Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

D octor Scarpetta, before you get started we need to ask you a few questions,” the CIA’s Gus Gutenberg says, and I feel an interrogation coming. “It will take just a few minutes, and I apologize in advance for coming across as personally invasive. It goes without saying that all of us here have the utmost respect for you. But we understand you once had a significant relationship with Sal Giordano. That has to be discussed.”

“I did long ago.” I tell him the year Sal and I met, giving a quick summary of what was going on with me then.

“You lived together in Rome for two months. In the Giordano family apartment,” Gus continues.

“Yes.”

“And when it was time for you to return to the U.S., Sal didn’t want you to leave. That’s what he told you.” Gus has gotten up from his chair, moving closer to the observation window, looking down at me. “He wanted you to stay in Rome with him during his yearlong sabbatical, and talked to you about eventually getting married. Is this accurate?”

“It is.” I can feel Marino’s eyes on me.

I sense him thinking that I haven’t been honest with him, and to some extent he’s right. It’s true that Sal asked me to stay with him in Italy. He wanted us to get married, and I told him I couldn’t. I needed to finish what I’d started in my life and career. I knew it would be disastrous if I lost myself in him or anyone else. I’ve shared none of this with Marino or Lucy. Only Benton knows.

“And you told him you wouldn’t marry him,” Gus is saying to me as Marino impatiently lumbers about opening cabinets and drawers. His PPE makes slippery sounds.

“He thought I could teach forensic medicine while he wrote books and did research,” I reply. “I knew that wasn’t the life for me.”

I won’t mention that anyone partnered with Sal would be an afterthought, a sweet one. He was unfailingly gentle and kind. He was abundantly generous. But deep in his soul there was no room for anything but what drove him.

“He knew what he was getting. Or not getting, better put perhaps. And it actually suited him, don’t you think? Even as he claimed otherwise, Doctor Scarpetta?” Gus replies to my surprise. “I’m wondering if it ever occurred to you that he knew you wouldn’t marry him. And that was the answer he was counting on.”

“I’m not aware that he…”

“I suspect he knew from the start that you wouldn’t give up practicing forensic medicine.”

“That wasn’t the only reason…”

“The chase was exciting for him. And it was safe.” Gus pauses, shuffling through notes on small pieces of paper. “Excuse the psychologizing. I can’t help it. You know, when I see dots that need connecting.” He’s trained as a psychiatrist.

“Most of all, Sal Giordano couldn’t really get close to you or anyone because of his work,” Gus is saying. “And long before that the problem was his mother. Both of his parents, actually.”

“By work we’re not just talking about looking through a telescope,” Bella adds. “But work he was sworn not to share with scarcely anyone else on earth. Work that could lead him into temptation. Work that could get him murdered and perhaps has.”

“He was as close to you emotionally as he would allow himself to be with anyone,” Gus then says.

Deve bastare, amore. It has to be enough, I’d tell Sal when we’d talk about the future. To want more than is possible is a useless and selfish ambition.

I wonder what he would have said had I agreed to stay in Italy and marry him. I drove myself to distraction about hurting him, and a commitment wasn’t what he really wanted after all. What an irony. He was counting on my saying no, and I suppose it’s understandable. He wasn’t good at give-and-take even if he loved the person as profoundly as he said.

“You left Italy at the end of that summer, returning to Virginia,” Gus is saying. “Then what?”

“The intimate part of our relationship ended,” I reply. “We had limited contact, keeping up by phone now and then.”

“And you got involved with Benton Wesley. Whom you’d already met professionally on numerous earlier occasions.”

“It didn’t happen right away…”

“There was nothing between you prior to your summer of teaching abroad?” Gus can ask anything without sounding provocative.

“No,” I reply.

But I desperately wanted there to be, and that was part of my problem. The attraction between us was dangerous, and I wouldn’t have much insight about Sal’s role in the narrative until later. I sought him out as a cure. But when I returned to Richmond, my feelings for Benton were back with a vengeance. We ended up out of town together on a case, and the inevitable happened.

I look up at him seated overhead with other high-ranking officials. He meets my eyes, and I understand the importance of being transparent. But when we were on the phone this morning and texting later, he didn’t mention briefing his colleagues about my private life. And I know he has. There can be no other source of the information.

“Doctor Scarpetta, again, I’m sorry to pry, but it’s necessary as we proceed with this investigation,” Gus goes on, not sorry at all even as he sounds it.

“Investigation into what exactly?” Marino interrupts.

“Everything that might have led to this unfortunate moment,” the NSA replies.

“Well, as I’m listening, it’s sounding like what you’re investigating is the doc.” Marino stares up defiantly.

“We’re not,” Gus says in his blasé way as I give Marino a look that tells him to cool it. “Will your personal relationship with Sal Giordano prevent you from doing your job?” Gus asks me.

“It won’t.” I snap a new blade into a scalpel.

“A year after your summer in Italy, he returned to his post at Georgetown University. The two of you were but a couple hours’ drive from each other. And you didn’t try to get together stateside?”

“No.” I begin labeling test tubes as Marino arranges Post-its, envelopes, Sharpies, other supplies on the countertop.

Gus asks a question I don’t want to answer. “Did he suggest resuming your relationship?”

“He wanted to be friends. But also, more.”

“Friends with benefits, as they say?”

“That would have been acceptable to him on occasion. But it wasn’t to me.”

“You were seeing Benton Wesley by then,” Gus says.

“We weren’t actually together yet. But we were aware of our feelings for each other.”

“How would you describe your relationship with Sal since you’ve been married to Benton?” Gus goes on as if Benton isn’t present.

“We remained close friends and confidants over the years. But that’s all,” I reply, Benton’s face inscrutable.

“Nothing physical? No remnant of that long-ago romance? Not even a little bit on occasion as he suggested?” Gus says in his flat affect.

“No.”

“And if your text messages, your emails, etcetera were looked at, what we’d find would verify that?”

“They would.” I have no doubt that if the CIA wants to hack into such things, it can and possibly has.

“I’m not going to be disingenuous with you, Doctor Scarpetta. It’s important we know if Sal might have shared information with you that he shouldn’t have.” Gus gets around to what the government is most worried about.

“We’re wondering if you ever had a sense he might be passing on information to anyone who shouldn’t have it?” the NSA asks.

“That includes during those early days when you were with him in Rome. As you may have gathered, he’s been involved with us for a very long time. And I know you’re familiar with the term pillow talk ,” Gus says before I can answer the disheartening suspicions. “If he divulged sensitive information to you at any time, it speaks to his character, I’m afraid. It speaks to other things he may have done and continued to do.”

What I’m hearing is that Sal was working with the intelligence community while we were together that summer. I was sleeping with a spy and had not the slightest inkling. The question is whose side was he on. Or that seems to be the shocking point.

“It’s important that we ask you about this on the record,” Bella is saying apologetically, and of course we’re being recorded. “We have very serious concerns about Sal’s activities. Especially of late. And now this. He’s dead. Bizarrely and horribly…,” she adds, her voice catching.

“For one thing, the timing is a problem.” Benton is looking directly at me again. “As you know, it’s about a four-hour drive from Alexandria to Green Bank, and he set out yesterday at eleven-thirty. When he called while getting gas in Weyers Cave, it was around one-thirty. I believe that’s what you told Lucy earlier.”

“Yes.”

“Which should have put him in the Green Bank area between three-thirty and four P.M. ,” Benton explains. “Not at seven when he met his colleagues at the Red Caboose. We know he didn’t go to the lodge first because he never checked in. And he didn’t go to the observatory. So where was he for three hours?”

“The interval can’t be accounted for,” Gus is saying. “The last time Sal’s phone signal was picked up was when he called you from the convenience store in Weyers Cave. After that he turned off his phone as he drove deeper into the Quiet Zone. We don’t know where he went or what he was doing.”

“What about satellite images?” I suggest.

“Forget it,” Lucy says. “He wasn’t under surveillance and therefore not a target.”

“It would be a crapshoot for a satellite in low Earth orbit to catch him driving somewhere in his truck,” General Gunner says. “And the spysats we have in the geostationary orbit aren’t going to pick him up from twenty-two thousand miles above the planet. He was completely off grid.”

“Are you sure he didn’t mention an errand he planned to run, some other stop?” Bella asks me.

“He didn’t.”

“Maybe somebody he hoped to see along the way?” she then suggests.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Someone he’d seen before, perhaps.” She holds my gaze. “We know from his credit card activity that last month he got gas at the same convenience store in Weyers Cave. The Little Rebel off Route Two-Fifty-Six. And he was there filling his truck last summer in June, July and August. Then again in January and March, as I mentioned. What was he doing in Weyers Cave? Who was he seeing?”

“I don’t know, unless he was on his way to or from Green Bank?” I offer.

“He wasn’t on those occasions.” Gus moves away from the window, returning to his chair. “The last time he visited the observatory was in September, and it doesn’t appear that he stopped in Weyers Cave coming or going.”

“Doctor Scarpetta, might you have noticed if he was carrying anything unusual in his truck yesterday while he was getting ready to leave for West Virginia?” the National Security Agency asks.

“Such as?”

“For example, a blue fabric briefcase with a black shoulder strap?”

“I didn’t notice anything like that. And that’s not what he typically carried—”

“Asking about a blue fabric briefcase is pretty damn specific,” Marino interrupts again.

“Images from his front-door camera show him placing it on the floor of the front passenger seat not long before Doctor Scarpetta showed up.” Secret Service Director Bella Steele twists off the cap from a water bottle, taking a swallow. “Four days ago, on Thursday, he stopped by his bank and withdrew five thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. And he did the same thing around the time of those other visits to the convenience store in Weyers Cave. A total of thirty-five thousand dollars cash has been withdrawn since last June. Do you have any idea why?” She’s asking me this.

“No, I don’t,” I reply. “And the blue briefcase doesn’t sound familiar.”

“It’s missing, like everything else, it seems,” Lucy says. “We’ve not had the chance to search his truck yet, but it’s looking like nothing was inside when it went off the mountain.”

“It certainly seems that Sal Giordano might have been meeting someone on his way to Green Bank yesterday afternoon,” Bella goes on as she looks at me. “And perhaps exchanging the briefcase and cash for something. Of course, some of this is conjecture. But one has to ask if it’s connected to his death.”

The speculations continue implying that Sal may have been a traitor, and I can scarcely listen. How quickly people want to blame the victim, and he wasn’t perfect. No one is. But he wasn’t a turncoat. I refuse to believe it, and I pull on fresh gloves, unwilling to discuss this further.

“I know some of you have seen postmortems. Who hasn’t?” I look up at my audience behind glass, and several people raise their hands. “Think of a forensic autopsy as exploratory instead of something gory.” I begin taking x-rays through the double layers of thick plastic.

I give them a preview of what to expect while moving the C-arm as images appear on the console’s video screen. Marino is checking out a vintage Nikon 35-millimeter camera that isn’t Wi-Fi enabled.

“It’s an excavation rather than an anatomical dissection,” I’m saying to our audience. “The goal is to see what truths the dead have to tell.”

As I explain, I notice a radiodense object in the stomach. The shape makes me think of a pharmaceutical capsule that Sal must have swallowed close to the time he ate dinner. I find this puzzling, not aware that he was on any medications. He was staunchly against them, taking only vitamins and other nutritional supplements.

But I’m not the end-all when it comes to information about him despite what’s been implied. I roll the C-arm from one part of the body to the next, monitoring the images on the display, doing what I can to disavow people of their assumptions.

“You saw him how often, would you estimate?” the NSA asks me.

“On average once a month or so we’d see each other at meetings. Or he’d come to our house. Now and then Benton and I would drop by his. Sometimes we’d run into each other in the neighborhood.”

“And how often did you text or talk on the phone?”

“It varied depending on what was going on. At least several times a month.” I’m aware of Benton’s eyes on me.

“Would Sal Giordano have told you if he’d gotten involved with someone?” Gus wants to know.

“What do you mean by involved?”

“If he were sleeping with someone. Would he have confided that in you?”

“Not necessarily.” I position the C-arm over the right side of the head.

“What makes you think he was sleeping with someone?” Marino asks as he finds a six-inch plastic ruler that he’ll use for a photographic scale.

“Because he seems to have been living a secret life,” Gus says. “Our concern is that he might have been lured into something. Unfortunately, it happens all too often. No one is immune to mistakes of the heart.”

“Or mistakes of a lower part of the anatomy, I was actually thinking,” Bella says, and those around her manage to smile. “Did Sal sleep with a lot of women? Does anybody know? Because that’s not how he came across to me. The question is whether he was easily led astray, shall we say.”

“That wasn’t my impression,” I reply.

“I’m more suspicious about him selling secrets to the bad guys,” says the secretary of state.

“Except it appears Sal was the one paying somebody possibly in twenty-dollar bills delivered in a briefcase,” Benton replies.