Page 77 of Unnatural Death

“Especially sleeping out in the woods where you can’t hear a sound.” Faye has poetic sensibilities and a reflective nature. “Just the quiet splashing of a creek, and the wind rocking the trees. Pretending the world’s civilized for just a little while, that nothing wants to hurt you.”

“I’m not sure I’m able to pretend that anymore,” I reply. “I feel like everything wants to hurt me, including the desserts you keep bringing Shannon, knowing she’ll share.”

Taped to the partitions of Faye’s workstation are photographs of her latest prizewinning decorated cakes. The Garden of Eden. Stonehenge. Dinosaurs lumbering through a forest. A Picasso painting. My favorite is Mars with its roverPerseveranceand rotorcraftIngenuity. The planet’s red velvet surface is scattered with red rock candy and looming with red chocolate volcanoes.

“I’m always amazed.” I look at the pictures of her elaborate baked creations. “I don’t know how you stand making something so perfect and then destroying it.”

The lemon cake she surprised me with on my birthday was covered with colorful icing wildflowers that looked real enough to pick. I almost couldn’t cut into it.

“I think of them as sand art. Here, then erased with the sweep of a hand,” Faye explains. “I enjoy beauty when it visits, but it doesn’t have to stay.”

“If only ugliness wouldn’t. What is it you need to see me about?” I ask her.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she begins. “What you’re about to hear from me is the truth. The evidence doesn’t lie. But people do. God only knows the spin that will be put on things. In fact, it’s already happening.”

“That’s quite a preamble,” I reply.

“I’m talking to you as a friend, Doctor Scarpetta.”

“Tell me what?” I can’t help but think of Lucy and Benton misleading me about Carrie.

“Something that involves you personally,” Faye says. “I’ll probably catch hell for this despite our best intentions. The FBI made it clear not to release information without their permission. Or better put, Patty Mullet did. She’s called three times in the past four hours, most recently just a few minutes ago.”

“It seems she’s turning up like the proverbial bad penny again,” I reply.

“Come closer.” Faye rolls her chair to one side, giving me a view of what’s on the video screen attached to her comparison microscope.

The two bullet fragments displayed are from a test fire and an active criminal investigation, she explains. She’s placed the copper shards on the microscope’s two separate stages. The pair of objective lenses connected by a prism make it possible to do a side-by-side comparison on the split screen.

“A match,” she says. “Thanks to the NIST Ballistics Toolmark Research Database. More popularly known as the NBTRD.Nib-Tired, as I call it. Marino has another pronunciation that I won’t repeat. I got a hit in minutes after running the ballistic fingerprint of a weapon I examined earlier this afternoon.”

The lands, grooves and other striations are identical. The markings known as rifling were imparted by the gun barrel that fired the two bullets.

“A shooting from which case? And what does this have to do with me?” I ask.

“Earlier today I conducted test fires with an AR-fifteen that was in the possession of the two ex-con assholes dressed like clowns.” Faye is talking about the attempted home invasion in Old Town last night at around nineP.M.as it began to rain.

The police found the assault rifle and other guns inside theTwo Bozos’truck, as Faye refers to them. The would-be assailants had parked several blocks from the targeted Georgian-style white brick house, designated as a historic site with a plaque in front. The ex-cons left the firearms behind, apparently assuming the victim was an easy mark. And it seems they were interested in a more intimate encounter.

Armed with military-style knives, they had duct tape, zip ties, surgical gloves and condoms. They’d brought an electric livestock prod, a shock collar and box cutters, Faye explains as I think,The fucking monsters. Shooting the victim wouldn’t be as much fun as what they had in mind. It’s an example of what can happen when you don’t do your homework.

Had the ex-cons bothered to so much as Google the person who lived at that address, they might have thought twice. It’s possible they knew nothing beyond her being older and living alone in an upscale neighborhood where she does her own yardwork. Had they researched her even a little they would have discovered that she’s a retired rear admiral who’d served as a senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan and Africa.

When they pried open her kitchen door, she welcomed them with both barrels of a 12-gauge shotgun, dropping them in their tracks. They probably didn’t see it coming and never knew what hit them.

“They had it easy compared to what was in store for her and whoever else they planned to victimize next. What had they been in prison for? Do we know?” I’m wondering what this has to do with me personally beyond the location. The house where it occurred isn’t far from mine.

“Their rap sheet includes armed robberies, burglaries, assaults, stealing cars,” Faye says. “They’re suspected of torturing and murdering an entire family in New Jersey before burning down the house. This is according to Blaise Fruge.”

“Thank God they won’t be hurting anybody else.”

“And they would have,” Faye says. “The AR-fifteen recovered from their truck was used in at least three previous crimes. Ones considered terrorist acts.”

Most recently, it was an electrical substation that someone tried to take out in Hampton Roads in early October. The same thing happened again a week later just south of Baltimore. Shots were fired but little damage was done.

* * *

“This is the new thing violent extremists are up to, as you know. Using high-powered rifles to shoot up electrical grids, hoping to cause entire cities to lose power,” Faye explains. “Targeting the infrastructure, in other words, to destroy the lives of innocent civilians.”

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