Trace - Cornwell Patricia (серии книг читать онлайн бесплатно полностью txt) 📗

42

Lights from flashlights poke like long yellow pencils in the black backyard. Scarpetta stands by the window, looking out, hopeful the police will have some luck at this hour, but she is pricked by doubt. What she suggested seems remote if not paranoid, perhaps because she is very tired.

"So you don't remember him living with Mrs. Arnette?" Detective Browning asks, tapping a pen on top of a notepad and chewing gum as he sits in a simple wooden chair inside the bedroom.

"I didn't know him," she replies, watching the long lights moving in the dark and feeling cold air seep in around the window. Chances are, they won't find anything, but she worries that they will. She thinks about the bone dust in Gilly's mouth and on the tractor driver and worries the police will find something. "I wouldn't have any way of knowing who he lived with, assuming he lived with anybody. I can't remember ever having a real conversation with him."

"Not sure what you'd talk about with a squirrel like that."

"Unfortunately, those who worked in the Anatomical Division were viewed as rather odd by everybody else. What they did was off-putting to the rest of my staff. They were always invited to parties, picnics, the Fourth of July cook-out I always had at my home. But you never knew if they'd show up or not," she says.

"He ever show up?" Browning is chewing gum. She can hear him working the gum vigorously between his teeth as she stands looking out the window.

"I honestly don't remember. Edgar Allan could come and go without anyone noticing. It may sound unkind, but he was the most nonexistent person who ever worked for me. I hardly remember what he looked like."

"Looked is operative here. We got no clue what he looks like now," Browning supposes, flipping a page in his notepad. "You said he was a little guy with red hair back then. What? Five-eight, five-nine? One-fifty?"

"More like five-foot-six, maybe a hundred and thirty pounds," she recalls. "I can't remember the color of his eyes."

"According to DMV, brown. But maybe not, 'cause he lied about his height and weight. On his license he's got himself five-foot-ten, one eighty."

"Then why did you ask me?" She turns around and looks at him.

"To give you a chance to remember before I jinxed you with what is probably false information." He winks at her, chewing gum. "He's also got himself as having brown hair." He taps the notepad with his pen. "So back then, what was a guy like him making embalming bodies and doing whatever he did down there in the Anatomical Division?"

"Eight, ten years ago?" She looks out the window again, at the night, at the lights burning in Gilly Paulsson's house on the other side of the fence. The police are in her yard too. They're in her bedroom. She can see shadows moving behind the curtained window in her bedroom, the same window Edgar Allan Pogue probably peeped into whenever he could, looking and fantasizing and maybe watching the games that went on in that house while he left stains on his sheets. "I would say he wasn't making more than twenty-two thousand a year back then."

"And then all of a sudden he quit. Saying he was disabled for one reason or another. Ain't that a common story."

"Exposure to formaldehyde. He wasn't faking. I had to review his medical reports and probably did talk to him then. I must have. He had respiratory disease from formaldehyde, had fibrosis in his lungs that

centrations in his blood were off, significantly off, and spirometry clearly demonstrated diminished respiratory function." "Spir-what?"

tory function.

"Got'cha. When I used to smoke, I probably would've flunked that

„ one.

"If you kept smoking, eventually you would have."

"AJrighty. So Edgar Allan really had a problem. Am I to assume he still would?"

"Well, once he was no longer exposed to formaldehyde or any other irritant, his disease shouldn't have progressed. But that doesn't mean it reversed itself, because he's going to have scarring. Scarring is permanent. So yes, he still has a problem. How serious a problem, I don't know."

"He should have a doctor. You think we could find out the name of his doctor from old personnel files?"

"They'd be in state archives, assuming they still exist. Actually, Dr. Marcus is the one to ask. I don't have the authority."

"Uh huh. In your medical opinion, Dr. Scarpetta, I guess what I'm really wanting to know is how sick this guy is. Is he so sick he might still be going to the doctor or a clinic or be on prescription drugs?"

"Certainly he could be on prescription drugs. But he might not be. As long as he's taken reasonable care of his health, his biggest concern is probably going to be avoiding sick people, staying away from people who have colds or the flu and are contagious. He doesn't want to get an upper respiratory infection because he doesn't have much healthy lung in reserve, not like you and I do. So he can get seriously ill. He can get pneumonia. If he is susceptible to asthma, then he's going to avoid whatever sets that off. He might have prescription drugs, steroids for example. He might take allergy shots. He might use over-the-counter remedies. He might do all kinds of things. He might do nothing."

"Right, right, right," he says, tapping his pen and chewing hard. "He'd probably get really out of breath if he struggled with someone, then."

"Probably." This has been going on for more than an hour and Scarpetta is very tired. She has eaten little all day and her energy is used up. "I mean, he could be strong bur his physical activity is going to be limited. He's not running sprints or playing tennis. If he's been on steroids on and off for years, he might be fat. His endurance isn't good." The long bright probes of the flashlights slash over the front of the wooden shed behind the house, and the lights focus on the doorway, and a uniformed cop is illuminated as he lifts bolt cutters to a lock on the door.

"Strike you as odd he might have done something to Gilly Paulsson when she was sick with the flu? Wouldn't he be worried he'd catch it?" Browning asks.

"No," she says, looking out at the cop with the bolt cutters, and seeing the door suddenly open wide and the beams of light stab into the darkness inside the shed.

"How come?" he asks as her cell phone vibrates.

"Drug addicts don't think about hepatitis and AIDS when they're suffering withdrawal. Serial rapists and killers aren't thinking about sexually transmitted diseases when they're in a mood to rape and murder," she says, sliding the phone out of her pocket. "No, I wouldn't expect Edgar Allan to be thinking about the flu if he were seized by the urge to kill a young girl. Excuse me." She answers her phone.

It's me, Rudy says. Something's come up, something you need to know about. The case you're on in Richmond, well, latents from it match latents from a case we're working in Florida. IAFIS matched up latents. Unknown latents."

"Who's we?"

"One of our cases. A case Lucy and I are working. You don't know about it. It's too much to go into right now. Lucy didn't want you to know about it."

Scarpetta listens and disbelief thaws her numbness, and through the window she watches a big figure in dark clothing walk away from the woodshed behind the house, his flashlight moving as he moves. Marino is heading toward the house. "What kind of case?" she asks Rudy.

"I'm not supposed to be talking about it." He pauses and takes a breath. "But I can't get Lucy. Her damn phone, I don't know what she's doing but she's not answering it again, hasn't for the past two hours, dammit. An attempted murder of one of our rookies, a female. She was inside Lucy's house when it happened."

"Oh God." Scarpetta briefly shuts her eyes.

"Weird as shit. I thought at first she was faking for attention or something. But prints on the bottle bomb are the same as ones we lifted in the bedroom. Same as prints from your case in Richmond, the girl's case you got called in to work."