Lucy was not in a private room, and I walked right past her at first because she did not look like anyone I knew. Her hair, stiff with blood, was dark red and standing up, her eyes black-and-blue. She was propped up in bed in a drug-induced stage that was neither here nor there. I got close to her and took her hand.
"Lucy?" She barely opened her eyes.
"Hi," she said groggily.
"How are you feeling?"
"Not too bad. I'm sorry. Aunt Kay. How did you get here?"
"I rented a car."
"What kind?"
"A Lincoln."
"Bet you got one with air bags on both sides." She smiled wanly.
"Lucy, what happened?"
"All I remember is going to the restaurant. Then someone was sewing up my head in the emergency room."
"You have a concussion."
"They think I hit the top of my head on the roof when the car was flipping.
I feel so bad about your car." Her eyes filled with tears.
"Don't worry about the car. That's not important. Do you remember anything at all about the accident?" She shook her head and reached for a tissue.
"Do you remember anything about dinner at the Outback or your visit to Green Top?"
"How did you know? Oh, well." She drifted for a moment, eyelids heavy.
"I went to the restaurant about four."
"Who did you meet?"
"Just a friend. I left at seven to come back here."
"You had a lot to drink," I said.
"I didn't think I had that much. I don't know why I ran off the road, but I think something happened."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know. I can't remember, but it seems like something happened."
"What about the gun store? Do you remember stopping there?"
"I don't remember leaving."
"You bought a.380 semiautomatic pistol, Lucy. Do you remember that?"
"I know that's why I went there."
"So you go to a gun shop when you've been drinking. Can you tell me what was in your mind?"
"I didn't want to be staying at your house without protection. Pete recommended the gun."
"Marino did?" I asked, shocked.
"I called him the other day. He said to get a Sig and said he always uses Green Top in Hanover."
"He's in North Carolina," I said.
"I don't know where he was. I called his pager and he called me back."
"I have guns. Why didn't you ask me?"
"I want my own and I'm old enough now." She could not keep her eyes open much longer.
I found her doctor on the floor and caught up with him for a moment before I left. He was very young and talked to me as if I were a worried aunt or mother who did not know the difference between a kidney and a spleen. When he rather abruptly explained to me that a concussion was basically a bruised brain resulting from a severe blow, I did not say a word or change the expression on my face. He blushed when a medical student, who happened to be one of my advisees, passed us in the hall and greeted me by name.
I left the hospital and went to my office, where I had not been for more than a week. My desk looked rather much as I feared it would, and I spent the next few hours trying to clear it while I tried to track down the state police officer who worked Lucy's accident. I left a message, then called Gloria Loving at Vital Records.
"Any luck?" I asked.
"I can't believe I'm getting to talk to you twice in one week. Are you across the street again?"
"I am." I couldn't help but smile.
"No luck so far, Kay," she said.
"We haven't found any record in California of a Mary Jo Steiner who died of SIDS. We're trying to code the death several other ways. Is it possible you could get a date and place of death?"
"I'll see what I can do," I said.
I thought of calling Denesa Steiner and ended up just staring at the phone.
I was about to do it when State Police Officer Reed, whom I had been trying to reach, returned my call.
"I wonder if you could fax me your report," I said to him.
"Actually, Hanover's got a lot of that."
"I thought the accident occurred on Ninety-five," I said, for the interstate was state police jurisdiction, no matter the locale.
"Officer Sinclair rolled up just as I did, so he gave me a hand. When the tags came back to you, I thought it was important to check that out." Oddly, it had not crossed my mind before this moment that tags coming back to me would have created quite a stir.
"What is Officer Sinclair's first name?" I asked.
"His initials are A. D." I believe. "
I was very fortunate that Officer Andrew D. Sinclair was in his office when I called him next. He told me Lucy was involved in a single-car accident that occurred while she was driving at a high rate of speed southbound on Ninety-five just north of the Henrico County line.
"How high a rate of speed?" I asked him.
"Seventy miles per hour."
"What about skid marks?"
"We found one thirty-two feet long where it appears she tapped her brakes and then went off the road."
"Why would she tap her brakes?"
"She was traveling at a high rate of speed and under the influence, ma'am. Could be she drifted off to sleep and suddenly was on somebody's bumper."
"Officer Sinclair, you need a skid mark of three hundred and twenty-nine feet to calculate that someone was driving seventy miles an hour. You have a thirty-two-foot skid mark here. I don't see how you can possibly calculate that she was driving seventy miles an hour."
"The speed limit on that stretch is sixty-five" was all he had to say.
"What was her blood alcohol?"
"Point one-two."
"I wonder if you could fax me your diagrams and report as soon as possible and tell me where my car was towed."
"It's at Covey's Texaco in Hanover. Off Route One. It's totaled, ma'am. If you can give me your fax number, I'll get you those reports right away."
I had them within the hour, and by using an overlay to interpret the codes I determined that Sinclair basically assumed Lucy was drunk and fell asleep at the wheel. When she suddenly awoke and tapped her brakes, she went into a skid, lost control of the car, left the pavement, and over corrected This resulted in her jerking back onto the road and flipping across two lanes of traffic before crashing upside down into a tree.
I had serious problems with his assumptions and one important detail. My Mercedes had anti lock brakes. When Lucy hit the brakes she should not have gone into the sort of skid Officer Sinclair had described.
I left my office and went downstairs to the morgue. My deputy chief. Fielding, and two young female forensic pathologists I had hired last year had cases on the three stainless steel tables. The sharp noise of steel against steel rose above the background thunder of water drumming into sinks, air blowing, and generators humming. The huge stainless steel refrigerator door opened with a loud suck as one of the morgue assistants rolled out another body.
"Dr. Scarpetta, can you look at this?" Dr. Wheat was a woman from Topeka. Her intelligent gray eyes peered out at me from behind a plastic face shield speckled with blood.
I went to her table.
"Does this look like soot in the wound?" She pointed a bloody gloved finger at a bullet wound to the back of the neck.
I bent close.
"It's got burned edges, so maybe it's searing. Was there clothing?"
"He didn't have a shirt on. It happened in his residence."
"Well, this is an ambiguous one. We need to get a microscopic."
"Entrance or exit?" Fielding asked as he studied a wound from his own case.
"Let me get your vote while you're here."
"Entrance," I said.
"Me, too. Are you going to be around?"
"In and out."
"In and out of town or in and out of here?"
"Both. I've got my Skypager."
"It's going all right?" he asked, his formidable biceps bunching as he cut through ribs.
"It's a nightmare, really," I said. It took half an hour to get to the Texaco gas station with the twenty-four-hour towing service that had taken care of my car. I spotted my Mercedes in a corner near a chain link fence, and the sight of its destruction tightened my stomach. I got-weak in the knees. The front end was crumpled up against the windshield, the driver's side gaping like a toothless mouth. Hydraulic tools had forced open the doors, which had been removed along with the center post. My heart beat hard as I got close, and I jumped when a deep drawl sounded behind me.
"May I help ya?"
I turned to face a grizzled old man wearing a faded red cap with purina over the bill.
"This is my car," I told him.
"I sure as hell hope you wasn't the one driving it."
I noticed the tires were not flat and both air bags had deployed.
"It sure is a shame." He shook his head as he stared at my hideously mangled Mercedes-Benz.
"Believe this is the first one of these I've seen. A 500E. Now, one of the boys here knows Mercedes and tells me Porsche helped design the engine in this one and there aren't but so many around. What is it? A '93? I don't reckon your husband got it around here."
I noticed that the left taillight was shattered, and near it was a scrape that was smudged with what appeared to be greenish paint. I bent over to get a closer look as my nerves began to tensely hum. The man talked on.
"Course, with as few miles as you had on it, it's more'n likely a '94. If you don't mind my asking, about how much would one like this cost? About fifty?"
"Did you tow this in?" I straightened up, my eyes darting over details that were sending off alarms, one right after another.
"Toby brought it in last night. I don't guess you'd know the horsepower."
"Was it exactly like this at the scene?"
The man looked slightly befuddled.
"For example," I went on, "the phone's off the hook."
"I guess so when a car's been flipping and slams into a tree."
"And the sunscreen's up."
He leaned over and peered in at the back windshield. He scratched his neck.
"I just figured it was dark because the glass is tinted. I didn't notice the screen was up. You wouldn't think someone'd put it up at night."
I carefully leaned inside to look at the rearview mirror. It had been flipped up to reduce the glare of headlights from the rear. I got keys out of my pocketbook and sat sidesaddle on the driver's seat.
"Now I wouldn't be doing that if I was you. That metal's like bunches of knives in there. And there's an awful lot of blood on the seats and ever' where I hung up the car phone and turned on the ignition. The phone sounded its tone to tell me it was working, and red lights went on warning me not to run down the battery. The radio and the CD player were off. Headlights and fog lamps were on. I picked up the phone and hit redial. It began to ring and a woman's voice answered.
"Nine-one-one."
I hung up, my pulse pounding in my neck as chills raced up to the roots of my hair. I looked around at red spatters on the dark gray leather, on the dash and console, and all over the inside of the roof. They were too red and thick. Here and there bits of angel hair pasta were cemented to the interior of my car.
I got out a metal fingernail file and scraped off greenish paint from the damage to the rear. Folding the paint flecks into a tissue, next I tried to pry off the damaged taillight unit. When I couldn't, I got the man to fetch a screwdriver.
"It's a '92," I said as I rapidly walked away, leaving him staring after me with an open mouth.
"Three hundred and fifteen horsepower. It cost eighty thousand dollars. There are only six hundred in this country-were. I bought it at McGeorge in Richmond. I don't have a husband." I was breathing hard as I got in the Lincoln.
"It's not blood inside it, goddam it. Goddam it. Goddam it! " I muttered on as I slammed the door shut and started the engine. Tires squealed as I shot out into the highway and raced back to 95 South. Just past the Atlee/Elmont exit I slowed down and pulled off the road. I kept as far off the pavement as I could, and when cars and trucks roared past I was hit by walls of wind. Sinclair's report stated that my Mercedes had left the pavement approximately eighty feet north of the eighty-six-mile marker. I was at least two hundred feet north of that when I spotted a yaw mark not far from broken taillight glass in the right lane. The mark, which was a sideways scuff about two feet long, was about ten feet from a set of straight skid marks that were approximately thirty feet long. I darted in and out of traffic, collecting glass.
I started walking again, and it was approximately another hundred feet before I got to marks on pavement that Sinclair had diagrammed in his report. My heart skipped another beat as I stared, stunned, at black rubber streaks left by my Pirelli tires the night before last. They were not skids at all, but acceleration marks made when tires spin abruptly straight ahead, as I had done when leaving the Texaco station moments earlier. It was just after she had made these marks that Lucy had lost control and had gone off the road. I saw her tire impressions in the dirt, the smear of rubber when she over corrected and a tire caught the pavement's edge. I surveyed deep gashes in the road made when the car flipped, the gouge in the tree in the median, and bits of metal and plastic scattered everywhere.
I drove back to Richmond not sure what to do or whom to call. Then I thought of Investigator McKee with the state police. We had worked many traffic fatality scenes together and spent many hours in my office moving Matchbox cars on my desk until we believed we had reconstructed what had led to a crash. I left a message with his office, and he returned my call shortly after I got home.
"I didn't ask Sinclair if he got casts of the tire impressions where she left the road, but I can't imagine he would have," I said, after explaining a little of what was going on.
"No, he wouldn't have," McKee concurred.
"I heard a lot about it. Dr. Scarpetta. There was a lot of talk. And the thing was, what Reed first noticed when he responded to the scene was your low number tag. "
"I talked to Reed briefly. He wasn't very involved."
"Right. Under ordinary circumstances, when the Hanover officer… uh, Sinclair, rolled up. Reed would have told him things were under control and done all the diagrams and measurements himself. But he sees this low three-digit tag and bells go off. He knows the car belongs to somebody important in government.
"Sinclair gets to do his thing while Reed gets on the radio and the phone, calls for a supervisor, runs the tag ASAP. Bingo. The car comes back to you, and now his first thought is ifs you inside. So you can imagine how it was out there."
"A circus."
"You got it. Turns out Sinclair just got out of the academy. Your wreck was his second."
"Even if it was his twentieth, I can see how he might have made a mistake.
There was no reason for him to look for skid marks two hundred feet up from where Lucy went off the road."
"And you're certain it was a yaw mark you saw?"
"Absolutely. You make those casts, and you're going to find the impression on the shoulder's going to match the impression back there on the road. The only way that yaw mark or scuff could have been left was if an outside force caused the car to suddenly change direction."
"And then acceleration marks two hundred or so feet later," he thought out loud.
"Lucy gets hit from the rear, taps her brakes, and keeps on going. Seconds later she suddenly accelerates and loses control."
"Probably about the same time she dialed Nine-one- one," I said.
"I'll check with the cellular phone company and get the exact time of that call. Then we'll find it on the tape."
"Someone was on her bumper with their high beams on, and she flipped on the night mirror, and finally resorted to putting up the rear sunscreen to block out the glare. She didn't have the radio or CD player on because she was concentrating hard. She was wide awake and scared because someone's on top of her.
"This person finally hits her from the rear and Lucy applies the brakes," I continued to reconstruct what I believed had happened.
"She drives on, and realizes the person is gaining on her again. Panicking, Lucy floors it and loses control. All of this would have taken place in seconds."
"If what you found out there is right, it sure could have happened exactly like that."
"Will you look into it?"
"You bet. What about the paint?"
"I'll turn it, the taillight unit, and everything else in to the labs and ask them to put a rush on it."
"Put my name on the paperwork. Have them call me with the results right away." It was five o'clock and dark out when I got off the phone in my upstairs office. I looked around dazed, and felt like a stranger in my house. Hunger gnawing my stomach was followed by nausea, and I drank Mylanta from the bottle and rummaged in the medicine cabinet for Zantac. My ulcer had vanished during the summer, but unlike former lovers, it always came back. Both phone lines rang and were answered by voice mail. I heard the fax machine as I soaked in the tub and sipped wine on top of medicine. I had so much to do. I knew my sister, Dorothy, would want to come immediately. She always rose to crisis occasions because it fed her need for drama. She would use it for research. No doubt, in her next children's book, one of her characters would deal with an auto wreck. Critics again would rave about the sensitivity and wisdom of Dorothy, who mothered people she imagined much better than she did her only daughter. The fax, I found, was Dorothy's flight schedule. She was arriving late tomorrow afternoon and would stay with Lucy in my home.
"She won't be in the hospital long, will she?" she asked, when I called her minutes later.
"I imagine I'll be bringing her here in the afternoon," I said.
"She must look terrible."
"Most people do after automobile accidents."
"But is any of it permanent?" She almost whispered.
"She won't be disfigured, will she?"
"No, Dorothy. She won't be disfigured. How aware have you been of her drinking?"
"Now how would I know anything about that? She's up there near you in school and never seems to want to come home. And when she does she certainly doesn't confide in me or her grandmother. I would think if anyone were aware, you should have been."
"If she's convicted of DUI, the courts could order her into treatment," I said as patiently as possible. Silence. Then, "My God."
I went on, "Even if they don't, it would be a good idea for two reasons. The most obvious is that she needs to deal with the problem. Second, the judge may look upon her case with more sympathy if she volunteers to get some help. "
"Well, I'm just going to leave all that up to you. You're the doctor-lawyer in the family. But I know my little girl. She's not going to want to do it.
I can't imagine her going off to some mental ward where they don't have computers. She'd never be able to face anyone again."
"She will not be going off to a mental ward, and there is nothing the least bit shameful about being treated for alcohol or drug abuse. What's shameful is to let it go on to ruin your life. "
"I've always stopped at three glasses of wine."
"There are many types of addictions," I said.
"Yours happens to be to men."
"Oh, Kay." She laughed.
"That's quite something coming from you. By the way, are you seeing anyone?"