Trace Read Free

building. "When I used to see ol' smoky going, I didn't particularly want to be driving around down here breathing the air."
         Scarpetta glides past the rear of the building, and it is still intact and looks exactly the way it did last time she saw it. The parking lot is empty except for a big yellow tractor that is parked almost exactly where she used to park when she was chief, just to the right of the massive closed bay door. For an instant, she hears the screeching and complaining of that door cranking up or down when the big green and red buttons inside were pressed. She hears voices, hearses and ambulances rumbling, doors opening and slamming shut, and the clack and clatter of stretcher legs and wheels as shrouded bodies were rolled up and down the ramp, the dead in and out, day and night, night and day, coming and going.
         "Take a good look," she says to Marino.
         "I did the first time you went around the block," he replies. "You plan on us driving around in circles all day?"
         "We'll circle it twice. Take a good look."
         Turning left on Main Street, she drives a little faster around the demolition site, thinking that pretty soon it will look like an amputee's raw stump. When the back parking lot comes into view again, she notices a man in olive-green pants and a black jacket standing close to the big yellow tractor, doing something to the engine. She can tell he is having a problem with his tractor, and she wishes he wouldn't stand in front of the huge back tire, doing whatever he's doing to the engine.
         "I think you might want to leave the cap in the car," she says to Marino.
         "Huh?" Marino asks, and his big weathered face looks at her.
         "You heard me. A little friendly advice for your own good," she says as the tractor and the man recede behind her and are gone.
         "You always say something's friendly and for my own good," he answers. "And it never is." He takes off the LAPD cap and looks at it thoughtfully, his bald head glistening with sweat. The scant quota of gray hair nature is kind enough to allot him is gone by his design.
         "You never did tell me why you started shaving your head," she says.
         "You never asked."
         "I'm asking." She turns north, heading away from the building toward Broad Street and going the speed limit now.
         "It's the in thing," he replies. "Point is, if you ain't got hair, may as well getrid of it."
         "I suppose that makes sense," she says. "As much sense as anything."

    Chapter 2

         Edgar Allan Pogue stares at his bare toes as he relaxes in the lawn chair. He smiles and contemplates the reactions of people should they find out he now has a home in Hollywood. A second home, he reminds himself. He, Edgar Allan Pogue, has a second home where he can come for sun and fun and privacy.
         No one is going to ask which Hollywood. At the mention of Hollywood, what immediately comes to mind is the big white Hollywood sign on the hill, mansions protected by walls, convertible sports cars, and the blessed beautiful ones, the gods. It would never enter anyone's mind that Edgar Allan Pogue's Hollywood is in Broward County, about an hour's drive north of Miami, and does not attract the rich and famous. He will tell his doctor, he thinks with a trace of pain. That's right, his doctor will be the first to know, and next time he won't run out of the flu shot, Pogue thinks with a trace of fear. No doctor would ever deprive his Hollywood patient of a flu shot, no matter the shortage, Pogue decides with a trace of rage.
         "See, Mother Dear, we're here. We really are here. It's not a dream," Pogue says in the slurred voice of someone who has an object in his mouth that interferes with the movement of his lips and tongue.
         His even, bleached teeth clamp down harder on a wooden pencil.
         "And you thought the day would never come," he talks around the pencil as a