imagine odors and sounds as colors in a spectrum or instruments in an orchestra. I’m good at singling them out. Cologne for example. Some cops wear a lot of it and Hyde’s masculine musky fragrance is as loud as his voice. I can hear him in the next room talking about me, asking what I’m doing and if I’m aware that the dead woman was into drugs, was probably a psych case, a whacko, a frequent flying loony tune. The cops are wandering around bantering as if I’m not here, and Hyde leads the charge with his boisterous clunky snipes and asides. He doesn’t hold back, especially when it comes to me.
What’s Doc Mort found? How is Chief Zombie’s leg after you know …? (whisper, whisper) What time is Count Kay returning to her coffin? Shit. I guess that’s not a good thing to say considering what went down two months ago in Florida. I mean do we know for a fact what really happened at the bottom of the sea? We sure it wasn’t a shark that got her. Or maybe she speared herself accidentally? She’s okay now, right? I mean that really had to fuck her up. She can’t hear me, right?
His words and not-so-quiet whispers are around me like shards of glass that glint and cut. Fragments of thoughts. Ignorant banal ones. Hyde is the master of dumb nicknames and comes up with dreadful puns, and I remember what he said as recently as last month when a group of us met at the Cambridge watering hole Paddy’s to toast Pete Marino’s birthday. Hyde insisted on buying me a round, on treating me to a stiff drink, maybe a Bloody Mary or a Sudden Death or a Spontaneous Combustion.
To this day I’m not sure what the latter is but he claims it includes corn whiskey and is served flaming. It might not be lethal but will make you wish it were he must have said five times. He dabbles in comedy, occasionally does stand-up in local clubs. He thinks he’s quite entertaining. He’s not.
“Is Doctor Death still here?”
“I’m in the foyer.” I drop my purple nitrile exam gloves into a red biohazard bag, my Tyvek-covered boots making slippery sounds as I move around the bloody marble floor, staring at the display on my phone.
“Sorry, Doctor Scarpetta. Didn’t know you could hear me.”
“I can.”
“Oh. I guess you heard everything I was just saying.”
“I did.”
“Sorry. How’s your leg?”
“Still attached.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“No thanks.”
“We’re making a Dunkin’ Donuts run.” Hyde’s voice sounds from the dining room, and I’m vaguely aware of him and other cops walking, opening cabinets and drawers.
Marino’s not with them now. I no longer hear him and don’t know where he is inside the house and that’s typical. He does his own thing and he’s competitive. If there’s anything to find he’ll be the one who does, and I should be looking around too. But not now. My priority this moment is the image of four-eleven, what we used to call Lucy’s FBI dorm room in Quantico, Virginia.
So far the recording is devoid of people, narration or even captions as it plays on second by second, offering nothing but the static image of Lucy’s empty stark former quarters. I pay attention to the subtle background sounds, turning up the volume, listening though my wireless earpiece.
A helicopter. A car. Gunshots on distant firing ranges.
Footsteps and I listen carefully. My attention beams back into the real world, the here and now inside this historic house on the border of the Harvard campus.
I detect the hard rubbery tread of the uniformed cops walking toward the foyer. They don’t have plasticized covers over their shoes and boots. They aren’t investigators or crime scene techs, not Officer Hyde, not any of them. More nonessential personnel, and there have been plenty of them in and out since I got here about an hour ago, not long after thirty-seven-year-old Chanel Gilbert was found dead in the mahogany entranceway near the big solid antique front door inside her historic home.
How awful that discovery must have been, and I imagine the housekeeper letting herself in through the kitchen door just like she did every morning, she told the police. Instantly she would have noticed the extreme heat. She would have noticed the stench and followed it to the foyer where the woman she worked for is decomposing on the floor, her face discolored and distorted as if she’s enraged by us.
What Hyde said is almost true. Allegedly Chanel Gilbert fell off a ladder while changing lightbulbs in the entryway chandelier. It sounds like a bad joke but it’s anything but funny to see her once slender body in the early stages of putrefaction, bloated with areas of her skin slipping. She survived her head injuries long enough to have bruising and swelling, her eyes slitted and bulging like a bullfrog’s, her brown hair a sticky bloody mass that reminds me of a rusting Brillo pad. I estimate that after she sustained her injuries, she was lying on the floor unconscious and bleeding as her brain swelled, compressing her upper spinal cord and eventually shutting down her heart and lungs.
The cops aren’t suspicious of her death, not sincerely no matter what they discuss or claim. What they really are is voyeuristic. In their own unseemly way they’re enjoying the drama and it’s one of their favorites. Blame the victim. It must be her fault. She did something to cause her own untimely death, a death that was stupid. I’ve heard that word several times too and I’m not at all happy when people close their minds to other possibilities. I’m not convinced this is an accident. There are too many oddities and inconsistencies. If she died at some point late last night or early this morning as the cops suspect then why is decomposition this advanced? As I attempt to figure out time of death what keeps coming to mind is a Marino turn of phrase.
Cluster fuck. That’s what this is and my intuition is picking up on something else. I sense a presence inside this house. A presence beyond the cops. Beyond the dead woman. Beyond the housekeeper who showed up at quarter of eight this morning and made a shocking discovery that ruined her day to put it tritely. I sense something that unsettles me and I have no empirical explanation for it and don’t intend to say a word.
I usually don’t share my so-called gut feelings, my intuitive flashes, not with cops, not even with Marino. I’m not expected to have any impression that isn’t provable. In fact it’s worse than that if you’re me. I’m not supposed to have feelings and at the same time I’m accused of not having them. In other words a catch-22. In other words I can’t win. But that’s nothing new. I’m used to it.
“Ma’am?” An unfamiliar man’s voice but I don’t look up as I stand in the foyer, covered in white Tyvek from head to toe, my phone in my bare hands, the body of the dead woman several feet away near the upright ladder.
Profession unknown. Kept to herself. Attractive in a sharp off-putting way, brown hair, blue eyes based on the driver’s license photo I’ve been shown. The daughter of a juggernaut Hollywood producer named Amanda Gilbert, the owner of this expensive property and on her way to Boston from Los Angeles. That much I know and it explains plenty. Two Cambridge cops and one Massachusetts state police trooper are now passing through the dining room talking loudly about movies Amanda Gilbert has or hasn’t made.
“I didn’t see it. But I saw the other one with Ethan Hawke.”
“The movie that took twelve years to make? Where you watch the kid grow up …?”
“That
