Scarpetta 09 by Point of Origin

Author:Point of Origin [Origin, Point of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-09-18T12:01:10+00:00

His remains would have to be shipped to Richmond, and despite all I knew about death, the two of us had never devoted much attention to our own or the funeral service we might want and where we should be buried. We had not wanted to think about our own, and so we hadn't.

I-95 South was a blur of highway running forever through stopped time. When tears filled my eyes, I turned to my window and hid my face. Lucy was silent in the back seat, her anger, grief, and fear as palpable as a concrete wall.

'I'm going to quit,' she finally said when we passed through Fredericksburg. 'This is it for me. I'll find something somewhere. Maybe in computers.'

'Bullshit,' Marino answered, his eyes on her in the rearview mirror. 'That's just what the bitch wants you to do. Quit law enforcement. Be a loser and a big fuck-up.'

'I am a loser and a fuck-up.'

'Bull fucking shit,' he said.

'She killed him because of me,' she went on in the same heartless monotone.

'She killed him because she wanted to. And we can sit here and have a pity party, or we can figure out what we're gonna do before she whacks the next one of us.'

But my niece was not to be consoled. Indirectly, she had exposed all of us to Carrie a long time ago.

'Carrie wants you to blame yourself for this,' I said to her. Lucy did not respond, and I turned around to look at her. She was dressed in dirty BDUs and boots, her hair a mess. She still smelled of fire, because she had not bathed. She had not eaten or slept, as best I knew. Her eyes were flat and hard. They glinted coldly of the decision she had made, and I had seen the look before, when hopelessness and hostility made her self-destructive. A part of her wanted to die, or maybe a part of her already had.

We reached my house at half past five, and the slanted rays of the sun were hot and bright, the sky hazy blue but cloudless. I carried in newspapers from the front steps and was sickened again by this morning's front-page headline about Benton's death. Although identification was tentative, it was believed he had died in a fire under very suspicious circumstances while assisting the FBI in the nationwide hunt for the escaped killer Carrie Grethen. Investigators would not say why Benton had been inside the small grocery store that had burned, or if he might have been lured there.

'What do you want to do with this?' Marino asked.

He had opened the car trunk, where three large brown paper bags contained the personal effects collected from Benton's hotel room. I could not decide.

'Want me to just put them in your office?' he asked. 'Or I can go through them if you want, Doc.'

'No, no, just leave them,' I said. Stiff paper crackled as he carried the bags into the house and down the hall. His footsteps were

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