Scarpetta

Scarpetta

Kay Scarpetta (16)

by Patricia Cornwell

Chapter 1

Brain tissue clung like wet, gray lint to the sleeves of Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s surgical gown, and the front of it was splashed with blood. Stryker saws whined, running water drummed, and bone dust sifted through the air like flour. Three tables were full. More bodies were on the way. It was Tuesday, January 1, New Year’s Day.

She didn’t need to rush toxicology to know her patient had been drinking before he pulled the shotgun’s trigger with his toe. The instant she’d opened him up, she detected the putrid, pungent smell of booze as it breaks down in the body. When she was a forensic pathology resident long years ago, she used to wonder if giving substance abusers a tour of the morgue might shock them into sobriety. If she showed them a head opened up like an egg cup, let them catch the stench of postmortem champagne, maybe they’d switch to Perrier. If only it worked that way.

She watched her deputy chief, Jack Fielding, lift the shimmering block of organs from the chest cavity of a university student robbed and shot at an ATM, and waited for his outburst. During this morning’s staff conference, he’d made the incensed comment that the victim was the same age as his daughter, both of them track stars and pre-med. Nothing good happened when Fielding personalized a case.

“We not sharpening knives anymore?” he yelled.

The oscillating blade of a Stryker saw screamed, the morgue assistant opening a skull and yelling back, “Do I look busy?”

Fielding tossed the surgical knife back on his cart with a loud clatter. “How am I supposed to get anything fucking done around here?”

“Good God, somebody get him a Xanax or something.” The morgue assistant pried off the skull cap with a chisel.

Scarpetta placed a lung on a scale, using a smartpen to jot down the weight on a smart notepad. There wasn’t a ballpoint pen, clipboard, or paper form in sight. When she got upstairs, all she’d have to do is download what she wrote or sketched into her computer, but technology had no remedy for her fluent thoughts, and she still dictated them after she was done and her gloves were off. Hers was a modern medical examiner’s office, upgraded with what she considered essential in a world she no longer recognized, where the public believed everything “forensic” it saw on TV, and violence wasn’t a societal problem but a war.

She began sectioning the lung, making a mental note that it was typically formed with smooth, glistening visceral pleurae, and an atelectatic dusky red parenchyma. Minimal quantity of pink froth. Otherwise lacked discrete gross lesion, and the pulmonary vasculature was without note. She paused when her administrative assistant, Bryce, walked in, a look of disdain and avoidance on his youthful face. He wasn’t squeamish about what went on in here, just offended for every reason one might be, and he snatched several paper towels from a dispenser. Covering his hand, he picked up the receiver of the black wall phone, where line one was lit up.

“Benton, you still with me?” he said into the phone. “She’s right here holding a very big knife. I’m sure she told you today’s specials? The Tufts student is the worst, her life worth two hundred bucks. The Bloods or the Crips, some gang piece of shit, you should see him on video surveillance. All over the news. Jack shouldn’t be doing that case. Does anybody ask me? About to blow an aneurysm. And the suicide, yup. Comes home from Iraq without a scratch. He’s fine. Have a happy holiday and a nice life.”

Scarpetta pushed back her face shield. She pulled off her bloody gloves and dropped them in a bright red biohazard can. She scrubbed her hands in a deep steel sink.

“Bad weather inside and out,” Bryce chatted to Benton, who wasn’t fond of chatting. “A full house and Jack’s irritable depression, did I mention that? Maybe we should do an intervention. Maybe a weekend getaway at that Harvard hospital of yours? We probably could qualify for a family plan . . . ?”

Scarpetta took the receiver from him, removed the paper towels, and dropped them into the trash.

“Stop picking on Jack,” she said to Bryce.

“I think he’s on steroids again, and that’s why he’s so cranky.”

She turned her back to him and everything else.

“What’s happened?” she said to Benton.

They had talked at dawn. For him to call again several hours later while she was in the autopsy suite didn’t bode anything good.

“I’m afraid we’ve got a situation,” he said.

It was the same way he’d phrased it last night when she’d just gotten home from the ATM homicide scene and found him putting on his coat, headed to Logan to catch the shuttle. NYPD had a situation and needed him immediately.

“Jaime Berger’s asking if you can get here,” he added.

Hearing her name always unnerved Scarpetta, gave her a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the New York prosecutor personally. Berger would always be linked to a past that Scarpetta preferred to forget.

Benton said, “The sooner the better. Maybe the one-o’clock shuttle?”

The wall clock said it was almost ten. She’d have to finish her case, shower, change, and she’d want to stop by the house first. Food, she thought. Homemade mozzarella, chickpea soup, meat-balls, bread. What else? The ricotta with fresh basil that Benton loved on homemade pizza. She’d prepared all that and more yesterday, having no idea she was about to spend New Year’s Eve alone. There would be nothing to eat in their New York apartment. When Benton was by himself, he usually got take-out.

“Come straight to Bellevue,” he said. “You can leave your bags in my office. I have your crime scene case ready and waiting.”

She could barely hear over the rhythmic rasping of a knife being sharpened in long, aggressive sweeps. The buzzer from the bay blared, and on the closed-circuit video screen on the countertop, a dark-sleeved arm emerged from the driver’s window of a white van as attendants from a delivery service buzzed.

“Can someone please get that?” Scarpetta said at the top of her voice.

On the prison-ward floor of the modern Bellevue Hospital Center, the thin wire of Benton’s headset connected him to his wife some hundred and fifty miles away.

He explained that late last night a man was admitted to the forensic psychiatric unit, making the point, “Berger wants you to examine his injuries.”

“What’s he been charged with?” Scarpetta asked.

In the background, he could hear the indistinguishable voices, the noise of the morgue—or what he wryly called her “deconstruction site.”

“Nothing yet,” he said. “There was a murder last night. An unusual one.”

He tapped the down arrow on his keyboard, scrolling through what was on his computer screen.

“You mean there’s no court order for the examination?” Scarpetta’s voice moved at the speed of sound.

“Not yet. But he needs to be looked at now.”

“He should have been looked at already. The minute he was admitted. If there was any trace evidence, by now it’s likely been contaminated or lost.”

Benton kept tapping the down arrow, re-reading what was on the screen, wondering how he was going to approach her about it. He could tell by her tone she didn’t know, and he hoped like hell she didn’t hear it from someone else first. Lucy Farinelli, her niece, had damn well better abide by his wish to let him handle it. Not that he was doing a good job so far.

Jaime Berger had seemed all business when she’d called him a few minutes earlier, and from that he’d inferred she wasn’t aware of the trashy gossip on the Internet. Why he didn’t say something to her while he’d had the chance, he wasn’t sure. But he hadn’t, and he should have. He should have been honest with Berger long before now. He should have explained everything to her almost half a year ago.

“His injuries are superficial,” Benton said to Scarpetta. “He’s in isolation, won’t talk, won’t cooperate unless you come. Berger doesn’t want anyone coercing him into anything and decided the exam could wait until you got here. Since that’s what he wants . . .”

“Since when is it about what the inmate wants?”

“PR, political reasons, and he’s not an inmate, not that anybody on the ward’s considered an inmate once they’ve been admitted. They’re patients.” His nervous ramblings didn’t sound like him as he heard himself talk. “As I’ve said, he’s not been charged with any crime. There’s no warrant. There’s nothing. He’s basically a civil admission. We can’t make him stay the minimum seventy-two hours because he didn’t sign a consent form, and as I said, he’s not been charged with a crime, at least not yet. Maybe that will change after you’ve seen him. But at this moment, he can leave whenever he wants.”

“You’re expecting me to find something that will give the police probable cause to charge him with murder? And what do you mean he didn’t sign . . . ? Back up. This patient signed himself into a prison ward with the proviso he can walk out the door whenever he pleases?”

“I’ll explain more when I see you. I’m not expecting you to find anything. No expectations, Kay. I’m just asking you to come because it’s a very complicated situation. And Berger really wants you here.”

“Even though he might be gone by the time I get there.”

He detected the question she wasn’t going to ask. He wasn’t acting like the cool, unflappable forensic psychologist she had known for twenty years, but she wasn’t going to point that out. She was in the morgue and she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t going to ask him what the hell was wrong with him.

Benton said, “He definitely won’t leave before you get here.”

“I don’t understand why he’s there.” She wasn’t going to let that go.

“We’re not entirely sure. But in a nutshell? When the cops arrived at the scene, he insisted on being transported to Bellevue. . . .”

“His name?”

“Oscar Bane. He said the only person he’d allow to conduct the psychological evaluation was me. So I was called, and as you know, I left immediately for New York. He’s afraid of doctors. Gets panic attacks.”

“How did he know who you are?”

“Because he knows who you are.”

“He knows who I am?”

“The cops have his clothes, but he says if they want any evidence collected from him physically—and there’s no warrant, as I keep emphasizing—it will have to be you who does it. We hoped he’d calm down, agree to let a local ME take care of him. Never going to happen. He’s more adamant than ever. Says he’s terrified of doctors. Has odynephobia, dishabiliophobia.”

“He’s afraid of pain and taking his clothes off?”

“And caligynephobia. Fear of beautiful women.”

“I see. So that’s why he’d feel safe with me.”

“That part was supposed to be funny. He thinks you’re beautiful, and he’s definitely not afraid of you. I’m the one who should be afraid.”

That was the truth of the matter. Benton didn’t want her here. He didn’t even want her in New York right now.

“Let me make sure I understand. Jaime Berger wants me to fly there in a snowstorm, examine a patient on a prison ward who hasn’t been charged with a crime—”

“If you can get out of Boston, the weather’s fine here. Just cold.” Benton looked out his window and saw nothing but gray.

“Let me finish up with my Army Reservist sergeant who was a casualty in Iraq but didn’t know it until he got home. And I’ll see you mid-afternoon,” she said.

“Fly safe. I love you.”

Benton hung up, started tapping the down arrow again, then the up arrow, reading and re-reading, as though if he read the anonymous gossip column often enough, it wouldn’t seem so offensive, so ugly, so hateful. “Sticks and stones,” Scarpetta always said. Maybe that was true in grammar school, but not in their adult lives. Words could hurt. They could hurt badly. What kind of monster would write something like this? How did the monster find out?

He reached for the phone.

Scarpetta paid scant attention to Bryce as he drove her to Logan International Airport. He’d been talking nonstop about one thing or another ever since picking her up at her house.

Mainly, he’d been complaining about Dr. Jack Fielding, reminding her yet again that returning to the past was like a dog returning to its own vomit. Or Lot’s wife looking back and turning into a pillar of salt. Bryce’s biblical analogies were endless and irritating and had nothing to do with his religious beliefs, assuming he had any, but were leftover pearls from a college term paper he’d done on the Bible as literature.

Her administrative assistant’s point was you don’t hire people from your past. Fielding was from Scarpetta’s past. He’d had his problems, but then who hadn’t? When she had accepted the position up here and had started looking for a deputy chief, she wondered what Fielding was doing, tracked him down, and found out he wasn’t doing much.

Benton’s input had been unusually toothless, maybe even patronizing, which made more sense to her now. He’d said she was looking for stability, and often people move backward instead of forward when they are overwhelmed by change. Feeling the desire to hire someone she’d known since the early days of her career was understandable, Benton had said. But the danger in looking back was that we saw only what we wanted to see, he’d added. We saw what made us feel safe.

What Benton had chosen to avoid is why she didn’t feel safe to begin with. He hadn’t wanted to get within range of how she really felt about her domestic life with him, which was as chaotic and dissonant as it had ever been. Since their relationship began with an adulterous affair more than fifteen years ago, they’d never lived in the same place, didn’t know the meaning of day-to-day togetherness, until last summer. Theirs had been a very simple ceremony in the garden behind her carriage house in Charleston, South Carolina, where she’d just set up a private practice that she then was forced to close.

Afterward, they’d moved to Belmont, Massachusetts, to be near his psychiatric hospital, McLean, and her new headquarters in Watertown, where she’d accepted the position of chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth’s Northeastern District. Because of their proximity to New York, she thought it a fine idea for them to accept John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s invitation to serve as visiting lecturers there, which included offering pro bono consultation for the NYPD, the New York Medical Examiner’s office, and forensic psychiatric units such as the one at Bellevue.

“. . . I know it’s not the sort of thing you’d look at or maybe even be a big deal to you, but at the risk of pissing you off, I’m going to point it out.” Bryce’s voice penetrated her preoccupations.

She said, “What big deal?”

“Well, hello? Don’t mind me. I was just talking to myself.”

“I’m sorry. Rewind the tape.”

“I didn’t say anything after staff meeting because I didn’t want to distract you from all the shit going on this morning. Thought I’d wait until you were done and we could have a little heart-to-heart behind your closed door. And since nobody’s said anything to me, I don’t think they saw it. Which is good, right? As if Jack isn’t pissy enough this morning. Of course, he’s always pissy, which is why he has eczema and alopecia. And by the way, did you see the crusty lesion behind his right ear? Home for the holidays. Does wonders for the nerves.”

“How much coffee have you had today?”

“Why is it always me? Kill the messenger. You zone out until what I’m trying to convey reaches critical mass, and then kaboom, and I’m the bad guy, and bye-bye messenger. If you’re going to be in New York more than a night, please let me know a-sap so I can get coverage. Should I set up some sessions with that trainer you like so much? What’s his name?”

Bryce thought, touching a finger to his lips.

“Kit,” he answered himself. “Maybe one of these days when you need me as your boy Friday in New York, he can have a go at me. Love handles.”

He pinched his waist.

“Although I hear liposuction’s the only thing that works once you turn thirty,” he said. “Truth serum time?”

He glanced over at her, his hands gesturing as if they were something alive and not part of him.

“I did look him up on the Internet,” he confessed. “I’m surprised Benton lets him anywhere near you. Reminds me of, of what’s-his-name on Queer as Folk ? The football star? Drove a Hummer and quite the homophobe until he hooked up with Emmett, who everyone says looks just like me, or the other way around, since he’s the one who’s famous. Well, you probably don’t watch it.”

Scarpetta said, “Kill the messenger because of what? And please keep at least one hand on the wheel since we’re driving in a blizzard. How many shots did you get in your Starbucks this morning? I saw two Venti cups on your desk. Hopefully not both of them from this morning. Remember our talk about caffeine? That it’s a drug, and therefore addictive?”

“You’re the whole damn thing,” Bryce went on. “Which I’ve never seen before. It’s really weird. Usually it’s not just one famous person, you know? Because whoever the columnist is, he roams around the city like some undercover asshole, and shits on a lot of celebs at once. The other week, it was Bloomberg, and, oh, what’s her name? That model always getting arrested for throwing things at people? Well, this time she was what got thrown —out of Elaine’s for saying something lewd to Charlie Rose. No, wait a minute. Barbara Walters? No. I’m crossing over into something I saw on The View . Maybe what’s-her-name the model went after that singer from American Idol. No, he was on Ellen, not in Elaine’s. And not Clay Aiken or Kelly Clarkson. Who’s the other one? TiVo’s simply killing me. It’s like the remote surfs through channels when you’re not touching anything. You ever have that happen?”

Snow was like a swarm of white gnats hitting the windshield, the wipers hypnotically useless. Traffic was slow but steady, Logan just a few minutes out.

“Bryce?” Scarpetta said in the tone she used when she was warning him to shut up and answer her question. “What big deal?”

“That disgusting online gossip column. Gotham Gotcha. ”

She’d seen ads for it on New York City buses and taxicab tops, the anonymous columnist notoriously vicious. The guessing game of who was behind it ranged from a nobody to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was having great fun making mean-spirited mischief and money.

“Nas-ty,” Bryce said. “Now, I know it’s supposed to be nasty, but this is nasty below the belt. Not that I read such tripe. But for obvious reasons, I have you as a Google alert. There’s a photograph, which is the worst part. It’s not flattering.”

Chapter 2

Benton leaned back in his desk chair, looking out at his view of ugly red brick in the flat wintry light.

“Sounds like you got a cold,” he said into the phone.

“I’m slightly under the weather today. Which is why I didn’t get back to you sooner. Don’t ask me what we did last night to deserve it. Gerald won’t get out of bed. And I don’t mean it in a good way,” Dr. Thomas said.

She was a colleague at McLean. She was also Benton’s psychiatrist. There was nothing unusual about it. As Dr. Thomas, who was born in the coal-mining hinterlands of western Virginia, liked to say, “Hospitals are more incestuous than hillbillies.” Practitioners treated one another and their families and friends. They prescribed drugs for one another and their families and friends. They fucked one another, but hopefully not their families and friends. Occasionally, they got married. Dr. Thomas had married a McLean radiologist who scanned Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy, in the neuroimaging lab where Benton had his office. Dr. Thomas knew Benton’s business, pretty much all of it. She was the first person he’d thought of some months back when he’d realized he had to talk to someone.

“Did you open the link I e-mailed to you?” Benton asked her.

“Yes, and the real question is who are you more worried about? I think the answer might be you. What do you think?”

“I think that would make me incredibly selfish,” Benton said.

“It would be normal to feel cuckolded, humiliated,” she said.

“I forgot you were a Shakespearean actor in an earlier life,” he said. “Can’t remember the last time I heard someone refer to anyone as cuckolded, and it doesn’t apply. Kay didn’t wander out of the nest and into the arms of another man. She was grabbed. Were I to feel cuckolded, it should have been when it happened. But I didn’t. I was too worried about her. Don’t say ‘the lady doth protest too much.’ ”

“What I’ll say is when it happened, there wasn’t an audience,” Dr. Thomas said. “Perhaps it makes it more real when everybody knows? Did you tell her what’s on the Internet? Or had she already seen it?”

“I didn’t tell her, and I’m sure she hasn’t seen it. She would have called to warn me. Funny how she’s like that.”

“Yes. Kay and her fragile heroes with their feet of clay. Why didn’t you tell her?”

“Timing,” Benton said.

“Yours or hers?”

“She was in the morgue,” he said. “I wanted to wait and do it in person.”

“Let’s retrace our steps, Benton. You talked to her at the crack of dawn, let me guess. Isn’t that what you always do when you’re away from each other?”

“We talked early this morning.”

“So when you talked to her early this morning, you already knew what was on the Internet, because Lucy called you when?” Dr. Thomas said. “At one a.m. to tell you, since your hypomanic niece by marriage has audible alarms programmed into her computer to wake her up like a fireman if one of her search engines finds something important in cyberspace?”

Dr. Thomas wasn’t joking. Lucy did have alarms that signaled her when one of her search engines found something she needed to know about.

He said, “Actually, she called me at midnight. When the damn thing was posted.”

“But she didn’t call Kay.”

“To her credit, she didn’t, and she let it go when I said I would handle it.”

“Which you didn’t do,” Dr. Thomas said. “So we’re back to that. You talked to Kay early this morning, by which time you’d known for many hours what’s on the Internet? Yet you said nothing. You’ve still said nothing. I don’t believe it’s about telling her in person. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance she might find out from someone other than you—if she hasn’t already.”

Benton took a deep, quiet breath. He pressed his lips together and wondered when it was, exactly, that he’d begun to lose faith in himself and his ability to read his environment and react accordingly. For as far back as he could remember, he had possessed the uncanny ability to size up people at a glance or a quick listen. Scarpetta called it his party trick. He’d meet someone or overhear a snippet of a conversation, and that was it. Rarely was he wrong.

But he’d completely missed the danger at the door this time, and still didn’t fully comprehend how he could have been so devastatingly obtuse. He’d watched Pete Marino’s anger and frustration build over the years. He knew damn well it was a matter of time before Marino’s self-loathing and rage reached flashover. But Benton didn’t fear it. He didn’t give Marino enough credit to be feared like that. He wasn’t sure he’d ever imagined Marino having a dick prior to its becoming a weapon.

It made no sense, in retrospect. For virtually everybody else, it was impossible to get past Marino’s rough-hewn machismo and volatility, and that particular recipe was Benton’s bread and butter. Sexual violence, no matter its catalyst, was what kept forensic psychologists in business.

“I’m having homicidal thoughts about him,” Benton said to Dr. Thomas. “Of course, I wouldn’t do it. Just thoughts. I’m having a lot of thoughts. I believed I’d forgiven him and felt proud of myself, really proud of myself, because of the way I handled it. Where would he be without me? All I’ve done for him, and now I want to kill him. Lucy wants to kill him. The reminder this morning didn’t help, and now everyone knows. It’s made it happen all over again.”

“Or maybe happen for the first time. It feels real to you now.”

“Oh, it feels real. It always felt real,” Benton said.

“But it’s different when you read it on the Internet and know a million other people are, too. That’s a different level of real. You’re finally having an emotional response. Before, it was intellectual. Out of self-defense, you processed it in your head. I think this is a breakthrough, Benton. A very unpleasant one. I’m sorry for that.”

“He doesn’t know Lucy’s in New York, and if she sees him—” Benton intercepted his thought. “Well, not true. She wouldn’t really think about killing him, because she’s been through that. She’s long past that. She wouldn’t kill him, just so you know.”

Benton watched the gray sky subtly change the redness of the old bricks beyond his window, and when he shifted in his chair and rubbed his chin, he caught his own male scent and felt stubble that Scarpetta always said looked exactly like sand. He’d been up all night, had never left the hospital. He needed a shower. He needed a shave. He needed food and sleep.

“Sometimes I catch myself by surprise,” he said. “When I say things like that about Lucy? It’s literally a consideration and a reminder of what a warped life I live. The only person who never wanted to kill him is Kay. She still thinks she’s somehow to blame, and it makes me angry. Just incredibly angry. I avoid the subject completely with her, and that’s probably why I didn’t say anything. The whole goddamn world is reading about it on the goddamn Internet. I’m tired. I was up all night with someone I can’t tell you about who is going to be a major problem.”

He stopped looking out the window. He didn’t look at anything.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Dr. Thomas said. “I’ve wondered when you’d cut the crap about what a saint you are. You’re angry as hell, and you’re no saint. There are no saints, by the way.”

“Angry as hell. Yes, I’m angry as hell.”

“Angry at her.”

“Yes, I really am,” Benton said, and admitting it frightened him. “I know it’s not fair. Good God, she’s the one who was hurt. Of course she didn’t ask for it. She’d worked with him for half her life, so why wouldn’t she let him into her house when he was drunk and half out of his mind? That’s what friends do. Even knowing what he felt about her doesn’t make it her fault.”

“He’s wanted her sexually since they first met,” Dr. Thomas said. “Rather much the way you felt. He fell in love with her. As did you. I wonder who fell in love with her first? Both of you met her around the same time, didn’t you? Nineteen-ninety.”

“His wanting her. Well, that had been going on for a long time, true. His feeling that way and her stepping around it and trying so hard not to hurt his feelings. I can sit here and analyze it all I want, but honestly?”

Benton was looking out his window again, talking to the bricks.

“There isn’t anything different she could have done,” he said. “What he did to her absolutely wasn’t her fault. In many ways, it wasn’t his fault. He would never do that sober. Not even close.”

“You certainly sound convinced,” Dr. Thomas said.

Benton turned away from the window and stared at what was on his computer screen. Then he looked out his window again as if the steely cold sky was a message for him, a metaphor. He removed a paper clip from a journal article he was revising and stapled the pages together, suddenly furious. The American Psychological Society probably wasn’t going to accept yet another damn research article on emotional responses to members of social outgroups. Someone from Princeton just published basically the same damn thing Benton was about to submit. He straightened the paper clip. The challenge was to straighten it without a trace of a kink. In the end, they always snapped.

“Of all people, to be so irrational,” he said. “So out of touch. And I have been. From day one. Irrational about everything, and now I’m about to pay for it.”

“You’re about to pay for it because other people know what your friend Pete Marino did to her?”

“He’s not my friend.”

“I thought he was. I thought you thought he was,” Dr. Thomas said.

“We never socialized. We have nothing in common. Bowling, fishing, motorcycles, watching football, and drinking beer. Well, not beer. Not now. That’s Marino. That’s not me. Now that I think about it, I don’t recall ever even going out to dinner with him, just the two of us. Not in twenty years. We have nothing in common. We’ll never have anything in common.”

“He’s not from an elitist New England family? He didn’t go to graduate school, was never an FBI profiler? He’s not on the faculty of Harvard Medical School? Is that what you mean?”

“I’m not trying to be a snob,” Benton said.

“Seems as if the two of you have Kay in common.”

“Not that way. It never went that far,” Benton said.

“How far did it need to go?”

“She told me it never went that far. He did other things. When she finally got undressed in front of me, I could see what he did. She made excuses for a day or two. Lied. I knew damn well she hadn’t shut the hatchback on her wrists.”

Benton remembered bruises as dark as thunderclouds and shaped exactly the way they would be had someone pinned her hands behind her and held her against the wall. She’d offered no explanation at all when Benton finally saw her breasts. No one had ever done anything like that to her before, and he had never seen anything like that before except in cases he worked. When he’d sat on the bed looking at her, he’d felt as if a monstrous cretin had mangled the wings of a dove or mauled a child’s tender flesh. He’d imagined Marino trying to eat her.

“Have you ever felt competitive with him?” Dr. Thomas’s voice was distant as Benton envisioned stigmatas he didn’t want to remember.

He heard himself say, “What’s bad, I guess, is I never felt much of anything about him.”

“He’s spent a lot more time with Kay than you have,” Dr. Thomas said. “That might make some people feel competitive. Feel threatened.”

“Kay’s never been attracted to him. If he were the last person on the planet, she wouldn’t be.”

“I guess we won’t know the answer to that unless there’s just the two of them left on the planet. In which case, you and I still won’t know.”

“I should have protected her better than I did,” Benton said. “That’s one thing I know how to do. Protect people. Those I love, and myself, or people I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I’m an expert at it or I would have been dead a long time ago. A lot of people would be.”

“Yes, Mr. Bond, but you weren’t home that night. You were up here.”

Dr. Thomas may as well have thrown a punch. Benton silently took it, could barely breathe. He worked the paper clip back and forth, bending and unbending, until it broke.

“Do you blame yourself, Benton?”

“We’ve been through this. And I’ve had no sleep,” he answered.

“Yes, we’ve been through all sorts of facts and possibilities. Such as you’ve never allowed yourself a chance to feel the personal insult of what Marino did to Kay, who you quickly married afterwards. Maybe too quickly? Because you felt you had to hold everything together, especially since you didn’t protect her, didn’t prevent it? No different than what you do when you handle a criminal case, really. You take over the investigation, handle it, micromanage it, keep it a safe distance from your psyche. But the same rules don’t apply in our personal lives. You’re telling me you have homicidal feelings toward Marino, and in our last several conversations, we’ve delved into what you call your sexual acting out with Kay, although she isn’t necessarily aware of it, is that still correct? Nor is she aware that you’re aware of other women in a way that’s unsettling to you? Still true?”

“It’s normal for men to feel attractions they don’t do anything about.”

“Only men do that?” Dr. Thomas asked.

“You know what I mean.”

“What’s Kay aware of?”

“I’m trying to be a good husband,” Benton said. “I love her. I’m in love with her.”

“Are you worried you’ll have an affair? Cheat?”

“No. Absolutely not. I would never do that,” he said.

“No. Not. Never. You cheated on Connie. Left her for Kay. But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it.”

“I’ve never loved anybody as much as I love Kay,” Benton said. “I would never forgive myself.”

“My question is whether you completely trust yourself.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you completely trust her? She’s very attractive, and now she must have a lot of fans because of CNN. A powerful, good-looking woman can have her pick. What about her trainer? You said you can’t stand the thought that he puts his hands on her.”

“I’m glad she’s taking care of herself, and a trainer’s a good thing. Prevents people from injuring themselves, especially if they’ve never worked with weights and aren’t twenty years old.”

“I believe his name is Kit.”

Benton didn’t like Kit. He always found excuses not to use the gym in their apartment building if Scarpetta was working out with Kit.

“Truth of the matter,” Dr. Thomas said. “Whether you trust Kay or not, it won’t change her behavior. That’s her power, not yours. I’m more interested in whether you trust yourself.”

“I don’t know why you continue to push me on this,” Benton said.

“Since you got married, your sexual patterns have changed. At least that’s what you told me the first time we talked. You find excuses not to have sex when the opportunity is there, and then want it when you, quote, shouldn’t. Again, what you told me. Still true?”

“Probably,” Benton said.

“That’s one way to pay her back.”

“I’m not paying her back for Marino. Jesus Christ. She didn’t do anything wrong.” Benton tried not to sound angry.

“No,” Dr. Thomas said. “I think it’s more likely you’re paying her back for being your wife. You don’t want a wife. You never have, and that’s not what you fell in love with. You fell in love with a powerful woman, not a wife. You’re sexually attracted to Kay Scarpetta, not to a wife.”

“She’s Kay Scarpetta and my wife. In fact, in many ways, she’s more powerful than she’s ever been in her life.”

“It’s not the rest of us who need convincing, Benton.”

Dr. Thomas always gave him special treatment, meaning she was more aggressive and confrontational than she was with her other patients. She and Benton shared a commonality that went beyond their therapeutic bond. Each understood how the other processed information, and Dr. Thomas could see right through linguistic camouflage. Denial, evasion, and passive communication simply weren’t options. Long sessions of silent staring as the shrink waited for an uptight patient to launch into what was bothering him weren’t going to happen. One minute into the void, and she was going to prompt Benton as she did last time: Did you come here for me to admire your Hermès tie? Or do you have something on your mind? Maybe we should pick up where we left off last time. How’s your libido?

Dr. Thomas said, “And Marino? Will you talk to him?”

“Probably not,” Benton said.

“Well, it seems you have a lot of people not to talk to, and I’ll leave you with my quirky little theory that at some level we intend everything we do. That’s why it’s extremely important to root out our intentions before they uproot us. Gerald’s waiting for me. Errands. We’re having a dinner party tonight, which we need like a hole in the head.”

It was her way of saying “Enough.” Benton needed to process.

He got up from his desk and stood before his office window, gazing out at the leaden winter afternoon. Nineteen floors below, the hospital’s small garden was barren, its concrete fountain dry.

Chapter 3

GOTHAM GOTCHA!

Happy New Year, everyone!

My resolution is all about you—what will really grab you, and as I was mulling it over . . . ? Well, you know how they roll back the year? Remind us of every awful thing that happened so we can get depressed all over again? Guess who filled my to-die-for fifty-eight-inch HD Samsung plasma TV?

The to-die-for queen herself: Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

Walking up courthouse steps to testify in another sensational murder trial. Her sidekick investigator Pete Marino in tow—meaning the trial was at least six, seven months ago, right? I think we all know the poor fat maggot’s not her sidekick anymore. Has anybody seen him? Is he in a cosmic jail somewhere? (Imagine working for a forensic diva like Scarpetta. Were it me, I might just commit suicide and hope she’s not the one who does the autopsy.)

Anyway, back to her walking up the courthouse steps. Cameras, the media, wannabes, spectators everywhere. Because she’s the expert, right? Gets called in from here to Italy because who better? So I poured another glass of Maker’s Mark, cranked up Coldplay, and watched her for a while, testifying in that pathological language of hers so few of us understand beyond getting the drift that some little girl was raped from stem to stern, even found seminal fluid in her ear (thought you could get that only from phone sex), and her head was bashed against the tile floor and blunt force trauma was what killed her. It dawned on me:

Who the hell is Scarpetta, anyway?

If you took away the hype, would there be anything behind it?

I began doing a little research. Start with this. She’s a politico. Don’t fall for bullshit about her being a champion for justice, a voice for those who can no longer speak, the lady physician who believes in “First Do No Harm.” (Are we absolutely sure Hippocrates isn’t where the word hypocrite comes from?) Fact is, Scarpetta’s a megalomaniac who manipulates us on CNN into believing she’s serving an altruistic social service when the only thing she’s serving is herself. . . .

Scarpetta had seen enough and dropped her BlackBerry into her handbag, disgusted that Bryce had suggested she look at such rot. She was as annoyed with him as she would be if he had written it, and she could have done without his critique of the photograph that accompanied the column. Although the display on her BlackBerry was small, she saw enough to get a good impression of what he’d meant when he’d said the photograph was unflattering.

She looked like a she-devil in bloody scrubs, a face shield, a disposable hair cover reminiscent of a shower cap. Her mouth was open mid-sentence, her bloody gloved hand pointing a scalpel, as if she was threatening someone. The black rubber chronograph watch she was wearing was a birthday gift from Lucy in 2005, meaning the photograph had been taken at some point in the last three and a half years.

Taken where?

Scarpetta didn’t know. The background had been whited out.

“Thirty-four dollar, twenty cent,” her driver said loudly as the taxi abruptly halted.

She looked through her side window at the closed black iron front gates of Bellevue’s former psychiatric hospital, a foreboding red-rock building some two centuries old that hadn’t seen a patient in decades. No lights, no cars, nobody home, the guard booth behind the fence empty.

“Not here,” she said loudly through the opening in the Plexiglas partition. “Wrong Bellevue.”

She repeated the address she’d given him when he’d picked her up at La Guardia, but the more she explained, the more insistent he got, jabbing his finger at the entrance, where Psychiatric Hospital was carved in granite. She leaned closer to him, directing his attention several blocks ahead where tall buildings were etched in gray, but he was bullish in his bad English. He wasn’t taking her anywhere else, and she must get out of the cab right now. It entered her mind that he truly didn’t know that the Bellevue Hospital Center wasn’t this creepy old horror that looked like something out of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He probably thought his passenger was a psychiatric patient, a criminally insane one suffering a relapse. Why else would she have luggage?

Scarpetta decided she’d rather walk the rest of the way in arctic blasts of wind than deal with him. Paying the fare, she got out of the cab, shouldered two bags, and began rolling her suitcase full of home cooking along the sidewalk. She pressed a button on her wireless earpiece.

“I’m almost here—” she started to tell Benton. “Dammit!” Her suitcase flopped over as if someone shot it.

“Kay? Where are you?”

“I just got thrown out of a taxi—”

“What? Thrown out of what? You’re breaking up . . .” he said, right before the battery went dead.

She felt like a homeless person as she struggled with her luggage, the suitcase falling over every other minute, and when she’d bend down to set it upright, her other bags would slide off her shoulders. Cold and irritable, she made her way to the modern Bellevue at First Avenue and East 27th, a full-service hospital center with a glass atrium entrance, a garden, a renowned trauma unit and ICU, and a forensic psychiatric floor for male patients whose alleged crimes ranged from jumping a turnstile to murdering John Lennon.

The phone on Benton’s desk rang just minutes after he and Scarpetta were disconnected. He was sure it was her, trying him back.

“What happened?” he said.

“I was about to ask you that.” Jaime Berger’s voice.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were Kay. She’s having some problem—”

“I’d say. Nice of you to mention it when we spoke earlier. Let’s see. That would have been six, seven hours ago? Why didn’t you say something?”

Berger must have read Gotham Gotcha.

“It’s complicated,” Benton said.

“I’m sure it is. We have a number of complications to deal with. I’m two minutes from the hospital. Meet me in the cafeteria.”

Pete Marino’s one-bedroom walk-up in Harlem was close enough to Manna’s Soul Food that he lived and breathed fried chicken and short ribs. It was unfair to a man whose deprivation of food and drink had created an insatiable appetite for everything he couldn’t have.

His makeshift dining area was a TV tray and straight-back chair overlooking the constant traffic on Fifth Avenue. He stacked deli turkey on a slice of whole-wheat bread, which he folded in half and dipped into a puddle of Nathan’s Coney Island mustard on a paper plate. He drank a Sharp’s nonalcoholic beer, about a third of the bottle in two swallows. Since he’d fled from Charleston, he’d lost fifty pounds and certain parts of his personality. Boxes of biker clothes, including an impressive collection of Harley-Davidson leather, went to a bazaar on 116th Sreet, where in exchange he got three suits, one blazer, two pairs of dress shoes, and a variety of shirts and ties, all knockoffs made in China.

He no longer wore his diamond stud, leaving a tiny hole badly located in his right earlobe, which somehow seemed a symbol of his have-not, off-center life. He’d quit shaving his scalp as smooth as a bowling ball, and what gray hair hadn’t abandoned him circled his large head like part of a tarnished silver halo held up by his ears. He’d made a pact to give up women until he was ready, and his motorcycle and pickup truck were pointless when there was no place to park, so he’d given them up, too. His therapist at the treatment center, Nancy, had helped him comprehend the importance of self-control in his day-to-day interactions with other people, no matter what was wrong with them or what they had coming to them.

She said in her descriptive way that alcohol was the lighted match that ignited the bonfire of his anger, and had gone on to explain that his drinking was a fatal disease he’d acquired honestly from his blue-collar, uneducated, and inadequate father who got drunk and violent every payday. In short, Marino had inherited this fatal disease, and based on the brisk business at every bar and liquor store he quickly walked past, it was an epidemic. He decided it had been around since the Garden of Eden, where it wasn’t an apple but a bottle of bourbon that the snake had given to Eve, which she in turn had shared with Adam, and that had led to sex and being thrown out of paradise with nothing but the fig leaves on their backs.

Nancy warned Marino if he didn’t religiously attend AA meetings, he would become a dry drunk, which was an individual who got angry, nasty, compulsive, and out of control without the benefit of a six-pack or two. The nearest gathering place of the AAs, as Marino called them, was a church not far from the Professional African Hair Braiding Center, and therefore quite convenient for him. But he hadn’t become a regular or even an irregular. When he’d first moved here, he’d attended three times in three days, uncomfortable as hell when the participants, suspiciously kind and friendly, had gone around the room, introducing themselves, giving him no choice but to solemnly swear himself in, as if he were on trial.

My name’s Pete and I’m an alcoholic.

Hi, Pete.

He sent Nancy e-mails explaining that it went against the nature and training of a cop to confess to anything, especially in a room packed with strangers, any one of whom might turn out to be a potential dry-drunk shitcan Marino might have to lock up someday. Besides, it had taken only three meetings for him to complete all twelve steps, although he’d decided against making a list of persons he’d harmed and making amends. His reason was step nine, which clearly stated that one shouldn’t make amends if it would only further injure whoever had been harmed, and he decided that was everyone.

Step ten was easier, and he had filled an entire notebook with the names of those who had wronged him throughout his life.

He hadn’t included Scarpetta on either list until a strange coincidence occurred. He found the apartment where he now lived, made a deal with the landlord to lease it at an affordable price in exchange for services, such as handling evictions, only to discover the location was so close to former President Bill Clinton’s office that Marino often walked past the fourteen-story building on his way to the subway station at 125th and Lenox. Thinking of Bill Clinton caused Marino to think of Hillary Clinton, and that caused him to think about women who were powerful enough to be the president or some other world leader. That led to thoughts of Scarpetta.

It had gotten to where he almost confused the two in his fantasies. He would see Hillary on CNN, then see Scarpetta on CNN, and by the time he changed channels in a desperate attempt to divert his attention with ESPN or maybe a pay-per-view movie, he was depressed. His heart would ache like an abscessed tooth. He would obsess about Scarpetta and the lists she wasn’t on. He would jot her name on one list, then scratch through it and jot it on the other. He fantasized about what it would be like if she were president. He would suddenly find himself on the Secret Service’s security threat list and have to escape to Canada.

Maybe Mexico. He’d spent several years in South Florida and could handle Spanish-speaking people better than he could those who spoke French. He’d never understood the French, and didn’t like their food. What did it say about a country that didn’t have a national beer, like Budweiser, Corona, Dos Equis, Heineken, or Red Stripe?

He finished a second turkey roll-up, took another slug of Sharp’s, and watched people whose only ambitions were West Indian take-out, boutiques, juice bars, tailor shops, or maybe the nearby Apollo theater, the noise of cars, trucks, and pedestrians a jarring orchestra that Marino didn’t mind in the least. In warm weather he kept his windows open until he couldn’t stand the dust. What he avoided was silence. He’d had plenty enough of that in rehab, where he wasn’t allowed to listen to music or watch TV, couldn’t fill his head with anything but the confessions of drunks and drug addicts, and his own haunted thoughts and memories of embarrassingly naked talks with Nancy.

He got up from his chair and collected his soggy paper plate, his napkin, his empty Sharp’s bottle. The kitchen was no more than six steps away, with a small window above the sink that afforded him a view of artificial turf-covered concrete and aluminum tables and chairs surrounded by a chain-link fence—what was advertised as the apartment building’s backyard.

On the counter was his computer, and he read the gossip column from this morning that he’d saved on the desktop, determined to discover who was behind it, then find the scumbag and do something that would rearrange his or her body parts permanently.

No investigative tool he knew of worked. He could Google Gotham Gotcha until the cows came home, and nothing that popped up told him a damn thing he didn’t already know. It was useless trying to trace the columnist through the advertising companies that paid to push foods, liquor, books, electronics, movies, and TV shows. There was no pattern, only the validation that millions of fans were addicted to a fucking gossip column that this morning had made the worst episode of Marino’s life its centerpiece.

His phone rang.

It was Detective Mike Morales.

“What’s up,” Marino said.

“Data mining, bro,” Morales said in his slow, lazy way.

“I’m not your bro. Don’t waste your rapper-talk shit on me.”

Morales’s MO was to come across as half asleep and bored, and doped up on sedatives or painkillers, which Marino doubted, but then again, he didn’t know. Behind Morales’s haze was a snobby bastard who had gone to Dartmouth, then Johns Hopkins, where he’d completed medical school and decided he’d rather be one of New York’s finest, a cop, which Marino didn’t take at face value. Nobody who could be a doctor would end up a cop.

Besides, he was a bullshit artist who circulated all sorts of wild stories about himself and laughed his ass off when other cops believed him. Supposedly, his cousin was the president of Bolivia, and his father had moved the family to America because he believed in capitalism and was tired of herding llamas. Supposedly, Morales had grown up in the projects of Chicago and had been a pal of Barack Obama until politics interfered, which seemed reasonable to those who didn’t know better. No presidential candidate would want to be friends with someone who used words like bro and looked like a member of a street gang, right down to his half-mast baggy jeans, big gold chains and rings, and cornrow hair.

“Been running queries all day—not to be confused with homos, bro,” Morales said.

“Got no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Queer-ies? I forgot you got no sense of humor and barely finished high school. Looking for the usual patterns, trends, modus operandi, complaints, from here to Dollywood, and I think I hit on something.”

“What besides Berger?” Marino said.

“What is it about women like her and Kay Scarpetta? It might be worth dying to have her hands all over me. Goddamn. Can you imagine doing her and Berger at the same time? Well, who am I talking to? Of course you can imagine it.”

Marino’s dislike of Morales instantly turned to hate. He was always screwing with Marino, putting him down, and the only reason Marino didn’t screw him back, only harder, was Marino’s self-imposed probation. Benton had asked Berger for a favor. If she hadn’t granted it, God knows where Marino would be. Probably a dispatcher in some shitbox small-town police department somewhere. Or a drunk in a homeless shelter. Or dead.

“It’s possible our killer’s struck before,” Morales said. “I’ve found two other homicides that are somewhat similar. Not New York, but remember Oscar’s self-employed and doesn’t, quote, go to the office. He’s got a car. He’s got disposable income because he gets a tax-free check from his family every birthday, and right now the limit’s up to twelve grand—their way of not feeling guilty about their freako only son. He’s got no one to support but himself. So we got no idea how much he travels or what he does, now, do we? I might just get a couple of oldie goldies cleared while I’m at it.”

Marino opened the refrigerator, found another Sharp’s, twisted off the cap, and hurled it into the sink, where it clattered like shotgun pellets smacking a pop-up metal target.

“What two other homicides?” he asked.

“Got hits on two possibles in our database. Like I said, not New York cases, which is why they didn’t come to mind. Both in the summer of 2003, two months apart. A fourteen-year-old kid hooked on oxys. Found nude, hands and ankles bound, strangled with a ligature that was missing from the scene. From a good family in Greenwich, Connecticut. Body dumped near the Bugatti dealership. Unsolved, no suspects.”

Marino said, “Where was Oscar the summer of 2003?”

“Same place he is now. Same job, living his whacked life in his same apartment. Meaning he could have been anywhere.”

“I’m not seeing the connection. The kid’s what? Doing blows for drugs and got picked up by the wrong customer? That’s what it sounds like to me. And you got reason to think Oscar Bane’s into teenage boys?”

“You ever notice we don’t know what the hell people are into until after they start raping and murdering and it comes out in the wash? It could have been Oscar. Like I said, he drives. He can afford to get around and has plenty of time on his hands. He’s strong as hell. We should keep an open mind.”

“What about the other case? Another teenage boy?”

“A woman.”

“So tell me who and why Oscar might have done her,” Marino said.

“Oops.” Morales yawned loudly. “I’m reshuffling my paperwork. Out of order, me, oh, my. She was first, then the kid. Beautiful, twenty-one, just moved to Baltimore from a rural town in North Carolina, got a nothing job with a radio station, was hoping to get into television, and instead got involved in some extracurricular activities to keep herself in oxys. So she was vulnerable to being picked up. Nude, hands bound, strangled with a ligature that wasn’t found at the scene. Body found in a Dumpster near the harbor.”

Marino said, “DNA in either case?”

“Nothing useful, and there was no sign of sexual assault. Negative for seminal fluid.”

“I’m still waiting for the connection,” Marino said. “Homicides where people are probably doing tricks for drugs and end up bound and strangled and dumped are a dime a dozen.”

“You aware Terri Bridges had a thin gold chain around her left ankle? Nobody knows where it came from. Kind of weird she had no other jewelry on, and when I pushed Oscar about the ankle bracelet, he said he’d never seen it before.”

“And?”

“And these other two cases, same thing. No jewelry except a thin gold bracelet around the left ankle. Same side as the heart, right? Like a leg iron? Like, you’re my love slave? Could be the killer’s signature. Could be Oscar’s signature. I’m getting the case files together, still data-searching and digging for other info. Will put out alerts to the usual suspects—including the posse from your past.”

“What posse from my past?” Marino’s thoughts went from dark to black.

He couldn’t see through the storm clouds rolling in his head.

“Benton Wesley. And that hot young former agent-cop-whatever who’s unfortunately untouchable to yours truly here, if rumors are to be believed. Of course, your little discovery of the laptops when you dropped by the scene earlier today without my permission just threw her a bone.”

“I don’t need your permission. You’re not my den mother.”

“Nope. The den mother would be Berger. Maybe you should ask her who’s in charge.”

“If I need to, I will. Right now, I’m doing my job. Investigating this homicide, exactly like she expects me to do.”

He drained the last of the Sharp’s and glass clanked inside the refrigerator as he went for another one. By his calculations, if each bottle was point three percent alcohol, he could achieve the first hint of a buzz if he drank at least twelve in quick succession, which he had tried before, and had felt nothing but an urgency to pee.

Morales said, “She’s got this forensic computer company Berger’s eager to use. Lucy, as in Kay Scarpetta’s niece.”

“I know who she is.”

Marino also knew about Lucy’s company in the Village, and that Scarpetta and Benton were involved with John Jay. He knew a lot of things he chose not to discuss with Morales or anyone else. What he didn’t know was that Lucy, Benton, and Scarpetta were involved in the Terri Bridges case, or that Scarpetta and Benton were in the city right this minute.

Morales’s cocky voice: “It may relieve you to know that I don’t believe Kay will be around long enough for you to have any awkward encounters.”

There could be no doubt. Morales had read that fucking gossip column.

“She’s here to examine Oscar,” Morales said.

“What the hell for?”

“Looks like she’s the blue plate special on Oscar’s menu. He demanded her, and Berger’s giving the little guy whatever his little heart wants.”

Marino couldn’t stand the thought of Scarpetta being alone with Oscar Bane. It unnerved him that Oscar had requested her specifically, because that could mean only one thing: He was far more aware of her than he ought to be.

Marino said, “You’re suggesting he might be a serial killer, so what’s he doing with the Doc? I can’t believe Berger or anybody set her up for something like this. Especially since he could get out any minute. Jesus.”

He was pacing. In a dozen steps, he could cover his apartment’s entire square footage.

“Once she’s done, maybe she’ll buzz back to Massachusetts and you got nothing to worry about,” Morales said. “Which is good, right? Since you got plenty to worry about already.”

“That right? Why don’t you tell me.”

“I’m reminding you this is a sensitive case, and you didn’t handle it all too well when Oscar Bane poured his heart out to you last month.”

“I did it by the book.”

“Funny thing about that. Nobody gives a shit once there’s a problem. As far as your former boss Kay goes, I advise avoidance. Not that you have any reason to be in her company or show up unexpected at Bellevue. For example.”

It inflamed Marino to hear Morales call her Kay. Marino had never called her Kay, and he’d worked side by side with her, had probably spent ten thousand hours with her in the morgue, in her office, in the car, at crime scenes, in her home, including on holidays, and even having a drink or two in her hotel room when they worked cases out of town. So if he didn’t call her Kay, who the hell did Morales think he was?

“My advice to you is to make yourself scarce until Kay’s back in Massachusetts,” Morales said. “She doesn’t need any more stress, you hearing me, bro? And what I don’t want is next time we call her in for assistance, she says no because of you. We don’t need her quitting her position at John Jay, quitting as a consultant because of you. Then Benton would quit next, if he wants to keep the wife happy. So we lose both of them because of you. I plan on spending a lot of years working with both of them. Being the Three Musketeers.”

“You don’t know them.” Marino was so angry, his heart was pounding in his neck.

“They quit and it will hit the news,” Morales said. “And you know how things get passed down the line. A scandal because it will be the front page of the Post, a headline ten feet tall that Jaime Berger, the ace prosecutor of sex crimes, hired a sex offender and maybe she gets fired. Unbelievable how you can bring down the house of cards, man. Anyway, I gotta get off the phone. About what’s on the Internet, what happened between you and Kay. Not to pry—”

“Then fucking don’t,” Marino snapped.

Chapter 4

Oscar Bane’s hairless, shackled legs dangled over the edge of the examination table inside one of the several infirmaries in the psychiatric prison ward. His eyes, one blue, the other green, gave Scarpetta the unsettling sensation that two people were staring at her.

A Department of Corrections officer had the solid, silent presence of the Rockies as he stood near the wall, allowing her space to work, but close enough to intervene should Oscar become violent, which seemed unlikely. He was frightened. He’d been crying. She sensed nothing aggressive about him as he sat on the table, self-conscious in a thin cotton gown that was long on him but periodically sneaked open below the tie at his waist. Chains quietly clanked whenever he shifted his shackled legs or cuffed hands to cover himself.

Oscar was a little person, a dwarf. While his extremities and fingers were disproportionately short, his flimsy gown revealed that he was well endowed elsewhere. One might go so far as to say that God had overcompensated him for what Scarpetta suspected was achondroplasia, caused by a spontaneous mutation of the gene responsible for the formation of bone, primarily targeting the long bones of the arms and legs. His torso and head were disproportionately large for his extremities, and his short, thick fingers diverged between the middle and ring fingers, giving his hands a somewhat trident appearance. Beyond that, he appeared normal anatomically except for what he had done to himself at considerable misery and expense.

His startling white teeth had been bonded or bleached, possibly crowned, and his short hair was dyed bright yellow-gold. His nails were buffed and perfectly squared, and although Scarpetta couldn’t swear to it, she credited his tranquil brow to injections of Botox. Most remarkable was his body, which looked as if it were sculpted of beige Carrara marble with bluish-gray veining. Perfectly balanced in its musculature, it was almost completely devoid of hair. The overall effect of his appearance, with his intensely different eyes and Apollo-like radiance, was rather surreal and bizarre, and she found Benton’s comment about Oscar’s phobias quite strange. He could not look the way he did without worshipping at the feet of pain and the practitioners who inflicted it.

She felt the probe of his blue-green gaze as she opened the crime scene case Benton kept in his office for her. Unlike those whose professions didn’t demand forceps, evidence envelopes and bags and containers, or camera equipment, forensic light sources, sharp blades, and all the rest, Scarpetta was forced to live a life of redundancy. If bottled water couldn’t make it through airport security, a crime scene case certainly wouldn’t, and flaunting her medical examiner’s shield only drew more unwanted attention.

She’d tried it once at Logan and had ended up in a room where she was interrogated, searched, and subjected to other invasions to make sure she wasn’t a terrorist who, the TSA officers had to admit, just happened to be the spitting image of that lady medical examiner on CNN. In the end, she wasn’t allowed to carry the crime scene case on the plane anyway, and refusing to check it in baggage, she ended up driving. Now she kept duplicates of all security threats in Manhattan.

She asked Oscar, “Do you understand the purpose of these samples and why you’re under no obligation to give them?”

He watched her arrange envelopes, forceps, a tape measure, and various other forensic items on the white paper-covered examination table. He turned away from her and stared at the wall.

The corrections officer said, “Look at the doctor when she talks to you, Oscar.”

Oscar continued to stare at the wall.

In a tense, tenor voice, he said, “Dr. Scarpetta, could you repeat what you said, please?”

“You signed a release, agreeing it was all right for me to take certain biological samples,” she replied. “I’m confirming you understand the scientific information these samples can provide, and that no one has asked for them.”

Oscar still hadn’t been charged with a crime. She wondered if Benton, Berger, and the police interpreted his malingering to mean he was going to confess any minute to a murder Scarpetta knew nothing about. This forced her into an untenable and unprecedented position. Since he wasn’t under arrest, she couldn’t divulge anything he revealed to her unless he waived the doctor-patient privilege, and the only waiver he had signed so far was one that allowed her to take biological samples.

Oscar looked at her and said, “I know what they’re for. DNA. I know why you need my hair.”

“The samples will be analyzed and the labs will have your DNA profile. Hair can tell us if you’re a chronic substance abuser. There are other things the police, the scientists look for. Trace evidence . . .”

“I know what it is.”

“I’m making sure you understand.”

“I don’t do drugs, and I’m certainly not a chronic substance abuser of any description,” he said in a shaky voice, facing the wall again. “And my DNA and fingerprints are all over her apartment. My blood’s in there. I cut my thumb.”

He showed her his right thumb, a Band-Aid around the second knuckle.

“I let them fingerprint me when they brought me in,” he said. “I’m not in any database. They’ll see I’ve never committed a crime. I don’t get parking tickets. I stay out of trouble.”

He stared at the forceps she picked up, and fear shadowed his mismatched eyes.

“I don’t need those,” he said. “I’ll do it myself.”

“Have you showered since you got here?” she asked, putting down the forceps.

“No. I said I wouldn’t until you looked at me.”

“Have you washed your hands?”

“No. I’ve touched as little as possible, mainly the pencil your husband had me use during certain psychological tests. Projective figure drawings. I’ve refused to eat. I didn’t want to do anything to my body until you looked. I’m afraid of doctors. I don’t like pain.”

She tore open paper packets of swabs and applicators while he watched, as if at any moment he expected her to do something that might hurt.

“I’d like to scrape under your nails,” she said. “Only if it’s all right. We can recover trace evidence, DNA, from under fingernails, toenails.”

“I know what it’s for. You won’t find anything that shows I did anything to her. Finding her DNA means nothing. My DNA’s all over her apartment,” he repeated himself.

He sat very still while she used a plastic scraper to scrape under his nails, and she could feel his stare. She sensed his blue-green eyes like warm light as they touched her head and other parts of her, as if he was examining her while she was examining him. When she was done with the scraping and looked up at him, he was looking at the wall. He asked her not to watch while he plucked his own head hair, which she helped him place inside an envelope, and then his pubic hair, which went into another envelope. For someone so averse to pain, he didn’t flinch, but his face was tense and his forehead was beaded with sweat.

She peeled open a buccal brush, and he swabbed the inside of his cheek, and his hands trembled.

“Now please make him leave.” He meant the corrections officer. “You don’t need him here. I’m not talking with him here.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” the officer said. “It’s not your choice.”

Oscar was silent. He stared at the wall. The officer looked at Scarpetta, waiting to see what she was going to do.

“You know,” she decided, “I think we’ll be fine.”

“I’d rather not do that, Doc. He’s pretty keyed up.”

He didn’t seem keyed up, but she didn’t comment. What he seemed was dazed and upset, and on the verge of hysteria.

“What you mean is chained up like Houdini,” Oscar said. “It’s one thing to be in lockup. But I don’t need to be shackled like some serial killer. I’m surprised you didn’t roll me out in a Hannibal Lecter cage. The staff here obviously doesn’t know that mechanical restraints in psychiatric hospitals were abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. What have I done to deserve this?”

He raised his cuffed hands and was sputtering, he was so incensed.

“It’s because ignorant people like you think I’m a circus freak,” he said.

“Hey, Oscar,” the guard replied. “Here’s a news flash. You’re not in a normal psychiatric hospital. This is the prison ward you checked yourself into.” He said to Scarpetta, “I’d prefer to stay, Doc.”

“A freak. That’s what ignorant people like you think.”

“We’re fine,” she repeated to the officer, and she could understand why Berger was exercising caution.

Oscar was quick to point out anything he perceived as unfair. He was quick to remind everyone he was a little person, when in fact that wasn’t the first thing people probably noticed about him, unless he was standing. Certainly, it wasn’t what had caught her attention the instant she’d walked into the infirmary. His different-colored eyes had flashed at her, and seemed a more startling green and blue in contrast to the brightness of his teeth and hair, and although his features weren’t flawless, the way they fit together had invited her to stare, to study. She continued to wonder just what it was that Oscar Bane reminded her of. Perhaps a bust on an ancient gold coin.

“I’ll be right out here,” the officer said.

He left, shutting the door, which like every door on the ward had no handles. Only the corrections officers had keys, so it was important to keep the double-cylinder deadbolt in the locked position. If the bolt was out, the door wasn’t going to shut all the way and accidentally trap a member of the staff or visiting consultant such as herself inside a small room with a two-hundred-pound man who’d just dismembered some woman he’d met in a bar, for example.

Scarpetta picked up the tape measure and said to Oscar, “I’d like to measure your arms and legs. Get your exact height and weight.”

“I’m four foot and a quarter,” he said. “I weigh one hundred and nine pounds. I wear a size-five shoe. Sometimes a four. Or a six and a half if it’s a woman’s. Sometimes a five and a half. It depends on the shoe. I have a wide foot.”

“Left arm from the glenohumeral joint to the tip of your third finger. If you don’t mind holding your arms as straight as you can. That’s perfect. Sixteen and one-eighth inches for the left. Sixteen and two-eighths for the right. Not unusual. Most people’s arms aren’t precisely the same length. Now your legs, if you can hold them straight out. I’m going to measure from your acetabulum, your hip joint.”

She felt it through the thin cotton of his gown, and measured the length of his legs to the tip of his toes, and the shackles clacked quietly and his muscles bulged as he moved. His legs were only about two inches longer than his arms, and slightly bowed. She wrote down the measurements and retrieved other paperwork from the countertop.

“Let me confirm what they gave me when I got here,” she said. “You’re thirty-four, your middle name is Lawrence. You’re right-handed, according to this,” and she got as far as his date of birth and address in the city before he interrupted her.

“Aren’t you going to ask why I want you here? Why I demanded it? Why I made sure Jaime Berger was informed I wouldn’t cooperate unless you came? Screw her.” His eyes were watering and his voice wavered. “Terri would still be here if it wasn’t for her.”

He turned his head to the right and looked at the wall.

“Are you having trouble hearing me, Oscar?” Scarpetta asked.

“My right ear,” he said in a voice that intermittently shook and changed octaves.

“But you can hear with your left ear?”

“Chronic ear infections when I was a boy. I’m deaf in my right ear.”

“Do you know Jaime Berger?”

“She’s cold-blooded, doesn’t give a shit about anybody. You’re nothing like her. You care about victims. I’m a victim. I need you to care about me. You’re all I’ve got.”

“In what way are you a victim?” Scarpetta labeled envelopes.

“My life’s been ruined. The person who means most to me is gone. I’ll never see her again. She’s gone. I have nothing left. I don’t care if I die. I know who you are and what you do. I would even if you weren’t famous. Famous or not, I would know who and what you are. I had to think fast, very fast. After finding . . . after finding Terri . . .” His voice cracked, and he blinked back tears. “I told the police to bring me here. Where I’d be safe.”

“Safe from what?”

“I said I might be a danger to myself. And they asked, ‘What about to others?’ And I said no, only to myself. I requested solitary confinement on the prison ward because I can’t be in general population. They’re calling me the Midget Murderer up here. Laughing at me. The police have no probable cause to arrest me, but they think I’m deranged and don’t want me disappearing, and I do have money and a passport, because I come from a good family in Connecticut, although my parents aren’t very kind. I don’t care if I die. In the minds of the police and Jaime Berger, I’m guilty.”

“They’re doing what they can to accommodate you. You’re here. You met with Dr. Wesley. Now I’m here,” Scarpetta reminded him.

“They’re just using you. They don’t care about me.”

“I promise not to let anybody use me.”

“They already are. To cover their asses. They’ve already convicted me, aren’t looking for anybody else. The real killer’s out there somewhere. He knows who I am. Someone will be next. Whoever did this will do it again. They have a motive, a cause, and I was warned but I didn’t think they meant Terri. It never occurred to me they intended to hurt Terri.”

“Warned?”

“They communicate with me. I have these communications.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“If you don’t know who they are, you have to be careful who you tell. I tried to warn Jaime Berger a month ago about how unsafe it was for me to come forward with what I know. But I never imagined I was putting Terri at risk. They never communicated with me about Terri. So I didn’t know about that, about the danger to her.”

He wiped tears with the backs of his hands, and his chains clanked.

“How did you warn Jaime Berger? Or try to warn her?”

“I called her office. She’ll tell you. Get her to tell you what a cold-blooded human being she is. Get her to tell you how much she cares. She doesn’t.” Tears rolled down his face. “And now Terri’s gone. I knew something bad was going to happen, but I didn’t know it would be to her. And you’re wondering why. Well, I don’t know. Maybe they hate little people, want to wipe us off the planet. Like the Nazis did to the Jews, the homosexuals and gypsies, the handicapped, the mentally ill. Whoever threatened Hitler’s Master Race ended up in the ovens. Somehow they’ve stolen my identity and my thoughts, and they know everything about me. I reported it but Berger didn’t care. I demanded to have mind justice, but she wouldn’t even get on the phone with me.”

“Tell me about mind justice.”

“When your mind is stolen. Justice is getting it back. It’s her fault. She could have stopped it. I don’t have my mind back. I don’t have Terri. All I have is you. Please help me.”

Scarpetta slipped her gloved hands into the pockets of her lab coat and felt herself slipping deeper into trouble. She didn’t want to be Oscar Bane’s physician. She should tell him right now she wanted no further relationship with him. She should open that beige-painted steel door and never look back.

“They killed her. I know they did it,” Oscar said.

“Who do you think they are?”

“I don’t know who they are. They’ve been following me, some specialized group supporting some cause. I’m their target. It’s been going on for months, at least. How can she be gone? Maybe I am a danger to myself. Maybe I do want to die.”

He began to cry.

“I loved her more than anyone . . . ever in my life. I keep thinking I’ll wake up. It isn’t true. It can’t be true. I’m not really here. I hate Jaime Berger. Maybe they’ll kill someone she loves. See how that feels. Let her live that hell. I hope it happens. I hope someone murders whoever she loves most in her life.”

“Do you wish you could kill someone she loves?” Scarpetta asked.

She tucked several tissues into his cuffed hands. Tears fell, and his nose ran.

He said, “I don’t know who they are. If I’m out there, they’ll follow me again. They know where I am right this minute. They try to control me through fear. Through harassment.”

“How are they doing this? Do you have reason to believe someone is stalking you?”

“Advanced electronics. There are countless unclassified devices you can order off the Internet. Microwave-transmitted voice to skull. Silent sound. Through-the-wall radar. I have every reason to believe I’ve been selected as a mind-control target, and if you don’t think things like this happen, think back to the human radiation experiments conducted by the government after World War Two. Those people were secretly fed radioactive materials, injected with plutonium for purposes of nuclear warfare research. I’m not making this up.”

“I’m aware of the radiation experiments,” Scarpetta said. “There’s no denying that happened.”

“I don’t know what they want from me,” he said. “It’s Berger’s fault. All of it’s her fault.”

“Explain that to me.”

“The DA’s office investigates identity theft, stalking, harassment, and I called and asked to talk to her, and they wouldn’t let me. I told you. They put me on the phone with this asshole cop. He thought I was a lunatic, of course, and nobody did anything. There was no investigation. No one cares. I trust you. I know you care about people. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Please help me. Please. I’m completely unprotected. I have no shields here. No protections.”

She checked shallow abrasions on the left side of his neck, noting that the stage of scab formation looked relatively fresh.

“Why would you trust me?” she asked.

“I can’t believe you’d say that. What manipulation are you trying?”

“I don’t manipulate people. I have no intention of manipulating you.”

He studied her face as she studied more abrasions.

“Okay,” he said. “I understand you have to be careful what you say. It doesn’t matter. I respected you before all that. You don’t know who they are, either. You have to be careful.”

“Before all what?”

“You were brave to discuss Bhutto’s assassination. Terri and I watched you on CNN. You had a long day and night on CNN, talking about it, were so compassionate and respectful about that terrible tragedy. And brave and matter-of-fact, but I could tell what you felt in your heart. I could tell you were as devastated as we were. You were devastated, and it wasn’t for show. You worked hard to hide it. I knew I could trust you. I understood. Terri did, too, of course. But it was disappointing. I told her she had to think of it from your perspective. Because I knew I could trust you.”

“I’m not sure why seeing me on TV would make you think you could trust me.”

She retrieved a camera from her crime scene case.

When he didn’t answer her, she said, “Tell me why Terri was disappointed.”

“You know why, and it was completely understandable. You respect people,” Oscar said. “You care about them. You help them. I stay away from doctors unless I have no choice. I can’t stand pain. I tell them to put me under, give me an injection of Demerol, do anything if it’s going to hurt. I admit it. I’m afraid of doctors. I’m afraid of pain. I can’t look at a needle if I’m injected. I can’t see it or I’ll faint. I’ll tell them to cover my eyes or inject me where I can’t see it. You aren’t going to hurt me, are you? Or give me a shot?”

“No. Nothing I do should be painful,” she said as she checked abrasions under his left ear.

They were shallow, with no sign of epithelial regeneration at the edges. Again, the scabbing was fresh. Oscar seemed reassured by what she said, and soothed by her touch.

“Whoever’s following me, spying on me,” he started on that again. “Maybe the government, but whose government? Maybe some hate cell or some cult. I know you’re not afraid of anyone or any government or any cult or group or you wouldn’t talk about the things you do on TV. Terri said the same thing. You’re her hero. If only she knew I was sitting in this room with you, talking about her. Maybe she knows. Do you believe in the after-life? That the loved one’s spirit doesn’t leave you?”

His bloodshot eyes looked up, as if looking for Terri.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.

“Let me make sure you understand something,” Scarpetta said.

She pulled up a plastic chair and sat close to the table.

“I know nothing about this case,” she said. “I don’t know what you supposedly did or didn’t do. I don’t know who Terri is.”

Shock registered on his face. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I was called in to examine your injuries, and agreed to do so. And I’m probably not the person you should be speaking to. Your well-being is of my utmost concern, so I’m obliged to tell you that the more you talk to me about Terri, about what happened, the bigger the risk.”

“You’re the only one I should be speaking to.”

He wiped his nose and eyes, and stared at her as if he were trying to figure out something very important.

He said, “You have your reasons. Maybe you know something.”

“You should have a lawyer. Then every word you say is privileged, unconditionally.”

“You’re a physician. Whatever we discuss is privileged. You can’t allow the police to interfere with my medical care, and they have no right to any information unless I give permission or there’s a court order. You must protect my dignity. That’s the law.”

“It’s also the law that if you’re charged with a crime, my records can be subpoenaed by the prosecution or the defense. You need to think about that before you continue to talk to me about Terri, about what happened last night. Anything I say could be subpoenaed,” she emphasized.

“Jaime Berger had her chance to talk to me. She’s nothing like you. She deserves to be fired. She deserves to suffer the way I am and to lose what I’ve lost. It’s her fault.”

“Do you want to cause Jaime Berger harm?” Scarpetta asked.

“I’d never harm anybody. But she’s harmed herself. It’s her fault. The universe repays in kind. If she loses someone she loves, it will be her fault.”

“I’ll try to impress it upon you again. If you’re charged with a crime, I can be subpoenaed and will have no choice but to disclose anything I’ve observed. Yes. I absolutely can be subpoenaed by Jaime Berger. Do you understand that?”

His different-colored eyes stared at her, his body rigid with anger. Scarpetta was aware of the heavy steel door, wondering if she should open it.

“They won’t find any justifiable cause to pin this on me,” he said. “I didn’t stop them from taking my clothes, my car. I’ve given consent to go inside my apartment because I’ve got nothing to hide, and you can see for yourself the way I’m forced to live. I want you to see it. I insist you see it. I said you have to see it or they can’t go in. There’s no evidence I’ve ever hurt Terri unless they make it up. And maybe they will. But you’ll protect me because you’re my witness. You’ll watch after me no matter where I am, and if anything happens to me, you’ll know it’s part of a plan. And you can’t tell anyone anything I don’t want them to know. Right now, legally, you can’t reveal anything that goes on between us. Not even to your husband. I allowed him to do my psychological eval, and he’ll tell you from my mental-health assessment that I’m not crazy. I trust his expertise. More important, I knew he could get to you.”

“Did you tell him what you’re telling me?”

“I let him do the eval, and that’s all. I said he could check my mind and you could check the rest of me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t cooperate. You can’t tell him what I say. Not even him. If that changes and I get falsely accused and you get subpoenaed? By then you’ll believe in me and fight for me anyway. You should believe in me. It’s not like you’ve never heard of me.”

“Why would you think I’ve heard of you?”

“I see.” His stare was fierce. “You’ve been instructed not to talk. Fine. I don’t like this game. But okay. Fine. All I ask is you listen to me and not betray me or violate your sworn oath.”

Scarpetta should stop now. But she was thinking about Berger. Oscar hadn’t threatened Berger. Not yet. Unless he did, Scarpetta couldn’t reveal a word he said, but that didn’t stop her from worrying about Berger, about anybody close to Berger. She wished he would come right out with it and say in no uncertain terms that he was a danger to Berger or to someone. Then no more confidentiality, and at the very least, he would be arrested for communicating a threat.

“I’m going to take notes, which I’ll keep in a file as a consultation,” Scarpetta said.

“Yes, notes. I want a record of the truth in your hands. In case something happens.”

She slipped a pad of paper and pen out of a pocket of her lab coat.

“In case I die,” he said. “There’s probably no way out. They’ll probably get me. This will probably be my last New Year’s Day. Probably I don’t care.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Whatever I do, wherever I go, they know.”

“What about right now?”

“Maybe. But you know?” He looked at the door. “There’s a lot of steel to get through. I’m not sure they can get through it, but I’m going to be careful what I say and what I think. You need to listen carefully. You need to read my mind while you can. Eventually, they’ll completely control what’s left of my free will, my thoughts. Maybe what they’re doing is practice. They have to practice on someone. We know the CIA’s had covert behavior-modification neuro-electromagnetic programs for half a century, and who do you think they practice on? And what do you think happens if you go to the police? Mysteriously, no report is filed. Same thing that happened when I reported it to Ms. Berger. I was ignored. And now Terri’s dead. I’m not paranoid. I’m not suffering some schizoid, psychotic episode. I don’t have a personality disorder. I’m not delusional. I don’t believe the Air Loom Gang is after me with their infernal machine, although one has to wonder about the politicians and if that’s why we’re at war in the Middle East. Of course, I’m being facetious, although not much would surprise me anymore.”

“You seem very well versed in psychology and psychiatric history.”

“I have a Ph.D. I teach the history of psychiatry at Gotham College.”

She’d never heard of it and asked him where it was.

“It’s nowhere,” he said.

Chapter 5

Her username was Shrew because her husband used to call her that. He didn’t always mean it as an insult. Sometimes it was a term of endearment.

“Don’t be such a goddamn shrew,” he would say, verbatim, after her complaints about his cigars or not picking up after himself. “Let’s have a drink, my darling little shrew” usually meant it was five p.m. and he was in a decent mood and wanted to watch the news.

She’d carry in their drinks and a bowl of cashews, and he’d pat the cushion next to him on the tawny corduroy couch. After a half-hour of the news, which, needless to say, was never good, he would get quiet and not call her a shrew or talk to her, and dinner would be the sounds of eating, after which he would retreat to the bedroom and read. One day he went out on an errand and never came back.

She had no illusions about what he’d have to say were he still here. He wouldn’t approve of her being the anonymous system administrator for the Gotham Gotcha website. He would call what she did disgusting detritus that was intended to ruthlessly exploit and inflict disease upon people, and would say it was insane for her to work a job where she’d never met any of those involved or for that matter didn’t know their names. He would say it was outrageously suspicious that Shrew did not know who the anonymous columnist was.

Most of all, he would be aghast that she had been hired over the phone by an “agent” who wasn’t an American. He said he lived in the UK, but he sounded about as English as Tony Soprano, and had forced Shrew to sign numerous legal documents without her own counsel reviewing them first. When she’d done everything asked of her, she was given a trial run of one month. Without pay. At the end of that period, no one had called to tell her what a marvelous job she’d done or how thrilled the Boss (as Shrew thought of the anonymous columnist) was to have her onboard. She’d never heard a word.

And so she continued, and every two weeks, money was wired into her bank account. No taxes were withheld, and she received no benefits, nor was she reimbursed for any expenses she might incur, such as when she’d needed a new computer some months back and a range extender for the wireless network. She wasn’t given sick leave or vacation days or paid overtime, but as the agent had explained, it was part of the job description to be “on the call twenty-forty-seven.”

In an earlier life, Shrew had held real jobs with real companies, her last one a database marketing manager for a consulting firm. She was no tabula rasa, was all too aware that her current employment demands were unreasonable and she had grounds to sue the company if she knew whom she worked for. But she wouldn’t think of complaining. She was paid reasonably well, and it was an honor to work for an anonymous celebrity whose column was the most talked-about one in New York, if not the entire country.

The holidays were an especially busy time for Shrew. Not for personal reasons, because she really wasn’t allowed to have personal reasons for anything. But website traffic inevitably surged, and the banner on the home page was a tremendous challenge. Shrew was clever, but admittedly had never been an especially gifted graphic artist.

This time of year the publishing schedule was escalated as well. Instead of three columns per week, the Boss picked up the pace to please the fans and sponsors, and rewarded them for a year of being a faithful, enthusiastic, lucrative audience. Beginning Christmas Eve, Shrew was to post a column daily. On occasion, she was fortunate and got several at once and made adjustments, and they waited in a queue for auto release, and she was allowed a respite, could run a frivolous errand or two, or get her hair done, or go for a walk, instead of waiting for the Boss to get on with things. The Boss never thought twice about Shrew’s inconveniences, and the truth was, it might be more dismal than that.

Shrew suspected the Boss deliberately orchestrated it, no doubt through programming, so that columns were shipped one at a time although several days of them had been done in advance and were already in the can. What this implied was two important bits of intelligence.

First, unlike Shrew, the Boss had a life and stockpiled work so he or she could do other things, maybe take a trip or be with friends or family, or simply rest. Second, the Boss did think about Shrew, was invested enough in their relationship to remind her regularly that she was small and unimportant, and was owned and controlled by whoever the anonymous celebrity might be. Shrew’s was a nonexistence, and it was not her right to be granted a day or two when the work was done and she didn’t need to think about it. She was to wait on the Boss and serve at the Boss’s pleasure. The Boss answered Shrew’s prayers or didn’t, rather much with a finger on the mouse, the cursor on send.

It was fortunate, really, that Shrew would dread the holidays were she given the opportunity to enjoy them, because they were nothing more than an empty ship that took her from one year into the next, reminding her of what she didn’t have and what wasn’t ahead, and that biology was unkind and played mischievous tricks on the mind. She didn’t recall the process being a gradual one, as logic had always told her it would be—a little gray hair here, a wrinkle or stiff joint there.

It seemed that one day she looked in the mirror and didn’t find the thirty-year-old she was inside or recognize the ruin looking back at her. Whenever she’d put on her glasses these days, she discovered she was surrounded by loose, crinkled skin. She’d find that pigmented spots, like squatters, had taken up residence all over her body, and hair, like neglected landscaping, had moved from where it belonged to areas well outside the garden. She had no idea why she needed so many veins unless it was to rush extra blood to cells bent on dying for the hell of it.

It suited her that during this joyless journey between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day she’d not had a moment to herself, and was on hold, waiting for the next column, no matter how many of them might already be done, the momentum building in a crescendo to New Year’s Day, when the Boss posted twice. These, naturally, were always the most sensational.

Shrew had received the second one a little while ago and was surprised and puzzled by it. The Boss never headlined with the same public figure twice in a row, especially for today’s Daily Double, and this second column, like the first one, was solely devoted to Dr. Kay Scarpetta. No doubt it would be quite the hit because it covered all the bases: sex, violence, and the Catholic Church.

Shrew expected a swarm of comments from the fans, and possibly yet another coveted Poisoned Pen Prize, which would leave everybody guessing, just like last time, when no one showed up to collect it. But she couldn’t help puzzling rather nervously. What was it about the well-respected lady medical examiner that had set off the Boss like this?

Shrew carefully re-read the new column, making sure there were no typos or misspellings she might have missed. She fine-tuned the format as she wondered where on earth the Boss had gotten all this highly personal information she had flagged with the familiar NBS in red. Never-before-seen information was the most coveted. With rare exception, it and all gossip came from anecdotes, sightings, rumors, and fabrications sent in by fans, which were sifted through by Shrew and moved to an electronic research file accessed by the Boss. But none of the NBS information about Dr. Scarpetta was anything Shrew had sorted through or selected.

So where had the Boss gotten it?

Apparently, assuming this was true, Dr. Kay Scarpetta had grown up in a poor, uneducated Italian family: a sister who was screwing boys before puberty, a dumb cow of a mother, and a blue-collar father just off the boat, whom little Kay helped in the small family grocery store. She played the role of doctor for many years while he died of cancer in his bedroom, thus explaining her eventual addiction to death. Her priest felt sorry for her and arranged for a scholarship at a Miami parochial school, where she was the resident nerd, a whiner, and a tattletale. For good reason, the other girls hated her.

At this point in the column, the Boss switched to story mode, which was always when the writing was strongest.

. . . On this particular afternoon, little Florida cracker Kay was alone in the chemistry lab, working on a project for extra credit, when Sister Polly suddenly appeared. She flowed across the empty room in her black scapular, her wimple and veil, and nailed her severe little pious eyes onto little Kay.

“What does our Father instruct us about forgiveness, Kay?” Sister Polly demanded, her hands on her virgin hips.

“That we should forgive others as He forgives us.”

“And did you obey His word? What do you say?”

“I didn’t obey.”

“Because you tattled.”

“I was working on a math problem and had my pencils on my desk, Sister Polly, and Sarah broke them in half. I had to buy more, and she knows my family is poor . . .”

“And now you’ve just tattled again.” Sister Polly reached into a pocket and said, “God believes in restitution.” She pressed a quarter into the palm of little Kay’s hand before slapping her across the face.

Sister Polly told her to pray for her enemies and to forgive them. She severely reprimanded little Kay for being a sinner with a wagging tongue, and said she clearly needed reminding that God didn’t look kindly upon tattlers.

In the bathroom across the hall, Sister Polly locked the door and took off her black leather cincture as she ordered little Kay to remove her plaid tunic and Peter Pan collar blouse and everything under it, and bend over and hold her knees. . . .

Satisfied that the column was ready to go live, Shrew typed her system administrator password to get into the website programming. She posted the column, but not without misgiving.

Had Dr. Scarpetta done something of late that might have incited hatred in the Boss, whoever the Boss was?

Shrew gazed out the window behind her computer, momentarily reminded that throughout the entire day, a police car had been parked in front of the brownstone apartment building directly across the street. Perhaps a policeman had moved in, although she couldn’t imagine that the average policeman could afford the rents in Murray Hill. It occurred to her that the policeman might be on a stakeout. Perhaps there was a burglar or lunatic on the loose. Her thoughts returned to the Boss’s obvious intention of ruining the New Year for the lady medical examiner whom Shrew had always admired.

The last time she had seen Dr. Scarpetta on TV was a few days after Christmas, after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, and Dr. Scarpetta was explaining, diplomatically and tastefully, the damage shrapnel or a bullet or blunt-force trauma could cause, depending on what part of the brain or spinal cord was injured. Might that have something to do with the Boss’s first column this morning, and now the bonus column? Perhaps Dr. Scarpetta had touched a nerve of extreme prejudice. If so, what sort of person did Shrew work for? Was it someone who hated the Pakistanis or Islam or democracy or human rights or women in charge? Perhaps the timing was simply coincidental and completely unrelated.

But somehow Shrew didn’t think so, and her intuition gave rise to an awful speculation she’d never before considered. How did she know she didn’t work for a terrorist organization that used the infamous, highly profitable Internet gossip column to subliminally communicate with extremist sympathizers and spread propaganda and, most important, fund terrorist plots?

Shrew didn’t know. But if she was right, it was simply a matter of time before someone came looking for her, either Homeland Security or a member of the very terrorist sect behind Shrew’s highly secretive and, frankly, suspicious job—one she had never uttered a word about to anyone.

To her knowledge, the only people who knew she worked for Gotham Gotcha were the Italian agent who had hired her over the phone (a man she’d never met and whose name she didn’t know), and the anonymous celebrity who actually wrote the columns and e-mailed them to Shrew for a light copyedit and format. Then she’d post them, and the programming would do the rest, and the columns would go live at one minute past midnight. If terrorists were involved, then Dr. Scarpetta was a target. They were trying to destroy her professionally and personally, and her life could be in danger.

Shrew needed to warn her.

How could she do that without admitting she was the anonymous system administrator for the anonymous website?

She couldn’t.

She pondered this as she sat in front of her computer, staring out her window at the police car, wondering if there might be a way to get an anonymous message to her.

At the very moment she was having these paranoid and decidedly unpleasant thoughts, someone pounded on her door, startling her. Maybe it was that strange young man in the apartment across from hers. Like most people who had caring families, he had gone away for the holidays. Maybe he was back and wanted to borrow something or ask a question.

She looked through the peephole and was shocked to see a big rugged face, a balding head, and out-of-style wire-rimmed glasses.

Oh God in heaven.

She snatched up the phone and called 911.

Inside Bellevue’s cafeteria, Benton Wesley and Jaime Berger sat in a pink booth against the back wall, where they could have privacy. People who didn’t recognize Berger often noticed her anyway.

She had compelling good looks, was of medium height and slim, with deep blue eyes and lustrous dark hair. Always smartly dressed, today she wore a charcoal cashmere blazer, a button-up black sweater, a black skirt with a slit in back, and black pumps with small silver buckles on the sides. Berger wasn’t provocative, but she wasn’t afraid to look like a woman. It was well known that if the attention of lawyers, cops, or violent offenders began wandering over her physical landscape, she’d lean close, point at her eyes, and say, “Look here. Look right here when I’m talking to you.”

She reminded him of Scarpetta. Her voice had the same low timbre that commanded attention because it didn’t ask for it, her features similar in their keenness, and her physical architectural style completely to his liking, simple lines that led to generous curves. He had his fetishes. He admitted it. But as he had emphasized to Dr. Thomas a short while ago over the phone, he was faithful to Scarpetta and always would be. Even in his imagination, he was faithful to her, would instantly change channels when his fantasies strayed to erotic dramas that didn’t feature her. He would never cheat on her. Never.

His behavior hadn’t always been so virtuous. What Dr. Thomas had said was true. He’d cheated on his first wife, Connie, and if he was honest about it, the betrayal had begun early on when he’d decided it was perfectly admissible and, in fact, healthy to enjoy the same magazines and movies other males did, especially during his four monk-like months at the FBI Academy when there was little to do at night except have a few beers in the Board-room, then return to his dorm where he could briefly relieve his stress and escape his uptight life.

He had maintained this clandestine but healthy sexual routine throughout his sensible marriage until he and Scarpetta had worked one too many cases together and ended up in the Travel-Eze Motel. He’d lost his wife and half of a considerable inheritance, and their three daughters continued to have nothing to do with him. To this day, some of his former colleagues from his FBI past still had no respect for him, or at least they blamed it on his morals. He didn’t care.

Worse than not caring and a vacuum where there should be a spark of remorse was the truth that he would do it all again, if he could. And he did do it all again, often, in his mind. He would replay that scene in the motel room, where he was bleeding from cuts that required stitches, and Scarpetta had tended to him. She’d barely dressed his wounds before he was undressing her. It was beyond fantasy.

What always struck him when he looked back on it was how he’d managed to work around her for the better part of five years and not succumb sooner. The more he’d flipped back through the pages of his life during his talks with Dr. Thomas, the more amazed he was by a number of things, not the least of which was Scarpetta’s imperviousness. She honestly hadn’t known how he felt, was far more aware of how she felt. Or at least that’s what she told him when he’d admitted that with rare exception, whenever she’d seen him with his briefcase in his lap, it meant he was hiding an erection.

Including the first time we met?

Probably.

In the morgue?

Yes.

Reviewing cases in that awful conference room of yours at Quantico, going through reports, photographs, having those relentless, endless, serious conversations?

Especially then. Afterward, when I’d walk you back to your car, it was all I could do not to get in it and . . .

If I’d known,Scarpetta had told him one night, when they were drinking a lot of wine, I would have seduced you immediately instead of wasting five goddamn years singing solo.

Singing solo? Do you mean . . . ?

Just because I work around dead people doesn’t mean I am one.

“This is the main reason I’m not going to,” Jaime Berger was saying to Benton. “Political correctness. Political sensitivity. Are you paying any attention to me at all?”

“Yes. If I seem glazed, I’m slightly sleep-deprived.”

“The last thing I want is a perception of prejudice. Especially now, when there’s much more public awareness about dwarfism and the misconceptions and stereotypes historically associated with it. This morning’s Post, for example. The headline about this big.” She held her hands about two inches apart. “ Midget Murder.Horrible. Exactly what we don’t want, and I expect a backlash, especially if other news sources pick it up and it’s all the hell over the place.” Her eyes were on his, and she paused. “Unfortunately, I can’t control the press any more than you can.”

She said it as if she meant something else.

It was the something else that Benton was anticipating. He knew damn well the Terri Bridges case wasn’t Berger’s only agenda. He’d made a tactical error. He should have brought up the Gotham Gotcha column while he’d had the chance.

“The joys of contemporary journalism,” she said. “We’re never sure what’s true.”

She would accuse Benton of lying to her by omission. But technically he hadn’t, because technically Pete Marino had committed no crime. What Dr. Thomas had said was correct. Benton wasn’t in Scarpetta’s house when it happened and would never know the nuances of what Marino had done to her that warm, humid Charleston night last May. Marino’s drunken, grossly inappropriate behavior had gone unreported and largely undiscussed. For Benton to have made even the slightest allusion to it would have been a betrayal of Scarpetta—and of Marino, for that matter—and in fact would constitute hearsay that Berger would never tolerate under other circumstances.

“Unfortunately,” Benton said, “the same sort of thing is being passed around on the ward. The other patients are calling Oscar names.”

“Vaudeville, carnivals, the Wizard of Oz,” Berger said.

She reached for her coffee, and every time she moved her hands, Benton noticed the absence of her large-carat diamond ring and matching wedding band. He had almost asked her about it last summer, after not seeing her for a number of years, but refrained when it became apparent that she never mentioned her multimillionaire husband or her stepchildren. She never made any reference to any aspect of her private life. Not even the cops were talking.

Maybe there was nothing to talk about. Maybe her marriage was intact. Maybe she’d developed an allergy to metals or worried about being robbed. But if it were the latter, she should think twice about the Blancpain she had on. Benton estimated it was a numbered timepiece that cost in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars.

“Negative portrayals in the media, in the entertainment industry,” Berger went on. “Fools, dimwits. The movie Don’t Look Now. Folktale dwarfs, imperial court dwarfs. And rather apropos, the omnipresent dwarf who witnesses everything, from the triumph of Julius Caesar to the discovery of Moses in the bulrushes. Oscar Bane was witness to something, and at the same time accuses others of being witness to everything. His claims of being stalked, spied on, subjected to some sort of electronic harassment, and that the CIA might be involved and is torturing him with electronic and antipersonnel weapons as some sort of experiment or persecution.”

“He didn’t go into that kind of detail with me,” Benton replied.

“It’s what he reported when he called my office a month ago, and I’ll get back to that momentarily. What’s your assessment of his mental state?”

“His evaluation is perplexing in its contradictions. MMPI-TWO indicates traits of social introversion. During the Rorschach, he had perceptions of buildings, flowers, lakes, mountains, but no people. Similar pattern with the TAT. A forest with eyes and faces in the leaves, indicative of someone disconnected from people, someone profoundly anxious, paranoid. Aloneness, frustration, fear. Projective figure drawings were mature, but no human figures, just faces with empty eyes. Again, paranoia. A feeling of being watched. Yet nothing indicative that his paranoia is long-standing. That’s the contradiction. That’s what’s disconcerting. He’s paranoid, but I don’t believe his paranoia is long-standing,” he repeated.

“He’s afraid of something right now that to him is real.”

“In my opinion, yes. He’s afraid and depressed.”

“His paranoia,” Berger said. “Based on your experience and the time you spent with him, you don’t believe it’s his inherent disposition? It doesn’t go back to his childhood? As in, he’s always been paranoid because he’s a little person? Perhaps was made fun of, mistreated, discriminated against?”

“For the most part, it doesn’t appear he had those early experiences. Except with the police. He repeatedly told me he hates the police. And he hates you.”

“Yet he’s cooperated with the police. Excessively. Let me guess. His excessive cooperation won’t prove helpful.” As if she hadn’t heard the part about Oscar hating her.

“I hope you’ll get your chance with him,” Benton said.

The saying was, if a broken window were the victim, Berger could get a confession from the rock.

“I’m fascinated by his cooperation with a group of people he certainly doesn’t trust,” she said. “Yet he’s rather much given us free rein. Biological samples and his statement, as long as Kay’s the one he gives them to. His clothing, his car, apartment, as long as Kay is right there. Why?”

“Based on his fears?” Benton said. “I would venture to say that he wants to prove there’s no evidence linking him to Terri Bridges’s murder. Most of all, prove this to Kay.”

“He should be more worried about proving it to me.”

“He doesn’t trust you. He does trust Kay. Trusts her irrationally, and that worries me a lot. But back to his mind-set. He wants to prove to her he’s a good guy. He didn’t do anything wrong. As long as she believes in him, he’s safe. Physically, and in how he views himself. At this point, he needs her validation. Without her, he almost doesn’t know who he is anymore.”

“Guess what. We do know who he is and what he probably did.”

Benton said, “You need to understand this fear of mind control is very real to thousands of people who believe they are victims of mind weapons. That the government is spying on them, reprogramming them, controlling their thoughts, their entire lives, through movies, computer games, chemicals, microwaves, implants. And the fears have gotten exponentially worse in the past eight years. I was walking through Central Park not so long ago, and here’s this guy talking to the squirrels. I watched him for a while, and he turns around and tells me he’s a victim of the very thing we’re discussing. One of the ways he copes is to visit the squirrels, and if he can get them to eat peanuts out of his hands, then he knows he’s still grounded. He’s not letting the bastards get him.”

“That’s New York, all right. And the pigeons wear homing devices.”

“And Tesla gravity radar waves are being used to brainwash the woodpeckers,” Benton said.

Berger frowned. “Do we have woodpeckers here?”

“Ask Lucy about advances in technology, about experiments that sound like a schizophrenic’s bad dreams,” he said. “Only this stuff is real. I don’t doubt Oscar thinks it’s real.”

“I don’t think anybody doubts that. They just think he’s crazy. And they worry his craziness led him to murder his girlfriend. I alluded to his rather unusual protection devices. A plastic shield glued to the back of his cell phone. Another plastic shield in the back pocket of his jeans. A magnet-mounted external antenna on his SUV that seems to have no purpose. Investigator Morales—you haven’t met him yet—says this is anti-radiation stuff. That—and let me see if I can remember this right. A TriField meter?”

“To detect frequency-weighted electric fields in the ELF and VLF range. A detector, in other words. An electromagnetic measurement tool,” Benton said. “You hold it up in the middle of a room to see if you get readings that might indicate you’re being electronically monitored.”

“Does it work?”

“It’s popular in ghost hunting,” Benton said.

Chapter 6

For the third time, Investigator P. R. Marino refused tea, coffee, soda, or a glass of water. She tried harder.

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” she parroted her husband’s old quip. “How about a little spot of bourbon?”

“I’m all set,” Investigator Marino said.

“You sure? It’s no trouble. I might have a taste of it myself.”

She returned to the living room.

“No, thanks.”

She sat back down and there was no might about it. She’d poured herself a generous one. Ice rattled as she set down the glass on a coaster.

“I’m not usually like this,” she said from the corduroy couch. “I’m not a drunk.”

“I don’t go around judging people,” Investigator Marino said, his eyes lingering on her drink as if it were a pretty woman.

“Sometimes a person needs something for the nerves,” she said. “I’d be dishonest if I pretended you didn’t scare me a little.”

She was still shaky after a good ten minutes of back and forth about whether he really was the police. Holding up a badge to the peephole was a trick she’d seen numerous times in violent movies, and had the 911 operator not stayed on the line, assuring her that the man at her door was legitimate, and continued to stay on the line while she let him in, he wouldn’t be sitting in her living room right now.

Investigator Marino was a big man, with weathered skin and a red hue to his complexion that caused her concern about his blood pressure. Mostly bald with unfortunate wisps of gray hair in a crescent moon around his pate, he had the look and demeanor of one who did everything the hard way, listened to no one, and certainly wasn’t to be trifled with. She was quite sure he could pick up two thugs by the scruff of the neck, one in each hand, and simultaneously toss them across the room as if they were made of hay. She suspected he’d cut quite a figure when he was young. She also suspected he was single at this time, or would be better off if he were, because if he had a sweetheart and she let him out the door looking the way he did, either she didn’t care about him or she was of questionable breeding.

Oh, how Shrew would love to give him a tip or two about the way he dressed. If a man was large-boned, then the rule was that cheap, skimpily cut suits, especially black ones, and white cotton shirts without a tie, and rubber-bottomed black leather lace-up shoes tended to make him look a bit like Herman Munster. But she wasn’t about to offer him advice, for fear he would react the same way her husband had, and she was careful not to study the investigator too closely.

Instead, she continued to make nervous comments and to reach for her drink, and to ask him if he wanted something as she sipped and set her drink back down. The more she talked and reached for her drink, the less he said as he occupied her husband’s favorite leather recliner.

Investigator Marino had yet to tell her the purpose of his visit.

Finally she said, “Well, enough about me. I’m sure you’re very busy. What kind of investigator did you say you are? Burglary, I imagine. This is the time of year for it, and if I had my way about it, I’d certainly live in a full-service building with a doorman. What happened across the street. I suppose that’s why you’re here.”

“I’d appreciate whatever you can tell me about it,” Investigator Marino said, and his huge presence in the recliner seemed to shrink the image she had of her husband sitting there. “You find out from the Post, or did a neighbor say something?”

“Neither one.”

“I’m curious because nothing much about it’s made the news yet. We’re not releasing details, for good reason. The less known at this time, the better. You can see the logic in that, right? So you and me having this private little conversation’s between the two of us. Nothing said to the neighbors or anyone. I’m a special investigator for the DA’s office. That translates into court. I know you wouldn’t want to do anything that might mess up a case in court. You ever heard of Jaime Berger?”

“Yes, I certainly have,” Shrew replied, regretting she’d implied she knew something, and worrying what trouble she’d just caused herself. “I appreciate her advocacy of animal rights.”

He looked silently at her. She looked silently at him until she couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Did I say something wrong?” she asked, reaching for her drink.

His glasses glinted as his attention poked around her apartment like a flashlight searching for something hidden or lost. He seemed especially interested in her extensive collection of porcelain and crystal dogs, and photographs of her with her husband and the various dogs they had owned throughout their lives together. She loved dogs. She loved them far more than her children.

Then the investigator stared down at the tan-and-blue braided rug under the old cherry coffee table.

“You got a dog?” he asked.

Obviously he’d noticed the tiny white-and-black dog hairs embedded in the rug, which weren’t really her fault. She’d had no success vacuuming them up, and didn’t feel like getting on her hands and knees, plucking them out, one at a time, as she continued to mourn the untimely death of Ivy.

“I’m not a bad housekeeper,” she said. “Dog hairs tend to work their way into things, and it’s difficult getting them out. Sort of like they do to your heart. Work their way in. I don’t know what it is about dogs, but God had a hand in it, and anybody who says they’re just animals has no soul. Dogs are fallen angels, while cats don’t live in this world. They just visit. Dog hairs can actually stick into your skin like splinters if you walk around barefoot. I’ve always had dogs. Just right now I don’t. Are you involved in Ms. Berger’s crusade against cruelty to animals? I’m feeling the bourbon, I’m afraid.”

“What do you mean by animals?” he asked, and maybe he was trying to ease the tension, but she couldn’t be sure. “You talking four-legged or two-legged?”

She decided it was best to take him seriously and said, “I’m sure you deal with your share of two-legged animals, but in my book, that’s a terrible misnomer. Animals don’t have cold hearts and cruel imaginations. They just want to be loved, unless they’re rabid or have something else wrong with them or it’s about the food chain. Even then, they don’t rob and murder innocent people. They don’t break into apartments while people are gone for the holidays. I can only imagine what it was like to come home to find something as awful as that. Most of these apartment buildings around here are easy pickings, if you ask me. No doormen, no security, very few burglar-alarm systems. I don’t have one, I’m sure that hasn’t escaped your attention. Being attentive is your training, your job, and by the looks of you, you’ve been at it for a while. I meant the four-legged kind.”

“What four-legged kind?” Investigator Marino seemed on the verge of smiling, as if he found her entertaining.

It was probably her imagination. And the bourbon.

“Pardon my non sequitur,” she said. “I’ve read articles about Jaime Berger. What a fine woman. Anybody who’s a champion of animals is a decent person in my book. She’s cleaned up a number of these dreadful pet stores that sell sick and genetically compromised creatures, and maybe you’ve helped. If so, I thank you very much. I had a puppy from one.”

He listened with no discernible reaction. The more he listened, the more she talked and tentatively reached for her bourbon, usually three times before picking up the glass and taking a sip. She’d gone from thinking he found her interesting to believing he suspected her of something. All in a minute or two.

“A Boston terrier named Ivy,” she said as she clutched a tissue in her lap.

“I asked about a dog,” he said, “because I was wondering if you went out much. As in walking a dog. I’m wondering if maybe you’re observant about what goes on in your neighborhood. People who walk dogs notice what goes on around them. Even more than people with babies in strollers. That’s a little-known fact.” His glasses on her. “You ever observe how many people cross the street, pushing the stroller in front of them? What gets hit first? Dog owners are more careful.”

“Absolutely,” she said, elated that she wasn’t the only one who had noticed the same imbecilic thing about people letting strollers lead the way when they crossed busy New York streets. “But no. I don’t have one at the moment.”

Another long silence, and this time he broke it.

“What happened to Ivy?” he asked.

“Well, it wasn’t me who bought her in that pet shop around the corner. Puppingham Palace. ‘Where pets get the royal treatment. ’ What it ought to say is ‘Where vets get the royal treatment, ’ because vets around here must get most of their business from that unspeakable place. The woman across the street got Ivy as a gift, and couldn’t keep her and gave her to me in a panic. Not a week later, Ivy died of parvovirus. This wasn’t that long ago. Around Thanksgiving.”

“What lady across the street?”

It occurred to Shrew with a jolt of disbelief. “Please don’t tell me Terri’s the one who was burglarized. I wouldn’t have thought it since she’s the only one home over there, and her lights are on, so it wouldn’t dawn on me that someone would break into an apartment where the resident was home.”

She reached for her glass and held on to it.

“I suppose she might have been out last night like most people on New Year’s Eve,” she said.

She drank more than a sip.

“I wouldn’t know.” She kept talking. “I always stay in and retreat to my bedroom. I don’t wait to see the ball drop. I really have no interest. One day is the same as another.”

“What time did you turn in last night?” Investigator Marino asked.

She was certain he asked it as if he thought she was implying she hadn’t seen a thing, and he didn’t believe it for one minute.

“Of course, I understand what you’re leading up to,” she said. “It’s not exactly a matter of when I went to sleep. What I’m telling you is I wasn’t sitting at my computer.”

It was directly in front of the window that afforded a perfect view of Terri’s first-floor apartment. He looked right at it.

“Not that I’m staring out my window, down at the street, every other minute, either,” she said. “I ate in the kitchen at my usual time of six o’clock. Leftover tuna casserole. After that, I read for a while back in my bedroom, where the drapes are always drawn.”

“What are you reading?”

“I see, you’re testing me, as if I’m making this up. Ian Mc-Ewan’s Chesil Beach. It’s the third time I’ve read it. I keep hoping they’ll find each other again in the end. Have you ever done that? Read a book or watched a movie again, thinking it will end the way you wish?”

“Unless it’s reality TV, they end the way they end. A lot like crime and tragedy. You can keep talking about it for a hundred years, and people are still mugged, killed in a terrible accident, or, worst of all, murdered.”

Shrew got up from the sofa.

“I’m topping it off. You sure?” As she headed to her tiny kitchen that hadn’t been updated in forty years.

“Just so you’re aware,” his voice followed her, “no one else was home last night, not in your building or the one across the street. All the residents, except you, are gone for the holiday and have been since before Christmas.”

He’d run background checks. He knew all about everyone, including her, she thought, splashing more Maker’s Mark into her glass, the hell with ice. Well, so what? Her husband was a well-respected accountant, and neither of them had ever gotten into any kind of trouble or associated with unsavory people. Other than her secret professional life, which not even a police investigator could possibly know about, Shrew had nothing to hide.

“It’s very important you think hard,” he said as she returned to the couch. “Was there anything at all you saw or heard at any point yesterday that might be of interest? Maybe somebody in the area who caught your attention? What about in recent days or weeks? Anybody around here who might have raised your suspicions? Or just given you one of those feelings. You know what I’m saying? A feeling right here.”

He pointed at his gut, which she suspected used to be much more formidable than it was now. She based this on the sagging skin along his jaw. He used to be heavier.

“No,” she said. “This is a quiet street. Certain types don’t frequent this neighborhood. Now, the young man in the other apartment on my floor, he’s a doctor at Bellevue. He smokes pot and must get it from somewhere, but I don’t for a moment think he buys it right around here. More likely in the vicinity of the hospital, which isn’t the nicest area. The woman in the apartment directly under this one, which, of course, faces the street just like mine. . . .”

“Neither one of them were here last night.”

“She’s not friendly, and I started to say that she has a boyfriend she fights with a lot. But he’s been coming around for over a year, so I doubt he’s a criminal.”

“What about workmen, servicemen, anybody like that?”

“Now and then the cable company.” She looked at the window behind her computer. “There’s a satellite dish on top of the roof, which I have a good view of, and on occasion I’ve seen someone up there doing whatever it is they do.”

He got up and looked out the window at the flat roof of the building where the police car was parked. His suit jacket was taut across his shoulders in back, and it wasn’t even buttoned.

Without turning around, he said, “I see an old fire escape. Wonder if that’s how the servicemen get up there? You ever seen anybody climbing up the fire escape? Don’t know how you’d get a satellite dish up that ladder. Jeez. Not a job for me. Couldn’t pay me enough.”

He looked out the window, at the darkness. This time of year, daylight was gone by four.

“I don’t know about the ladder,” she said. “Can’t think of a time I’ve seen anybody climbing it, and I suspect there’s some other access to the roof. You’re thinking the burglar got in through a roof access? If so, that’s of great concern. Makes me worry about this building.”

She looked up at her plaster ceiling, wondering what might be on the other side of it.

“I’m on the second floor, and that certainly would make me vulnerable to an intruder, I should think. They must lock access doors.”

She was working herself into quite a state over it.

“This building has an old fire escape, too, you know,” she said.

“Tell me about the lady who gave you the puppy.”

He sat down heavily, and the chair creaked as if it might snap in half.

“I know only her first name, Terri. She’s very easy to describe because, and the proper way to say it is, she’s a little person. Not the dwarf word. I’ve learned never to use that. There are a number of shows about little people, which I watch with great interest since I live across the street from one. And her boyfriend is a little person as well. Blond, handsome, a well-built man, although extremely short, of course. I happened to be returning from the market not so long ago, and saw him up close as he got out of his SUV, and I said hello and he said hello back. He was carrying a single long-stem yellow rose. I remember that vividly. Do you know why?”

The investigator’s big face and glasses waited.

“Yellow suggests sensitivity. Not the same old red, red rose. It was sweet. It was the same yellow as his hair, almost. As if he were saying he was also her friend, not just her boyfriend, if you see what I mean. I remember it touched my heart. I’ve never had a yellow rose in my life. Not once. I would have liked yellow ones so much better than red on Valentine’s Day. Not pink, mind you. Pink is anemic. Yellow is strong. It fills my heart with sunlight to see a yellow rose.”

“When exactly was this?”

She thought hard. “I’d bought a half-pound of sliced honey-glazed turkey breast. Would you like me to dig up the receipt? Old habits die hard. My husband was an accountant.”

“How ’bout a guess.”

“Well, of course. He comes to see her on Saturdays, that I’m sure of. So it must have been this past Saturday, late afternoon. Although there are other times when I think I’ve spotted him in the area.”

“You mean driving around? Walking around? Alone?”

“Alone. I’ve seen him drive by. A couple times in the last month. I go out at least once a day to get a little exercise, run errands. Unless the weather is impossible, I have to get out. Are you sure I can’t get you anything?”

Both of them looked at her drink at the same time.

“Do you remember the last time you saw him in this area?” he asked.

“Christmas was on a Tuesday. I believe I actually saw him that day. And then a few days before that. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’ve spotted him three or four times over the past month, just driving by. So he’s likely done it more than that, you know, when I didn’t see him. Well, that was poorly worded. What I’m trying to . . .”

“Was he staring at her building? Was he going slow? Did he pull over at any point? And yeah, I get it. If you saw him once, he might have been here twenty other times when you didn’t see him.”

“He was driving slowly. And yes.” She sipped. “You said it exactly the way I meant.”

This investigator was far more intelligent than he looked and sounded. She wouldn’t want trouble from him. He was the sort who caught people without them ever having the slightest premonition, and it entered her mind again. What if he were an agent investigating terrorist funding or who knows what? And that’s why he was here?

“What time of day?” he asked her.

“Different times.”

“You’ve been home throughout the holidays. What about your family?”

The way he said it made her suspect he already knew she had two daughters who lived in the Midwest, both of them very busy and disingenuous when they were attentive.

Shrew replied, “My two children prefer I go see them, and I don’t like to travel, certainly not this time of year. They don’t like to spend the money to visit New York. Certainly not these days. I never thought I’d live to see the Canadian dollar worth more than ours. We used to make jokes about the Canadians. Now I suspect they’re making a few jokes about us. As I believe I mentioned, my husband was an accountant. I’m glad he’s not one anymore. It would break his heart.”

“You’re saying you never see your daughters.”

He’d yet to pick up on any comments about her husband and respond. But she felt sure the investigator knew about him, too. It was a matter of public record.

“I’m saying I don’t travel,” she said. “I see them now and again. Every few years, they come here for several days. In the summer. They stay at the Shelburne.”

“The place near the Empire State Building.”

“Yes. That lovely European-looking hotel on Thirty-seventh Street. Within walking distance of here. I’ve never stayed there.”

“Why don’t you travel?”

“I just don’t.”

“No big loss. Expensive as hell these days, the planes always late or canceled. Not to mention getting trapped in one on the runway and the toilet overflows. That ever happen to you? Because it happened to me.”

She had completely shredded the tissue and felt foolish as she thought about the Shelburne and imagined times in her life when it would have been wonderful to stay there. Not now. She couldn’t possibly get away from her work. And why bother?

“I just don’t travel,” she said.

“So you keep telling me.”

“I like to stay put. And you’re starting to make me uncomfortable, as if you’re accusing me of something. And then being friendly to break me down, as if I have information. I don’t. I don’t have any. I shouldn’t talk to you while I’m drinking.”

“If I accused you of something, what might it be?” he said in that rough New Jersey accent of his, his glasses looking right at her.

“Ask my husband.” Nodding at the recliner chair, as if her husband were in the room. “He’d look you squarely in the eye and with all seriousness want to know if nagging is a crime. If so, he’d tell you to lock me up and throw away the key.”

“Well, now.” The chair creaked as he leaned forward a little. “You don’t seem like the nagging type. You seem like a nice lady who shouldn’t be all alone over the holidays. Someone smart who doesn’t miss a trick.”

For some reason, she felt like crying, and she remembered the little blond man with the single long-stemmed yellow rose. But thinking about that made her feel worse.

“I don’t know his name,” she said. “Her boyfriend. But he must be pretty crazy about her. He’s the one who gave her the puppy that she in turn gave to me. Apparently, he surprised her with it, and she couldn’t possibly have one and the store wouldn’t take it back. An odd thing to do, as I reflect on it. Someone you talk to now and then on the sidewalk, and out of the blue one day she appears at my door with a basket covered with a towel, as if bringing me something she’d just baked, which wouldn’t have made sense, either, since, as I said, I didn’t know her and she never made overtures like that to me. She said she had to find a home for a puppy, and wondered if I’d please take it. She knew I lived alone and didn’t work outside of the apartment, and she didn’t know where else to turn.”

“When was this?”

“Around Thanksgiving. I told her it died. This was a week or so later, when I happened to bump into her on the street. She was upset about it and apologetic, and insisted on buying me another one as long as I picked it out myself. She said she’d give me the money, which I found rather impersonal. I can see the wheels turning in your head. You’re wondering if I was ever inside her apartment, and I never was. I’ve never even been inside her building, and wouldn’t have the foggiest notion as to what she owned that a burglar might have been after. Like jewelry, for example. I don’t recall her wearing expensive-looking jewelry. Indeed, I don’t recall her wearing any jewelry. I asked her why in the world I would want another puppy, warranty or not, from that same shop where her boyfriend got Ivy. She said there was no warranty and she had no intention of getting anything from that shop, but I shouldn’t be judgmental. Not every place is as bad as that horrid Puppingham Palace. For example, she said the Tell-Tail Hearts chain of shops is wonderful, and she’d happily give me money if I wanted to get a puppy from there, from one of the shops here in New York or in New Jersey. I have read nice things about Tell-Tail Hearts, and I have been thinking seriously about trying again. Honestly, I just might in light of what’s happened. Anything that barks or growls. Burglars don’t break in if there’s a dog.”

“Except you have to take it out,” Investigator Marino said. “Including in the middle of the night. Which leaves you wide open for getting mugged or having someone force his way inside your building and right into your apartment.”

“I’m not naïve about security,” Shrew said. “You don’t have to take a dog out if it’s small enough. Wee Wee Pads work fine. I had a Yorkie quite a long time ago and taught it to use the litter box. I could fit him in the palm of one hand, but talk about a bark. He would go for the ankles. I had to pick him up whenever we were on an elevator or when people would come over. Until he got used to them. Obviously, I didn’t take Ivy out. Not something that young and sickly on these filthy sidewalks. I’ve no doubt she already had the parvovirus when the boyfriend bought her at that dreadful Puppingham Palace.”

“What makes you so certain her boyfriend bought the puppy?”

“Goodness,” Shrew said.

She held her drink in both hands and contemplated what he was implying.

The recliner creaked as he waited.

“I’m jumping to conclusions,” she said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Here’s what you do. What I tell every witness I talk to.”

“Witness?”

“You knew her. You live across the street.”

What was she a witness to? she asked herself as she shredded bits of tissue and stared up at the ceiling, hoping there was no access door beyond it.

“Pretend you’re writing a movie,” he said. “You got a pen and paper? Terri gives you little Ivy. Write me the scene. I’m going to sit right here while you write it up, then you’re going to read it to me.”

Chapter 7

After Nine-Eleven, the city decided to build the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office a fifteen-story DNA building that looked like a blue-glass office high-rise.

Technology, including STRs and SNPs and low-copy-number profiling, was so advanced, scientists could analyze a sample as small as seventeen human cells. There was no backlog. If Berger wanted DNA testing in a high-priority case, theoretically she could get results in a matter of hours.

“No smoking gun,” Berger said.

She handed Benton a copy of the report as the waitress refilled their coffees.

“Just a hell of a lot of smoke,” she said. “In fact, Terri Bridges’s vaginal swabs are as confusing as I’ve seen in any case that comes to mind. No seminal fluid, and DNA from multiple donors. I spoke to Dr. Lester about it, which wasn’t helpful. I can’t wait to hear what Kay has to say about this.”

“Have all the profiles been run through CODIS?” Benton asked.

“One hit. It gets weirder. A woman.”

“In the database for what reason?” Benton scanned the report.

It didn’t tell him much—just that Dr. Lester had submitted swabs, and then the results that Berger was discussing.

“Vehicular manslaughter in 2002,” Berger said. “Fell asleep at the wheel and hit a kid on a bicycle, convicted, sentence suspended. Not here, where we wouldn’t be so nice, even if she is elderly and was stone-cold sober at the time of the accident. This was in Palm Beach, Florida, although she does have a Park Avenue apartment and is here, actually, even as we speak. But she was attending a New Year’s Eve party last night at the time Terri Bridges was murdered, not that I have any reason to suspect for a nanosecond she had anything to do with it. Another reason the judge in Palm Beach was so forgiving? She broke her back when she hit the kid on the bike. So you got any brilliant ideas why a seventy-eight-year-old female paraplegic’s DNA was in Terri Bridges’s vagina along with a host of other people’s?”

“Not unless there’s some bizarre error in the sample or the analysis?”

“I’m told there’s not a chance. In fact, to be on the safe side, since all of us have such deep respect for Dr. Lester’s competence, God, why did she have to be the one who did the damn autopsy? You are aware of that.”

“Morales gave me a few things. I’ve seen her preliminary report. You know how I feel about her.”

“And you know how she feels about me. Is it possible for a woman to be a misogynist? Because I believe she truly hates women.”

“Envy or a feeling that other women might lower the person’s status. In other words, sure. Women can be women-haters. We’ve seen plenty of that this political season.”

“The labs went ahead and began running the DNA on every case autopsied in the morgue this morning, on the off chance Terri’s swabs got contaminated or mislabeled somehow,” Berger said. “Even gone so far as to make comparisons with everybody who works at the ME’s office, including the chief, and, of course, all the cops who were at the scene last night—all of whom are already in the database for exclusionary reasons, obviously. Negative for the people in the morgue except for the ME who responded, which wasn’t Dr. Lester. And for Morales, and both guys who transported the body to the morgue. DNA testing is so sensitive these days, you breathe at a scene and good chance your DNA turns up. Which is as bad as it’s good.”

“Has someone asked this Palm Beach lady if she knows Oscar Bane or has any connection with him?” Benton asked.

“I did the unpleasant deed and called her myself,” Berger said. “Never heard of him before reading the Post. To put it diplomatically, she was indignant and unhappy at the implication she might somehow be connected to him. She said, and I’m only loosely paraphrasing, that even if she’s sitting in the same waiting room with a dwarf, she doesn’t speak or look at him for fear she might make him self-conscious.”

“Does she know why it would enter our minds to link her to Oscar? Did you mention her DNA?”

“Absolutely not. I said her name had come up. And she leapt to the conclusion that the parents of the sixteen-year-old Eagle Scout honor student she accidentally ran over in her Bentley are always trying to cause her problems. You know, shocking acts of aggression like lawsuits to pay medical bills that aren’t covered by insurance, but how is that her fault? And she complained about the sob stories to the media. She supposed that the parents no doubt heard about the, and I quote, Midget Murder, and decided to somehow drag her through more public embarrassment.”

“What a fucking bitch.”

“I’m still thinking contamination,” Berger said. “I can’t see any other explanation for the DNA. Maybe Kay will have an insight that eludes me at the moment. And tomorrow, hopefully, we’ll have Oscar’s DNA. But we expect his DNA to be on everything. A positive result isn’t likely to be helpful.”

“What about his e-mail? His consent or not, you can access it, right? I’m assuming he e-mailed Terri,” Benton said.

“We can access it, and we will. And no one’s telling him that. In summary, and I think we’ve established this clearly? He’s really not as cooperative as he might seem. Unless we find probable cause for his arrest, that won’t change. A very difficult position for me. I have to be extra-careful, yet I want to know what Kay knows. He’s telling her something up there in the infirmary. Something he’s not telling us and she’s not allowed to divulge under the current circumstances. I’m sure I don’t need to ask, but she has no history with Oscar Bane?”

“If she does, she didn’t know about it, didn’t remember it, or she would have said something the minute I mentioned his name when I called her earlier,” Benton said. “But we’re not going to find out unless Oscar is arrested or volunteers to waive doctor-patient confidentiality. I know Kay. She’s not going to say anything improper.”

“What about a connection with Terri Bridges? Possible?”

“Can’t imagine it. If Oscar discusses Terri with her, and she realizes there’s a connection, she’ll immediately recuse herself or at least notify us so we could figure out what to do.”

“Not a fun thing to put her through,” Berger said. “Not fun for either of you, really. I imagine you’re not used to it. Professional discussions are your dinner conversations. They’re your dialogues on weekends, holidays. They’re even the source of fights, perhaps.” Her eyes on his. “Nothing off-limits unless you’re expert witnesses for opposing counsel in the same court case, and that almost never happens. Quite the team, the two of you. No secrets. Always professionally inseparable. And now, personally inseparable. I hope it’s going well.”

“No, this isn’t fun.” He didn’t like her personal references. “It would be easier if Oscar’s charged with killing his girlfriend. That’s a terrible thing to hope.”

“We hope a lot of things we don’t want to admit,” she said. “But fact is, if he murdered Terri Bridges, we’re not looking for someone else.”

She remembered snow that stung like nettles, and she needed a pound of Breakfast Blend coffee, but she didn’t feel like going out. Overall, there was nothing good she could say about that day.

She’d had a harder time than usual with a column she was supposed to post, an especially mean-spirited one titled “The Ex-File,” which was a list of celebrities whose fans had turned on them and why. Certainly Shrew had to leave out that part as she wrote the scene for Investigator Marino. There was a lot she had to leave out. For example, she couldn’t tell him her horror when her doorbell rang, and she let Terri in, not realizing the Gotham Gotcha website programming was as big as life on her twenty-four-inch computer screen.

Terri set the basket on the coffee table and walked right over to the desk, which was forward of her, now that Shrew thought about it as she wrote the scene on her pad of paper, leaving out what she was remembering right this minute.

Terri looked at what was on the screen, and Shrew tried to figure out how to explain what was clearly a Gotham Gotcha column, formatted and embedded in actual programming language.

What’s this?Terri was so short, she was eye level with the computer screen on top of the desk.

I confess I readGotham Gotcha.

Why does it look like that? Are you a computer programmer? I didn’t know you worked.

I have display codes on because I’m such a ninny. Please sit down.Shrew almost bumped her out of the way so she could exit the program. No, I certainly don’t work. She was quick to clear that up.

Terri sat on the sofa and her feet stuck straight out from the edge of the cushion, because her legs were stunted. She said she used e-mail, but aside from that was computer-illiterate. Of course, she was familiar with Gotham Gotcha, because she saw ads for it everywhere and heard references to it all the time, but she didn’t read it. Graduate school didn’t allow her time to read for pleasure, although she wouldn’t read a gossip column anyway. It wasn’t her thing. In fact, she’d heard it was filth and lowbrow. And she wanted to know if Shrew thought so, too.

“I don’t know how to write a movie script,” Shrew said to Investigator Marino. “I believe they require a special language and formatting, and in fact, people who write them use special software. When I was at Vassar, I took a course in theater and read a number of scripts for plays and musicals, and I’m quite aware that scripts aren’t written to be read. They’re written to be acted, performed, sung, et cetera. I hope you won’t be offended, but it’s better I stick to plain prose. At any rate, let me read this to you.”

She had a tickle in her throat. Memories and bourbon were making her emotional, and she sensed that Investigator Marino wouldn’t be sitting in the recliner if he had nothing better to do. He did have better things to do. Asking her to write a movie scene and all the rest hinted that what had happened across the street was part of a much bigger, more threatening problem. The only other explanation would be the worst one of all. He was an undercover agent, perhaps for the federal government, and believed she was involved with terrorists because of unusual banking activity, such as wires from the UK and the fact that she didn’t pay what she should in taxes, since on paper, it didn’t appear she had an income beyond Social Security benefits and other monies she received in dribs and drabs.

She read from the pad of paper. “Terri set the basket on the coffee table and climbed up on the sofa with great agility and no hesitation, and it was quite clear she was accustomed to improvising and compensating for her short arms and legs. She managed in an effortless way, but I’d never seen her sit, so it did startle me a bit that her feet stuck out from the edge of the cushion like a cartoon character or a five-year-old. It’s important to add that no matter what she said or did, from the instant I opened my door to her, I could tell she was immensely sad. Indeed, she seemed quietly frantic, and held the basket in a way that told me something unusual was in it that she neither wanted nor was comfortable with.

“I need to mention how she was dressed, because that, indeed, is part of a scene. She had on blue jeans and ankle boots, navy socks, and a navy blue cotton shirt. She was not wearing a coat, but had on blue dishwashing gloves, because she’d rushed out of her apartment as if it were on fire. No question, she was in the midst of a true crisis.

“ ‘What on earth has happened?’ I said to her, and I offered her refreshment, which she declined.

“ ‘I know you love animals. Especially dogs,’ she said, looking at all of the crystal and porcelain dogs placed about my apartment, gifts from my husband.

“ ‘It’s true, but I don’t know how you would know. I haven’t had a dog since you moved in across the street.’

“ ‘When we chat on the sidewalk, you mention them and notice other people out walking them. I’m sorry. This is urgent. I don’t know where else to turn.’

“I pulled back the towel and I thought my heart would break. Ivy was no bigger than a small flashlight, and so quiet, I thought at first she was dead. Terri said it was a gift, and she couldn’t keep it, and her boyfriend had tried to get the shop to take it back. But it wouldn’t. Ivy wasn’t thriving, and right then a part of me knew she wouldn’t make it. She didn’t move until I picked her up to hold her against my heart, and she nuzzled her little head under my neck. I called her Ivy because she clung to me like . . .”

Shrew dried her eyes with a tissue and after a moment said to Investigator Marino, “I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s as far as I got. It’s too painful. And I’m still so angry about it. Why are you upsetting me like this? If you’re toying with me, then I’ll file a complaint against you with Jaime Berger’s office. I don’t care if you’re the police. I’ll complain about you all the same. And if you’re some secret agent for the government, just come right out and say it and get it over with.”

“I’m not toying with you, and I’m sure as hell not a secret agent,” he said, and she detected kindness in his otherwise firm tone. “I promise I wouldn’t be digging into all this if it wasn’t important. Obviously, Terri’s bringing the sick puppy over here’s something I need to know about because it’s unusual and isn’t consistent with a few other things I’m aware of. I was inside her apartment earlier today. Went over there after talking to her parents. They live in Arizona. Maybe you knew that.”

“I didn’t know. I can’t imagine what a mess her apartment must be.”

“You told me you’ve never been inside it.”

“Never.”

“Let me put it to you this way. She’s not a pet person. You could eat off her floors, and anybody as concerned about tidiness and cleanliness as she was wouldn’t have pets. And she didn’t have pets, and the reason I can say that with certainty is after I saw her apartment and noticed all the antibacterial soaps and the rest of it, I called her parents a second time and asked a few more questions. That’s when the subject of pets came up. They said even as a child, she never had a pet and wouldn’t have anything to do with other people’s pets. She wouldn’t touch a dog or cat, and was afraid of them, and hated the hell out of birds. Maybe if you think back to that scene you just described to me, you’ll take a look at a couple of the details and see them in a different light. She didn’t have on her coat, but she was wearing dishwashing gloves. You assumed she was washing the dishes when someone arrived with the sick puppy as a gift, and in a panic, she fled across the street to see you.”

“Yes.”

“Did you ask her why she had on dishwashing gloves?”

“I did. And that’s what she told me. She seemed slightly embarrassed, and took them off and gave them to me to throw away.”

“Did she touch the puppy after she took them off?”

“She never touched the puppy. She took the gloves off as she was leaving. I suppose I should make that clear. It was toward the end.”

“That’s right. She had the gloves on because she was afraid of germs. She wasn’t wearing a coat because she didn’t want the sick puppy’s germs on it or germs from your apartment on it, and it’s easier to wash a shirt than a coat. I bet she left the basket and towel in your apartment, too.”

“She certainly did.”

“She knew damn well the puppy was sick as hell and dying when she gave it to you.”

“I told you I was angry.”

“Damn right you are. She knew the puppy was going to die, so she dumps it on you. That was a pretty lousy thing to do. Especially to someone who loves animals. She took advantage of you because you have a tender heart, especially when it comes to dogs. But the big question is, where did she get Ivy? You see what I mean?”

“Exactly,” Shrew said, feeling very angry now.

Those few days with Ivy were hell on earth. All Shrew did was cry as she held Ivy and tried to get her to drink water and eat something. By the time she got her to the vet, it was too late.

“No one who knew Terri would give her a puppy and think it was a nice thing to do,” Investigator Marino said. “Certainly not a sick one. I can’t imagine her boyfriend would do that, unless he’s a mean son of a bitch and did it to hurt her, to make her suffer, to jerk her around.”

“Well, she certainly was unhappy. Beside herself, really.”

“It reminds me of dirty tricks little boys play on little girls in school. Remember? Scaring them with a spider, a snake in a shoe box. Whatever would make the little girl scream. Terri was afraid. She was afraid of germs and dirt, of sickness and death. So it was sick to give her a sick puppy.”

“If what you’re saying is true, it was diabolical.”

“How long have you and Terri Bridges lived across the street from each other?” he asked, and leather creaked as he stretched his legs.

“She moved in about two years ago. I never knew her last name. We weren’t friends, I need to make that clear. Other than running into her, really. Usually on the sidewalk when both of us were heading in and out, although I also want to make it clear I’m not aware that she was out a lot. I don’t think she has a car. Walks like I do. Over the years I have run into her a few other places. Once in Lands’ End, both of us like their shoes, turns out. She was getting a pair of Mary Jane Trekkers, I remember that. Once I ran into her near the Guggenheim. In fact, I believe it was the last time I went to the Guggenheim, for a Jackson Pollock exhibit. We ran into each other on the sidewalk and stopped to chat.”

“She was going to a museum?”

“I don’t believe so. I think she was just walking. But I do recall her face looked rather red and puffy, and she had on a hat and sunglasses, even though it was overcast. I wondered if she had gotten into something she was allergic to, or maybe had been crying. I didn’t ask. I’m not a nosy person.”

“Her last name’s Bridges.” He said it again. “It was in today’s Post. So nobody’s mentioned it.”

“I don’t read the Post. I get all the news I want on the Internet.” Instantly, she regretted saying it.

The last thing she needed was for him to get nosy about what she did on the Internet.

“Well, TV, mostly,” she added. “If you don’t mind my asking, how bad was it? The break-in? It appears a police car’s been there all day, and you’ve been over there, and I haven’t seen her. I’m sure she went to stay with family, perhaps her boyfriend. I wouldn’t sleep a wink after something like that. I’ve noticed you’ve used the past tense several times, as if she’s not over there anymore. And you’ve talked to her family. So I assume it was bad. I don’t know what her family in Arizona has to do with . . . Well, why you would talk to them. It’s really bad, isn’t it?”

He said, “I’m afraid it doesn’t get any worse.”

Something fluttered in her stomach like fingers about to grab.

Leather creaked loudly as he leaned forward in a chair not meant for him, and his face got bigger as he said to her, “Where’d you get the idea it was a burglary?”

“I just thought . . .” She could barely speak.

“I’m sorry to tell you it wasn’t. Your neighbor was murdered last night. Kind of hard to believe you weren’t aware of all the commotion out there, right across the street. Police cars, a van from the Medical Examiner’s office.”

Shrew thought about Dr. Scarpetta.

“A lot of flashing lights and car doors slamming shut, and people talking. And you didn’t hear or see a thing,” he said it again.

“Did Dr. Scarpetta show up at the scene?” she blurted out, wiping her eyes, her heart racing.

The look on his face—it was as if she’d just given him the finger.

“What the hell are you getting at?” he said, not nicely.

She realized it much too late. She hadn’t made the connection, at least not consciously, before this instant. How could it be possible? P. R. Marino? As in Pete Marino, the same name in the column she herself had edited, formatted, and posted. It couldn’t be the same person, could it? That Marino lived in South Carolina, didn’t he? He didn’t work for Jaime Berger, surely not. A woman like Ms. Berger wouldn’t hire a man like that, would she?

Shrew was about to panic, her heart beating so hard, her chest hurt. If this Marino was the same one the Boss had just written about, then he had no business sitting in Shrew’s living room, in her husband’s recliner. For all she knew, he was the maniac who murdered that defenseless little lady across the street.

This was exactly how the Boston Strangler got his victims. Pretended to be someone nice and responsible. Had a cup of tea and a pleasant conversation in the living room right before he . . .

“What about Dr. Scarpetta?” Investigator Marino looked at Shrew as if she had insulted him unforgivably.

“I worry about her,” Shrew said as calmly as she could, her hands shaking so hard she had to lace them tightly in her lap. “I worry about all the publicity she gets and the nature of what she . . . well, the subject matter. It appeals to the ones who do the things she talks about.”

She took a deep breath. She’d said just the right thing. What she mustn’t do is make any allusion to having read anything about Dr. Scarpetta on the Internet, specifically in the very columns Shrew had posted today.

“I have a feeling you’re thinking about something in particular,” he said. “So get it out on the table.”

“I think she might be in danger,” Shrew said. “It’s just a feeling.”

“Based on what?” He looked stonily at her.

“Terrorists,” she said.

“Terrorists?” He looked less stony. “What terrorists?” He didn’t look as offended.

“It’s what all of us are afraid of these days.” Shrew tried that tactic.

“I tell you what.” Pete Marino got up and was a giant towering over her. “I’m leaving my card for you, and I want you to do a lot of thinking. Anything that comes to mind, even if it seems trivial, you call me right away. I don’t care what time it is.”

“I can’t imagine who would do something like that.” She got up and followed him to the door.

“It’s always the ones you don’t imagine,” he said. “Either because they knew the victim or they didn’t.”

Chapter 8

Cyberspace, the perfect place to hide from ridicule.

Gotham was an online college, where students saw Dr. Oscar Bane’s talents and intelligence and not the dwarfed vessel that contained them.

“It couldn’t be a student or group of students,” he said to Scarpetta. “They don’t know me. My address and phone number aren’t listed. There’s no physical college where people go. The faculty meets several times a year in Arizona. And that’s as much as most of us see each other.”

“What about your e-mail address?”

“It’s on the college website. It has to be. That’s probably how it started. The Internet. Easiest way to steal your identity. I told the DA’s office. I said that’s probably how they got access to me. My speculations didn’t matter. They didn’t believe me, and I realized they might be part of the mind stealing. That’s what’s happening. They’re trying to steal my mind.”

Scarpetta got up from her chair. She tucked her notepad and the pen into her lab coat pocket.

She said, “I’m moving around to the other side of the table so I can look at your back. You must go out at least some.”

“The grocery store, ATM, gas stations, doctors’ offices, the dentist, the theater, restaurants. When it began, I started changing my patterns. Different places, different times, different days.”

“What about the gym?”

She untied his gown and gently pulled it down to his hips.

“I work out in my apartment. I still power-walk outside. Four to five miles, six days a week.”

There was a distinctive pattern to his injuries that didn’t make her feel any better about him.

“Not the same walk or at the same time of day. I mix things up,” he added.

“Groups, clubs, organizations you belong to or are involved with?”

“Little People of America. What’s happening has nothing to do with the LPA, no way. Like I said, the electronic harassment just started maybe three months ago. As far as I know.”

“Anything unusual happen three months ago? Anything change in your life?”

“Terri. I started dating Terri. And they started following me. I’ve got proof. On a CD hidden in my apartment. If they break in, they won’t find it. I need you to get it when you’re in there.”

She measured abrasions on his lower back.

“When you’re inside my apartment,” he said. “I gave my written consent to that detective. I don’t like him. But he asked me, and I gave him my consent, my key, the information for the burglar alarm, because I’ve got nothing to hide, and I want you to go in. I told him I want you to go in with him. Do it right away before they go in there. Maybe they already have.”

“The police?”

“No. The others.”

His body relaxed as her gloved fingers touched him.

“I wouldn’t put anything past them and their capabilities,” he said. “But even if they’ve already gone in, they didn’t find it. They won’t find it. It’s not possible. The CD’s hidden in a book. The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor by Littleton Winslow. Published in 1874 in London. Fourth shelf of the second bookcase, left of the door in the guest bedroom. You’re the only person who knows.”

“Did you tell Terri you were being followed, spied on? Did she know about the CD?”

“Not for a long time. I didn’t want her to worry. She has problems with anxiety. Then I had no choice. I had to tell her several weeks ago when she started mentioning she wanted to see my apartment, and I wouldn’t let her. She started accusing me of hiding something from her, so I had to tell her. I had to make sure she understood it wasn’t safe for me to bring her to my apartment because I was being electronically harassed.”

“The CD?”

“I didn’t tell her where it is. Just what’s on it.”

“Did she worry that knowing you might place her at risk, too? No matter where you saw her?”

“It’s obvious they never followed me to her apartment.”

“How is that obvious?”

“They tell me where they follow me. You’ll see. I explained to Terri I was sure they didn’t know about her and she was safe.”

“Did she believe you?”

“She was upset, but she wasn’t frightened.”

“Seems a little unusual for someone who has a lot of anxiety,” Scarpetta said. “I’m surprised she wasn’t frightened.”

“The communications from them stopped. It’s been weeks, and they’ve stopped. I began to hope they weren’t interested in me anymore. Of course, they were just setting me up for the cruelest thing of all.”

“What are these communications?”

“E-mails.”

“If they stopped after you told Terri about them, might that suggest the possibility they were from her? That she was sending you whatever these e-mails are that make you feel you’re being harassed, spied on? And when you said something about it, she stopped sending them?”

“Absolutely not. She would never do something so heinous. Especially not to me. It’s impossible.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“She couldn’t possibly do it. How would she know I took a detour when I was walking and ended up at Columbus Circle, for example, if I’d never told her? How could she know I went to the store for coffee creamer if I never mentioned it?”

“Is there any reason she might have to hire someone to follow you?”

“She wouldn’t do that. And after what’s happened, it makes no sense at all to think she had anything to do with it. She’s dead! They killed her!”

The steel door moved slightly, and the guard’s eyes appeared in the crack. “We okay in here?”

“We’re fine,” Scarpetta said.

The eyes vanished.

“But the e-mails stopped,” she said to Oscar.

“Eavesdropping.”

“You were raising your voice, Oscar. You need to stay calm or he’ll come back in here.”

“I made one backup copy of what I’d already gotten, and cleaned everything off my computer so they couldn’t get in there and delete them or alter them to make it look as if I’m lying. The only record of the original e-mails is on the CD that’s in the book. The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor. Littleton Winslow. I collect old books and documents.”

Scarpetta took photographs of abrasions and clusters of fingernail marks, all in the same area of his right lower back.

“Psychiatry, topics related to it, mainly,” he said. “A lot of them, including ones about Bellevue. I know more about this place than the people who work here. You and your husband would find my Bellevue collection of great interest. Maybe I’ll get to show it to you someday. You’re welcome to borrow it. Terri’s always been interested in the history of psychiatry, fascinated by people. She really cares about people and why they do what they do. She says she could sit in an airport, a park, all day and watch people. Why are you wearing gloves? Achondroplasia isn’t contagious.”

“For your protection.”

It was and it wasn’t. She wanted a latex barrier between his skin and hers. He had crossed the line with her already. Before she’d even met him, he’d crossed it.

“They know where I go, places I’ve been, where I live,” he said. “But not her apartment. Not Terri’s brownstone. Not Murray Hill. I never had any reason to believe they knew anything about her. They’ve never shown that location when they let me know where I’ve been on any given day. So why wouldn’t they show it? I go there every Saturday.”

“Always the same time?”

“Five o’clock.”

“Where in Murray Hill?”

“Not far from here. You could walk from here. Near Loews theater. We go to the movies sometimes and eat hot dogs and cheese fries when we’re splurging.”

His back trembled as she touched it. Grief welling up inside of him.

“Both of us are careful about our weight,” he said. “I never had any reason to believe they’d followed me to Murray Hill, to any place we’d been together. I had no idea or I would have done something to protect her. I wouldn’t have let her live alone. Maybe I could have convinced her to leave the city. I didn’t do it. I would never hurt her. She’s the love of my life.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask.” Berger’s shrewd, pretty face studied Benton. “If Kay’s Lucy’s aunt, does that make you Lucy’s uncle? Or are you a de facto uncle, an almost uncle? Does she call you Uncle Benton?”

“Lucy doesn’t listen to her almost uncle or her aunt. I hope she’ll listen to you.” Benton knew damn well what Berger was doing.

She was sticking him, goading him. She wanted him to bring up that damn gossip column, to confess and surrender himself to the mercy of her court. But he had his mind made up. He wasn’t going to volunteer anything because he’d done nothing wrong. When the timing was right, he could defend himself easily. He could explain his silence and justify it by reminding her that, legally, Marino had been neither charged nor accused of anything, and Scarpetta’s privacy wasn’t Benton’s to violate.

“Does Lucy have the laptops?” he asked.

“Not yet. But she will. And as soon as she determines the details of the e-mail accounts, we’ll go to the providers and get the passwords. Including Oscar’s.”

“When you met with her to discuss what she’s going to—”

“I haven’t met with her yet,” Berger interrupted him. “Only talked to her briefly over the phone. I’m surprised you never told me she’d moved to the city. On second thought, I shouldn’t be surprised.” She reached for her coffee. “I had to find out from several sources she’d recently moved here and started her own company. She’s built a reputation rather quickly, which is why I decided to ask for her help in this particular case.”

She drank coffee and set the mug back down, her every move thoughtful and deliberate.

“You have to understand that he and I don’t routinely have contact with each other,” she said.

She meant Marino. The cross-examination had begun.

“Knowing what I do, assuming there’s any truth to it,” she said, “I can’t imagine Lucy told him she was here or has had any contact with him at all—or even knows that he’s here. I’m wondering why you didn’t tell her. Or am I making an unfair assumption? Have you told her?”

“No.”

“That’s quite something. She relocates to New York, and you’ve never told her he’s here. Alive and well in my DA squad. And maybe his secret would have been safe a little longer if it wasn’t his bad luck that he’s the one who took Oscar’s call last month.”

“Lucy’s still setting up shop, hasn’t been involved in many cases yet,” Benton said. “A couple in the Bronx and Queens. This will be the first in Manhattan, in other words, involving your office. Of course, at some point, she and Marino were going to find out about each other. I expected that to happen naturally and professionally.”

“You didn’t expect anything of the sort, Benton. You’ve been in complete denial. You’ve made flawed and desperate decisions and not logically thought through the inevitable consequences. And now your two degrees of separation have begun to converge. Must be an indescribable feeling, moving people around like pawns only to wake up one day and realize that because of a banal gossip column, your pawns are now destined to confront each other and possibly knock each other off your game board. Let me try to recap what’s happened.”

With a slight movement of her fingers, she said no to the waitress and her coffeepot.

“Your original plan didn’t include a residence in New York,” Berger said.

“I didn’t know John Jay was going to—”

“Ask both of you to be visiting lecturers, consultants? I bet you tried to talk Kay out of it.”

“I thought it was unwise.”

“Of course you did.”

“She’d just been hired as chief, relocated her entire existence. I advised against her taking on more work, more stress. I told her she shouldn’t do it.”

“Of course you did.”

“She was insistent. Said it would be good to help if we could. And she didn’t want to be limited.”

“That would be Kay,” Berger said. “Always one to help anywhere she can and position herself accordingly. The world is her stage. You couldn’t possibly coop her up in a corner of Massachusetts, and you couldn’t push too hard because then you’d have to tell her why you didn’t want her in New York. You found yourself with a problem on your hands. You’d already moved Marino to New York, and let’s be honest, talked me into hiring him. And now Kay’s going to be in and out of New York, and possibly end up helping in cases that will involve my office. Since both of you are going to be in and out of New York, why not? Lucy moves to the great city of opportunity, as well. What better place on the planet for her than the Village? How could you possibly have anticipated all this when you came up with your master design? And since you didn’t anticipate it, you also didn’t anticipate I’d find out the real reason you parked Marino in my office.”

“I’m not going to say I never worried about it,” Benton replied. “I simply hoped it wouldn’t happen anytime soon. And it wasn’t my place to discuss—”

She cut him off. “You’ve never told Marino, have you? About John Jay, about your apartment here?”

“I haven’t told him Kay’s in and out of New York. I haven’t told him about Lucy’s moving here.”

“No, in other words.”

“I can’t remember the last time I talked to him, and have no idea what he might have found out on his own. But you’re right. I never expected anything like this to happen when I recommended you hire him. However, it wasn’t my place to divulge—”

She cut him off again. “Divulge? You divulged plenty, just not the whole truth.”

“It would be hearsay. . . .”

“His was such a sad story. And savvy prosecutor that I am, I fell for it without question. Marino and his problem with alcohol. Quits his job because he can’t deal with your engagement to Kay, and he’s depressed and self-destructive. A month in a treatment center, good as new, and I should hire him. After all, he started out his career with NYPD, and he wasn’t a stranger to me. I believe the phrase you used was mutually beneficial. ”

“He’s a damn good investigator. At least give me credit for that.”

“Did you really think—for even five minutes—that he’d never find out? That Kay and Lucy would never find out, for God’s sake? At any given moment, Kay could be summoned to my office to go over an autopsy report that Marino has something to do with—which will probably happen, by the way. She’s in and out of the morgue as a consultant. She’s on CNN every other week.”

“For all he knows, she does CNN by satellite from Boston.”

“Oh, please. Marino hasn’t had a lobotomy since you saw him last. But I’m starting to wonder if you have.”

“Look,” Benton said, “I hoped if enough time passed . . . Well, we’d deal with it. And I don’t pass on tawdry stories that are, if we’re honest, nothing more than rumors.”

“Nonsense. What you wanted was to avoid dealing with reality, and that’s how this entire mess has happened.”

“I was putting off dealing with it. Yes.”

“Putting it off until when? The next life?”

“Until I figured out what to do about it. I lost control of it.”

“Now we’re getting close to the facts of the case. This isn’t about hearsay, and you know it. It’s about your head in the sand,” she said.

“All I wanted, Jaime, was to restore some civility. Restore something. To move on and do so without malice, without irrevocable damage.”

“To magically make everybody friends again. Restore the past, the good ol’ days. Happily ever after. Delusions. Fairy tales. I imagine Lucy hates him. Probably Kay doesn’t. She’s not the sort to hate.”

“I don’t know what the hell Lucy will do when she sees him. And she will. Then what? It’s a big concern. It’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You’ve seen her in action. This is serious.”

“I was hoping she’d outgrown killing people in the line of what she considers duty.”

“She’s going to see him eventually, or know about it, at least,” Benton said. “Since you’ve decided to avail yourself of her forensic computer skills.”

“Which, by the way, I found out from the DA in Queens County and a couple of cops. Not from you. Because you didn’t want me to know she was here, either, because you hoped I’d never use her—nice de facto uncle that you are. Because if I decided to use her, one day she’d show up at my office, and guess who she might run into?”

“When you talked to her on the phone, is that what happened?” Benton asked. “You said something about Marino?”

“To my knowledge, she doesn’t know about him. Yet. Because no. I didn’t mention him. I was too busy worrying about this woman who was murdered last night and what might be on her laptops and what Lucy could do to help. I was too busy thinking about the last time I saw Lucy in my own apartment after she’d come back from Poland, and you and I both know what she did over there. Brilliant, brash. A vigilante with no respect for boundaries. Now she’s started this forensic computer investigation company. Connextions. Interesting name, I thought, as in connections and What’s next? And we all know, whatever’s next, Lucy will be there first. And what a relief. It didn’t sound like the Lucy I once knew. Showed less of a need to overpower and impress, more thoughtful, more reflective. She used to be into all these acronyms, remember? When she was the wunderkind doing a summer internship at Quantico. CAIN. Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network. She designs a system like that when she’s, what, still in high school? No bloody wonder she was so obnoxious, such a renegade, so out of bounds. And friendless. But maybe she’s changed. When I talked to her—granted, over the phone, not in person—she sounded mature, not so grandiose and self-absorbed, and she appreciated my reaching out to her first. Certainly not the old Lucy.”

Benton was rather stunned that she remembered so much about the old Lucy or seemed so fascinated by the new one.

“These were the things going through my mind when she was telling me that the programming she did way back when’s now as obsolete as Noah’s ark, and I’d be amazed by what’s possible now,” Berger said. “No. I didn’t mention Marino. I don’t think she has a clue he’s currently assigned to my sex crimes unit and actively working the same case I just asked her to work. Obviously not. Or she would have reacted, said something. Well, she’s about to know. I’m going to have to tell her.”

“And that’s still a good idea? Getting her involved?”

“Probably not. But I’m in a bit of a quandary, if I’ve not made that perfectly plain. I don’t intend to un-invite her at this precise moment because, frankly, if her abilities are what they’re cracked up to be, I need her. Internet crime is one of our biggest problems, and it’s beating us. We’re up against a world of invisible criminals who in many instances don’t seem to leave evidence, or if they do, it’s deliberately misleading. I’m not going to let Marino or a gossip column or your insecurities and marital issues derail what I’ve got in the works. I will do what’s best for this case. Period.”

“I know Lucy’s capabilities. Frankly, you’d be foolish not to take advantage of her,” Benton said.

“That’s about the long and short of it. I’ll have to take advantage of her. A city government budget can’t afford someone like her.”

“She’d probably do it for free. She doesn’t need the money.”

“Nothing’s free, Benton.”

“And it’s true. She’s changed. Not the same person you knew last time you saw her, when you could have had her brought up on—”

“Let’s don’t talk about what I could have done. Whatever she confessed to me that night five or so years ago, I don’t remember. The rest of it, she never told me. As far as I’m concerned, she never went to Poland. However, I’m trusting there won’t be a repeat of that sort of thing. And I sure as hell don’t need another FBI, ATF situation.”

Early in her career, Lucy basically had been fired by both.

“You’ll get the laptops to her when?” Benton asked.

“Soon. I have the search warrant to go through the contents, all my ducks in a row.”

“I’m a little surprised you didn’t get on this right away, last night,” he said. “Whatever’s in her laptops may tell us what we need to know.”

“Simple answer. We didn’t have them last night. They weren’t found on the first search. Marino came across them during a second one late this morning.”

“News to me. I didn’t realize Marino was that involved.”

“And I didn’t realize Oscar was the same person Marino talked to last month until Morales had already cleared the scene last night. Once I connected the dots, I called Marino. I said I wanted him involved because he’s already involved.”

“And because you need him to cover your ass,” Benton said. “Perception will be that Oscar called your office for help a month ago and you dropped the ball. Marino dropped the ball. No one will work harder to cover your ass than a person who needs to cover his own. That’s the cynical solution. But you’re lucky. He also doesn’t miss much. In fact, he’s probably the best person you’ve got in your whole damn squad. You just haven’t figured it out yet because he’s easy to underestimate, and now you’re biased. Let me guess. He took it upon himself to take a look at the scene, and he found what might be the most important piece of evidence. Her laptops. Where the hell were they? Under the floorboards?”

“Packed inside a piece of luggage in her closet. Obviously, something she planned to carry on the plane she was to take to Phoenix this morning. That and another packed suitcase,” Berger replied.

“Who found out she was planning on flying to Phoenix this morning?”

“Oscar said nothing about it to you last night?”

“He didn’t say anything to me about anything last night. He cooperated with the evaluation, and that’s it, as I’ve said. So her travel plans weren’t known last night? If not, who found out about them and how?”

“Well, that would be Marino, who’s a good investigator and doesn’t quit once he starts. All true. And he’s a lone ranger because he’s been out there long enough to know you don’t divulge information just because the other person’s a cop or even a prosecutor or a judge. People in criminal justice are the worst gossips and the least likely to keep their mouths shut when they should. You’re right about him, and it’s going to make him some enemies. I can see it coming, which is all the more reason what’s surfaced about him is so unfortunate. Apparently, he tracked down Terri’s parents in Scottsdale before anybody else—including Morales—did, and delivered the death notification. They mentioned she was planning to fly home to spend several days with them. That’s what prompted him to go to her apartment.”

“Let me guess,” Benton said. “No plane ticket lying around that might have given the cops a heads-up last night. Because these days everything’s done electronically.”

“Right.”

“That explains why I didn’t see any luggage in the crime scene photos Morales gave me.”

“Those photographs are from his search—the first search. I can see why the carry-on was missed last night. Not saying it’s good that it was, but I can see it.”

“You suspect it was deliberately hidden?”

“You mean, by someone like Oscar?”

“Wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense.” Benton thought about it. “If he’s worried about her computers, why didn’t he remove them from the scene? Why hide them in her closet?”

“People do a lot of things that don’t make sense, no matter how meticulously they plan a crime.”

“Then he’s pretty disorganized. If he’s the killer,” Benton said. “But one thing Terri wasn’t was disorganized, based on the photos of her apartment I’ve seen. She was extremely neat. A possible theory? She might have finished packing for her trip and put the luggage out of sight herself, because she was having company. I think it imprudent to assume Oscar planned any crime. I’m not ready to assume he killed her.”

“You know the old saying, Benton. Don’t search for unicorns. Start with the ponies. Oscar’s the first pony on my list. The most obvious. Problem is, we have no evidence. Nothing yet.”

“At least Oscar can’t beat you to the draw when it comes to whatever’s on Terri’s computers. He doesn’t have them, and he doesn’t have access to the Internet on the ward,” Benton said.

“And that was his choice. He doesn’t have to be up there. And that continues to strike me as extremely suspicious and cause me great concern about his mental stability. Whether we found the laptops or not, he must know we’d gain access to her e-mail once we determined her username or usernames, her provider. And that would lead us to his e-mail, because I can’t imagine he and Terri didn’t e-mail each other regularly. Yet he doesn’t seem to care. Were he not up here in isolation, he might have had a chance to rush home and start tampering. But he didn’t try that. Why?”