MARINO TOOK SO LONG GETTING HERE BECAUSE he had stopped by the property room at headquarters. I had asked him to pick up the stainless-steel key I found in the pocket of Mitch Barbosa's running shorts. Marino tells Berger and me that he rooted around for quite some time inside that small room behind wire mesh where Spacesaver shelves are crowded with bar-coded bags, some of which hold items the police took from my house last Saturday.
I have been in the property room before. I can picture it. Portable phones ring from inside those bags. Pagers go off as unwitting people keep trying to call associates who are either locked up or dead. There are also locked refrigerators for the storage of Physical Evidence Recovery Kits and any other evidence that might be perishable_such as the raw chicken I pounded with the chipping hammer.
"Now, why did you pound raw chicken with a chipping hammer?" Berger wants further clarification on this part of my rather odd story.
"To see if the injuries correlated to the ones on Bray's body," I reply.
"Well, the chicken's still inside the evidence refrigerator," Marino says. "Gotta say, you sure beat the hell out of it."
"Describe in detail exactly what you did to the chicken," Berger prods me, as if I am on the witness stand.
I face her and Marino inside my entrance hallway and explain that I placed raw chicken breasts on a cutting board and beat them with every side and edge of the chipping hammer to note the pattern of injuries. The wounds from both the blunt-bladed tip and the pointed tip were identical in configuration and measurement to those on Bray's body, particularly to the punched-out areas in her cartilage and skull, which are excellent for retaining the shape_or tool mark_of whatever penetrated them. Then I spread out a white pillowcase, I explain, i rolled the coiled handle of the chipping hammer in barbecue sauce. What kind of barbecue sauce? Berger wants to know, of course.
I recall it was Smokey Pig barbecue sauce that I had thinned to the consistency of blood, and then I pressed the sauce-coated handle against the cloth to see what that transfer pattern looked like. I got the same striations that were left in blood on Bray's mattress. The pillowcase with its barbecue sauce imprints, Marino says, were turned in to the DNA lab. I remark that this is a waste of time. We don't test for tomatoes. I am not trying to be funny but am sufficiently frustrated to emit a spark of sarcasm. The only result the DNA lab will get from the pillowcase, I promise, is not human. Marino is pacing the floor.
I am screwed, he says, because the chipping hammer I bought and did all these tests with is gone. He couldn't find it. He looked everywhere for it. It isn't listed in the evidence computer. It clearly was never turned in to the evidence room, nor was it picked up by forensic technicians and receipted to the labs. It is gone. Gone. And I have no receipt. By now I am sure of this.
"I told you from my car phone that I had bought it," I remind him.
"Yeah," he says. He remembers my calling him from my car after I left Pleasants Hardware store, sometime between six-thirty and seven. I told him I believed a chipping hammer was what had been used on Bray. I said I had bought one. But, he points out, that doesn't mean I didn't buy such a tool after Bray's murder to fabricate an alibi. "You know, to make it look like you didn't own one or even know what she was killed with until after the fact."
"Whose goddamn side are you on?" I say to him. "You believe this Righter bullshit? Jesus. I can't take any more of this."
"This isn't about sides, Doc," Marino grimly replies as Berger looks on.
We are back to there being only one hammer: the one with Bray's blood on it found inside my house. Specifically, in my great room on the Persian rug, exactly seventeen and a half inches to the right of the Jarrah Wood coffee table. Chan-donne's hammer, not my hammer, I keep saying as I imagine cheap brown paper bags with a voucher number and bar code that represent Scarpetta_me, behind wire mesh on Space-saver shelves.
I lean against the wall inside my entry hallway and feel lightheaded. It is as if I am having an out-of-body experience, looking down on myself after something terrible and final has happened. My undoing. My destruction. I am dead like other people whose brown paper bags end up in that evidence room. I am not dead, but maybe it is worse to be the accused. I hate even to suggest the next stage of my undoing. It is overkill. "Marino," I say, "try the key in my door."
He hesitates, frowning. Then he slips the clear plastic evidence bag out of the inner pocket of his old leather jacket with its balding fleece lining. Cold wind punches into the house as he opens the front door and slides the steel key_easily slides it_into the lock, and clicks the lock, and the dead bolt slides open and shut.
"The number written on it," I quietly tell Marino and Berger. "Two-thirty-three. That's my burglar alarm code."
"What?" Berger, for once, is almost speechless.
The three of us go into my great room. This time I perch on the cold hearth, like Cinderella. Berger and Marino avoid sitting on the ruined couch, but situate themselves near me,
T H E L A S T F R E C I N C T looking at me, waiting for any possible explanation. There is but one. and I think it is rather obvious. "Police and God knows who else have been in and out of my house since Saturday," 1 begin. "A drawer in the kitchen. In it are keys to everything. My house, my car, my office, file cabinets, whatever. So it's not like someone didn't have easy access to a spare key to my house, and you guys had my burglar alarm code, right?" I look at Marino. "I mean, you weren't leaving my house unarmed after you left it. And the alarm was on when we came in a little while ago."
"We need a list of everybody who's been inside this house," Berger grimly decides.
"I can tell you everybody I know about," Marino answers. "'But I haven't been here every time somebody else has. So I canl say I know who everybody is."
I sigh and lean my back against the fireplace. I start naming cops I saw with my own eyes, including Jay Talley. Including Marino. "And Righter's been in here," I add.
"As have I," Berger replies. "But I certainly didn't let myself in. I had no idea what your code is."
"Who let you in?" I ask.
Her answer is to look at Marino. It bothers me that Marino never told me he was Berger's tour guide. It is irrational for me to feel stung. After all, who better than Marino? Who do I trust more than him? Marino is visibly agitated. He gets up and strolls through the doorway leading into my kitchen. I hear him open the drawer where I keep the keys, then he opens the refrigerator.
"Well, I was with you when you found that key in Mitch Barbosa's pocket," Berger starts to think out loud. "You couldn't have put it there, couldn't have planted it." She is working this out. "Because you weren't at the scene. And you didn't touch the body unwitnessed. I mean, Marino and I were right there when you unzipped the pouch." She blows out in frustration. "And Marino?"
"He wouldn't," I cut her off with a weary wave of my hand. "No way. Sure, he had access, but no way. And based on his account of the crime scene, he never saw Barbosa's body. It was already being loaded into the ambulance when he pulled up on Mosby Court."
"So either one of the cops at the scene did it…"
"Or more likely," I finish her thought, "the key was placed in Barbosa's pocket when he was killed. At the crime scene. Not where he was dumped."
Marino walks in drinking a bottle of Spaten beer that Lucy must have bought. I don't remember buying it. Nothing about my house seems to belong to me anymore, and Anna's story comes to mind. I am beginning to understand the way she must have felt when Nazis occupied her family home. 1 realize, suddenly, that people can be pushed beyond anger, beyond tears, beyond protest, beyond even grief. Fipally, you just sink into a dark mire of acceptance. What is, is. And what was, is past. "I can't live here anymore," I tell Berger and Marino.
"You got that right," Marino fires back in the aggressive, angry tone he seems to wear like his own skin these days.
"Look," I say to him, "don't bark at me anymore, Marino. We're all angry, frustrated, worn out. I don't understand what's happening, but it's clear someone connected to us is also involved in the murder of these two recent victims, these men who were tortured, and I guess whoever planted my key on Barbosa's body wants to either implicate me in those crimes, as well, or more likely, is sending me a warning."
"I think it's a warning," Marino says.
And where's Rocky these days? I almost ask him.
"Your dear son Rocky," Berger says it for me.
Marino takes a slug of beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He doesn't respond. Berger glances at her watch and looks up at us. "Well," she says, "Merry Christmas, I guess."