Madelisa imagines someone—probably a man—drunk and depressed or sick, maybe explaining why the dog got out. Someone was in here not long ago, drinking, she thinks, and whoever it was started cooking on the grill and seems to have vanished. Her heart pounds. She can’t shake the feeling she’s being watched, and she thinks, My Lord, it’s cold in here.

“Hello? Anybody home?” she calls out hoarsely.

Her feet seem to move on their own as she explores in awe, and fear hums inside her like electricity. She should leave. She’s trespassing like a burglar. Breaking and entering. She’s going to get in trouble. She feels something looking at her. The police will be looking at her, all right, if and when they find out, and she’s getting panicky, but her feet won’t listen. They keep moving her from one place to the next.

“Hello?” she calls out, her voice cracking.

Beyond the living room, off to the left of the foyer, is another room, and she hears running water.

“Hello!”

She hesitantly follows the sound of running water, can’t seem to stop her feet. They keep right on, and she finds herself in a large bedroom with fancy, formal furniture and drawn silk curtains and pictures all over the walls. A beautiful little girl with a very pretty, happy woman who must be her mother. The little girl joyous in a wading pool with a puppy—the basset hound. The same pretty woman crying, sitting on a couch talking to the famous talk-show psychiatrist Dr. Self, big cameras rolled in close. The same pretty lady posing with Drew Martin and a handsome man with olive skin and very dark hair. Drew and the man are in tennis clothes, holding racquets on a tennis court somewhere.

Drew Martin’s dead. Murdered.

The pale blue duvet on the bed is messy. On the black marble floor near the head of the bed are clothes that seem to have been dropped there. A pink jogging suit, a pair of socks, a bra. The sound of running water gets louder as her feet move toward it, and Madelisa tells her feet to run the other way but they won’t. Run, she tells them as they walk her into a bathroom of black onyx and copper. RUN! She slowly takes in the wet, bloody towels in the copper sink, the bloody saw-toothed knife and bloody box cutters on the back of the black toilet, the neat stack of clean, pale rose linens on top of the hamper.

Behind tiger-striped curtains drawn around the copper tub, water runs, splashing on something that doesn’t sound like metal.

Chapter 13

Kay Scarpetta 15 - Book of the Dead

Chapter 13

A fter dark. Scarpetta shines her flashlight on a stainless-steel Colt revolver in the middle of the alley behind her house.