The Last Precinct

Patricia Cornwell

The Last Precinct

Prologue:

THE COLD DUSK GIVES UP ITS BRUISED COLOR TO complete darkness, and I am grateful that the draperies in my bedroom are heavy enough to absorb even the faintest hint of my silhouette as I move about packing my bags. Life could not be more abnormal than it is right now.

"I want a drink," I a

Richmond Police Captain Pete Marino dominates my bedroom like a thick lighthouse, his giant hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. He doesn't offer to help me pack the suit bag and tote bags laid open on the bed, knowing me well enough to not even think about it. Marino may look like a red-

neck, talk like a redneck, act like a redneck, but he is as smart as hell, sensitive and very perceptive. This very moment, for example, he realizes a simple fact: Not even twenty-four hours ago, a man named Jean-Baptiste Chando

Safer for me to say what he did to those victims, which was to savagely beat them, to bite their breasts, hands and feet, and to play with their blood. He doesn't always use the same weapon. Last night, he was armed with a chipping hammer, a peculiar tool used in masonry. It looks very much like a pickaxe. I know for a fact what a chipping hammer can do to a human body because Chando

"What day is it?" I ask Captain Marino. "Saturday, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Saturday."

"December eighteenth. One week before Christmas. Happy holidays." I unzip a side pocket of the suit bag.

"Yeah, December eighteenth."

He watches me as if I am someone who might spring into irrationality any second, his bloodshot eyes reflecting a wariness that pervades my house. Distrust is palpable in the air. I taste it like dust. I smell it like ozone. I feel it like dampness. The wet swishing of tires on the street, the discord of feet, of voices and radio chatter are a disharmony from hell as law enforcement continues its occupation of my property. I am violated. Every inch of my home is exposed, every facet of my life is laid bare. I may as well be a naked body on one of my own steel tables in the morgue. So Marino knows not to ask if he can help me pack. Oh yes, he sure as hell knows he better dare not even think about touching a damn thing, not a shoe, not a sock, not a hairbrush, not a bottle of shampoo, not the smallest item. Police have asked me to leave the sturdy stone house of dreams I built in my quiet, gated West End neighborhood. Imagine that. I am quite certain Jean-Baptiste Chando

Marino hasn't bathed or been to bed in at least twenty-four hours. When I move past him, I smell Chando

A car door shuts out front. "Now what?" I complain. "Who this time? The FBI?" I open another drawer. "Marino, that's it." I gesture with a fuck-you wave of my hands. "Get them out of my house, all of them. Now." Fury shimmers like mirages on hot blacktop. "So I can finish packing and get the hell out of here. Can't they just leave long enough for me to get out?" My hands shake as I pick through socks. "It's bad enough they're in my yard." I toss a pair of socks in the tote bag. "It's bad enough they're here at all." Another pair. "They can come back when I leave." And I throw another pair and miss, and stoop over to pick it up. "They can at least let me walk through my own house." Another pair. "And let me get out in peace and privacy." I put a pair back in the drawer. "Why the hell are they in my kitchen?" I change my mind and get out the socks I just put back. "Why are they in my study? I told them he didn't go in there."

"We gotta look around, Doc," is what Marino has to say about it.

He sits down on the foot of my bed, and that is wrong, too. I want to tell him to get off my bed and out of my room. It is all I can do not to order him out of my house and possibly out of my life. It doesn't matter how long I have known him or how much we have been through together.

"How's the elbow, Doc?" He indicates the cast that immobilizes my left arm like a stovepipe.

"It's fractured. It hurts like hell." I shut the drawer too hard.

'Taking your medicine?"

"I'll survive."

He watches my every move. "You need to be taking that stuff they gave you."

We have suddenly reversed roles. I act like the rude cop while he is logical and calm like the lawyer-physician I am supposed to be. I walk back into the cedar-lined closet and begin gathering blouses and laying them in the suit bag, making sure top buttons are buttoned, smoothing silk and polished cotton with my right hand. My left elbow throbs like a toothache, my flesh sweating and itching inside plaster. I spent most of the day in the hospital_not that getting a cast put on a fractured limb is a lengthy procedure, but doctors insisted on checking me very carefully to make sure I didn't have other injuries. I repeatedly explained that when I fled from my house, I fell down my front steps and fractured my elbow, nothing more. Jean-Baptiste Chando