3.

DR. JOEL MARCUS gives her a stiff smile, and she shakes his dry, small-boned hand. She feels she might despise him given a chance, but other than that premonition, which she pushes down into a dark part of her heart, she feels nothing.

About four months ago, she found out about him the same way she has found out about most things that have to do with her past life in Virginia. It was an accident, a coincidence. She happened to be on a plane reading USA Today, and happened to notice a news brief about Virginia that read, “Governor appoints new chief medical examiner after long search …” Finally, after years of no chief or acting chiefs, Virginia got a new chief. Scarpetta’s opinion and guidance were not requested during the endless ordeal of a search. Her endorsement was not necessary when Dr. Marcus became a candidate for her former position.

Had she been asked, she would have confessed that she had never heard of him. This would have been followed by her diplomatic suggestion that she must have run into him at a national meeting or two and just didn’t recall his name. Certainly he is a forensic pathologist of note, she would have offered, otherwise he would not have been recruited to head the most prominent statewide medical examiner system in the United States.

But as she shakes Dr. Marcus’s hand and looks into his small cold eyes, she realizes he is a complete stranger. Clearly, he has been on no committees of significance, nor has he lectured at any pathology or medico-legal or forensic science meetings she has attended, or she would remember him. She may forget names, but rarely a face.

“Kay, at last we meet,” he says, offending her again, only now it is worse because he is offending her in person.

What her intuition was reluctant to pick up over the phone is unavoidable now that she is in his presence inside the lobby of the building called Biotech II where she last worked as chief. Dr. Marcus is a small thin man with a small thin face and a small thin stripe of dirty gray hair on the back of his small head, as if nature has been trifling with him. He wears an outdated narrow tie, shapeless gray trousers and loafers. A sleeveless undershirt is visible beneath a cheap white dress shirt that sags around his thin neck, the inside of the collar dingy and rough with cotton picks.

“Let’s go in,” he says. “I’m afraid we’ve got a full house this morning.”

She is about to inform him that she isn’t alone when Marino emerges from the men’s room, hitching up his black cargo pants, the LAPD cap pulled low over his eyes. Scarpetta is polite but all business as she makes introductions, explaining Marino, as much as he can be explained.

“He used to be with the Richmond Police Department and is a very experienced investigator,” she says as Dr. Marcus’s face hardens.

“You didn’t mention you were bringing anyone,” he says curtly in her former spacious lobby of granite and glass blocks, where she has signed in, where she has stood for twenty minutes, feeling as conspicuous as a statue in a rotunda, while she waited for Dr. Marcus, or someone, to come get her. “I thought I made it clear this is a very sensitive situation.”

“Hey, not to worry. I’m a real sensitive guy,” Marino says loudly.

Dr. Marcus doesn’t seem to hear him, but he bristles. Scarpetta can almost hear his anger displace air.

“My senior superlative in high school was Most Likely to Be Sensitive,” Marino adds loudly. “Yo, Bruce!” he yells to a uniformed guard who is at least thirty feet away, having just stepped out of the evidence room and into the lobby. “What’cha know, man? Still bowling on that sorry team The Pin Heads?”

“I didn’t mention it?” Scarpetta is saying. “I apologize.” She didn’t mention it, and she isn’t sorry. When she is called into a case, she’ll bring who and whatever she wants, and she can’t forgive Dr. Marcus for calling her Kay.

Bruce the guard looks puzzled, then amazed. “Marino! Holy smoke, that you? Talk about a ghost from the past.”

“No, you didn’t,” Dr. Marcus reiterates to Scarpetta, momentarily off balance, his confusion palpable, like the flapping of startled birds.

“The one and only, and I ain’t no ghost,” Marino says as obnoxiously as possible.

“I’m not sure I can allow it. This hasn’t been cleared,” Dr. Marcus says, flustered and inadvertently exposing the ugly fact that someone he answers to not only knows Scarpetta is here but may indeed be the reason she is here.

“How long you in town?” The yelling between old friends goes on.

Scarpetta’s inner voice warned her and she didn’t listen. She is walking into something.

“Long as it takes, man.”

This was a mistake, a bad one, she thinks. I should have gone to Aspen.

“When you get a minute, stop by.”

“You got it, buddy.”

“That’s enough, please,” Dr. Marcus snaps. “This is not a beer hall.”

He wears a master key to the kingdom on a lanyard around his neck, and he stoops to hold the magnetic card close to an infrared scanner next to an opaque glass door. On the other side is the chief medical examiner’s wing. Scarpetta’s mouth is dry. She is sweating under the arms and her stomach feels hollow as she walks into the chief medical examiner’s section of the handsome building she helped design and find funding for and moved into before she was fired. The dark blue couch and matching chair, the wooden coffee table, and the painting of a farm scene hanging on the wall are the same. The reception area hasn’t changed, except there used to be two corn plants and several hibiscus. She was enthusiastic about her plants, watering them herself, picking off the dead leaves, rearranging them as the light changed with the seasons.

“I’m afraid you can’t bring a guest,” Dr. Marcus makes a decision as they pause before another locked door, this one leading into administrative offices and the morgue, the inner sanctum that once was hers rightfully and completely.

His magnetic card does its magic again and the lock clicks free. He goes first, walking fast, his small wire-rimmed glasses catching fluorescent light. “I got caught in traffic, so I’m running late, and we have a full house. Eight cases,” he continues, directing his comments to her as if Marino doesn’t exist. “I have to go straight into staff meeting. Probably the best thing is for you, Kay, to getcoffee. I may be a while. Julie?” he calls out to a clerk who is invisible inside a cubicle, her fingers tapping like castanets on a computer keyboard. “If you could show our guest where to get coffee.” This to Scarpetta, “If you’ll just make yourself comfortable in the library. I’ll get to you as soon as I can.”

At the very least, as a matter of professional courtesy, a visiting forensic pathologist would be welcomed at staff meeting and in the morgue, especially if she is providing expertise pro bono to the medical examiner’s office that she once headed. Dr. Marcus could not have insulted Scarpetta more had he asked her to drop off his dry cleaning or wait in the parking lot.

“I’m afraid your guest really can’t be in here.” Dr. Marcus makes that clear once again as he looks around impatiently. “Julie, can you show this gentleman back out to the lobby?”

“He’s not my guest and he’s not waiting in the lobby,” Scarpetta says quietly.

“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Marcus’s small thin face looks at her.

“We’re together,” she says.

“Perhaps you don’t understand the situation,” Dr. Marcus replies in a tight voice.

“Perhaps I don’t. Let’s talk.” It is not a request.

He almost flinches, his reluctance is so acute. “Very well,” he acquiesces. “We’ll duck into the library for a minute.”

“Will you excuse us?” She smiles at Marino.

“No problem.” He walks inside Julie’s cubicle and picks up a stack of autopsy photographs and starts going through them like playing cards. He snaps one out between forefinger and thumb like a blackjack dealer. “Know why drug dealers got less body fat than let’s say you and me?” He drops the photograph on her keyboard.

Julie, who can’t be more than twenty-five and is attractive but a bit plump, stares at a photograph of a muscular young black male, as naked as the day he was born. He is on top of an autopsy table, chest cut open wide, hollowed out, organs gone except for one very conspicuously large organ, probably his most vital organ, at least to him, at least when he was alive enough to care about it. “What?” Julie asks. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“I’m serious as a heart attack.” Marino pulls up a chair and sits next to her, very close. “See, darling, body fat directly correlates to the weight of the brain. Witness you and me. Always a struggle, ain’t it?”

“No kidding. You really think smarter people get fat?”

“A fact of life. People like you and me gotta work extra hard.”

“Don’t tell me you’re on one of those eat-all-you-want-except-white-stuff diets.”

“You got it, babe. Nothing white for me except women. Now me? If I was a drug dealer, I wouldn’t give a shit. Eat whatever the hell I wanted. Twinkies, Moon Pies, white bread and jelly. But that’s because I wouldn’t have a brain, right? See, all these dead drug dealers are dead because they’re stupid, and that’s why they ain’t got body fat and can eat all the white shit they want.”

Their voices and laughter fade as Scarpetta follows a corridor so familiar she remembers the brush of the gray carpet beneath her shoes, the exact feel of the firm low-pile carpet she picked out when she designed her part of the building.

“He really is most inappropriate,” Dr. Marcus is saying. “One thing I do require in this place is proper decorum.”

Walls are scuffed, and the Norman Rockwell prints she bought and framed herself are cockeyed and two are missing. She stares inside the open doorways of offices they pass, noticing sloppy mounds of paperwork and microscopic slide folders and compound microscopes perched like big tired gray birds on overwhelmed desks. Every sight and sound reaches out to her like needy hands, and deep down she feels what has been lost and it hurts much more than she ever thought it could.

“Now I’m making the connection, regrettably. The infamous Peter Marano. Yes indeed. Quite a reputation that man has,” Dr. Marcus says.

“Marino,” she corrects him.

A right turn and they do not pause at the coffee station but Dr. Marcus opens a solid wooden door that leads into the library, and she is greeted by medical books abandoned on long tables and other reference books tilted and upended on shelves like drunks. The huge horseshoe-shaped table is a landfill of journals, scraps of paper, dirty coffee cups, even a Krispy Kreme doughnut box. Her heart pounds as she looks around. She designed this generous space and was proud of the way she budgeted her funds because medical and scientific textbooks and a library to hold them are exorbitantly expensive and beyond what the state considers necessary for an office whose patients are dead. Her attention hovers over sets of Greenfield’s Neuropathology and law reviews that she donated from her own collection. The volumes are out of order. One of them is upside down. Her anger spikes.

She fastens her eyes on Dr. Marcus and says, “I think we’d better lay down some ground rules.”

“Goodness, Kay. Ground rules?” he asks with a puzzled frown that is feigned and annoying.

She can’t believe his blatant condescension. He reminds her of a defense attorney, not a good one, who hoodwinks the courtroom by stipulating away the seventeen years she spent in postgraduate education and reduces her on the witness stand to Ma’am or Mrs. or Ms. or, worst of all, Kay.

“I’m sensing resistance to my being here …” she starts to say.

“Resistance? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“I think you do …”

“Let’s don’t make assumptions.”

“Please don’t interrupt me, Dr. Marcus. I don’t have to be here.” She takes in trashed tables and unloved books and wonders if he is this contemptuous with his own belongings. “What in God’s name has happened to this place?” she asks.

He pauses as if it requires a moment of divining to understand what she means. Then he comments blandly, “Today’s medical students. No doubt they were never taught to pick up after themselves.”

“In five years they’ve changed that much,” she says, dryly.

“Perhaps you’re misinterpreting my mood this morning,” he replies in the same coaxing tone that he used with her over the phone yesterday. “Granted, I have a lot on my mind, but I’m quite pleased you’re here.”

“You seem anything but pleased.” She keeps her eyes steadily on him while he stares past her. “Let’s start with this. I didn’t call you. You called me. Why?” I should have asked you yesterday, she thinks. I should have asked you then.

“I thought I’d made myself clear, Kay. You’re a very respected forensic pathologist, a well-known consultant.” It sounds like an ingenuous endorsement for someone he secretly can’t stand.

“We don’t know each other. We’ve never even met. I’m having a hard time believing you called me because I’m respected or well known.” Her arms are folded and she is glad she wore a serious dark suit. “I don’t play games, Dr. Marcus.”

“I certainly don’t have time for games.” Any attempt at cordiality fades from his face and pettiness begins to glint like the sharp edge of a blade.

“Did someone suggest me? Were you told to call me?” She is certain she detects the stench of politics.

He glances toward the door in a not so subtle reminder that he is a busy, important man with eight cases and a staff meeting to run. Or perhaps he is worrying that someone is eavesdropping. “This is not productive,” he says. “I think it’s best we terminate this discussion.”

“Fine.” She picks up her briefcase. “The last thing I want is to be a pawn in some agenda. Or shut off in a room, drinking coffee half the day. I can’t help an office that isn’t open to me, and my number-one ground rule, Dr. Marcus, is that an office requesting my assistance must be open to me.”

“All right. If you want candor, indeed you shall have it.” His imperiousness fails to hide his fear. He doesn’t want her to leave. He sincerely doesn’t. “Frankly, bringing you here wasn’t my idea. Frankly, the health commissioner wanted an outside opinion and somehow came up with you,” he explains as if her name were drawn from a hat.

“He should have called me himself,” she replies. “That would have been more honest.”

“I told him I would do it. Frankly, I didn’t want to put you on the spot,” he explains, and the more he says “frankly,” the less she believes a word he says. “What happened is this. When Dr. Fielding couldn’t determine a cause or manner of death, the girl’s father, Gilly Paulsson’s father, called the commissioner.”

The mention of Dr. Fielding’s name stings her. She didn’t know whether he was still here and she hasn’t asked.

“And as I said, the commissioner called me. He said he wanted a full-court press. Those were his words.”

The father must have clout, she thinks. Phone calls from upset families are not unusual, but rarely do they result in a high-ranking government official’s demanding an outside expert.

“Kay, I can understand how uncomfortable this must be for you,” Dr. Marcus says. “I wouldn’t relish being in your position.”

“And what is my position as you see it, Dr. Marcus?”

“I believe Dickens wrote a story about that called A Christmas Carol. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Ghost of Christmas Past?” He smiles his trifling smile, and perhaps he doesn’t realize he is plagiarizing Bruce, the guard who called Marino a ghost from the past. “Going back is never easy. You have guts, I’ll give you that. I don’t believe I would have been so generous, not if I perceived that my former office had been somewhat uncharitable to me, and I can well understand your feeling that way.”

“This isn’t about me,” she replies. “It’s about a dead fourteen-year-old girl. It’s about your officean office that, yes, I’m quite familiar with, but …”

He interrupts her, “That’s very philosophical of …”

“Let me state the obvious,” she cuts him off. “When children die, it’s federal law that their fatalities are thoroughly investigated and reviewed, not only to determine cause and manner of death, but whether the tragedy might be part of a pattern. If it turns out that Gilly Paulsson was murdered, then every molecule of your office is going to be scrutinized and publicly judged, and I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t call me Kay in front of your staff and colleagues. Actually, I would prefer that you didn’t call me by my first name at all.”

“I suppose part of the commissioner’s motivation is preventive damage control,” Dr. Marcus replies as if she said nothing about his calling her Kay.

“I didn’t agree to participate in some media relations scheme,” she tells him. “When you called yesterday, I agreed to do what I could to help you figure out what happened to Gilly Paulsson. And I can’t do that if you aren’t completely open with me and whoever I bring in to assist me, which in this case is Pete Marino.”

“Frankly, it didn’t occur to me that you would have a strong desire to attend staff meeting.” He glances at his watch again, an old watch with a narrow leather wristband. “But as you wish. We have no secrets in this place. Later, I’ll go over the Paulsson case with you. You can re-autopsy her if you want.”

He holds open the library door. Scarpetta stares at him in disbelief.

“She died two weeks ago and her body hasn’t been released to her family yet?” she asks.

“They’re so distraught, they haven’t made arrangements to claim her, allegedly,” he replies. “I suppose they’re hoping we’ll pay for the burial.”

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