THE COLD DUSK GIVES UP ITS BRUISED COLOR TO complete darkness, and I am grateful that the draperies in my bedroom are heavy enough to absorb even the faintest hint of my silhouette as I move about packing my bags. Life could not be more abnormal than it is right now.
“I want a drink,” I announce as I open a dresser drawer. “I want to build a fire and have a drink and make pasta. Yellow and green broad noodles, sweet peppers, sausage. Le pappare-delle del cantunzein. I’ve always wanted to take a sabbatical, go to Italy, learn Italian, really learn it. Speak it. Not just know the names of food. Or maybe France. I will go to France. Maybe I’ll go there right this minute,” I add with a double edge of helplessness and rage. “I could live in Paris. Easily.” It is my way of rejecting Virginia and everybody in it.
Richmond Police Captain Pete Marino dominates my bed-room like a thick lighthouse, his giant hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. He doesn’t offer to help me pack the suit bag and tote bags laid open on the bed, knowing me well enough to not even think about it. Marino may look like a red
neck, talk like a redneck, act like a redneck, but he is as smart as hell, sensitive and very perceptive. This very moment, for example, he realizes a simple fact: Not even twenty-four hours ago, a man named Jean-Baptiste Chandonne tracked through snow beneath a full moon and tricked his way into my house. I was already intimately familiar with Chandonne’s modus operandi, so I can safely project what he would have done to me given the chance. But I haven’t quite been able to subject myself to anatomically correct images of my own mauled dead body, and nobody could more accurately de-scribe such a thing than I. I am a forensic pathologist with a law degree, the chief medical examiner of Virginia. I autop-sied the two women Chandonne recently killed here in Rich-mond and reviewed the cases of seven others he murdered in Paris.
