'I've learned that as well as it can be learned.'
'You have to leave it outside the door like stinking crime scene clothes.'
But I could not. A day never went by when a memory wasn't triggered, when an image didn't flash. I would see a face bloated by injury and death, a body in bondage. I would see suffering and annihilation in unbearable detail, for nothing was hidden from me. I knew the victims too well. I closed my eyes and saw bare footprints in snow.
I knew the victims too well. I closed my eyes and saw bare footprints in snow. I saw blood the bright red of Christmas.
'Benton, I do not want to spend Christmas here,' I said with deep depression.
I felt him sit next to me. He pulled me to him and we held each other for a while. We could not be close without touching.
'We should not be doing this,' I said as we continued doing it.
'I know.'
'And it's really difficult to talk about.'
'I know.' He reached for the lamp and turned it off.
'I find that ironical,' I said. 'When you think of what we share, what we have seen. Talking should not be difficult.'
'Those darker landscapes have nothing to do with intimacy,' he said.
'They do.'
'Then why are you not intimate with Marino? Or your deputy chief, Fielding?'
'Working the same horrors does not mean the next logical step is to go to bed. But I don't think I could be intimate with someone who does not understand what it's like for me.'
'I don't know.' His hands went still.
'Do you tell Connie?' I referred to his wife, who did not know that Wesley and I had become lovers last fall.
'I don't tell her everything.'
'How much does she know?'
'She knows nothing about some things.' He paused. 'She knows very little, really, about my work. I don't want her to know.'
I did not reply.
'I don't want her to know because of what it does to us. We change color, just as when cities become sooty, moths change color.'
'I don't want to take on the dingy shade of our habitat. I refuse.'
'You can refuse all you like.'
'Do you think it's fair you hold so much back from your wife?' I said quietly, and it was very hard to think because my flesh felt hot where he traced the contours of it.
'It isn't fair for her, and it isn't fair for me.'
'But you feel you have no choice.'
'I know I don't. She understands that there are places in me beyond her reach.'
'Is that the way she wants it?'
'Yes.' I felt him reach for his Scotch. 'You ready for another round?'
'Yes,' I said.
He got up and metal snapped in the dark as he broke screw cap seals. He poured straight Scotch into our glasses and sat back down.
'That's all there is unless you want to switch to something else,' he said.
'I don't even need this much.'
'If you're asking me to say what we've done is right, I can't,' he said. 'I won't say that.'
'I know what we've done is not right.'
I took a swallow of my drink and as I reached to set the glass on the bedside table, his hands moved. We kissed again more deeply, and he did not waste time on buttons as his hands slid under and around whatever was in their way. We were frenzied, as if our clothes were on fire and we had to get them off.
Later, curtains began to glow with morning light and we floated between passion and sleep, mouths tasting like stale whiskey. I sat up, gathering covers around me.
'Benton, it's half past six.'
Groaning, he covered his eyes with an arm as if the sun were very rude to rouse him. He lay on his back, tangled in sheets, as I took a shower and began to dress. Hot water cleared my head, and this was the first Christmas morning in years when someone other than me had been in my bed. I felt I had stolen something.
'You can't go anywhere,' Wesley said, half asleep.
I buttoned my coat. 'I have to,' I said, sadly looking down at him.
'It's Christmas.'
'They're waiting for me at the morgue.
'It's Christmas.'
'They're waiting for me at the morgue.'
'I'm sorry to hear it,' he mumbled into the pillow. 'I didn't know you felt that bad.'
4
New York's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was on First Avenue, across from the Gothic red brick hospital called Bellevue, where the city's autopsies had been performed in earlier years. Winter-brown vines and graffiti marred walls and wrought iron, and fat black bags of trash awaited pickup on top of filthy snow. Christmas music played nonstop inside the beat-up yellow cab squeaking to a halt on a street almost never this still.
'I need a receipt,' I said to my Russian driver, who had spent the last ten minutes telling me what was wrong with the world.
'How much for?'
'Eight.' I was generous. It was Christmas morning.
He nodded, scribbling, as I watched a man on the sidewalk watching me, near Bellevue's fence. Unshaven, with wild long hair, he wore a blue jean jacket lined with fleece, the cuffs of stained army pants caught in the tops of battered cowboy boots.
He began playing an imaginary guitar and singing as I got out of the cab.
'Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the day. OHHH what fun it is to ride to Galveston today-AAAAAYYYYY…'
'You have admirer,' my amused driver said as I took the receipt through an open window.
He drove off in a swirl of exhaust. There was not another person or car in sight, and the horrendous serenading got louder. Then my mentally disfranchised admirer darted after me. I was appalled when he began screaming, 'Galveston!' as if it were my name or an accusation. I fled into the chief medical examiner's lobby.
'There's someone following me,' I said to a security guard decidedly lacking in Christmas spirit as she sat at her desk.
The deranged musician pressed his face against the front door, staring in, nose flattened, cheeks blanched. He opened his mouth wide, obscenely rolling his tongue over the glass and thrusting his pelvis back and forth as if he were having sex with the building. The guard, a sturdy woman with dreadlocks, strode over to the door and banged on it with her fist.
'Benny, cut it out,' she scolded him loudly. 'You quit that right now, Benny.' She rapped harder. 'Don't you make me come out there.'
Benny backed away from the glass. Suddenly he was Nureyev doing pirouettes across the empty street.
'I'm Dr. Kay Scarpetta,' I said to the guard. 'Dr. Horowitz is expecting me.'
'No way the chief's expecting you. It's Christmas.' She regarded me with dark eyes that had seen it all. 'Dr. Pinto's on call. Now, I can try to get hold of him, if you want.' She headed back to her station.
'I'm well aware it's Christmas' — I followed her -'but Dr. Horowitz is supposed to meet me here.' I got out my wallet and displayed my chief medical examiner's gold shield.
