“Transference. All those women patients of yours don’t stand a chance. They want what I’ve got right now.”
She wanted it again. She wanted his attention and didn’t want to talk anymore about work, about problems, about human beings who were horrors. She wanted to be close to him, to feel that nothing was off-limits, and her yearning for closeness was insatiable because she couldn’t have what she wanted. She’d never had what she wanted with Benton, and that was why she still wanted him, wanted him palpably. It was why she’d wanted him to begin with, felt drawn to him, felt an intense desire for him the first time they’d met. She felt the same way now, twenty years later, a desperate attraction that fulfilled her and left her empty, and sex with him was like that, a cycle of taking and giving and filling and emptying and then rearming the mechanism so they could go back for more.
“I do love you, you know,” she said into his mouth. “Even when I’m angry.”
“You’ll always be angry. I hope you’ll always love me.”
“I want to understand.” She didn’t and probably couldn’t.
When she was reminded, she couldn’t understand the choices he’d made, that he could have left her so abruptly, so finally, and never checked on her. She wouldn’t have done what he did, but she wasn’t going to bring that up again.
“I know I’ll always love you.” She kissed him and got on top of him.
They rearranged themselves, knew intuitively how to move, the days long past when they needed to consciously calculate which was whose best side or the limits before fatigue and discomfort set in. Scarpetta had heard every permutation of the expected jokes about her skills in anatomy and what a bonus that must be in bed, which was ridiculous, not even that, because she didn’t find it amusing. Her patients were with rare exception dead, and their response to her touch therefore moot and not helpful. That didn’t mean the morgue hadn’t taught her something vital, because certainly it had. It had conditioned her to refine her senses, to see, smell, and feel the most subtle nuances in people who could no longer speak, unwilling people who needed her but could give nothing back. The morgue had empowered her with strong, capable hands and strong cravings. She wanted warmth and touch. She wanted sex.
Afterward, Benton fell asleep, a deep sleep. He didn’t stir when she got out of bed, her mind moving rapidly again, anxieties and resentments swarming back again. It was a few minutes past three a.m. She faced a long day that would inform her as it unfolded, one of those days that was what she called “unscripted.” The range at Rodman’s Neck and her possible bomb, and perhaps the labs, and maybe the office to dictate autopsy reports and catch up on phone calls and paperwork. She wasn’t scheduled to do autopsies, but that could always change depending on who was out and what came in. What to do about her BlackBerry. Maybe Lucy had answered her. What to do about her niece. She’d been acting so odd of late, so easily irritated, so impatient, and then what she’d done about the smartphones, swapping them out and not asking permission, as if that was generous and considerate. You should go back to bed and get some rest. Fatigue and everything seems worse, Scarpetta told herself. Going back to sleep wasn’t a possibility right now. She had things to take care of, needed to deal with Lucy, get it over with. Tell her what you did. Tell her how stupid her Aunt Kay is.
Lucy probably was the most technically gifted person Scarpetta had ever known, curious about the way everything worked from the day she was born, putting this and that together and taking them apart, always confident she could improve the functioning of whatever it was. Such a proclivity plus a massive insecurity plus an overriding need for power and control and the result was a Lucy, a wizard who could easily destroy just as much as she fixed, depending on her motive and mostly on her mood. Swapping out phones without permission had not been an appropriate act, and Scarpetta still didn’t understand why her niece suddenly had done it. In the past she would have asked. She wouldn’t have become the self-appointed system administrator for everyone without permission, without so much as a warning, and she was going to be incensed when she learned the truth about Scarpetta’s folly, her foolishness. Lucy would say it was like not looking before you cross the street, like walking into the tail rotor.
Scarpetta dreaded the lecture she was certain to get when she confessed to disabling the password on her BlackBerry two days after receiving it, her frustration had been that great. You shouldn’t have, you absolutely shouldn’t have-the thought was caught in a loop in her mind. But every time she’d pulled the device out of its holster she’d had to unlock it. If she didn’t use it for ten minutes, it was locked again. Then the last straw, scaring the hell out of herself when her typos had resulted in her entering the password incorrectly six times in a row. Eight failed attempts-it was clearly written in Lucy’s instructions-and the BlackBerry rather much self-destructed, everything in it eradicated like those tape recordings in Mission: Impossible.
When Scarpetta had e-mailed Lucy that the BlackBerry had been “misplaced,” she’d neglected to mention the detail about the password. If someone had her smartphone, it would be a very bad thing, and Scarpetta was deeply afraid of that, and she was afraid of Lucy, and most of all she was afraid of herself. When did you start becoming so careless? You carried a bomb into your apartment and you disabled the password on your smartphone. What the hell’s the matter with you? Do something. Fix something. Take care of things. Don’t just fret.
She needed to eat, that was part of the problem, her stomach sour from having nothing in it. If she ate something, she’d feel better. She needed to do something with her hands, engage them in an act that was healing, an act besides sex. Preparing food was restorative and soothing. Making one of her favorite dishes, paying attention to details, helped return order and normalcy. It was either cook or clean, and she’d done enough cleaning, could still catch the scent of Murphy Oil Soap as she walked through the living room and into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, scanning for inspiration. A frittata, an omelet, she wasn’t hungry for eggs or bread or pasta. Something light and healthy, and with olive oil and fresh herbs, like an Insalata Caprese. That would be good. It was a summer dish, to be served only when tomatoes were in season, preferably handpicked from Scarpetta’s own garden. But in cities like Boston and New York, wherever there was a Whole Foods or gourmet markets, she could find heirloom tomatoes all year round, rich Black Krims, lush Brandywines, succulent Caspian Pinks, mellow Golden Eggs, sweetly acidic Green Zebras.
She selected a few from a basket on the counter and placed them on a cutting board, quartering them into wedges. She warmed fresh buffalo mozzarella to room temperature by enclosing it in a zip-lock bag and submerging it in hot water for several minutes. Arranging the tomato and the cheese in a circular pattern on a plate, she added leaves of fresh basil and a generous dribble of cold-pressed unfiltered olive oil, finishing with a sprinkle of coarse sea salt. She carried her snack to the adjoining dining room, with its view due west of lighted apartment high-rises and the Hudson, and the distant air traffic in New Jersey.
She took a bite of salad as she opened the browser on her MacBook. Time to deal with Lucy. She’d probably answered her by now. May as well face the music and deal with the missing BlackBerry. It wasn’t a trivial worry, nothing trifling about it, and had been on Scarpetta’s mind since she’d first noticed it gone, and now it was an obsession. For hours she’d been trying to recall what was on it, trying to imagine what someone might have access to, while a part of her wished she could return to a past when her biggest concern was snooping, someone flipping through a Rolodex or riffling through the call sheets, autopsy protocols, and photographs that routinely were on her desk. In the old days, her answer to most potential indiscretions and leaks was locks. Highly sensitive records went into locked file cabinets, and if there was something on her desk that she didn’t want others to see, she locked her office door while she was out. Plain and simple. Just good common sense. All manageable. Just hide the key.