She hesitates. I sense she doesn't want to give out information in front of me. Marino's question hangs heavy like moisture about to precipitate. I decide on two skirts, one navy blue, one gray, and drape them over the chair.
"There are fourteen rounds in the magazine," Galloway tells him in a robotic military tone. "There wasn't one in the chamber. It wasn't cocked. And it looks clean."
"Well, well. Then it wasn't cocked and she didn't shoot it. And it was a dark and stormy night and three Indians sat around a camp/ire. We want to go round and round, or can we fucking move along?" He is sweating and his body odor rises with his heat.
"Look, there's nothing new to add," I say, suddenly on the verge of tears, cold and trembling and smelling Chandonne's awful stench again.
"And why was it you had the jar in your home? And what exactly was in it? That stuff you use in the morgue, right?" Galloway positions herself to take Marino out of her sight line.
"Formalin. A ten percent dilution of formaldehyde known as formalin," I say. "It's used in the morgue to fix tissue, yes. Sections of organs. Skin, in this case."
I dashed a caustic chemical into the eyes of another human being. I maimed him. Maybe I permanently blinded him. I imagine him strapped to a bed on the ninth-floor prison ward of the Medical College of Virginia. I saved my own life and feel no satisfaction in that fact. All I feel is ruined.
"So you had human tissue in your house. The skin. A tattoo. From that unidentified body at the port? The one in the cargo container?" The sound of Galloway's voice, of her pen, of pages flipping, reminds me of reporters. "I don't mean to be dense, but why would you have something like that at your house?"
I go on to explain that we have had a very difficult time identifying the body from the port. We had nothing beyond a tattoo, really, and last week I drove to Petersburg and had an experienced tattoo artist look at the tattoo from my case. I came directly home afterward, which is why the tattoo in its jar of formalin happened to be in my house last night. "Ordinarily, I wouldn't have something like that in my house," I add.
"You kept it at your house for a week?" she asks with a dubious expression.
"A lot was happening. Kim Luong was murdered. My niece was almost killed in a shoot-out in Miami. I was called out of the country, to Lyon, France. Interpol wanted to see me, wanted to talk about seven women he"_I mean Chan-donne_"probably murdered in Paris and the suspicion that the dead man in the cargo container might be Thomas Chan-donne, the brother, the killer's brother, both of them sons of this Chandonne criminal cartel that half of law enforcement in the universe has been trying to bring down forever. Then Deputy Police Chief Diane Bray was murdered. Should I have returned the tattoo to the morgue?" My head pounds. "Yes, I certainly should have. But I was distracted. I just forgot." I almost snap at her.
"You just forgot," Officer Calloway repeats while Marino listens with gathering fury, trying to let her do her job and despising her at the same time. "Dr. Scarpetta, do you have other
body parts in your house?" Calloway then asks.
A stabbing pain penetrates my right eye. I am getting a migraine.
"What kind of fucking question is that?" Marino raises his voice another decibel.
"I just didn't want us walking in on anything else like body fluids or other chemicals or…"
"No, no." I shake my head and turn my attention to a stack of neatly folded slacks and polo shirts. "Just slides."
"Slides?"
"For histology," I vaguely explain.
"For what?"
"Galloway, you're done." Marino's words crack like a gavel as he rises from the bed.
"I just want to make sure we don't need to worry about any other hazards," she says to him, and her hot cheeks and the flash in her eyes belie her subordination. She hates Marino. A lot of people do.
"The only hazard you gotta worry about is the one you're looking at," Marino snaps at her. "How 'bout giving the Doc a little privacy, a little reprieve from dumb-ass questions?"
Galloway is an unattractive chinless woman with thick hips and narrow shoulders, her body tense with anger and embarrassment. She spins around and walks out of my bedroom, her footsteps absorbed by the Persian runner in the hallway.
"What's she think? You collect trophies or something?" Marino says to me. "You bring home souvenirs like fucking Jeffrey Dahmer? Jesus Christ."
"I can't take any more of this." I tuck perfectly folded polo shirts into the tote bag.
"You're gonna have to take it, Doc. But you don't have to take any more of it today." He wearily sits back down on the foot of my bed.
"Keep your detectives off me," I warn him. "I don't want to see another cop in my face. I'm not the one who did something wrong."
"If they got anything else, they'll run it through me. This is my investigation, even if people like Galloway ain't figured that out yet. But I also ain't the one you got to worry about.
It's like take a number in the deli line, there's so many people who insist they got to talk to you."
I stack slacks on top of the polo shirts, and then reverse the order, placing the shirts on top so they don't wrinkle.
"Course, nowhere near as many people as the ones who want to talk to him." He means Chandonne. "All these profilers and forensic psychiatrists and the media and shit." Marino goes through the Who's Who list.
I stop packing. I have no intention of picking through lingerie while Marino watches. I refuse to sort through toiletries with him witness to it all. "I need a few minutes alone," I tell him.
He stares at me, his eyes red, his face flushed the deep color of wine. Even his balding head is red, and he is disheveled in his jeans and a sweatshirt, his belly nine months pregnant, his Red Wing boots huge and dirty. I can see his mind working. He doesn't want to leave me alone and seems to be weighing concerns that he will not share with me. A paranoid thought rises like dark smoke in my mind. He doesn't trust me. Maybe he thinks I am suicidal.
"Marino, please. Can you just stand outside and keep people away while I finish up in here? Go to my car and get my crime scene case out of the trunk. If I get called out on something… well, I need to have it. The key's in the kitchen desk drawer, the top right_where I keep all my keys. Please. And I need my car, by the way. I guess I'll just take my car and you can leave the scene case in it." Confusion eddies.
He hesitates. "You can't take your car."
"Damn it!" I blurt out. "Don't tell me they've got to go through my car, too. This is insane."
"Look. The first time your alarm went off last night, it was because someone tried to break into your garage."
"What do you mean, someone!" I retort as migraine pain sears my temples and blurs my vision. "We know exactly who. He forced my garage door open because he wanted the alarm to go off. He wanted the police to show up. So it wouldn't seem odd if the police came back a little later be- cause a neighbor reported a prowler on my property, supposedly."
It was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne who came back. He impersonated the police. I still can't believe I fell for it.
"We ain't got all the answers yet," Marino replies.
"Why is it I keep getting this feeling you don't believe me?"
"You need to get to Anna's and sleep."
"He didn't touch my car," I assert. "He never got inside my garage. I don't want anyone touching my car. I want to take it tonight. Just leave the scene case inside the trunk."
"Not tonight."
Marino walks out and shuts the door behind him. I am desperate for a drink to override the electrical spikes in my central nervous system, but what do I do? Walk out to the bar and tell the cops to get the hell out of my way while I find the Scotch? Knowing that liquor probably won't help my headache doesn't have an impact. I am so miserable in my own skin, I don't care what is good or not good for me right now. In the bathroom I dig through more drawers and spill several lipsticks on the floor. They roll between the toilet and the tub. I am unsteady as I bend over to retrieve them, groping awkwardly with my right arm, all of this made more difficult because I am left-handed. I stop to ponder the perfumes neatly arranged on the vanity and gently pick up the small gold metal bottle of Hermes 24 Faubourg. It is cool in my hand. I lift the spray nozzle to my nose and the spicy, erotic scent that Ben-ton Wesley loved fills my eyes with tears and my heart feels as if it will fatally fly out of rhythm. I have not used the perfume in more than a year, not once since Benton was murdered. Now I have been murdered, I tell him in my throbbing mind. And I am still here, Benton, I am still here. You were a psychological profiler for the FBI, an expert in dissecting the psyches of monsters and interpreting and predicting their behavior. You would have seen this coming, wouldn't you? You would have predicted it, prevented it. Why weren't you here, Benton? I would be all right if you had been here.