Black Notice - Cornwell Patricia (читать книги онлайн без TXT) 📗

"Yeah, I guess he profiled us;" Marino said. "I guess he did. Like he somehow knew it would happen, and how we'd act."

"He knew me," I muttered. "Oh, God, did he know me. He knew I would handle it worse than anybody. I'don't cry. I don't want to cry! I learned not to when my father was dying, because to cry was to feel, and it was too much to feel. It was as if I could make myself get dry inside like a dry pod that rattles, my feelings tiny, hard… rattling. I'm devastated, Marino. I don't think I can get over it. Maybe it would be a good thing if I got fired, too. Or quit."

"That ain't gonna happen," he said.

When I didn't reply, he got up and lit a cigarette. He paced.

"You want some dinner or something?"

"I just need to sleep," I said.

"Maybe getting out'of this room would be a good thing."

"No, Marino."

I knocked myself out with Benadryl and felt thickheaded and bleary when I forced myself out of bed the next morning. I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw exhausted, puffy eyes. I splashed cold water on my face and dressed and got a cab at seven-thirty, this time without any help from Interpol.

The Institut Mйdico-Lйgal, a three-story building of red brick and pitted limestone, was in the east section of the city. The Voie Expressway cut it off from the Seine, which this morning was the color of honey. The taxi driver dropped me off in front, where I walked through a small, lovely park with primroses, pansies, daisies and wild flowers, and old plantain trees. A young couple necking on a bench and an old man walking his dog seemed oblivious to the distinct stench of death seeping through the Institut's barred windows and black iron front door.

Ruth Stvan was well known for the unusual system she ran. Visitors were received by hostesses, so when the bereft came through the door, they were immediately intercepted by someone kind who helped them find their way, and one of these hostesses reached out to me. She led me along a tile corridor where investigators waited in blue chairs, and I understood enough of what they were saying to gather that someone had jumped out of a window the night before.

I followed my silent guide past a small chapel with stained glass where a couple was crying over a young boy inside an open white casket. Handling the dead here was different from what we did. In America, there simply wasn't time or funding for hostesses, chapels and handholding in a society in which shootings came in every day and no one lobbied for the dead.

Dr. Stvan was working on a case in the Salle d'Autopsie, designated as such by a sign over automatically opening doors. When l walked in, I was overwhelmed by anxiety again. I shouldn't have come here. I didn't know what I would say. Ruth Stvan was placing a lung in a hanging scale, her green gown splashed with blood, glasses speckled with it. I knew her case was the man who had jumped. His face was smashed, feet split open, shin tones driven up into his thighs.

"Give me one minute, please," Dr. Stvan said to me.

There were two other cases going on, those doctors wearing white. On chalkboards were names and case numbers. A Stryker saw was opening a skull while water ran loudly in sinks. Dr. Stvan was quick and energetic, fair and big-boned and older than me. I remembered that when we were in Geneva she had kept to herself.

Dr. Stvan covered her unfinished case with a sheet and pulled off her gloves. She began untying her gown in back as she walked over to me with sure, strong steps.

"How are you?" she asked.

"I'm not sure," I said.

If she thought this an odd answer, she didn't show it.

"Follow me, please, and we'll talk as I clean up. Then get a coffee."

She took me into a small dressing room and dropped her gown in a clothes bin. Both of us washed our hands with disinfectant soap, and she scrubbed her face, too, and dried it with a rough, blue towel.

"Dr. Stvan," I said, "obviously I'm not here for a friendly chat or to dabble into what your M.E. system is like over here. We both know that."

"Of course," she replied, meeting my eyes. "I'm not friendly enough for a social visit." She smiled a little. "Yes, we met in Geneva, Dr. Scarpetta, but we didn't socialize. It's a shame, really. There were so few women back then:'

She talked as we walked along the corridor.

"When you called, I knew what it was about because I'm the one who asked you here," she added.

"It makes me a little nervous to hear you say that," I replied. "As if I'm not nervous enough."

"We're after the same things in life. If you were me, I'd be visiting you, do you see? I would be saying, we can't let this continue. We can't let other women die this way. Now in America, in Richmond. He's a monster, this Loup-Garou: "

We stepped inside her office, where there were no windows, and stacks of files and journals and memos spilled from every surface. She picked up the phone and dialed an extension, and asked someone to bring us coffee.

"Please, make yourself comfortable, if that's possible. I'd move things out of the way but I've no place to put them."

I pulled a chair close to her desk.

"I felt very out of place when we were in Geneva," she said, her mind apparently jumping back to that memory as she shut the door. "And part of the reason is the system here in France. Forensic pathologists are completely isolated here and that's not changed and perhaps never will in my lifetime. We're allowed to talk to no one, which isn't always so bad because I like to work alone."

She lit a cigarette.

"I inventory the injuries and police tell the whole story, if they choose. If a case is sensitive, I talk to the magistrate myself and maybe I get what I need, maybe I don't. Sometimes when I raise the question, no lab is appointed for the tests, do you understand?"

"Then, in a sense," I said, "your only job is to find the cause of death."

She nodded. "For each case I receive a mission from the magistrate to determine the cause of death, and that's all."

"You don't really investigate."

"Not the way you do. Not the way I want to," she replied, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth. "You see, the problem with French justice is the magistrate is independent. I can report to no one but the magistrate who appointed me, and only the minister of justice can take a case away and give it to another magistrate. So if there's a problem, I don't have the power to do anything about it. The magistrate does what he wants to my report. If I say it's a homicide and he doesn't agree, so be it. It's not my problem. This is law."

"He can change your report?" The idea was outrageous to me.

"Of course. I'm alone against everyone. And I suspect you are, too. “

I didn't want to think about how alone I was.

"I'm keenly. aware if anyone knew we were talking, it could be very bad, especially for you" I started to say.

She held up her hand for me to be quiet. The door opened and the same young woman who had escorted me came in with a tray of coffee, cream and sugar. Dr. Stvan thanked her and said something else in French I didn't get. The woman nodded and quietly left, shutting the door behind her:

"I told her to hold all calls," Dr. Stvan informed me. "I need to let you know right away that the magistrate who appointed me is someone I very much respect. But there are pressures above him, if you understand what I mean.

Pressures even above the minister of justice. I don't know where all of it comes from, but there was no lab work done in these cases, which is why you were sent."

"Sent? I thought it was you who asked for me."

"How do you take your coffee?" Dr. Stvan asked.

"Who told you I was sent?"

"Certainly, you've been sent in to relieve me of my secrets, and I'll give them up to you gladly. Do you take sugar and cream?"