Free Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell Page A

couldn’t take the pressure. A breakdown. A scandal. Maybe more than one of each. Then that highly publicized case in Florida a couple years back, some naked lady strung up from a rafter, tortured and tormented until she couldn’t take it anymore and hung herself with her own rope.
         A patient of that TV talk-show shrink. He tries to remember. Maybe it was more than one person tortured and killed. He’s quite sure Dr. Scarpetta testified and was key in convincing the jury to find Dr. Self guilty of something. And in a number of articles he’s read since, she has referred to Dr. Scarpetta as “incompetent and biased,” a “closet lesbian,” and a “has-been.” Probably true. Most powerful women are like men or at least wish they were men, and when she started out, there weren’t many women in her profession. Now there must be thousands of them. Supply and demand, nothing special about her anymore, no-sirree-bob, women all over the place – young ones – getting ideas from TV and doing the same thing she does. That and all the other stuff said about her sure as heck would explain why she moved to the Lowcountry and works out of a tiny carriage house – a former stable, let’s be honest – which certainly isn’t what Lucious works out of, not hardly.
         He lives in the upstairs of the funeral home the Meddick family has owned in Beaufort County for more than a hundred years. The three-story mansion on a former plantation still has the original slave cabins, sure isn’t some itty-bitty carriage house on an old narrow alleyway. Shocking, downright shocking. It’s one thing to embalm bodies and prepare them for burial in a professionally outfitted room in a mansion, quite another to do autopsies in a carriage house, especially if you’re dealing with floaters – greenies, he calls them – and others who are hard as hell to make presentable to families, no matter how much D-12 deodorant powder you use so they don’t stink up the chapel.
         A woman appears behind her two sets of gates, and he begins to indulge in his favorite preoccupation, voyeurism, scrutinizing her through the dark-tinted side window. Metal clanks as she opens and shuts the first black gate, then the outer one – tall with flat, twisted bars centered by two J-curves that look like a heart. As if she has a heart, and by now he’s sure she doesn’t. She’s dressed in a power suit, has blond hair, and he calculates she’s five-foot-five, wears a size-eight skirt, a size-ten blouse. Lucious is darn near infallible when it comes to his deductions about what people would look like naked on an embalming table, jokes around about having what he calls “x-ray eyes.”
         Since she so rudely ordered him not to get out of his vehicle, he doesn’t. She knocks on his dark window, and he starts to get flustered. His fingers twitch in his lap, try to rise to his mouth as if they have a will of their own, and he tells them no. He snaps himself hard with the rubber band around his wrist and tells his hands to stop it. He snaps the rubber band again and grips the wood-grain steering wheel to keep his hands out of trouble.
         She knocks again.
         He sucks on a wint-o-green Life Saver and rolls down his window. “You sure got a strange location to be hanging out your shingle,” he says with a big practiced smile.
         “You’re in the wrong place,” she tells him, not so much as a good morning or nice to meet you. “What in the world are you doing here?”
         “Wrong place, wrong time. That’s what keeps people like you and me in business,” Lucious replies with his toothy smile.
         “How did you get this address?” she says in the same unfriendly tone. She seems like she’s in a real big hurry. “This isn’t my office. This certainly isn’t the morgue. I’m sorry for your inconvenience, but you need to leave right now.”
         “I’m Lucious Meddick from Meddicks’