an instar is a position on a baseball field."
Nic wants to be funny but can't escape the gravity of her mood. "See that little maggot I gave Dr. Scarpetta…?"
"Ah! At last she confesses."
"It's second instar." Nic knows she should stop. "Already shed its skin once since it hatched."
"Oh, yeah? How do you know? You an eyewitness? You actually see little Maggie shed her little skin?" the detective with the shaved head persists, winking at her.
"Nic's got a tent in the Body Farm, sleeps out there with all her creepy-crawly friends," someone else says.
"I would if I needed to."
No one argues with that. Nic is well known for her ventures into the two-acre, wooded decay research facility at the University of Tennessee, where the decomposition of donated human bodies is studied to determine many important facts of death, not the least of which is when death occurred. The joke is, she visits the Body Farm as if she's dropping by the old folks' home and checking on her relatives.
"Bet Nic's got a name for every maggot, fly, beetle and buzzard out there."
The quips and gross-out jokes continue until Reba drops her fork with a loud clatter.
"Not while I'm eating rare steak!" she protests much too loudly.