Scarpetta.012.Blow.Fly.2003 by Cornwell Patricia

Author:Cornwell, Patricia [Cornwell, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

"I don't need her to get it off me," the woman pleads. "Maybe it's good to keep it on because of all the bugs."

"No. You need it washed off," Jay says, leaning close and smelling her neck. "You have too much on. It's toxic. She must have soaked you with an entire bottle. That's not good."

"I don't want her touching me again!"

"She hurt you?"

The lamb doesn't answer.

"I'm here. She won't hurt you."

Jay gets up from the edge of the bed, and Bev collects the wet, gory towel.

"We don't need to waste water," she says. "The tank's low."

"It's supposed to rain, eventually," Jay replies, studying the woman as if she's a car he might buy. "The tank's got plenty, anyway. Wash the towel and bring it back in here."

"Please don't hurt me."

The woman lifts her head up from the pillow. It is pinkish and wet, and a bright red spot indicates that her laceration has begun to bleed again.

"Just take me home and I won't tell anybody. Not anybody, I swear to God."

Her eyes plead with Jay, her only hope because he's glorious to look at, and so far he's been nice.

"Won't tell anybody what?" Jay asks her, moving closer, sitting on the edge of the iron-frame bed with its foul, broken-down mattress. "What's there to tell? You hurt yourself, now, didn't you, and we're Good Samaritans, taking care of you."

She nods, uncertainty, then fear contorting her face.

"Make it quick. Please," she whispers between convulsions, sobs and hiccups jerking her body. "If you aren't going to let me go. Make it quick."

Bev returns with the towel and hands it to Jay. Water drips on the bed and trickles down his bare, muscular arm. Bev runs her fingers through his hair and kisses the back of his neck, then presses close to him as he opens the woman's blouse.

"Ah. No bra," he says. "She wasn't wearing one?" He cranes his head around, demanding an answer in a soft voice that by now has become scary.

Bev slides her hands down his sweaty chest.

The woman's eyes are wide with the same glassy terror that Bev saw in the boat. She trembles violently, her naked breasts quivering. A drop of saliva slips out of the side of her mouth, and Jay stands up, disgusted.

"Get the rest of her clothes off and clean her up," he orders Bev. "You touch her again, you know what I'll do to you."

Bev smiles. Theirs is a well-rehearsed, long-running drama.

THE NEXT MORNING, Scarpetta is still in Florida. Once again, she was about to leave and was waylaid, this time by FedEx delivering two packages, one from the Polunsky Prison Information Office, the other a thick package containing Charlotte Dard's case, mostly copies of autopsy and lab reports and histological slides.

Scarpetta places a slide of the left ventricular free wall on the compound microscopes stage. If she could add up the hours she's spent looking at slides throughout her career, the number would be in the tens of thousands. Although she

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