“I’ll be fine.”
“That’s not what I asked.” He pulls me closer.
“I’ve been better but I’ll be okay,” I repeat. “What have you been up to all night?”
He answers vaguely that there’s been much to keep everybody scurrying about. Lucy has been reviewing security videos, making sure no one has been on the property that we don’t know about, he says.
“We’re talking about hours and hours of footage to review, and I was with her in the cottage for a while,” Benton explains.
I head toward the windows, barefoot, and in scrubs I don’t remember putting on.
“We’re checking the security recordings going back to before we moved in,” he says. “For one thing, to make sure no one might have been casing the place prior to our getting here.”
I walk past a mirror that murkily reflects the oil paintings on the opposite wall. It’s too dim to make out the Miró farm scenes or other fine art that I can’t afford on my government salary. Most of what’s rare and expensive doesn’t come from my side of the equation, the property we’re living on a perfect example.
Also, the Stickley trestle coffee table, the brown leather sofa, the barristers bookcases filled with old leather-bound volumes. My husband’s New England pedigree traces back to the Pilgrims, his father a wealthy art collector. I’m the product of first-generation Italians who settled in Miami after the Second World War.
My father owned a small grocery store in a neighborhood made up of Cubans and Italians. I have no ancestral heirlooms, no inherited antiques or art, and it’s safe to say that Benton Wesley didn’t marry me for money.
“When we started living on the property a month ago, I put the wine in the basement refrigerator.” I’m trying to work out what could have happened. “Meaning the bottle from Interpol was here while the alarm people and possibly others including the police have been on our property.”
“To leave no stone unturned, Marino and I went through the basement.” Benton waits by the bed, his eyes on me. “We especially focused on the area where you store the wine. We made sure there wasn’t anything that might make us think someone was in there who shouldn’t have been.”
“Except I’m not sure what you’d be looking for that we wouldn’t have noticed long before now. Assuming it was something that would be noticed at all.”
“What I can say is nothing jumped out at us but that doesn’t mean much,” he agrees. “Certainly, there’s no evidence that anyone has tried to break into the basement.”
“Like I said, I think we would know that by now,” I reply, looking out a window at the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge spanning a wide swath of the Potomac, connecting Virginia to Maryland.
CHAPTER 16
THE COLOR OF THE water this morning is the gray-green of old glass. Protruding from it is a stubble of dark wooden pilings left from the dock that was there centuries earlier. I imagine the sea captain who built our house watching his moored ship from this very spot.
“Are you okay to be on your own while I go downstairs?” Benton asks as I walk away from a view I’ve come to love. “Or do you want me to stay up here while you clean up? I don’t want you alone if you’re dizzy or even slightly unsteady on your feet.”
“I’m feeling much better, will be down in a few.” I hug and kiss him, grateful he takes such good care of me. “You could have married somebody easier, you know. I warned you often enough.”
“How boring that would be,” he says, walking off.
The old pumpkin pine flooring is smooth and cool beneath my feet as I head to the bathroom with its white subway-tile walls, the claw-foot tub and glass-enclosed shower. Flipping on the light, I squint at my pale reflection in the mirror over the marble washbasin.
“Goodness,” I mutter under my breath.
I look like death on a cracker, to quote my sister, my hair sticking up, and I hear Benton’s phone ring on the stairs. Then mine does, the area code in the display 202 for Washington, D.C., the exchange 538, and that can’t be good.
“Dr. Scarpetta,” I answer over speakerphone.
“It’s Tron,” the familiar voice says.
The U.S. Secret Service cyber investigator’s actual name is Sierra Patron, and she’s a member of the Doomsday Commission task force. She’s not calling to check in or chat because that’s not what she does, and I squeeze hot water from a washcloth, apologizing for the noise.