"Blow Fly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornwell Patricia)

31

SCARPETTA STARES AT THE unopened letter, the warm, damp air moving freely through her open door.

Clouds are black flowers floating low on the horizon, and she senses that rain will come before dawn and she will wake up with all the windows fogged up, which is intolerable. No doubt the neighbors think she's obsessive and mad when they see her on her balcony with bath towels at seven a.m., vigorously wiping condensation off the outside of the glass. Then, because of her forced and despicable bond with him, she imagines him inside his death-row cell with no view, and her mission of scrubbing clean her dewy, opaque windows becomes all the more urgent.

The unopened letter addressed to Madame Scarpetta, LLB is centered on a square of clean white freezer paper. Female physicians in France are addressed as Madame. In America, referring to a female physician as anything but Doctor is an insult. She is unpleasantly reminded of crafty defense attorneys addressing her in court as Mrs. Scarpetta instead of Dr. Scarpetta, thereby stripping her of her credentials and expertise, in hopes that the jurors and perhaps even the judge would not take her as seriously as they would a Medicinae Doctor whose specialty of pathology and sub-specialty of forensic pathology required six additional years of training after medical school.

While it is true that Scarpetta also has a law degree, virtually no one adds the abbreviation for legum baccalaureus after her surname, and for her to do so would be arrogant and misleading because she does not practice law. The three years she spent in law school at Georgetown were for the purpose of facilitating her eventual career in legal medicine, and that was all. To add the abbreviation LLB after her name is mocking in its pretentiousness and condescension.

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

She knows the letter is from him.

For an instant, she smells his horrible stench. An olfactory hallucination. The last time she had one was when she visited the Holocaust Museum and smelled death.

"I've been out in the yard with Billy. He's done his business and is very busy chasing lizards," Rose is saying. "Anything else I can do for you before I leave?"

"No thank you, Rose."

A pause, then, "Well, did you like my tuna salad?"

"You could open your own restaurant," Scarpetta says.

She puts on a fresh pair of white cotton examination gloves and picks up the letter and the scalpel, working the tip of the triangular blade into a top corner of the envelope. Stainless steel hisses through the cheap paper.