Blow Fly (12 page)

S
UNLIGHT ILLUMINATES A SLIVER
of Benton's face as he stares out the window.

Silence reigns for a long, tense moment. The air seems to shimmer ominously, and Marino rubs his eyes.

“I don't get it.” His mouth quivers. “You could be free, go home, be alive again.” His voice cracks. “I thought you'd at least thank my ass for going to all the trouble to come here and tell you that maybe Lucy and me ain't ever given up on getting you back . . . .”

“By offering her?” Benton turns around and looks at him. “By offering Kay as bait?”

At last he says her name, but he is so calm, it is as if he has no feelings, and Marino is shocked. He wipes his eyes.

“Bait? What . . . ?”

“Isn't it enough what the bastard has already done to her?” Benton goes on. “He tried to kill her once.” He's not talking about Jean-Baptiste. He's talking about Jay Talley.

“He ain't gonna kill her when he's sitting behind bulletproof glass, chatting away on a phone inside a maximum-security prison,” Marino says as they continue to talk about two different people.

“You're not listening to me,” Benton tells him.

“That's because you're not listening to me,” Marino childishly retorts.

Benton turns off the air conditioner and slides up the window. He closes his eyes as a breeze touches his hot cheeks like cool fingers. He smells the burgeoning Earth. For an instant, he remembers being alive with her, and he begins to bleed inside like a hemophiliac.

“Does she know?” he asks.

Marino rubs his face. “Jesus. I'm so sick and tired of my blood pressure shooting up like I'm a damn thermometer.”

“Tell me.” Benton presses his palms against the window frame, leaning into the fresh air. He turns around and meets Marino's eyes. “Does she know?”

Marino gets his meaning and sighs. “No, hell no. She don't know. She'll never know unless you're the one who tells her. I wouldn't do that to her. Lucy wouldn't do that to her. See”—he angrily pulls himself to his feet—“some of us care too much about her to hurt her like that. Imagine how she'd feel if she knew you're alive and don't care a shit about her anymore.”

He walks to the door, shaking with rage and grief. “I thought you might thank me.”

“I do thank you. I know you mean well.” Benton walks over to him, his calm demeanor uncanny. “I know you don't understand, but maybe someday you will. Good-bye, Pete. I don't ever want to see or hear from you again. Please don't take it personally.”

Marino grabs the doorknob and almost yanks it out of the wood. “Good riddance and go fuck yourself. Don't take it personally.”

They face each other like two men squaring off in a gun fight, neither wanting to be the first to move, neither really wanting the other to be gone from his life. Benton's hazel eyes are vacant, as if whoever lives behind them has vanished. Marino's pulse measures panic as he realizes that the Benton he knew is gone and nothing will ever bring him back.

And somehow Marino is going to have to tell Lucy. And somehow
Marino will have to accept the fact that his dream of rescuing Benton and returning him to Scarpetta will always be a dream, only a dream.

“It don't make sense!” Marino shouts.

Benton touches an index finger to his lips. “Please go, Pete,” he quietly says. “It doesn't have to make sense.”

Marino hesitates in the dimly lit, stinking landing just beyond apartment 56. “Okay.” He fumbles for his cigarettes and spills several on the filthy concrete. “Okay . . .” He starts to say
Benton
but catches himself as he squats to pick up the cigarettes, his thick fingers clumsily breaking two of them.

He wipes his eyes with the back of a big hand as Benton looks down at him from the apartment doorway, watching, not offering to help pick up the cigarettes, unable to move.

“Take care, Pete,” Benton, the master of masks and self-control, says in a steady, reasonable voice.

Marino looks up with bloodshot eyes from his squatting position on the landing. The seam in the crotch of his wrinkled khakis is slightly ripped, his white briefs peeking through.

He blurts out, “Don't you get it, you can come back!”

“What
you
don't get is there is no
back
to go
back
to,” Benton says in a voice so low it is almost inaudible. “I don't want to come
back.
Now please get the hell out of my life and leave me alone.”

He pulls his apartment door shut and flips the dead bolt. Inside, he collapses on the couch and covers his face with his hands while Marino's insistent knocking turns to violent thuds and kicks.

“Yeah, well, enjoy your great life, asshole!” his muffled voice sounds through the door. “I always knew you was cold and don't give a fuck about anybody, including
her,
you fucking psycho!” The banging and kicking suddenly stop.

Benton holds his breath, straining to hear. The sudden silence is worse than any tantrum. Pete Marino's silence is damning. It is final. His friend's heavy feet scuff down the stairs.

“I am dead,” Benton mutters into his hands as he doubles over on the couch.

“No matter what, I am dead. I am Tom. Tom Haviland. Tom Speck Haviland . . .” His chest heaves and his heart seems to beat out of rhythm. “Born in Greenwich, Connecticut . . .”

He gets up, crushed by a depression that turns the room dark and the air as thick as oil. He smells Marino's lingering cigarette smoke, and it runs through him like a blade. Moving to the window, he stands to one side of it so he isn't visible from below, and he watches Pete Marino walking slowly away through intermittent shadows and dappled sunlight along uneven cobblestones.

Marino stops to light a Lucky Strike and turns around to stare up at Benton's depressing building until he finds apartment 56. Cheap sheer curtains are caught by a breeze and flutter out the open window like spirits leaving.

I
N POLAND,
it is a few minutes past midnight.

Lucy drives past caravans of World War II Russian Army trucks and speeds through miles of tiled tunnels and along the tree-lined E28. She can't stop thinking about the Red Notice, how easy it was for her to send computerized information that has law enforcement agencies around the world on guard. Of course, her information is legitimate. Rocco Caggiano is a criminal. She has known that for years. But until she recently received information that ties him to at least a few of his crimes, neither she nor other interested parties had probable cause to do anything more than hate him.

One simple phone call.

Lucy called Interpol's Central Bureau in Washington, D.C. She identified herself—her real identity, of course—and had a brief conversation with a U.S. Marshal liaison named McCord. The next step was a search of the Interpol database to see if Caggiano is known, and he wasn't, not even as a Green Notice, which simply means a person is of interest to Interpol and should be watched and subjected to extra scans and pat-downs when he or she crosses borders and passes through international airports.

Rocco Caggiano is in his mid-thirties. He has never been arrested and
has made a fortune, ostensibly as a scumbag, ambulance-chasing lawyer, but his formidable wealth and power come from his real clients, the Chandonnes, although it isn't accurate to call them clients. They own him. They shield him. He is kept in high style and alive at their pleasure.

“Check out a murder in 1997,” Lucy told McCord. “New Year's Day in Sicily. A journalist named Carlos Guarino. Shot in the head, his body dumped in a drainage ditch. He was working on an investigative story about the Chandonnes—a very risky thing to do, by the way. He had just interviewed a lawyer who represents Jean-Baptiste Chandonne . . .”

“Right, right. I know about that case. The Wolfman, or whatever they call him.”

“The cover of
People
magazine,
Time
magazine, whatever. Who doesn't know about the Wolfman serial killer, I guess,” Lucy replied. “Guarino was murdered hours after talking to Caggiano.

“Next, a journalist named Emmanuelle La Fleur. Barbizon, France, February eleventh, 1997. Worked for
Le Monde.
He also was unwisely doing a story on the Chandonne family.”

“Why all this interest in the Chandonnes, beyond their being Jean-Baptiste's unlucky parents?”

“Organized crime. A huge cartel. Never been proven that the father heads it, but he does. There are rumors. Investigative reporters are sometimes blinded by scoops and prizes. La Fleur had drinks with Caggiano hours before the journalist's body was found in a garden near the former château of the painter Jean François Millet—don't bother looking for him. He's been dead more than a hundred years.”

She wasn't being sarcastic. She would never assume that Millet was a household name and didn't want to find the artist was suddenly a person of interest.

“La Fleur was shot in the head, and the ten-millimeter bullet was fired from the same gun used to murder Guarino,” she explained.

There was more. The information came from a letter written by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

“I'll e-mail you his letter immediately,” Lucy said, a transmission that would have been unthinkable before Interpol began using the Internet.

But the International Police Agency's computerized communication network has more than enough firewalls, hieroglyphical encryptions and hacker-tracking systems to render any transmission secure. Lucy knows. When Interpol began to use the Internet, the secretary general personally invited her to hack her way in. She couldn't. She never made it past the first firewall and secretly was furious at being foiled, even though the last thing she should have wanted was success.

The secretary general called her, quite amused. He read to her a list of her usernames, passwords and the location of her computer.

“Don't worry, Lucy. I won't send the police,” he said.

“Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Hartman,”
she replied to the secretary general, who is American.

From New York to London to Berlin and now crossing the border into Poland, police have been alert, she sensed that. But they didn't take her seriously, could have cared less about this young American woman driving her rented Mercedes at a late hour on a cool spring night. To them she clearly doesn't look like a terrorist, and she isn't. But she could be—easily—and it is foolish not to take her seriously, for no reason beyond her nationality, youthfulness, appearance and a smile that can be warm and captivating when she chooses.

She is far too smart to carry a firearm. Her tactical baton will do if she runs into a problem, not from the police, but from some asshole along the way who might have singled her out for robbery or some other type of assault. The baton was easy for her to smuggle into Germany. She used her shopworn routine because it has never failed: overnighted it in a cosmetic bag filled with a jumble of accessories (curling iron, curling brush, blow-dryer, et cetera). The package arrived at a cheap hotel near the airport, addressed to one of Lucy's aliases; she also had a room reserved and paid for in that name. Lucy drove her rental car to the hotel, parked on a side street, picked up the package at check-in, messed up her room
a bit and hung a
Do Not Disturb
sign on the door. She was back in her car in half an hour.