“For Christ’s sake, for once don’t be rational.”
“It’s very beautiful,” she says of the ring. “You better mean it, because I’m not giving it back.”
Kay Scarpetta 15 - Book of the Dead
Chapter 3
N ine days later, Sunday. A ship’s horn is mournful out at sea.
Church steeples pierce the overcast dawn in Charleston, and a solitary bell begins to ring. Then a cluster of them joins in, clanging in a secret language that sounds the same around the world. With the bells comes the first light of dawn, and Scarpetta begins to stir about in her master suite, as she wryly refers to her living area on the second floor of her early-nineteenth- century carriage house. Compared to the somewhat sumptuous homes of her past, what she has is a very odd departure.
Her bedroom and study are combined, the space so crowded she can barely move without bumping into the antique chest of drawers or bookcases, or the long table draped with a black cloth that bears a microscope and slides, latex gloves, dust masks, camera equipment, and various crime scene necessities—all eccentric in their context. There are no closets, just side-by- side wardrobes lined with cedar, and from one of them she selects a charcoal skirt suit, a gray-and- white-striped silk blouse, and low-heeled black pumps.
Dressed for what promises to be a difficult day, she sits at her desk and looks out at the garden, watching it change in the varying shadows and light of morning. She logs into e-mail, checking to see if her investigator, Pete Marino, has sent her anything that might confound her plans for the day. No messages. To double-check, she calls him.
“Yeah.” He sounds groggy. In the background, an unfamiliar woman’s voice complains, “Shit. Now what?”
“You’re definitely coming in?” Scarpetta makes sure. “I got word late last night we have a body on the way from Beaufort, and I’m assuming you’ll be there to take care of it. Plus, we have that meeting this afternoon. I left you a message. You never called me back.”
“Yeah.”
The woman in the background says in the same complaining voice, “What’s she want this time?”
“I’m talking within the hour,” Scarpetta firmly tells Marino. “You need to be on your way now or there will be no one to let him in. Meddicks’ Funeral Home. I’m not familiar with it.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be in around eleven to finish up what I can with the little boy.”
As if the Drew Martin case isn’t bad enough. Scarpetta’s first day back to work after she returned from Rome brought in another horrible case, the murder of a little boy whose name she still doesn’t know. He has moved into her mind because he has nowhere else to go, and when she least expects it, she sees his delicate face, emaciated body, and curly brown hair. And then the rest of it. What he looked like when she was done. After all these years, after thousands of cases, a part of her hates the necessity of what she must do to the dead because of what someone did to them first.