"That's how I hit my head," she confides to Jay.
He tosses the bloody towel to Bev. She hasn't moved, just stands in the middle of the small room, staring at him like a cottonmouth coiled to strike. The towel lands at her feet, and she doesn't pick it up.
He tells her to pick it up.
Bev doesn't.
"Pick it up and wash it in the sink," he says. "I don't want to look at that thing on the floor. You shouldn't have hurt her. Clean the towel and get all this insect repellent off her."
"I don't need her to get it off me," the woman pleads. "Maybe it's good to keep it on because of all the bugs."
"No. You need it washed off," Jay says, leaning close and smelling her neck. "You have too much on. It's toxic. She must have soaked you with an entire bottle. That's not good."
"I don't want her touching me again!"
"She hurt you?"
The lamb doesn't answer.
"I'm here. She won't hurt you."
Jay gets up from the edge of the bed, and Bev collects the wet, gory towel.
"We don't need to waste water," she says. "The tank's low."
"It's supposed to rain, eventually," Jay replies, studying the woman as if she's a car he might buy. "The tank's got plenty, anyway. Wash the towel and bring it back in here."
"Please don't hurt me."
The woman lifts her head up from the pillow. It is pinkish and wet, and a bright red spot indicates that her laceration has begun to bleed again.
"Just take me home and I won't tell anybody. Not anybody, I swear to God."
Her eyes plead with Jay, her only hope because he's glorious to look at, and so far he's been nice.
"Won't tell anybody what?" Jay asks her, moving closer, sitting on the edge of the iron-frame bed with its foul, broken-down mattress. "What's there to tell? You hurt yourself, now, didn't you, and we're Good Samaritans, taking care of you."
She nods, uncertainty, then fear contorting her face.
"Make it quick. Please," she whispers between convulsions, sobs and hiccups jerking her body. "If you aren't going to let me go. Make it quick."
Bev returns with the towel and hands it to Jay. Water drips on the bed and trickles down his bare, muscular arm. Bev runs her fingers through his hair and kisses the back of his neck, then presses close to him as he opens the woman's blouse.
"Ah. No bra," he says. "She wasn't wearing one?" He cranes his head around, demanding an answer in a soft voice that by now has become scary.
Bev slides her hands down his sweaty chest.
The woman's eyes are wide with the same glassy terror that Bev saw in the boat. She trembles violently, her naked breasts quivering. A drop of saliva slips out of the side of her mouth, and Jay stands up, disgusted.
"Get the rest of her clothes off and clean her up," he orders Bev. "You touch her again, you know what I'll do to you."
Bev smiles. Theirs is a well-rehearsed, long-running drama.
60
THE NEXT MORNING, Scarpetta is still in Florida. Once again, she was about to leave and was waylaid, this time by FedEx delivering two packages, one from the Polunsky Prison Information Office, the other a thick package containing Charlotte Dard's case, mostly copies of autopsy and lab reports and histological slides.
Scarpetta places a slide of the left ventricular free wall on the compound microscopes stage. If she could add up the hours she's spent looking at slides throughout her career, the number would be in the tens of thousands. Although she respects the histologist, whose devotion is to the minuscule structures of tissues and the tales their cells can tell, she has never been able to comprehend sitting inside a tiny lab day in and day out, surrounded by sections of heart, lung, liver, brain and other organs, and injuries and stigmata of diseases that are cut into sections and turn rubbery inside bottles of a fixative such as formalin. Each tissue section is embedded in paraffin wax or a plastic resin and shaved into slices thin enough for light to pass through them. After they are mounted on glass slides, they are stained with a variety of dyes that were developed by the nineteenth-century textile industry.
Mostly, Scarpetta sees a lot of pinks and blues, but there are a perfusion of colors used, depending on the tissue and the cellular structure and possible defects that need to give up their secrets to her at the other end of the lens. Dyes, like diseases, are often named for whoever discovered or invented them, and this is where histology becomes unnecessarily complicated, if not annoying. It isn't enough for dyes or dyeing techniques to be called blue or violet; they must be Cresyl blue, Cresyl violet, or Perl's Prussian blue, or Heidenhain's haematoxylin (purplish red), or Masson's trichrome (blue and green), or Bielschowsky (neutral red), or her favorite mundanity: Jones's methenamine silver. A typical egocentric pathological legacy is a van Gieson staining of a Schwann cell nuclei from a Schwannoma, and Scarpetta fails to understand why German naturalist Theodor Schwann would have wanted a tumor named after him.
She peers into the lens at the contraction bands in the pink-stained tissue shaved from a section of Charlotte Dard's heart at autopsy. Some fibers are missing their nuclei, indicating necrosis, or the death of tissue, and other slides reveal pink-and-blue-stained inflammation and old scarring, and narrowing of the coronary arteries. The Louisiana woman was only thirty-two when she dropped dead at the door of a motel room in Baton Rouge, dressed to go out, keys in hand.
It was suspected eight years ago, at the time of her death, that her family pharmacist illegally gave her the powerful pain medication OxyCon-tin, found in her pocketbook. She didn't have a prescription for the drug. In a letter to Scarpetta, Dr. Lanier suggests that this pharmacist might have fled to Palm Desert, California. Dr. Lanier doesn't indicate what he bases this possibility on or offer further details for his reopening Charlotte Dard's case.
It is a mess for multiple reasons: The case is old; there is no evidence the drug came from the pharmacist, and even if it did, unless he premeditated killing her with OxyContin, he is not guilty of first-degree murder; at the time of Charlotte Dard's death, he would not talk to the police but through his attorney claimed that a family friend with a ruptured disk must have given Charlotte Dard OxyContin, and she accidentally overdosed on it.
Several copies of letters sent eight years ago to Dr. Lanier are from the pharmacist's attorney, Rocco Caggiano.
61
BEYOND THE WINDOW IN FRONT of Scarpetta's desk, shadows crawl over sand dunes as the sun moves.
Palm fronds rattle lightly, and a man walking his yellow lab on the beach leans into a headwind. Far off on the hazy blue horizon, a container ship forges south, probably to Miami. If Scarpetta is too caught up in her work, she will forget the time and where she is and soon will miss another flight to New York.
Dr. Lanier answers his phone and is hoarse as he says, "Hello."
"You sound terrible," Scarpetta says sympathetically.
"I don't know what I caught, but I feel like hell. Thanks for getting back to me."
"What meds are you taking? I hope it's decongestants and a cough suppressant with an expectorant, and that you're staying away from anti-histamines. Try the daytime or nondrowsy formulas that don't list antihistamines or doxylamine succinate on the label-unless you want to dry yourself out and get a bacterial infection. And stay away from alcohol. It lowers your immunities."
He blows his nose. "I'm a real medical doctor, just so you know. And an addictionologist, meaning I do know a thing or two about drugs." He says this without a trace of defensiveness. "Thought you might be relieved to hear that."
Scarpetta is embarrassed for making assumptions. Coroners are elected officials and unfortunately, nationwide, many of them are not physicians.
"I didn't mean to insult you, Dr. Lanier."
"You didn't. By the way, your sidekick Pete Marino thinks you walk on water."