Scarpetta

“He may not feel it’s necessary because he didn’t do anything wrong. Or maybe he’s not computer-savvy enough to tamper and get away with it. Or if he’s the killer and premeditated her murder, he did his tampering in advance.”

“Excellent point. Premeditation by someone who thinks he’s smarter than we are. He tampers in advance, then checks into Bellevue because he’s allegedly afraid the killer will get him next. In other words, he’s manipulating the hell out of everyone. And probably having a good time doing it.”

“I’m objectively presenting possibilities,” Benton said. “Here’s another one. He’s not the killer but knows everyone will suspect he is, and by checking into Bellevue, he earned the right to see me, to see Kay, and perhaps convince somebody who matters that he’s innocent and in danger.”

“Don’t tell me that’s what you really believe.”

“What I believe is he thinks Kay is his sanctuary. No matter what he did or didn’t do.”

“Yes, he has her because he can’t trust me. I believe my new moniker is ‘superbitch.’ ” Berger smiled. “Or at least I hope it’s new—the super part of it, anyway.”

“In his mind, you dissed him.”

“If you’re referring to when he called my office a month ago—like half the crazies in the city do every day? True. I wouldn’t talk to him. Nothing unusual about that. A lot of calls I never even hear about, much less take. He referred to me as a ‘superbitch.’ Adding if something bad happened, it would be my fault.”

“And who was it he said this to?” Benton said. “Marino? During their phone conversation last month?”

“It’s on tape,” she said.

“Hope that never makes its way into the press.”

“That certainly wouldn’t be helpful. Because something bad did happen. Very, very bad, indeed. There’s no question we have to be careful with Oscar Bane. Ordinarily, I’d be much more vigorous with someone in his situation. And by the way, I do suspect he murdered his girlfriend. It’s what makes the most sense. And that certainly would make his paranoia situational. He’s afraid of being caught.”

She picked up her briefcase as she pushed back her chair, and her skirt hiked up enough for him to see the hollow between her slender thighs.

“Without proof,” Benton said, “we shouldn’t dismiss what Oscar says. It’s possible he’s being followed. We don’t know for a fact he’s not.”

“That, Nessie, Bigfoot. Anything’s possible. Seems to me, no matter what, I have a PR bomb ticking, a legal bomb ticking, because we didn’t take him seriously when he called last month. And what I don’t need is the Little People of America picketing One Hogan Place. I definitely don’t need another problem. Seems I have more than my share. Which reminds me, and I’ll just say it.”

She paused to collect her coat, and they passed through the crowded cafeteria.

“If there’s a scandal,” she said, “do I need to worry that Kay might discuss it on CNN? Could that be why Oscar gave us no choice about getting her here? He wants the news coverage?”

Benton stopped at the cashier’s desk to pay the bill.

When they were outside the cafeteria, he said, “She would never do that to you.”

“I had to ask.”

“Even if she were the type, she can’t do it,” Benton said as they walked toward the atrium. “She’s either his physician or she ends up your witness.”

“Not sure Oscar thought of all that when he demanded an audience with her, demanded she pay a house call,” Berger said. “Maybe he thought he was giving her some grand pre-interview.”

“I don’t know what the hell he thought, but I shouldn’t have talked her into it. I shouldn’t have let anybody talk her into it.”

“Now you’re sounding like a husband. And by anybody, you obviously mean me.”

He didn’t answer.

Her high heels clicked on polished granite.

“If and when Oscar’s charged,” she said, “it may turn out that what he’s telling Kay is the only information we ever get that might be remotely reliable. It’s good she’s examining him. Good for a number of reasons. We want him happy. We want him treated extremely well. We want him safe and everyone around him safe.” She put on her coat. “When Marino interviewed him over the phone, Oscar started throwing around the term hate crime. He said he was a little person, made that point repeatedly to Marino, who of course didn’t understand what a little person was. Had to ask him. Oscar, by now quite agitated, answered, ‘Fucking dwarf.’ Said that’s why he was being followed, targeted. It was a hate crime in progress. . . .”

Berger’s cell phone rang.

“Kay’s going to have to be told Marino’s here,” she added as she put on her wireless earpiece.

She listened for a moment, and anger touched her face.

“We’ll see about that,” she said. “This is completely unacceptable. . . . Did I expect it? Well, it’s become the pattern, now, hasn’t it, but I hoped . . . No, no, no. I can’t. Certainly not in this case . . . Well. I’d really rather not . . . Yes, she is, but due to certain circumstances, I hesitate . . . Indeed, I did. Who the hell hasn’t seen it?” She looked at Benton. “Then maybe you understand why I don’t want to do that . . . Uh-huh. I’m hearing you. I got it loud and clear the first time you said it. I suppose I could find out if she’s willing and get back with you. But I wouldn’t blame her for wanting to get the hell out of here, catch the last shuttle to Logan. . . .”

She ended the call.

They were outside the hospital now, on the sidewalk. It was almost four, and getting dark, and very cold, and their breath was as thick as smoke.

“Marino doesn’t mean to hurt people,” Benton felt compelled to say. “He didn’t mean what happened.”

“You’re saying he didn’t mean it when he raped Kay.” Matter-of-factly as she put on gray mirror-finished glasses that hid her eyes. “Or is what’s all over the Internet today untrue? I wish to hell you’d sent him to some office other than mine. He’s fully involved in this goddamn case, and there’s no way to keep the two of them apart indefinitely. You have to talk to her.”

“What’s in that gossip column gives a false impression.”

“A forensic linguist would have a field day with that statement. But I’ll take your word for it. What’s on the Internet’s a complete fabrication. Glad to hear it.”

She pulled on kid-leather gloves and turned up the collar of her shorn mink coat.

“I didn’t say it was completely untrue,” he replied.

He stared at the distant Empire State Building, lighted red and green for the holidays, a warning beacon flashing atop its spire to remind aircraft to stay clear. Berger placed her hand on his arm.

“Look,” she said in a gentler tone. “You should have told me the real reason Marino left Charleston, left Kay, is because of what he did to her. I’m going to work very hard at being understanding. I know what it must have done to you. Of all people, I should know.”

“I’ll fix it.”

“You won’t fix anything, Benton. What you’ll do is move forward. All of us have to move forward and be smart each step of the way.”

She removed her hand from his arm, and it felt like rejection.

“It’s astonishing you’d do anything to help him,” Berger added. “You’re quite the friend to him, I must admit. But if we’re talking motive? My guess? You hoped if you helped him, covered up for him, it would make what he did untrue. But now the world knows. You want to guess how many calls I’ve had today? About that goddamn column?”

“You should ask him. He was drunk. Don’t fire him.”

“Every rapist I’ve locked up was drunk or on drugs or both or it was consensual or she started it or it didn’t happen. I won’t fire him unless he brings it upon himself. I’ve decided this is Kay’s battle. Not yours. Not Lucy’s. Although I fear Lucy’s not likely to see it that way.”

“Kay’s dealt with it.”

Hands in her pockets to ward off the cold, Berger said, “Really. Then why this big to-do about her not knowing he works for me? Why the secret? I thought it was all about his walking off the job, decompensating because of you and Kay, because he was jealous—which has always been as obvious as the Empire State Building you seem fixated on. He decided it was time to let her go and clean up his act. Stupid me. I never called Kay to corroborate your story. I didn’t ask for references. Because I trusted you.”

“He’s tried. He’s tried harder than anyone I know. That should be obvious to you. You’re around him. You need to ask him about him. Let him tell you what he did,” Benton said.

“For the record, you lied to me.”

She was looking for a taxi.

“For the record, I didn’t lie. And he didn’t rape her.”

“Were you there?”

“She said it didn’t go that far. She never pressed charges. To her it’s a private matter. It’s not my place to talk about it with you or anyone. She didn’t even tell me at first. Yes, fair enough. Delusion, my head in the sand. Poor judgment, probably. But what was in the gossip column this morning is distorted. Go ahead and ask Marino. I assume he’s seen it. Or he will soon enough.”

“And Lucy? Just so I know what to expect.”

“She’s seen the column, of course,” he said. “She’s the one who called me about it.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t kill him on the spot, as much as she adores her Aunt Kay.”

“She almost did.”

“Good to know. Not so long ago, she would have. You owe me a favor.”

A taxi perilously swerved toward her and lurched to a halt.

“I need Kay to drop by the morgue tonight,” she said. “And you’re just the person to ask her.”

She climbed inside the taxi.

“The phone call I got a few minutes ago?” She looked up at him and said, “I need Kay to examine the body, if she’s willing. I’m afraid Dr. Lester’s playing her usual games with me. We’re tracking her down. She’s getting her ass back to the morgue asap and will cooperate if I have to call the goddamn mayor.”

She pulled the door shut. Benton stood on the sidewalk in the cold and watched Jaime Berger’s yellow taxi speed away, cutting off two other cars to a cacophony of angry honks.

Chapter 9

Scarpetta examined long, shallow abrasions on the left side of Oscar’s upper back as he volunteered how he got them.

“He was already inside, and he attacked me,” he was saying. “He ran off, and I found her. The police didn’t believe me. I could see it on their faces. They think I got hurt because I struggled with her. You can tell, can’t you? That I didn’t struggle with her?”

“It would be helpful if you’d describe to me what you were wearing last night,” she replied.

“You can tell these injuries aren’t from my struggling with her. They won’t find my DNA under her nails. She didn’t scratch me. She didn’t fight with me. We never fought. Maybe just an argument now and then. She was already dead.”

Scarpetta gave him a moment, he was crying so hard.

When he was quieter, she repeated the question. “Last night. What were you wearing when you got into the struggle with—?”

“I couldn’t see him.”

“You’re certain it was a him.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what time this was?”

“Five o’clock.”

“Exactly?”

“I’m never late. All the lights were out. Even the entrance light was out. All her windows were dark. It didn’t make sense. She was expecting me. Her car was there on the street. I parked behind it. There were empty spaces. Because it was New Year’s Eve, and a lot of people were gone. I took my coat off and left it on the passenger’s seat. I had on a T-shirt and jeans. She likes me to wear tight T-shirts, sleeveless ones. She loves my body. I work on it because she loves it and I’d do anything to please her. She loves sex. I couldn’t be with a woman who doesn’t love sex.”

“Regular sex, rough sex, creative sex?” Scarpetta asked.

“I’m very considerate and gentle. I have to be. Because of my size.”

“What about fantasies? Such as bondage. It’s important I ask.”

“Never! Never!”

“It’s not a judgment. A lot of people do a lot of things, which is fine. As long as it’s all right for both of them.”

He was silent and uncertain. Scarpetta could tell he had a different answer than the one he wanted to give.

“I promise, there’s no judgment,” she said. “I’m trying to help. It doesn’t matter what consenting adults do as long as it’s all right for both of them.”

“She liked me to dominate,” he said. “Nothing painful. Just hold her down. To wrestle her down. She liked me to be strong.”

“Hold her down how? I’m asking because any information can help us figure out what happened.”

“Just hold her arms down on the bed. But I never hurt her. I never left a mark on her.”

“Ever used any types of bindings? Handcuffs? Anything like that? I’m just making sure.”

“Maybe her lingerie. She likes lingerie, to dress in very sexy ways. If I tie her hands with her bra, it’s very loose and I never hurt her. It’s just an idea, a suggestion, never real. I never spanked her or choked her or did anything real. We pretend, that’s all.”

“What about to you? Did she do these things to you?”

“No. I do them to her. I’m strong and powerful, and that’s what she likes, to be taken advantage of, but only the idea of it, never for real. She’s very, very sexy and exciting, and tells me exactly what she wants, and I do it, and it’s always amazing. We always have amazing sex.”

“Did you have sex last night? It’s important I ask.”

“How could I have? She was gone. It was so awful when I walked in and found her. Oh, God. Oh, God!”

“I’m sorry I have to ask you these questions. Do you understand why they’re important?”

He nodded, wiping his eyes and nose with the backs of his hands.

“It was cold last night,” Scarpetta said. “Why would you leave your coat in the car? Especially if all the lights were out and you were concerned.”

“I took my coat off to surprise her.”

“Surprise her?”

“She liked me in tight T-shirts. I already told you. I even thought about taking it off as she was opening the door. It was a sleeveless T-shirt. A white undershirt. I wanted her to open the door and see me in my undershirt.”

Too much explanation. His coat was in the car for another reason. He was lying, and doing it badly.

“I have a key to her building,” he said. “I went in and rang the bell to her apartment.”

Scarpetta asked, “Do you have a key to her apartment, or only to the building’s outer door?”

“Both. But I always ring the bell. I don’t just walk in on her. I rang the bell and suddenly the door flew open and this person was all over me, attacking me, dragging me inside, and slamming the door shut. That’s who killed her. It’s the same person who’s been following me, spying on me, tormenting me. Or he’s one of them.”

An interval of twenty-four hours was consistent with the age of Oscar’s injuries. But that didn’t mean he was telling the truth.

“Where’s your coat now?” Scarpetta asked.

He was staring at the wall.

“Oscar?”

He stared at the wall.

“Oscar?”

He answered as he stared at the wall, “It’s wherever they took it. The police. I said they could take my car, search it, do whatever they want. But they weren’t going to lay a finger on me. I told them they had to get you here. I would never hurt her.”

“Tell me more about your struggle with whoever was in her house.”

“We were near the door and it was pitch-dark. He was hitting me with the plastic flashlight. He ripped my T-shirt. It’s all ripped up and bloody.”

“You said it was pitch-dark. How do you know it was a flashlight?”

“When he opened the door, he shone it in my eyes, blinding me, then started the attack. We struggled.”

“Did he say anything?”

“All I heard was him breathing hard. Then he ran. He had on a big leather coat and leather gloves. He probably won’t have any injuries. He probably won’t have left his DNA or fibers. Things like that. He was smart.”

Oscar was the one who was smart, offering explanations to unasked questions. And lying.

“I shut the door and locked it and turned on all the lights. I screamed for Terri. The back of my neck feels like a cat clawed me. Hope I don’t get an infection. Maybe you should put me on an antibiotic. I’m glad you’re here. You had to be here. I told them. It all happened so fast, and it was so dark . . .” Tears, and he began to sob again. “I screamed for Terri.”

“The flashlight?” Scarpetta reminded him. “Was it on during your struggle?”

He hesitated, as if he’d never thought about that.

“He must have turned it off,” he decided. “Or maybe it broke when he was hitting me. Maybe he’s part of some kind of death squad. I don’t know. I don’t care how clever they are. There’s no perfect crime. You always quote Oscar Wilde. ‘Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.’ Except you. You could get away with it. Only someone like you could commit the perfect crime. You say it all the time.”

She couldn’t recall ever quoting Oscar Wilde, and she’d never said she could commit the perfect crime. It would be a stupid and outrageously offensive thing to say. She checked a cluster of slivered moon-shaped nail marks on his muscular left shoulder.

“He made a mistake. He had to have made at least one mistake. I know you can figure it out. You always say you can figure out anything.”

She never said that, either.

“Maybe it’s your voice and the way you express yourself. Your lack of pretense. You’re beautiful.”

He clenched his fists in his lap.

“Now that I see you in person, I can tell it isn’t from some makeup artist or perfect camera angle.”

His blue-green eyes fastened to her face.

“A little bit like Katharine Hepburn, only you’re blonde and not as tall.”

His clenched hands trembled, as if he was trying with all his might not to do something with them.

“You look very good in slacks, same as her. Actually, she wore trousers, didn’t she? Is there a difference? I don’t mean anything inappropriate. I’m not coming on to you. I wish you would hug me. I need you to hug me!”

“I can’t hug you. You understand why I can’t?” she said.

“You always say you’re very sweet with dead people. That you’re considerate and touch them as if they’re alive, talk to them as if they can feel and hear you. That people can still be attractive and desirable when they’re dead, and that’s why necrophilia’s not as hard to understand as the public thinks, especially if the body’s still warm. If you can touch dead people, why can’t you touch me? Why can’t you hug me?”

She’d never said she touched dead bodies as if they were alive, or talked to them as if they could feel and hear her. She’d never said dead bodies were desirable or that necrophilia was understandable. What the hell was he talking about?

“Did the person who attacked you try to choke you?” she asked.

The fingernail marks on the back of his neck were vertical. Perfectly vertical.

“At one point he had his hands around my neck, and he kept digging in his nails as I rolled around and managed to get myself free,” Oscar said. “Because I’m strong. I don’t know what would have happened if I weren’t so strong.”

“You said the spying started when you got involved with Terri. How did you meet her?”

“Online. She was one of my students, had been for a while. I know. You can’t talk about it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t bother. I’ll go along with it,” he said. “She was enrolled in my history of psychiatry course. Wanted to be a forensic psychologist. Curious so many women want to be forensic psychologists. This ward’s overrun with pretty young grad students from John Jay. Wouldn’t you expect women, especially pretty ones, to be afraid of the patients up here?”

Scarpetta began examining his broad, hairless chest, measuring more shallow abrasions. She touched his wounds and he rested his manacled wrists over his groin, and his blue-green eyes were like hands trying to explore what was under her lab coat.

“Wouldn’t you think women would be afraid to work in a place like this?” he said. “Are you afraid?”

When Shrew had gotten the cryptic phone call a year and a half ago, she’d had no idea how life-altering it would be.

The Italian-sounding man identified himself as an agent from a British trust company and said he had gotten her name indirectly because of the consulting group where she’d been a database marketing manager. In his bad English, he’d said he wanted to e-mail her a job description. Shrew had printed it out. It was still taped on her refrigerator to remind her of life’s synchronicities:

Webmaster: Must be able to take initiative, work unsupervised out of the home, have people skills and a flair for the dramatic. Limited technical experience required. Confidentiality utmost. Other requirements to be discussed. Great earning potential!

She had replied immediately, saying she was very interested but would like a little more information. In response to certain questions, the agent explained in his limited way that having people skills simply meant Shrew had to be interested in them, period. She wasn’t allowed to talk to them but needed to know what appealed to their “mostly basic instinct,” which she realized soon enough was voyeurism and taking immense pleasure in other people’s humiliation and extreme discomfort.

Shrew’s e-mailed acceptance, formatted exactly like the offer had been, was also taped to her refrigerator:

I agree with all conditions and am honored. Can start this minute and have no problem with working whenever needed, including weekends and holidays.

In a way, Shrew had become an anonymous cyber version by proxy of the comedian she adored, Kathy Griffin, whose shows and stand-up routines Shrew watched obsessively, always picking up a new pointer or two about how to fillet the rich and famous and serve them up to an insatiable audience that grew exponentially as the world got worse. People were desperate to laugh. They were desperate to vent their frustrations, resentments, and fury at the golden scapegoats, as Shrew thought of the privileged untouchables who might be angered and annoyed but never really wounded by the slings and arrows of slights and ridicule.

After all, what damage could be done, really, to a Paris Hilton or a Martha Stewart? Gossip, savage insinuation, and exposés—even incarceration—only enhanced their careers and made people envy and love them all the more.

The cruelest of punishments was to be ignored, dismissed, made to feel invisible and nonexistent, exactly the way Shrew had felt when scores of computer technical assistance and marketing management jobs, including hers, were outsourced to India. She’d been pushed overboard with no notice and no parachute. She would never forget packing up her personal effects and carrying them out in a cardboard box, just like she saw in the movies. Miraculously, right about the time she feared she could no longer afford to live in Murray Hill and was asking around about more affordable housing that wasn’t in the slums, the Boss’s UK-BASED Italian agent called.

If Shrew had any chronic complaint now, it was a loneliness that unexpectedly had given her insight into serial killers and hit men, and caused her to feel slightly sorry for them. How burdensome and isolating it was to keep a secret when the stakes were so high, and she often imagined what people would do if they knew that the lady next to them in line at CVS or Whole Foods was largely responsible for the most popular Internet gossip column in history.

But she couldn’t tell a soul, not even the police investigator who had just been here. She couldn’t take credit. She couldn’t have friends and run the risk she might make a slip. It was just as well she didn’t confide in her daughters or have much contact with them. It was probably wise never to date or marry again. Even if she quit the website, she could never breathe a word of her former remarkable anonymous career. She’d signed enough nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements to send her to prison for life, land her in the poorhouse, or—and maybe she was getting silly—result in unnatural death if she committed even the smallest infraction. But what could she divulge?

She didn’t know who Gotham Gotcha was. The columnist could be a man, a woman, old, young, American, or not. Or the website phenomenon could be a collection of people, maybe a bunch of young smart alecks from MIT or spies in China or a small pool of genius kids at a mega Internet search technology company. Shrew was paid well enough, and took enormous pride in being an anonymous celebrity by proxy, but the arrangement had begun to seriously wear on her in a way she hadn’t seen coming. She was beginning to doubt her own raison d’être, which probably had something to do with why she had behaved like such a fool when Investigator Marino had stopped by.

Shrew was starved for interaction with flesh and blood, for conversation and attention and validation, and had lost the art of having a substantive dialogue with a human being who was present. It had been an extraordinary event for her to have a living soul sit in her family room and notice the puppy hairs stuck in her rug, or bear witness to her wearing her red velour warm-up lounging suit that was splotched light pink in places from a mishap with bleach. She’d been sorry when he’d left, and at the same time relieved, but mostly sorry, the more she’d been thinking about it. She’d had no idea what desolate straits she was in. Now she knew and she could see why. She most certainly could. Who wouldn’t be?

The invisible money wired to her bank account every two weeks, the impersonal and ungrateful e-mailed remarks and instructions she received now and then, may as well come from God, who Shrew also had never met and never seen a picture of, and whose real name was debatable. If Shrew needed encouragement, praise, gratitude, a holiday or birthday gift, maybe a raise, neither the Boss nor God was interested. Both remained silent and unseen.

She could forgive God, she supposed, who had a universe of employees and disciples to look after. But she was feeling less charitable about the Boss, who had only Shrew. Something about Investigator Marino’s visit today had resulted in clarity. While Shrew was the first to acknowledge that the Boss had created her, although she was grateful, she realized she was resentful. Shrew had signed her life away. She had no dog and no friends, didn’t dare travel or engage in candid conversations, and had no visitors, unless they were uninvited. The only person she could even have called an acquaintance had been murdered last night.

What awful terms Shrew had accepted for how to live her life. And life was short. It could end—and end horribly—in a blink. The Boss was a selfish user, uncaring, and completely unfair. Without Shrew, the Boss would not be able to populate the website with what Shrew chose from the thousands of gossipy e-mails and images and cranky, crude comments and mean mentions that were sent by fans. Shrew did all the work, and the Boss got all the credit, even if the fans didn’t know who the Boss was.

Shrew sat at her desk in front of her computer, the curtains drawn so she didn’t have to look at the building across the street and think of the horror that had happened. Shrew didn’t want to look at the police car still parked in front of Terri’s apartment, and have the policeman it belonged to report to Investigator Marino that the neighbor he had interviewed earlier was spying out her window. Although she would enjoy another visit, she couldn’t afford one. Investigator Marino was suspicious of her already. She was certain he believed she’d seen something last night, and having done a little research on the Internet after he left, she could understand why.

Terri’s death was quite a mystery, and a very ugly one. No one was saying how she died, only that the blond man with the yellow rose, whom Shrew had said hello to not long ago, was locked up at Bellevue just like the Son of Sam had been when he was caught, and the medical examiner who did Terri’s autopsy had released no details. But they must be gruesome. The case must be of huge importance because Dr. Scarpetta had, indeed, been called in to help. That was the belief, based on her being spotted at both Logan and La Guardia airports this afternoon, then being sighted again at Bellevue, pulling a suitcase with a wobbly wheel, apparently on her way to meet her forensic psychologist husband on the men’s prison ward, where the boyfriend was being held.

No doubt the Boss would get yet another column out of Dr. Scarpetta, and that was too bad. Blogs everywhere were responding to both of the columns posted today, and the opinions dramatically varied. While quite a number of people thought it a disgrace that any sexual violation of Scarpetta, whether by Investigator Marino or Sister Polly, was made public, there were plenty of other people who wanted more.

Details! Details!

Why would someone break a little kid’s pencils?

Women like her ask for it. That’s why they’re attracted to crime.

I’m surprised about the investigator but not about the nun.

Shrew had been unusually unmotivated since Investigator Marino had left, and she’d better get with it and start weeding through the most recent information and images sent by fans, on the off chance there was something important she should post or move to the Boss’s research folder.

She opened and deleted scores of banal, boring gossipy anecdotes, alleged sightings, and images taken with cell phone cameras until she came to an e-mail that had been sent several hours ago. Immediately, she was excited by the subject line but skeptical:

NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTO! MARILYN MONROE IN THE MORGUE

There was no message, only an attachment. Shrew downloaded the image, and as it appeared in high resolution on her screen, she felt a thrill that made her understand what people meant when they said their hair stood on end.

“My word,” she muttered. “Oh, my dear Lord,” she exclaimed.

Marilyn Monroe’s nude body was stitched up like a rag doll on top of a shiny steel autopsy table, her blond hair wetly clumped around her dead face, which was a bit swollen, but recognizable. Shrew began zooming in on every detail, the mouse clicking like mad as she did exactly what the fans were bound to do. She gawked and enlarged and gawked some more at the puckering and flattening of the movie goddess’s once gorgeous breasts caused by the dreadful railroad track of sutures that ran in a V from her collarbones to her cleavage, then all the way down her once gorgeous body, past old surgical scars, before disappearing in pubic hair. Her famous lips and blue eyes were shut, and at the highest magnification the software could muster, Shrew came upon the truth that the world had always wanted and certainly deserved.

Just like that, she knew, and could prove it.

It couldn’t be more obvious.

The details were there. Evidence: The recently dyed blond hair without a hint of dark roots showing. The perfectly plucked eyebrows. The manicured finger- and toenails, and smoothly shaven legs. She was slender, not an unseemly ounce to spare.

Marilyn had been fastidiously attending to her grooming and pampering herself, and keeping a keen eye on her weight right up to her tragic last breath. And severely depressed people didn’t do that. The photo was proof positive of what Shrew had always suspected.

She excitedly typed the copy. It had to be short. The Boss was the writer, not Shrew, and she was never allowed to craft more than fifteen words for a cutline or any sort of text on the site:

MARILYN MONROE MURDERED! (VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED)

AN ASTONISHING NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN AUTOPSY PIC PROVES WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT THAT FILM GODDESS MARILYN MONROE WASN’T DEPRESSED AT THE TIME OF HER DEATH, AND DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE.

DETAILS CLEARLY VISIBLE DURING THE AUTOPSY PERFORMED ON AUGUST 5, 1962, IN LOS ANGELES, REVEAL INDISPUTABLE EVIDENCE THAT EVIL—NOT AN ACCIDENT OR SUICIDE—ENDED MARILYN’S LIFE.

Shrew should stop at that, for heaven’s sake. A word count of sixty-two, not including numbers and punctuation, almost five times the legal limit. But certainly the Boss would make an exception in this case and in fact would give Shrew a bonus and praise for once.

She jumped into the search window and easily found what purported to be the famous Dr. Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report and lab results. She read them carefully, not sure what many of the words and phrases meant. She looked up “fixed lividity,” and “a slight ecchymotic area,” and “no refractile crystals found in the stomach or the duodenum.” She looked up a lot of things and got increasingly indignant.

How dare a bunch of powermongering, womanizing, selfish men do this to Marilyn! Well, the world could stop speculating about what really happened. Shrew’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

HIGHLY CLASSIFIED INFORMATION FROM THE ACTUAL AUTOPSY REPORT IS COMPLETELY CONSISTENT WITH WHAT’S PLAINLY VISIBLE IN THIS REMARKABLE PHOTO. MARILYN MONROE, NUDE AND HELPLESS, WAS FORCIBLY HELD DOWN ON HER BED (EXPLAINING BRUISES ON HER LEFT HIP AND LOWER BACK) WHILE HER KILLERS ADMINISTERED AN ENEMA HEAVILY LACED WITH BARBITURATES.

SHE CERTAINLY DIDN’T DIE FROM A SUICIDAL OVERDOSE OF NEMBUTAL, OR THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN AT LEAST A TRACE OF PILL CAPSULES AND A YELLOWISH RESIDUE IN HER STOMACH AND DUODENUM—AND THERE WASN’T. ADDED TO THAT IS THE DISCOVERY THAT HER COLON WAS DISCOLORED AND DISTENDED—JUST AS ONE WOULD EXPECT IT TO BE AFTER A POISONOUS ENEMA!

AND BY THE WAY, IF SHE GAVE HERSELF THE ENEMA AS OPPOSED TO OTHERS DOING IT, WHERE WERE ALL THOSE EMPTY PILL CAPSULES? WHERE WAS THE EMPTY ENEMA BOTTLE?

ONCE THE DRUGS WERE IN HER SYSTEM, COMMON SENSE WOULD TELL YOU SHE COULDN’T POSSIBLY HAVE RUN OUT OF HER HOUSE TO DISPOSE OF THE EVIDENCE, THEN RETURNED, TAKEN OFF HER CLOTHES, CLIMBED BACK IN BED, AND TUCKED THE COVERS NEATLY UNDER HER CHIN. AFTER THAT ENEMA, SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN INCAPACITATED, UNCONSCIOUS, AND DEAD, FAST. IN FACT, SHE NEVER EVEN MADE IT TO THE BATHROOM! AT DEATH, HER BLADDER WAS FULL! IT SAYS SO ON THE AUTOPSY REPORT!

MARILYN WAS MURDERED BECAUSE SHE WOULDN’T KEEP HER MOUTH SHUT—NO MATTER WHO GAVE THE ORDER!

Chapter 10

The view from Jaime Berger’s office was of rampant lions carved in bas-relief on the granite building across from her eighth-floor office window.

She happened to have been gazing out that same window when American Airlines Flight 11 roared abnormally loud and low in a clear blue sky and slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Eighteen minutes later, the second plane hit the south tower. In disbelief, she watched the symbols of power she had known much of her life burn and collapse, and rain ash and debris over lower Manhattan, and she was sure the world had come to an end.

Since then, she wondered what would be different had she not been in New York that Tuesday morning, sitting in this same office, talking on the phone with Greg, who was in Buenos Aires without her because she had yet another big trial—one she could scarcely recall now.

There were always extremely important, and later hard to recall, big trials requiring her to stay in the city while Greg squired his two children from a previous marriage to wondrous spots around the world. He decided he liked London best and took a flat there, and then it turned out what he’d really taken there was a mistress, a young English barrister he’d met several years earlier while she was spending a few weeks at Berger’s office during an excessively stressful trial.

Berger had never thought twice about it when the young barrister and Greg had dinner together while Berger worked until the hands fell off the clock. As he used to put it.

She remained in a state of conjugal unconsciousness until Greg dropped by her office unannounced one day last winter to take her to lunch. They walked to Forlini’s, a favorite hangout of criminal-justice potentates and politicians, and husband and wife sat across from each other, surrounded by dark paneling and heavy oil paintings of the Old Country. He didn’t tell her he was having an affair and had been for years, just that he wanted out, and at that time and of all things, Berger’s thoughts shifted to Kay Scarpetta. There was a logical reason.

Forlini’s named booths after influential patrons, and the booth where Berger and Greg sat, coincidentally, was named for Nicholas Scoppetta, now the fire commissioner. Seeing the name Scoppetta on the wall made Berger think of Scarpetta, who Berger felt sure would have gotten up from that damn dusky rose leather booth and stalked out of the restaurant, instead of subjecting herself to, if not encouraging, blatant lies and humiliation.

But Berger didn’t move or lodge a protest. She was her usual poised, controlled self listening to Greg make the insane bullshit point that he didn’t love her anymore. He had stopped loving her after Nine-Eleven, probably because he was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, even though he was well aware he wasn’t in the country when the terrorist attack happened, but the constant replays on the news made it almost as bad as being there.

He said what had happened to America, and was continuing to happen—especially to his real-estate investments and the plummeting value of the dollar—was unbearably traumatizing, and therefore he was moving to London. He wanted a discreet divorce, and the more discreet and uncontested it was, the better off everyone would be. Berger asked if another woman might discreetly have something to do with it, just to see if he might have it in him to be honest. He’d said the question was irrelevant when a couple wasn’t in love anymore, and then made a not-so-subtle accusation that Berger had other interests, and he didn’t mean professional ones. She didn’t object, redirect, or even offer proof that she’d never violated the terms of their marital contract, even if she’d thought about it.

Berger was now discreetly divorced, discreetly rich, and discreetly isolated. Her office floor was vacant this late afternoon. It was, after all, a holiday, or a sick day, depending on how enthusiastically one had brought in the New Year. But Berger had no incentive to stay home. There was always work to be done. So with her former husband across the Pond, his children grown, and none of her own, she was alone in this cold stone Art Deco building not far from Ground Zero, nobody here to even answer the phone.

When it rang at exactly five p.m., exactly twenty-four hours after Oscar Bane said he had arrived at Terri Bridges’s brownstone, Berger picked up the receiver herself, already knowing who it was.

“No. Not the conference room,” she said to Lucy. “It’s just the two of us. We’ll do it in my office.”

Oscar stared at the clock built into a plastic case on the wall, and then covered his face with his cuffed hands.

At this time yesterday afternoon, Terri should have been opening her door to him, and maybe she did. Or maybe what he claimed was true, and by this time yesterday she was already dead. The minute hand on the wall clock twitched ahead to one past five.

Scarpetta asked, “Did Terri have any friends?”

“Online,” Oscar said. “That’s how she connected with people. That’s where she learned to trust them. Or realize she couldn’t. You know that. Why are you doing this? Why can’t you admit it? Who’s stopping you?”

“I don’t know what it is you want me to admit.”

“You’ve been instructed.”

“What makes you think I’ve been instructed? And instructed to do what?”

“Okay, fine,” Oscar said testily. “I’m getting very tired of this game. But I’ll tell you anyway. I have to believe you’re protecting me. I have to believe that’s why you’re so evasive. I’ll accept it and answer your question. Terri met people online. If you’re a little person and a woman, you’re much more vulnerable.”

“At what point did the two of you get together, start seeing each other?”

“After a year of exchanging e-mails. We discovered both of us were going to a meeting in the same location at the same time. Orlando. The LPA. That’s when we realized we both have achondroplasia. After Orlando, we began seeing each other. I told you. Three months ago.”

“Why her apartment from the very start?”

“She liked to be in her own place. She’s very neat, obsessively neat and clean.”

“She worried your apartment might be dirty?”

“She worried most places were dirty.”

“Was she obsessive-compulsive? Phobic of germs?”

“When we’d go out somewhere, she’d want both of us to shower when we got back to her place. At first I thought it was about sex, which was fine. Showering with her. Then I realized it was about being clean. I had to be very clean. I used to have long hair, but she made me cut it short because it’s easier to keep clean if it’s short. She said hair collects dirt and bacteria. I was a good sport but said there was one place I was keeping my body hair. Nobody was coming near me down there.”

“Where do you get your hair removal done?”

“A dermatologist on East Seventy-ninth. Laser removal. Other painful things I’ll never bother with again.”

“What about Terri? Did she go to this same dermatologist?”

“She referred me to her. Dr. Elizabeth Stuart. She has a big practice and is well respected. Terri’s been going to her for years.”

Scarpetta wrote down Dr. Stuart’s name and asked about any other doctors or other practitioners Terri might have seen, and Oscar said he didn’t know or he didn’t remember, but he was sure there would be records of that type of information in Terri’s apartment. She was impeccably well organized, he said.

“She never threw anything away that might be important, but everything has its proper place. If I draped my shirt over a chair, she was going to hang it up. I could barely finish eating before the dishes were in the dishwasher. She hated clutter. Hated things out of place. Her pocketbook, her raincoat, her snow boots, whatever it was, she tucked it out of sight even if she planned to use it again five minutes later. I realize that’s not normal.”

“Is her own hair cut short like yours?”

“I keep forgetting you never saw her.”

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t.”

“She didn’t cut her hair short, but she keeps it very clean. If she went somewhere, the minute she got back inside, she’d take a shower and wash her hair. Never a bath. Because you’re sitting in dirty water. That’s what she says, constantly. She uses a towel once, and then it went into the wash. I know it’s not normal. I told her she might want to talk to someone about her anxiety, that she’s obsessive-compulsive, not severely but has some of the symptoms. She didn’t wash her hands a hundred times a day or walk around the cracks in the sidewalk or refuse take-out food. Nothing like that.”

“What about when you had sex? Any extra precautions because of her vigilance about cleanliness?”

“Just that I’m clean. We shower afterwards, wash each other’s hair, and usually have sex again in the shower. She likes having sex in the shower. She calls it clean sex. I wanted to see her more than once a week. But that was all. Once a week. Always the same day, exact same time. Probably because she’s so organized. Saturday at five. We’d eat and make love. Sometimes we’d make love the minute I got there. I didn’t sleep there. She likes to wake up alone and get started on her work. My DNA’s all over her house.”

“But you didn’t have sex with her last night.”

“You already asked me that!”

He clenched his fists and the veins stood out in his muscular arms.

“How could I!”

“I’m just making sure. You understand why I have to ask.”

“I always use condoms. You’ll find them in the drawer by her bed. My saliva would be on her.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Because I held her. I tried mouth-to-mouth. When I knew she was gone, I kissed her face. I touched her. I had her in my arms. My DNA’s on her.”

“This and this.” Scarpetta touched bruises on his sternum. “When he hit you with the flashlight?”

“Some of them. Maybe some from hitting the floor. I don’t know.”

Bruises change color with time. They can indicate the shape of the object that caused them. His were reddish-purple. There were two on his chest, one on his left thigh, all about two inches wide and slightly curved. The most Scarpetta could say was they were consistent with a flashlight’s rim, and that he had been struck with what appeared to be moderate force around the same time he’d received his other injuries.

She took close-up photographs, aware of how easy it would be for him to throttle her with his forearm. She wouldn’t be able to scream. In minutes she would be dead.

She felt his body heat and smelled him. Then the air between them was cool again as she stepped back and returned to the counter, and began documenting injuries and making other notes while he watched her back. She could feel his mismatched eyes, only they weren’t as warm. They felt like cool drops of water. His devotion, his idealization, was beginning to chill. To him she wasn’t bigger than life on CNN. She was a woman, a real person who was disappointing him, betraying him. Almost without exception, that was the path of hero worship, because it was never really about the object of it.

“Nothing’s any better than it was thousands of years ago,” Oscar said to her back. “The fighting, the ugliness, the lies and hatefulness. People don’t change.”

“If you believe that,” she asked, “why would you want to go into psychology?”

“If you want to figure out where evil comes from, you have to follow where it goes,” he said. “Did it end up in a stab wound? Did it end up in the decapitated head of a hiker? Did it end up in discrimination? What part of our brain remains primitive in a world where violent aggression and hatred are counterproductive to survival? Why can’t we knock out that part of our genetic coding the way we knock out genes in mice? I know what your husband’s doing.”

He talked fast and in a flinty tone while she retrieved a silicone casting extruder gun and a polyvinylsiloxane refill cartridge from her crime scene case.

“The research he’s doing into that sort of thing. At his Harvard hospital, McLean. Using MRI. Functional MRI. Are we any closer to figuring it out? Or will we just keep tormenting, torturing, raping and killing and starting wars and committing genocide and deciding some people don’t deserve basic human rights?”

Locking the cartridge in place, she removed the pink cover cap and pressed the trigger, squeezing the white base and clear catalyst on a paper towel until there was a steady flow. She attached the mixing tip and returned to the table, explaining she was going to use a silicone compound on his fingertips and his injuries.

“This is very good for taking elastic impressions of rough or smooth surfaces, such as your fingernails and even your fingerprint pads,” she said. “There are no harmful side effects, and your skin should have no reaction to it. The scratches and nail marks are scabbed over and this shouldn’t hurt them, but if at any point you want me to stop, just tell me. I’m confirming I have your consent to do this.”

“Yes,” he said.

He went very still as she touched his hands, careful of his injured thumb.

“I’m going to very gently clean your fingers and your injuries with isopropyl alcohol,” she said. “So your own body secretions don’t interfere with the curing process. This shouldn’t hurt. At the most, a little sting. You let me know if you want me to stop.”

He fell silent, watching her clean his hands, one finger at a time.

“I’m trying to figure out why you’d be familiar with Dr. Wesley’s research study at McLean,” she said. “Since he hasn’t published anything yet. But I know the recruitment for subjects has been going on for a while and has been heavily advertised and publicized. I suppose that’s the answer?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Oscar said, staring down at his hands. “Nothing changes. People know why they’re hateful, and it changes nothing. You won’t change feelings. All the science in the world won’t change feelings.”

“I don’t agree,” she said. “We tend to hate what we fear. And we hate less when we’re less afraid.”

She squeezed the odorless compound over his fingertips, the extruder gun clicking each time she pressed the trigger.

“Hopefully, the more enlightened we are, the less we fear and the less we hate. I’m covering each finger to the first knuckle, and when the compound is dry, it will roll off like one of those rubber fingertips people wear when counting money. This material is excellent for microscopic evaluation.”

She used a wooden spatula to spread and smooth, and by the time she’d finished covering his multiple scratches and nail marks, the compound on his fingertips had begun to cure. It was interesting that he didn’t ask her why she’d want to get impressions of his fingertips, especially his fingernails, and also of the scratches and nail marks allegedly made by a stranger he said had attacked him. Oscar didn’t ask because he probably knew, and she didn’t really need these impressions for microscopic study as much as she needed him to see her taking them.

“There. If you can just hold your hands up,” she said.

She met his blue-green stare.

“It’s cool in here,” she said. “I’m guessing sixty-eight degrees. It should set in about four minutes. I’m going to pull your gown back up for now so you’ll be more comfortable.”

She smelled the pungent sweat of fear and confinement. She smelled unbrushed teeth and a trace of cologne. She wondered if a man would bother with cologne if his intention was to murder his lover.

Chapter 11

Lucy hung her leather jacket on the coatrack and, without invitation, moved a chair next to Berger and opened a MacBook Air.

“Excuse me,” Berger said, “I’m accustomed to people sitting on the other side of my desk.”

“I need to show you something,” Lucy said. “You’re looking well. The same.”

She openly appraised Berger.

“No, I’m wrong,” Lucy decided. “You look better, maybe even better than the first time we met eight years ago when you had two more skyscrapers several blocks from here. When I’m flying the helicopter and the skyline first comes in view, it still looks like the city’s had its two front teeth knocked out. Then along the Hudson at maybe eight hundred feet and I pass Ground Zero, and it’s still a hole.”

“It’s not something to make light of,” Berger said.

“I’m definitely not making light of it. I just wish it would change. You know. So I don’t keep feeling like the bad guys won?”

Berger couldn’t recall ever seeing Lucy in anything but tactical wear, and the tight threadbare jeans and black T-shirt she had on wouldn’t hide any type of weapon. The way she was dressed didn’t hide much at all, least of all that she had money. Her wide belt was crocodile with a Winston sabertoothed tiger buckle handcrafted of precious metals and stones, and the thick chain around her neck and its turquoise skull pendant was a Winston as well, and considered fine art and as expensive as such. She was remarkably fit and strong, and her mahogany hair with its shades of rose gold had been cut quite short. She could easily pass for a pretty boy model were it not for her breasts.

Berger said, “Terri Bridges’s laptops.”

She pointed to a table near the closed door, to the package wrapped in brown paper and neatly sealed with red evidence tape.

Lucy glanced at the package as if its presence couldn’t have been more obvious.

“I assume you’ve got a search warrant,” she said. “Anybody looked to see what’s on the hard drives yet?”

“No. They’re all yours.”

“When I find out what e-mail accounts she has, we’re going to need legal access to those as well. Quickly. And likely others, depending on who she was involved with—besides the boyfriend at Bellevue.”

“Of course.”

“Once I locate her e-mail hosting provider, check out her history, I’ll need passwords.”

“I know the drill, believe it or not.”

“Unless you want me to hack.” Lucy started typing.

“Let’s refrain from using that word, please. In fact, I never heard you use it.”

Lucy smiled a little as her agile fingers moved over the keyboard. She began a PowerPoint presentation.

Connextions—The Neural Networking Solution

“My God, you’re really not going to do this,” Berger said. “You have any idea how many of these things I see?”

“You’ve never seen this.” Lucy tapped a key. “You familiar with computational neuroscience? Technology based on neural networking? Connections that process information very much the way the brain does.”

Lucy’s index finger tap-tapped, a bulky silver ring on it. She had on a watch that Berger didn’t recognize, but it looked military, with its black face and luminous dial and rubber strap.

Lucy caught Berger looking at it and said, “Maybe you’re familiar with illumination technology? Gaseous tritium, a radioactive isotope that decays and causes the numbers and other markings on the watch to glow so they’re easy to read in the dark? I bought it myself. You buy your Blancpain yourself? Or was it a gift?”

“It was a gift to myself from myself. A reminder that time is precious.”

“And mine’s a reminder that we should utilize what other people fear, because you don’t fear something unless it’s powerful.”

“I don’t feel compelled to prove a point by wearing a radioactive watch,” Berger said.

“A total, at most, of twenty-five millicuries, or an exposure of maybe point-one micro sievert over the period of a year. Same thing one gets from normal radiation. Harmless, in other words. A good example of people shunning something because they’re ignorant.”

“People call me a lot of things, but not ignorant,” Berger said. “We need to get started on the laptops.”

“The artificial system I’ve developed—am developing, actually,” Lucy said, “because the possibilities are infinite, and when considering infinity, one has to ask if by its very nature it transforms what’s artificial into something real. Because to me, artificial is finite. So to me, it follows that infinite will no longer be artificial.”

“We need to get into this dead lady’s laptops,” Berger said.

“You need to understand what we’re doing,” Lucy said.

Her green eyes looked at Berger.

“Because it will be you explaining everything in court, not me,” Lucy said.

She started moving through the PowerPoint. Berger didn’t interrupt her this time.

“Wet mind, another bit of jargon you don’t know,” Lucy said. “The way our brain recognizes voices, faces, objects, and orients them into a context that’s meaningful, revealing, instructive, predictive, and I can tell you’re not looking at any of this or even listening.”

She removed her hands from the keyboard and studied Berger as if she were a question to be answered.

“What I want from you is straightforward,” Berger said. “To go through e-mail, all files of any description, re-create all deletions, recognize any patterns that might tell us the slightest thing about who, what, when, where. If she were murdered by somebody she knew, chances are good there’s something in there.” She indicated the packaged evidence on the table by the door. “Even if this is a stranger killing, there may be something she mentioned somewhere that could clue us in as to where this person might have come across her or where she came across him. You know how it works. You’ve been an investigator more years than you’re old.”

“Not exactly.”

Berger got up from her desk.

“I’ll receipt these to you,” she said. “How did you get here?”

“Since you don’t have a helipad, I took a cab.”

Lucy had closed the office door when she’d come in. They stood in front of it.

“I assumed one of your troops would give me a lift back to the Village and up the stairs, straight into my office,” Lucy said. “And I’ll sign the appropriate paperwork. Pro forma, maintaining the chain of evidence. All those things I learned in law enforcement one-oh-one.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

Berger made the phone call.

When she hung up, she said to Lucy, “You and I have one last thing to discuss.”

Lucy leaned against the door, hands in the pockets of her jeans, and said, “Let me guess. That gossip column. Pedestrian programming, I might add. Do you believe in the Golden Rule? Do unto others?”

“I’m not talking specifically about Gotham Gotcha ,” Berger said. “But it raises an important issue I need to tell you about. Marino works for me. I’m taking for granted you can and will handle that.”

Lucy put on her jacket.

“I need your assurance,” Berger said.

“You’re telling me this now?”

“Until earlier this afternoon, I didn’t know there was a reason to have this conversation. By then, you and I had already agreed to meet. That’s the chronology of things. That’s why I’m bringing it up right now.”

“Well, I hope you screen other people better than you did him,” Lucy said.

“That’s a topic for you and Benton, since he’s the one who referred Marino to me last summer. What I read today is the first I’d heard of why Marino really left Charleston. I’ll reiterate what matters right now, Lucy. You have to handle it.”

“That’s easy. I don’t intend to have anything to do with him.”

“It’s not your choice to make,” Berger said. “If you want to work for me, you’ll have to handle it. He takes priority over you because—”

“Glad to know your definition of justice,” Lucy interrupted. “Since I’m not the one who feloniously assaulted someone and then took a job under false pretenses.”

“That’s not legally or literally true, and I don’t want to argue about it. The fact is, he’s completely involved in this investigation and I can’t remove him without repercussions. The fact is, I don’t want him off the case for a number of reasons, not the least of which is he already has a history with it since he took a complaint from the victim’s boyfriend a month ago. I’m not going to get rid of Marino because of you. There are other forensic computer experts. Just so we’re clear.”

“There’s no one else who can do what I can. Just so we’re clear. But I’d rather end this before it starts. If that’s what you want.”

“It’s not what I want.”

“Does he know my aunt’s here?”

“To use your aviation language, it seems I’m an air traffic controller at the moment,” Berger said. “Doing my best to keep things moving without people crashing into each other. My goal is strategic, gentle landings.”

“What you’re saying is he knows she’s here.”

“I’m not saying that. I haven’t talked to him about it, but that doesn’t mean others haven’t. Especially since he’s suddenly headline news. At least on the Internet. He may have known for a long time that Kay’s in and out of New York, but in light of their sullied past, it doesn’t surprise me he’s never mentioned anything about her to me.”

“And you’ve never said anything about her to him?” Lucy’s eyes were shadowed by anger. “Like, how’s Kay? How’s she like working for CNN? How’s married life treating her? Gee, I really should try to have coffee with her some time when she’s in the city.”

“Marino and I don’t chat. It’s never been my desire to be his new Scarpetta. I’m not Batman, and I don’t need a Robin. No insult toward Kay intended.”

“Lucky for you, now that you know what Robin did to Batman.”

“I’m not entirely sure what happened,” Berger said as her phone rang. “I believe your car’s here.”

Scarpetta peeled off the hardened silicone and placed it in plastic evidence bags. She opened a cabinet and found antiseptic wipes and antibacterial ointment, then untied Oscar’s gown in back and lowered it around his waist again.

“You’re sure it was a flex-cuff?” she asked.

“You see them on TV,” Oscar said. “The police, the military, use them to tie people up like bags of garbage.”

“This shouldn’t hurt.”

Oscar didn’t move as she began cleaning his wounds again and gently applying ointment.

“They had no right to touch her,” he said. “I was already holding her, so what difference did it make if it had been me who picked her up and put her on the stretcher? Instead of those assholes putting their hands all over her. They took the towel off her. I saw them. When they were making me leave the bathroom. They took the towel off her. Why? You know why. Because they wanted to see her.”

“They were looking for evidence. For injuries.”

She carefully pulled up his gown and tied it in back.

“They didn’t need to take the towel off,” he said. “I told them there wasn’t any blood except the scratches on her legs. It’s like he hit her with something. Maybe a board. I don’t know where he got a board. Or where they got one. I didn’t see anything that might have made those scratches on her legs. Her face was dark red. There was a line around her neck. As if he strangled her with a rope or something. Whatever it was, it wasn’t around her neck anymore. The police didn’t need to take the towel off to see that, to take her pulse, to look at her wrists. You could look at her and see she was dead. I’m cold. Is there a blanket in here?”

Unable to find one, Scarpetta took off her lab coat and draped it over his shoulders. He was shivering. His teeth were chattering.

“I sat on the floor next to her, petting her hair, her face, talking to her,” he said. “I called nine-one-one. I remember feet. Black ankle boots and dark pants moving in the doorway. I had the towel over her and was holding her.”

He stared at the wall.

“I heard voices telling me to get away from her. They grabbed me. I started screaming I wasn’t going to leave her. But they made me. They wouldn’t let me see her even one more time. I never saw her again. Her family lives in Arizona, and that’s where she’ll go, and I’ll never see her again.”

“You said your online college is based in Arizona.”

“Her father’s the dean,” he said to the wall. “That’s why she ended up going there. They call it Gotham College as if it’s here in New York, but it’s really nowhere except there’s a building in Scottsdale, probably because it’s a nice place to live, much cheaper to live there. Her parents have a big house near Camelback Mountain. We never went to Scottsdale together because the next meeting isn’t until March. She’s not on the faculty, but she would have gone. . . . Well, she was supposed to fly there early this morning, to be in Scottsdale for a few days.”

“When you were in her apartment last night, did you see her luggage? Was she packed?”

“Terri doesn’t leave things out unless she’s about to use them. And she knows it upsets me to see her suitcase if I’m not going with her. It would have ruined our night.”

“Were you invited to go to Scottsdale with her?”

“She wanted a chance to tell them about me first.”

“After three months, they didn’t know she was seeing you?”

“They’re very protective of her. Stiflingly controlling.” He continued to face the wall, as if he was talking to it. “She didn’t want to tell them unless she was sure. I told her it was no wonder she was obsessive-compulsive. It’s because of them.”

“What did she feel she needed to be sure of?”

“Of me. That we’re serious. I fell harder for her than she did for me.”

He continued mixing up tenses, the way people often do when someone they love has just died.

“I knew right away what I wanted. But her parents . . . Well, if it didn’t work out, she didn’t want to explain. She’s always been afraid of them, afraid of their disapproval. It says a lot about her that she finally had the courage to move out. They have two other children who aren’t little people, and they went to universities and do what they want. But not Terri. She’s the smartest one in the family. One of the smartest people I know. But not her. They kept her at home until she was twenty-five, until she couldn’t take it anymore because she wanted to amount to something. She got into a fight with them, and she left.”

“How could she afford New York?”

“It was before I knew her. But she said she had money in savings, and they continued to help her some, not much, but some. Then she made amends with them, and I think they came to see her once and didn’t like where she lived. They increased whatever it is they give her, and she moved into the apartment where she is now. That’s what she told me. To give them credit, they’ve supported her, at least financially.”

His face turned very red with anger, and his short gold hair seemed as bright as metal.

“With people like that, there are always strings attached,” he then said. “I suspect they started controlling her long distance. I watched her obsessive-compulsiveness get worse. I began to notice an increasingly anxious tone to her e-mails. Even before we’d met. And over the past few months it’s just gotten worse and worse. I don’t know why. She can’t help it. I have to see her. Please let me see her. I have to say good-bye! I hate the police. Fuck them.”

He wiped his eyes with his cuffed hands.

“Why did they have to be so cold? Shouting and shoving. And on their radios. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. I hate that detective. . . .”

“The same one you invited to go through your apartment?” Scarpetta said.

“I don’t get to pick them! He was shouting, ordering me to look at him when he spoke to me, and I tried to explain I couldn’t hear him if I looked at him. Asking me things in the living room, demanding answers. Look at me, look at me! I was trying to help at first. I said someone must have come to the outer door and rung the bell and she thought it was me. Maybe she thought I was early and forgot my keys. There had to be a reason she felt it was safe to let the person in.”

“You keep telling me how anxious Terri was. Was she unusually cautious?”

“It’s New York, and people don’t just open their doors, and she’s always been incredibly cautious. People our size are cautious. That’s one of the reasons her parents are so protective, practically kept her locked up in the house when she was growing up. She wouldn’t open her door unless she felt safe.”

“What do you think that means, then? How did the intruder get in, and do you have any idea why someone would want to harm Terri?”

“They have their motives,” he said.

“When you were in her apartment, did you notice any signs of robbery? Might that have been a motive?”

“I didn’t notice anything missing. But I didn’t look.”

“What about jewelry? Did she wear a ring, a necklace, anything that was missing?”

“I didn’t want to leave her. They had no right to make me leave her, to make me sit in that detective’s car as if I were a murderer. He looks more like a murderer than I do, with his gang clothes and braided hair. I refused to talk.”

“You just said you did. Inside the house.”

“They had their minds made up. I hate the police. I’ve always hated them. Driving by in their patrol cars, talking, laughing, staring. Someone keyed my car and smashed all the windows. I was sixteen. And this cop says, ‘So, are we having a little problem? ’ And he sat in my car and put his feet on the extended pedals, and his knees were on either side of the steering wheel, while the other cop laughed. Fuck them.”

“What about other people? Have they mistreated you, made fun of you?”

“I grew up in a small town, and everybody knew me. I had friends. I was on the wrestling team and made good grades. I was the class president my senior year. I’m realistic. I don’t take stupid chances. I like people. Most people are all right.”

“Yet you’ve chosen a career where you can avoid them.”

“It’s predicted most students will go to college online eventually. The police think everybody’s guilty of something. If you look different or have some sort of disability. There was a boy with Down syndrome across the street from me. The cops always suspected him of something, always assumed he was going to rape every girl in the neighborhood.”

Scarpetta began packing her crime scene case. She was done with him. Comparing the silicone impressions of his fingernails and the scratches and nail marks, and relying on measurements and photographs were only going to corroborate what she already knew. He would realize that already, he must, and she wanted him to realize it.

She said, “You understand what we can tell from all that I’ve done today, don’t you, Oscar? The silicone impressions of your fingertips and wounds. The photographs and precise measurements.”

He stared at the wall.

She continued to bluff, slightly. “We can study these impressions under the microscope.”

“I know what you can do,” he said. “I know why you made the silicone casts. Yes, I know that now you’ll look at them under a microscope.”

“I’ll let the police labs do that. I don’t need to. I think I already have the information I need,” she said. “Did you do this to yourself, Oscar? The scratches, the bruises? They’re all within your reach. All angled the way they would be if they were self-inflicted.”

He didn’t say anything.

“If you really have this mythical notion that I can solve the perfect crime, would there have been a doubt in your mind that I would figure out you injured yourself?”

Nothing. Staring at the wall.

“Why?” she asked him. “Was it your intention for me to come here and determine you’d done this to yourself?”

“You can’t tell anyone. You can’t tell your husband. You can’t tell Detective Morales. You can’t tell Berger or that asshole in her office who didn’t believe me last month.”

“Under the current circumstances, what’s gone on between us is confidential. But that could change,” she reminded him.

“It’s the only way I could get you here. I had to be injured.”

“The attacker at her door?” she said.

“There was no one. I got there and the lights were out. Her door was unlocked. I ran inside calling out her name. And found her in the bathroom. The light was on in there, as if he wanted me to be shocked. You can’t see that light from where I parked because the bathroom’s in the back. I removed the flex-cuffs with scissors from the kitchen. That’s when I cut my thumb. Just a small cut, not sure how it happened, but I was grabbing for the scissors, and the block of knives fell over, and one of them must have nicked me, so I wrapped a paper towel around my thumb and ran out to my car and threw my coat inside. I sat with her on the bathroom floor and ripped my shirt and hurt myself. There’s blood on my shirt. I called the police.”

“The flashlight? You hit yourself with it?”

“I found it in the kitchen drawer. I wiped it off and left it on the living room floor. Near the door.”

“Why did you bother to wipe it off if your fingerprints and DNA are all over her house and all over her body?”

“So I could tell the police the intruder was wearing gloves. That would corroborate my story. The gloves wiped off any prints on the flashlight. Leather gloves, I told them.”

“And the scissors from the kitchen? What did you do with those after you cut off the flex-cuff?”

His face twitched, and she could almost see him re-creating that scene, and he began to breathe hard, rocking back and forth.

His voice wavered when he said, “Her hands were this awful deep bluish red. Her fingernails were blue. I rubbed her wrists and her hands to get the circulation going. I tried to rub the grooves away, these deep grooves.”

“Do you remember what you did with the scissors?”

“That flex-cuff was so tight. It had to hurt. I left the scissors on the bathroom floor.”

“When did you decide to injure yourself because, as you just told me, it was the only way to get me here?”

“I was on the bathroom floor with her. I knew I’d be blamed. I knew if I got to your husband, I could get to you. I had to get to you. I trust you, and you’re the only one who cared about her.”

“I didn’t know her.”

“Don’t lie to me!” he screamed.

Chapter 12

Shrew had resumed drinking Maker’s Mark, the same thing the Boss drank. She poured herself a tumbler full, on the rocks, the same way the Boss drank it.

She picked up the remote to the forty-inch flat-screen Samsung TV, just like the Boss used to have, according to the columns, but apparently not anymore. If what Shrew read was true, the Boss had gotten a new fifty-eight-inch plasma Panasonic. Unless that was nothing more than another paid endorsement. It was hard to know what was real and what was made up for money, because the business part of Gotham Gotcha was as hidden from Shrew as everything else.

Terrorists,she thought.

What if that’s where the money went? Maybe terrorists had killed her neighbor, gotten the buildings mixed up, and were really after Shrew because they sensed she was on to them? What if government agents who were after terrorists had tracked the website to Shrew and had gotten the apartments confused? It would be easy enough to do. Shrew’s and Terri’s apartments were directly across the street from each other, except Shrew’s was one floor higher. Governments took out people all the time, and Marilyn Monroe was probably one of them because she knew too much.

Maybe Shrew knew too much, or the wrong people thought she did. She was working herself into such a state of panic, she picked up the business card Investigator Pete Marino had left for her. She drank bourbon and held the card, and was within an inch of calling him. But what would she say? Besides, she wasn’t sure what she thought of him. If what the Boss had written about him was true, he was a sex maniac and had gotten away with it, and the last thing she needed inside her apartment right now was a sex maniac.

Shrew placed a dining room chair in front of her door, wedging the back of it under the knob, like she saw in the movies. She made sure all of her windows were locked and that no one was on the fire escape. She checked the TV guide to see if she could find a good comedy, and didn’t, so she played her favorite DVD of Kathy Griffin.

Shrew settled in front of her computer and drank her bourbon on the rocks and used her password to get into the website’s programming, or under the hood, as she thought of it.

She was astonished by what she discovered and not sure she believed it.

The Marilyn Monroe photo and Shrew’s accompanying sensational story had already gotten more than six hundred thousand hits. In less than an hour. She thought back to the video footage of Saddam Hussein being taunted and hanged, but no. That hadn’t gotten even a third as many hits the first hour it was up. Her amazement turned to pride, even if she was slightly terrified. What would the Boss do?

Shrew would justify her civil and literary disobedience by pointing out that if she hadn’t written the story about Marilyn’s murder, the world wouldn’t know the truth. It was the right and moral thing to do. Besides, the Boss never posted breaking news, so why should the Boss care if Shrew did? The Boss wasn’t particularly concerned about breaking anything except the hearts and spirits of whoever was on the radar.

Shrew logged out of the website and started surfing television channels, certain that somebody had picked up her startling revelation. She expected to see Dr. Scarpetta on CNN talking about it with Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer or Kitty Pilgrim. But no sign of the famous medical examiner whom the Boss seemed to hate, and no mention of Marilyn Monroe. It was early yet. She drank bourbon, and fifteen minutes later logged back in to the website programming to check the numbers again, and was dumbfounded to discover that almost a million people had clicked on the morgue photo of Marilyn Monroe. Shrew had never seen anything like this. She logged out of the programming and on to the actual site.

“Oh dear God,” she said out loud as her heart seemed to stop.

The home page looked demon-possessed. The letters spelling Gotham Gotcha! continuously rearranged themselves into OH C THA MAGGOT! and in the background, the New York skyline was blacked out, and behind it the sky flashed blood-red, then somehow the Christmas tree from Rockefeller Center was upside down in Central Park, and ice skaters were twirling inside the Boathouse restaurant while diners ate at tables on the ice of Wollman Rink, and then a heavy snow began to fall, and thunder clapped and lightning illuminated a horrendous rainstorm that ended up inside FAO Schwarz before turning into a sunny summer’s flight along the Hudson, where the Statue of Liberty suddenly filled the screen and deconstructed as if the helicopter had flown right into it.

On and on, over and over again, the banner was caught in a crazy loop that Shrew couldn’t stop. This is what millions of fans were seeing, and she couldn’t click her way out of it. All of the icons were unresponsive—dead. When she tried to access this morning’s column, or the more recently posted bonus column, or any column archived, she got the dreaded spinning color wheel. She couldn’t send an e-mail to the site or enter Gotham Gossip, where fans chatted and had spats and said terrible things about people they didn’t know.

She couldn’t visit the Bulletin Bored, or Sneak Peeks, or the Photo Swap Shop, or even the Dark Room, where one could see Sick Pics or Celebrity Overexposures or the wildly popular Gotham Gotcha A.D., where Shrew posted photographs taken after death, including the most recent one of Marilyn.

How could hundreds of thousands of fans be opening that photo and Shrew’s accompanying story when the website was locked up and haywire? A conspiracy, she thought. The Mafia, it occurred to her with horror as she thought about the mysterious Italian agent who had hired her over the phone. The government! Shrew had spilled the beans and the CIA or FBI or Homeland Security had sabotaged the site so the world wouldn’t know the truth. Or maybe it really was all about terrorists.

Shrew frantically clicked on every icon, and nothing happened, and the banner continued its infernal loop as Gotham Gotcha rearranged itself nonstop:

. . . GOTHAM GOTCHA! OH C THA MAGGOT!

GOTHAM GOTCHA!

Benton was waiting outside the infirmary, and in the space of the closing door, Oscar’s mismatched eyes stared at Scarpetta before disappearing behind beige steel. She heard the clanks and clicks of restraints being removed.

“Come on,” Benton said, touching her arm. “We’ll talk in my office.”

Tall and slender, he seemed to dominate any space he was in, but he looked tired, as if he was coming down with something. His handsome face was tense, his silver hair a mess, and he was dressed like an institutional employee in a bland gray suit, white shirt, and nondescript blue tie. He wore a cheap rubber sports watch and his simple platinum wedding band. Any sign of affluence was unwise on a prison ward, where the average stay was less than three weeks. It wasn’t uncommon for Benton to evaluate a patient at Bellevue and a month later see the same person on the street, rooting through garbage for something to eat.

He took the crime scene case from her, and she held on to envelopes of evidence and said she needed to receipt them to the police.

“I’ll get someone to stop by my office before we leave,” Benton said.

“It should go straight to the labs. They should analyze Oscar’s DNA and get it into the database as soon as possible.”

“I’ll call Berger.”

They walked away from the infirmary. Two linen carts rolling by sounded like a train, and a barrier door slammed shut as they passed cells that would have been spacious by prison standards were they not crammed with as many as six beds. Most of the men were in ill-fitting pajamas, sitting up and engaged in loud conversations. Some gazed through mesh-covered windows at the dark void of the East River, while others watched the ward through bars. One patient thought it a fine time to use the steel toilet, smiling at Scarpetta as he peed and telling her what a great story he’d be. His cell mates began bickering about who would look better on TV.

Benton and Scarpetta stopped at the first barrier door, which never opened fast enough, the guard in the control room on the other side busy with the rhythm of gatekeeping. Benton loudly announced that they were coming through, and they waited. He called out again as a man mopped a corridor that led to the recreation room, where there were tables and chairs, a few board games, and an old home gym with no detachable parts.

Beyond that were interview rooms, and areas for group therapy, and the law library with its two typewriters, which like the televisions and the wall clocks were covered with plastic to prevent patients from disassembling anything with components that could be fashioned into a weapon. Scarpetta had gotten the tour the first time she was summoned up here. She was confident nothing had changed.

The white-painted steel door finally slid open and slammed shut behind them, and a second opened to let them through. The guard inside the control room returned Scarpetta’s driver’s license, and she surrendered her visitor’s pass, the exchange made mutely through thick bars as officers escorted in the newest patient, who wore the blaze-orange jumpsuit of Rikers Island. Prisoners like him were temporary transfers, brought here only if they needed medical attention. Scarpetta never ceased to be dismayed by what malingerers would do to themselves to earn a brief stay at Bellevue.

“One of our frequent flyers,” Benton said as steel slammed. “A swallower. Last visit it was batteries. Triple A, double A. Can’t remember. About eight of them. Rocks and screws before that. Once it was toothpaste, still in the tube.”

Scarpetta felt as if her spirit were unzipped from her body like the lining of a coat. She couldn’t be who she was, couldn’t show emotion, couldn’t share her thoughts about Oscar or a single detail he had told her about himself or Terri. She was chilled by Benton’s professional distance, which was always the most extreme on the ward. It was here where he entertained fears he wouldn’t confess, and didn’t need to, because she knew him. Ever since Marino had gotten so drunk and out of control, Benton had been in a quiet, chronic panic he refused to admit. To him, every male was a potential beast who wanted to carry her off to his lair, and nothing she did or said reassured him.

“I’m going to quit CNN,” she said as they headed to his office.

“I understand the position Oscar’s just put you in,” Benton said. “None of this is your fault.”

“You mean, the position you’ve just put me in.”

“It’s Berger who wanted you here.”

“But you’re the one who asked.”

“If I had my way about it, you’d still be in Massachusetts,” he said. “But he wouldn’t talk unless you came here.”

“I just hope I’m not the reason he’s here.”

“Whatever the reason, you can’t hold yourself responsible.”

“I don’t like the way that sounds,” she said.

They passed shut office doors, no one around. It was just the two of them, and they didn’t disguise their tense tones.

“I hope you’re not hinting it’s possible some obsessed fan pulled a horrific stunt so he could have an audience with me,” she added. “I hope that’s not what you’re implying.”

“A woman’s dead. That’s no stunt,” Benton said.

She couldn’t talk to him about Oscar’s conviction that he was being spied on and that whoever was behind it was Terri Bridges’s killer. Maybe Benton already knew, but she couldn’t ask. She couldn’t reveal that Oscar’s injuries were self-inflicted, that he’d lied to the police and everyone else about how he’d gotten them. The most she could do was speak in generalities.

“I have no information that might justify my discussing him with you,” she said, implying Oscar had confessed to nothing, nor indicated he was a threat to himself or others.

Benton unlocked his office door.

“You spent a long time with him,” he said. “Remember what I always tell you, Kay. Your first cue is your gut. Listen to what your gut tells you about this guy. And I’m sorry if I seem strung out. I’ve had no sleep. Actually, things are rather much a fucking mess.”

The work space the hospital had allotted Benton was small, with books, journals, clutter piled everywhere as neatly as he could manage. They sat, and the desk between them seemed a solid manifestation of an emotional barrier she could not get past. He did not want sex, at least not with her. She didn’t believe he was having it with anybody else, but the benefits of marriage seemed to include shorter and more impersonal conversations, and less time in bed. She believed Benton had been happier before they’d gotten married, and that sad fact she wasn’t going to blame on Marino.

“What did your gut tell you?” Benton asked.

“That I shouldn’t be talking to him,” she replied. “That I shouldn’t be prevented from talking to you. My head tells me otherwise.”

“You’re an associate, a consultant here. We can have a professional discussion about him as a patient.”

“I don’t know anything about him as your patient. I can’t tell you anything about him as mine.”

“Before now you’d never heard of him? Or Terri Bridges?”

“That much I can say. Absolutely not. And I’m going to ask you not to cajole me. You know my limitations. You knew them when you called this morning.”

Benton opened a drawer and pulled out two envelopes. He reached across the desk to hand them to her.

“I didn’t know what might happen by the time you got here,” he said. “Maybe the cops would have found something, arrested him, and we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. But you’re right. At the moment, your priority has to be Oscar’s well-being. You’re his physician. But that doesn’t mean you have to see him again.”

Inside one envelope was a DNA report, and inside the other, a set of crime scene photographs.

“Berger wanted you to have a copy of the DNA analysis. The photographs and police report are from Mike Morales,” Benton said.

“Do I know him?”

“He’s relatively new to the detective division. You don’t know him, maybe won’t have to. Candidly speaking, I think he’s a jerk. Photos he took at the crime scene, his preliminary report. The DNA’s from swabs Dr. Lester took from Terri Bridges’s body. There’s a second set of photos I haven’t gotten yet. From a second search earlier this afternoon when luggage in her closet was checked, and it turned out Terri’s laptops were in it. Apparently, she was supposed to fly to Arizona this morning to spend a few days with her family. Why her luggage was packed and out of sight in her closet, no one knows.”

Scarpetta thought about what Oscar had told her. Terri didn’t leave luggage out. She was obsessively neat, and Oscar didn’t like good-byes.

Benton said, “One possible explanation is she was extremely neat. Perhaps obsessively so. You’ll see what I mean in the photos.”

“I’d say that’s a very plausible explanation,” she commented.

He held her gaze. He was trying to determine if she’d just given him information. She didn’t break their eye contact or the silence. He retrieved a number from his cell phone contact list and reached for the landline. He asked Berger if she could send someone by to pick up evidence Scarpetta had collected from Oscar Bane.

He listened for a moment, then looked up at Scarpetta and said to Berger, “I completely agree. Since he can leave whenever he wants, and you know how I feel about that. And no, I haven’t had a chance . . . Well, she’s right here. Why don’t you ask her?”

Benton moved the handset to the middle of the desk and held out the receiver to Scarpetta.

“Thanks for doing this,” Jaime Berger said, and Scarpetta tried to remember the last time they’d talked.

Five years ago.

“How was he?” Berger asked.

“Extremely cooperative.”

“Do you think he’ll stay put?”

“I think I’m in an awkward position.” Scarpetta’s way of saying she couldn’t talk about her patient.

“I understand.”

“All I can comfortably tell you,” Scarpetta said, “is if you can get his DNA analyzed quickly, that would be a good thing. There’s no downside to that.”

“Fortunately, there are plenty of people in the world right now who love overtime. One of them, however, isn’t Dr. Lester. While I’ve got you, I’ll ask you directly and let Benton off the hook, unless he’s already said something. Would you mind looking at Terri Bridges’s body tonight? Benton can fill you in. Dr. Lester should be on her way in from New Jersey. Sorry to subject you to something so unpleasant, and I don’t mean the morgue.”

“Whatever’s helpful,” Scarpetta replied.

“I’m sure we’ll talk later. And we should get together. Maybe dinner at Elaine’s,” Berger said.

It seemed to be the favorite line of professional women like them. They would get together, have lunch, maybe dinner. She and Berger had said it to each other the first time they met eight years ago, when Berger was brought to Virginia as a special prosecutor in a case that was one of the most stressful ones in Scarpetta’s life. And they’d said it to each other last time they met, in 2003, when both of them had been concerned about Lucy, who had just returned from a clandestine operation in Poland that Scarpetta still knew very little about, except that what Lucy had done wasn’t legal. It certainly wasn’t moral. In Berger’s penthouse apartment here in the city, the prosecutor had sat down with Scarpetta’s niece, and whatever had gone on between them had remained between them.

Oddly, Berger knew far more about Scarpetta than almost anybody she could think of, and yet they weren’t friends. It was unlikely they would get together and do anything except work, no matter how many times they suggested lunch or a drink and meant it. Their disconnection wasn’t simply due to the vicissitudes of very busy lives that collide and then resume their separate paths. Powerful women tended to be loners, because it was their instinct not to trust one another.

Scarpetta handed the receiver back to Benton.

She said, “If Terri were obsessive-compulsive, her body might offer a few hints. It seems I’ll have a chance to look for myself. Coincidentally.”

“I was about to tell you. Berger asked me earlier to see if you would.”

“Since Dr. Lester’s on her way back into the city, I guess I agreed to it before I knew about it.”

“You can leave afterwards, stay out of it,” Benton said. “Unless Oscar gets charged. Then I don’t know how it will involve you. That will be up to Berger.”

“Please don’t tell me this man killed someone to get my attention.”

“I don’t know what to tell you about anything. At this point, I don’t know what to think about anything. The DNA from Terri’s vaginal swabs, for example. Take a look.”

Scarpetta removed the lab report from an envelope and read it as he described what Berger had told him about a woman in Palm Beach.

“Well?” he said. “Can you think of any reason?”

“What’s not here is Dr. Lester’s report of what samples she took. You said vaginal.”

“That’s what Berger told me.”

“Exactly what they were and from where? Not here. So no. I’m not going to venture a guess about the unusual results and what they might mean.”

“Well, I will. Contamination,” he said. “Although I can’t figure out how an elderly woman in a wheelchair factors into that.”

“Any chance she has a connection with Oscar Bane?”

“I’m told no. Berger called her and asked.”

His phone rang. He answered, listening for a long silence, his closed face giving away nothing.

“Don’t think it was such a great idea,” he finally spoke to whoever was on the line. “Sorry that happened . . . Of course I regret it in light of . . . No, I didn’t want to tell you for this very reason . . . Because, no, hold on. Listen to me for a minute. The answer is, I have . . . Lucy, please. Let me finish. I don’t expect you to understand, and we can’t get into it now. Because . . . You don’t mean that. Because . . . When someone has nowhere else to turn . . . We’ll deal with it. Later, all right? Calm down and we’ll talk later,” and he got off the phone.

“What the hell was that about?” Scarpetta asked. “What was Lucy saying? What are you sorry about, and who has nowhere else to turn?”

Benton’s face was pale but impassive, and he said, “Sometimes she has no sense of time and place, and what I don’t need right now is one of her rages.”

“Rage? Over what?”

“You know how she gets.”

“Usually when she has good reason to get that way.”

“We can’t get into it now.” He said the same thing to her that he’d said to Lucy.

“How the hell am I supposed to concentrate after overhearing a conversation like that? Get into what?”

He was silent. She never liked it when he stopped to think after she’d asked him a question.

“Gotham Gotcha,”he said, to her surprise and annoyance.

“You’re not really going to make a big deal out of that.”

“You read it?”

“I started reading it in the cab. Bryce said I needed to.”

“Did you read all of it?”

“I was interrupted by being thrown out on the street.”

“Come look.”

He typed something as she moved next to him.

“That’s odd,” Benton said, frowning.

The Gotham Gotcha website had a massive programming error or had crashed. Buildings were dark, the sky flashing red, and Rockefeller Center’s huge Christmas tree was upside down in Central Park.

Benton impatiently scooted the mouse around on its pad and clicked it repeatedly.

“The site’s down for some reason and completely fucked up,” he said. “However, unfortunately, I can pull up the damn column anyway.”

Typing, he executed a search, hitting keys vigorously.

“It’s all the hell over the place,” he said.

The screen filled with references to Gotham Gotcha and Dr. Kay Scarpetta, and he clicked on a file and opened a copy of not one column but two that someone had cut and pasted on a forensic fan site. The unflattering photograph of Scarpetta filled the screen, and she and Benton looked at it for a moment.

“You think it was taken in Charleston?” he asked. “Or your new office? Do the scrubs tell you anything? The color? Don’t you wear cranberry scrubs in Watertown?”

“Depends on what we get from the medical linen service. They pick up and deliver, and one week it might be teal-green, the next week purple, different shades of blue, cranberry. That’s true at most morgues in recent years. The most I might specify is I don’t want something cute like SpongeBob, the Simpsons, Tom and Jerry. Literally true. I know pathologists who wear them, as if they’re pediatricians.”

“And you have no recollection of someone taking a picture of you during an autopsy? Maybe using their cell phone?”

She thought back, thought hard, and said, “No. Because if I saw it happen, I would have made the person delete it. I would never permit such a thing.”

“Most likely it happened since you moved and started with CNN. The celebrity factor. A cop. Someone from a funeral home, a removal service.”

“That would be bad,” she said, thinking about Bryce. “That would make me worry about someone on my staff. What’s this about Sister Polly? Who’s Sister Polly?”

“Don’t know. Read this. Then we’ll get to that.”

He moved the cursor to the first column that had been posted today, to the part he wanted her to see:

. . . yet beneath that impenetrable façade is a dirty secret she hides pretty well. Scarpetta may live in a world of stainless steel but she’s certainly no woman made of steel. She’s weak, a disgrace.

Guess what, she can be raped.

That’s right. Just like any other woman, only you can blame the victim this time. She brought it upon herself. Pushed away, mistreated, and belittled her investigative partner in crime until one drunken night in Charleston when he couldn’t take it anymore. You have to feel a little sorry for poor Pete Marino. . . .

Scarpetta returned to her chair. Gossip was one thing. This was another.

“I won’t ask why people are so hateful,” she said. “I learned a long time ago not to ask. Finally figured out the why part might give insight, but really doesn’t matter. Just the end result. That’s what matters. If I find out who this is, I’ll sue.”

“I won’t tell you not to let it get to you.”

“I believe you just told me by not telling me. What happened was never in the news. I never reported it. It’s not accurate. This is slander. I’ll sue.”

“Sue whom? An anonymous piece of shit in cyberspace?”

“Lucy could find out who.”

“Speaking of, I’m not sure it’s coincidental the site crashed,” he said. “That’s probably the best remedy. Maybe it will stay crashed forever.”

“Did you ask her to crash the site?”

“You just heard me on the phone with her. Of course not. But you know her, as do I. Sure as hell is something she’d do, and much more effective than a lawsuit. There’s no slander. You can’t prove that what this person’s written is a lie. You can’t prove what happened. And what didn’t.”

“You say that as if you don’t believe what I’ve told you.”

“Kay.” He met her eyes. “Let’s don’t turn this into a fight between us. What you need to brace yourself for, obviously, is the exposure. The public didn’t know, and now it does, and you’re going to be asked. Same thing with this. . . .” He read some more. “This other bullshit. Parochial school. Sister Polly. That’s a story I’m not familiar with.”

Scarpetta barely read it, didn’t need to, and she replied, “There’s no Sister Polly, and what was described didn’t happen, not like that. It was a different nun, and there certainly was no salacious whipping in the bathroom.”

“But some truth.”

“Yes. Miami, the scholarship to parochial school. And my father’s protracted, terminal illness.”

“And his grocery store. Did the other girls in school call you a Florida cracker?”

“I don’t want to talk about this, Benton.”

“I’m trying to determine what’s true and who would know it. What’s already out there? Any of this?”

“You know what’s out there. And no. None of this, true or false, is out there. I don’t know where the information came from.”

He said, “I’m not as concerned about what’s false. I want to know what’s out there that’s true, and if there’s a publicized source for what’s in these columns. Because if there isn’t, as you seem to be suggesting, then someone close to you is leaking information to whoever this hack writer is.”

“Marino,” she reluctantly said. “He knows things about me that other people don’t.”

“Well, obviously the Charleston information. Although I can’t imagine him using that word.”

“What word, Benton?”

He didn’t answer.

“You can’t bring yourself to say it, can you? The word rape. Even though that’s not what happened.”

“I don’t know what happened,” he said quietly. “That’s my problem. I only know as much as you’ve let me know.”

“Would you somehow feel better if you’d watched?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“You need to see every detail, as if that will give you closure,” Scarpetta said. “Who’s the one always saying there’s no such thing as closure? I believe that would be both of us. And now this columnist, and whoever is leaking information to him or her, wins. Why? Because we’re sitting here upset, not trusting each other, estranged. Truth is, you probably know far more about what happened than Marino does. I sincerely doubt he remembers much of what he did or said that night. For his sake, I hope I’m right.”

“I don’t want to be estranged, Kay. I don’t know why this bothers me more than it seems to bother you.”

“Of course you know why, Benton. You feel even more powerless than I did because you couldn’t stop it, and at least I stopped some of it. I stopped the worst of it.”

He pretended to read the two columns again. What he was really doing was composing himself.

“Would he know the Florida information?” he asked. “What did you tell him about your childhood? Or let me restate the question. The part that’s true”—he indicated what was on the computer—“is that from information you gave him?”

“Marino’s known me for almost twenty years. He’s met my sister, my mother. Of course he knows some details about my life. I don’t remember everything I’ve said to him, but it’s no great secret among those close to me that I grew up in a not-so-nice Miami neighborhood, and we had no money, and my father lingered with cancer for many years before dying. And that I did pretty well in school.”

“The girl who broke your pencils?”

“This is ridiculous.”

“I take that as a yes.”

“There was a girl who did that. A bully. I don’t remember her name.”

“Did a nun slap you across the face?”

“Because I confronted the girl, and she tattled on me, not the other way around, and one of the sisters punished me. That was it. No titillating bathroom scene. And it’s absurd we’re having this conversation.”

“I thought I knew all your stories. It doesn’t feel good that I don’t and had to find out from the Internet. Absurd or not, details like this will be bounced around all over the place, probably already are. You can’t escape it, not even on CNN, where you have friends. When you’re on the set, someone will be obliged to ask. I guess you’ll have to get used to it. I guess we both will.”

She wasn’t thinking about the exposure or getting used to it. She was thinking about Marino.

“That’s what Lucy was talking about when she called you a little while ago,” Scarpetta said. “She was saying something about him.”

Benton said nothing. That was his answer. Yes, Lucy had been talking about Marino.

“What did you mean about him having nowhere else to turn? Or were you talking about somebody else? Don’t keep anything from me. Not now.”

“What he did. Hit-and-run. That’s how Lucy thinks of it,” Benton said, and she had gotten better at knowing when he was being evasive. “Because he disappeared, and I’ve explained until I’m blue in the face that when someone feels he has no place to turn, he looks for an out. This isn’t new. You know the story. And you know Lucy.”

“What story? I’ve never known the story. He disappeared, and I never believed he killed himself. That’s not Marino. He wouldn’t have the nerve or the stupidity, and most of all he’s afraid of going to hell. He believes there really is a physical hell located somewhere in the molten core of the earth, and if he ends up there he’ll be on fire for all eternity. He confessed that to me on another drunken occasion. He’s wished hell on half the planet because he’s terrified of it for himself.”

The look in Benton’s eyes was unutterably sad.

“I don’t know what story you’re talking about, and I don’t believe you,” she said. “Something else has happened.”

They held each other’s eyes.

Benton said, “He’s here. He’s been here since last July. The first weekend in July, exactly.”

He went on to tell her that Marino worked for Berger, who found out from the gossip column the real reason Marino had left Charleston, a sordid detail she certainly didn’t know when she hired him. Now Lucy knew about Marino because Berger had just met with her and had told her.

“That’s why Lucy called,” he said. “And knowing you as well as I do, I suspect you would have wanted me to help Marino, despite it all. And you would have wanted me to honor his wish that he go into treatment and basically start his life again without your knowledge.”

“You should have told me a long time ago.”

“I couldn’t divulge details about him to anyone. Any more than you can tell me what Oscar told you. Doctor-patient confidentiality. Marino called me at McLean not long after he disappeared from Charleston and asked me to get him into a treatment center. He asked me to confer with his therapist up there, to oversee, to intervene.”

“And then get him a job with Jaime Berger? And that’s a secret, too? What’s that got to do with doctor-patient confidentiality?”

“He asked me not to tell you.”

Benton’s voice said he’d done the right thing, but the look in his eyes belied his certainty.

“This isn’t about doctor-patient confidentiality or your even being decent,” Scarpetta said. “You know what it’s about. Your reasoning is completely irrational because there’s no way he could work for Jaime Berger and I wouldn’t find out, eventually. Which is exactly what’s happened.”

She started flipping through the police report because she didn’t want to look at him. She felt someone behind her before the person spoke, and turned around, startled by the man in Benton’s doorway.

In his baggy gang clothing, thick gold chains, his hair in cornrows, he looked as if he’d just escaped from the prison ward.

“Kay, you and Detective Morales haven’t met, I don’t think,” Benton said, and he wasn’t particularly friendly about it.

“I bet you don’t remember, but we almost met once,” Morales said as he brazenly walked in and looked her over.

“I’m sorry.” Meaning she didn’t remember, and she didn’t offer to shake his hand.

“Last Labor Day weekend. In the morgue,” he said.

He had an unsettling energy that made her edgy and uncomfortable, and she imagined that whatever he did was thought out quickly and done in a hurry, and that it was his nature to dominate whatever he touched.

“A couple of tables away from where you were busy looking at that guy found in the East River, floating off the shore of Ward’s Island?” he said. “I can tell you don’t remember me. Question was whether he was tired of life and jumped off the footbridge, or someone hastened his journey to the Great Beyond, or maybe he’d had a heart attack and fell off the embankment. One of Pester Lester’s cases. Turns out, she failed to connect the dots—didn’t recognize the telltale fern-like pattern on his torso was—guess what? Arborization from being struck by lightning, which she had ruled out because she didn’t find any burns in his socks, the bottom of his shoes, shit like that. You used a compass to show his belt buckle was magnetized, which is typical in lightning strikes, right? Anyway, you wouldn’t remember me. Was in and out, grabbing a couple bullets that needed to go to the labs.”

He pulled an evidence form out of the back pocket of his half-mast voluminous jeans, unfolded it, and started filling it out, leaning over the desk, so close to her his elbow brushed against her shoulder as he wrote, obliging her to move her chair. He handed her the form and the pen, and she filled out the rest and signed it. Then he took the envelopes of Oscar Bane’s evidence and left.

“Needless to say,” Benton remarked, “Berger’s got her hands full with him.”

“He’s in her squad?”

“No, that might make it easier. Then maybe she could control him, at least a little,” Benton said. “He’s rather ubiquitous. Whenever a case is high-profile, he somehow manages to show up. Such as the lightning death he mentioned. And by the way, he probably won’t forgive you for not remembering him, which is why he had to point it out three times.”

Chapter 13

Benton leaned back in his fake leather chair and was quiet as Scarpetta scanned paperwork on the other side of the small scarred desk.

He loved the straight bridge of her nose, the strong lines of her jaw and cheekbones, and the deliberate but graceful way she moved when she did the slightest thing, such as turning a page. In his mind, she looked no different than the first time they’d met, when she’d appeared in the doorway of her conference room, her blond hair out of place, no makeup on, the pockets of her long white lab coat filled with pens, tissues, pink telephone slips for calls she had no time to return but somehow would.

He’d recognized on the spot that for all of her strength and seriousness, she was thoughtful and kind. He’d seen it in her eyes during that first encounter, and he saw it in them now, even when she was preoccupied, even when he had hurt her yet again. He couldn’t imagine not having her, and felt a pang of hatred pierce him, hatred of Marino. What Benton had immersed himself in all of his adult life was now inside his home. Marino had let the enemy in, and Benton didn’t know how to make it leave.

“What time did the police arrive at the scene? And why are you staring at me?” Scarpetta asked without looking up at him.

“About quarter past six. I messed things up. Please don’t be angry with me.”

“Notified how?” She turned a page.

“Nine-one-one. He claims he found Terri’s body around five, but he didn’t call nine-one-one until six. Nine minutes past six, to be exact. The police were there within minutes. About five minutes.”

When she didn’t answer him, he picked up a paper clip, started unbending it. He didn’t used to fidget.

“They found the outer door locked,” he said. “There are three other apartments in the building, no one home, no doorman. The police couldn’t get into the building, but her apartment’s on the ground floor, so they went around to the back, to the windows, and through a gap in the curtains they saw Oscar in the bathroom, cradling a woman’s body. She was covered by a blue towel. He was crying hysterically, holding her, stroking her. The cops rapped on the glass until they got his attention and he let them in.”

He was talking in choppy sentences, his brain sluggish and slightly disorganized, probably because he was extremely stressed. He worked on the paper clip. He watched her.

After a lengthy silence, she looked up at him and said, “Then what? Did he talk to them?”

She’s comparing notes,he thought. Wants to line up what I know with what Oscar said to her. She’s being clinical, impersonal, because she’s not going to forgive me, he thought.

“I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry with me,” he said.

She held his gaze and said, “I’m wondering why she had nothing on but a bra and a robe. If a stranger was at her door, would she answer it like that?”

“We can’t work through it now.” Benton meant their relationship, not the case. “Can we put it on a shelf?”

It was the way they phrased it when private matters presented themselves in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Her lingering gaze and the way her eyes turned a deeper shade of blue told him she would. She would put it on a shelf for now because she loved him, even if he didn’t deserve it.

“It’s a good question. The way she might have been dressed when she answered the door,” he said. “I have a few observations, when we get to that part.”

“What exactly did Oscar do when the police were inside the apartment with him?” she asked.

“He was sobbing, knees buckling, yelling. So insistent on returning to the bathroom that two officers had to hold on to him while they tried to get him to talk. He said he cut off the flex-cuff. It was on the bathroom floor near a pair of scissors he said he’d removed from the cutlery block in the kitchen.”

“Did he call it a flex-cuff at the scene? Or is that what the police called it? Where did the term flex-cuff come from? It’s important we know who said it first.”

“Don’t know.”

“Well, someone knows.”

Benton bent the paper clip into a figure-eight as what they’d placed on the shelf kept falling off. At some point they would talk, but talking didn’t fix broken trust any more than it fixes broken bones. Lies and more lies. The necessary axis of his life was lies, all well intended or professionally and legally necessary, which was why, in fact, Marino was a threat. The foundation of Marino’s relationship with her had never been lies. When he forced himself on her, he wasn’t showing contempt or hate or trying to humiliate. Marino was taking what he wanted when she wouldn’t give it, because it was the only way he could kill an unrequited love he could no longer survive. His betrayal of her was actually one of the most honest things he’d ever done.

“And we don’t know what’s become of the ligature she was strangled with,” Benton said. “It appears the killer removed it from her neck after she was dead and left with it. Police suspect it was another flex-cuff.”

“Based on?”

“Would be unusual to bring two different types of ligatures to the scene,” Benton said.

He worked the straightened paper clip back and forth until it broke.

“And of course it’s assumed the killer brought the flex-cuff—or cuffs—with him. Not exactly the sort of thing most people have lying around the house.”

“Why remove the flex-cuff from her neck and leave with it, and not bother with the one around her wrists? If that’s what happened,” she said.

“We don’t know this person’s mind. Not much to go on except circumstances. I suspect it comes as no surprise to you they think Oscar did it.”

“Based on?”

“Either the killer had a key or she must have let him in, and as you pointed out, she was wearing a bathrobe, not much else. So let’s talk about that. Why was she so comfortable, so trusting? How did she know who was buzzing the outer door? There’s no camera, no intercom. The implication, in my opinion, is she was expecting someone. She unlocked the outer door after dark when the building was empty, then she unlocked her apartment door. Or someone did. Violent offenders love holidays. Lots of symbolism, and nobody’s around. If Oscar killed her, last night was an ideal time to do it and stage it as something else.”

“That’s what the police believe happened, I assume you’re saying.”

She’s making comparisons again,Benton thought. What does she know?

“To them it makes the most sense,” he replied.

“When the police arrived, was her apartment door locked or unlocked?”

“Locked. Oscar locked the apartment door at some point after he was inside. What’s a little peculiar is after he called nine-one-one, he didn’t unlock the apartment building’s outer door, maybe prop it open. And he didn’t unlock the apartment door. I don’t know how he thought the police would get in.”

“I don’t find that peculiar in the least. No matter what he did or didn’t do, he probably was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“If he didn’t kill her, he was likely afraid the killer might come back.”

“How would the killer get back into the building? If he didn’t have a key?”

“People don’t always think about every detail when they’re afraid. Your first impulse when you’re afraid is to lock the doors.”

She’s checking out Oscar’s story. He must have told her he locked Terri’s apartment door because he was afraid.

“What did he say when he called nine-one-one?” she asked.

“I’ll let you listen for yourself,” Benton said.

The CD was already in his computer, and he opened an audio file and turned up the volume:

911 OPERATOR:“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

OSCAR(hysterical): “Yes! Police . . . ! My girlfriend . . . !”

911 OPERATOR:“What’s the problem, sir?”

OSCAR(almost inaudible): “My girlfriend . . . when I walked in . . . !”

911 OPERATOR:“Sir, what’s the problem?”

OSCAR(screaming): “She’s dead! She’s dead! Someone killed her! Someone strangled her!”

911 OPERATOR:“She was strangled?”

OSCAR:“Yes!”

911 OPERATOR:“Do you know if the person who strangled her is still in the house?”

OSCAR(crying, almost inaudible): “No . . . She’s dead . . . !”

911 OPERATOR:“We have units en route. Just stay where you are, okay?”

OSCAR(crying, unintelligible): “They . . .”

911 OPERATOR:“They? Is someone with you?”

OSCAR:“No . . .” (inaudible)

911 OPERATOR:“Stay on the line. The police are almost there. What happened?”

OSCAR:“I got here and she was on the floor . . .” (unintelligible)

Benton closed the file and said, “Then he hung up and wouldn’t answer when the operator called him back. If he’d stayed on the line, it would have been easier and quicker for the police to get inside the apartment. Instead of them having to go around back and bang on the window.”

“He sounded genuinely terrified and hysterical,” Scarpetta said.

“So did Lyle Menendez when he called nine-one-one to report his parents had been murdered. And we know how that story ended.”

“Just because the Menendez brothers—” she started to say.

“I know. I know it doesn’t mean Oscar killed Terri Bridges. But we don’t know he didn’t,” Benton said.

“And your explanation for why he said they ? As if implying more than one person killed her?” Scarpetta asked.

“His paranoia, obviously,” Benton said. “Which I do think he genuinely feels. But that isn’t necessarily to his advantage in terms of how the police view it. Paranoid people commit murder because of their paranoid delusions.”

“And that’s what you’re really thinking?” Scarpetta said. “That basically this is a domestic homicide?”

She doesn’t believe it,Benton thought. She believes something else. What did Oscar say to her?

He answered, “I can understand why the police think it. But I’d like some real evidence.”

“What else do we know?”

“What he said.”

“At the scene or when he was in the detective’s car, Morales’s car?”

“Oscar wasn’t cooperative with him once they were out of the apartment,” Benton said.

He tossed the bits of paper clip into his wastepaper basket, and they binked against empty metal.

“By that point,” Benton said, “all he wanted was to go to Bellevue. Said he wouldn’t talk unless it was to me. Then he demanded that you come here. And here we are.”

He started on another paper clip. She watched him work on it.

“What did he tell the police while he was still inside the apartment?” she asked.

“Said when he arrived at the building, all the lights were out. He unlocked the outer door. Then he rang her apartment bell, and the door swung open and he was attacked by an intruder. Who quickly fled. Oscar locked the front door, turned on the lights, looked around, and found her body in the bathroom. He said there was no ligature around her neck, but he saw a reddish mark.”

“And he knew she was dead, yet waited to call the police. Because? What was his reason, in your opinion?” Scarpetta asked.

“He had no concept of time. He was beside himself. Who knows what’s true? But no probable cause for arrest. Doesn’t mean the cops weren’t more than happy to grant his request and lock him up. Doesn’t help he’s a muscle-bound dwarf who for the most part lives and works in cyberspace.”

“You know about his profession. What else?”

“We know everything about him except what he chooses not to tell us. How about you?” Maiming the paper clip. “Any thoughts?”

“I can speak theoretically.”

He gave her silence so she would fill it.

“I’ve had numerous cases when the police weren’t called right away,” she said. “When the killer needed time to stage the crime scene to look like something else. Or whoever found the body attempted to cover up what really happened. Embarrassment, shame, life insurance. Asphyxiophilia, for example—sexual hanging that turns tragic and the person dies of asphyxiation. Usually accidental. Mother walks in, sees her son in black leather, a mask, chains, nipple clips. Maybe cross-dressing. He’s hanging from a rafter, pornography everywhere. She doesn’t want the world to remember her son like that and doesn’t call for help until she’s gotten rid of the evidence.”

“Another theory?”

“The person’s so bereft, so unwilling to let his loved one go, he spends time with the body, stroking it, holding it, covering it if it’s nude, removing restraints. Restoring his person to the way she was, as if somehow that will bring her back.”

“Rather much what he did, isn’t it,” Benton said.

“I had a case where the husband found his wife dead in bed, an overdose. He climbed in next to her, held her, didn’t call the police until rigor was fully developed and she was cold.”

Benton looked at her for a long moment and said, “Remorse in domestic cases. Husband kills wife. Child kills mother. Overwhelming remorse, grief, panic. Doesn’t call the police right away. Holds the body, strokes it, talks to it, cries. Something precious that’s broken and can’t be fixed. Forever changed, forever gone.”

“A type of behavior more typical with impulse crimes,” she said. “Not premeditated ones. This murder doesn’t seem impulsive. When an offender brings his own weapon, his own bindings, like duct tape or flex-cuffs, that’s premeditated.”

Benton accidentally poked his fingertip with the twisted paper clip and watched a bead of blood form. He sucked the blood away.

She said, “No first-aid kit in my crime scene case, which probably isn’t very smart, now that I think of it. We should clean that up, find a Band-Aid. . . .”

“Kay, I don’t want you in the middle of this.”

“You’re the one who put me in the middle of it. Or at least permitted it.” She stared at his finger. “It would be good if you let it bleed as much as possible. I don’t like puncture wounds. They’re worse than cuts.”

“I didn’t mean to put you in the middle of it, wasn’t my choice.”

He started to say he didn’t make choices for her, but that would be another lie. She reached across the desk and handed him several tissues.

“I hate it,” he said. “Always hate it when you’re in my world, not yours. A dead body doesn’t get attached to you, have feelings for you. You don’t have a relationship with someone dead. We’re not robots. A guy tortures someone to death, and I sit across a table from him. He’s a person, a human being. He’s my patient. He thinks I’m his best friend until he hears me testify in court that he knew the difference between right and wrong. He ends up in prison for the rest of his life or, depending on the jurisdiction, on death row. Doesn’t matter what I think or believe in. I’m doing my job. I’ve done what’s right in the eyes of the law. Knowing that doesn’t make me feel any less haunted.”

“We don’t know what it is not to feel haunted,” she said.

He squeezed his finger, staining the tissue brilliant red. He looked at her on the other side of his desk, at the squareness of her shoulders, at her strong, capable hands, and the lovely contour of her body beneath her suit, and he wanted her. He felt aroused just doors away from a prison, and yet when they were alone at home, he scarcely touched her. What had happened to him? It was as if he’d been in an accident and had been pieced back together wrong.

He said, “You should go back to Massachusetts, Kay. If he gets indicted and you’re subpoenaed, then you’ll come back and we’ll deal with it.”

“I’m not going to run from Marino,” she said. “I’m not going to avoid him.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” But it was exactly what he was saying. “It’s Oscar Bane I’m worried about. He could walk out of Bellevue right now. I’d like you as far away from him as possible.”

“What you want is for me to be as far away from Marino as possible.”

“I don’t know why you’d want to be around him.” His feelings went flat, his voice hard.

“I didn’t say I wanted it. I said I wasn’t going to run from it. I’m not the one who ran like a coward. He did.”

“Hopefully my part in this will be over in a few days,” Benton said. “Then it’s NYPD’s responsibility. God knows I’m way behind at McLean. Only halfway through my research study, although I’m not sure about the journal article anymore. You don’t have to do the consultation at the damn morgue. Why should you pull Dr. Lester’s feet out of the fire again?”

“That’s not what you really want. For me to be a no-show? For me to walk off the job after Berger’s asked me to help? The last shuttle’s at nine o’clock. I’d never make it. You know that. Why are you talking like this?”

“Lucy could take you in her helicopter.”

“It’s snowing at home. The visibility’s probably two feet.”

She watched his face, and it was hard for him to keep his feelings out of his eyes, because he wanted her. He wanted her now, in his office, and if she knew what he was feeling, she would be repulsed by him. She would decide he’d spent too many years wallowing through every form of perversion imaginable, and had finally been infected.

“I keep forgetting the weather’s different there,” he said.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Then that’s the way it will be. You certainly packed as if you aren’t going anywhere.”

Her luggage was by the door.

“Food,” she said. “As much as you’d love to take me out for a romantic dinner tonight, we’re eating in. If we ever get home.”

They looked into each other’s eyes. She had just asked him the question she’d been wanting to ask but hadn’t.

He answered her, “My feelings about you haven’t changed. If you knew how I felt sometimes. I just don’t tell you.”

“Maybe you’d better start telling me.”

“I am telling you.”

He wanted her right then, and she sensed it, and she didn’t recoil. Maybe she felt the same way. It was so easy for him to forget there was a reason she was so polished and precise, that science was just the lead she looped around the neck of the wild animal so she could walk with it, so she could understand it and handle it. What she’d chosen to expose herself to in life couldn’t be more naked or primitive or powerful, and nothing shocked her.

“I believe a very important element in this case is why Terri Bridges was murdered in the bathroom,” she said. “And what makes us so sure she was?”

“The police found no evidence she was killed in any other area of the house. Nothing to suggest her body was moved into the bathroom after the fact. What food?”

“What we were going to have last night. When you say nothing suggests her body was moved, what does that mean? What might have suggested it?”

“I only know that Morales says nothing suggested it.”

“And likely nothing would in this case,” Scarpetta said. “If she’d been dead less than two hours, her body wasn’t going to tell anybody much of anything. Livor, rigor usually take at least six hours to be fully developed. Was she warm?”

“He said when he got there, he felt for a pulse. She was warm.”

“Then if Oscar didn’t kill her, whoever did must have left her apartment shortly before he got there and found her dead. Coincidence, amazing good luck for the killer that he wasn’t interrupted. He was just minutes away from Oscar walking in on him. Assuming the killer and Oscar aren’t one and the same.”

“If they aren’t,” Benton said, “you have to wonder why someone else would assume Terri would be home alone on New Year’s Eve. Unless it was random. Her lights were on in an otherwise dark building, and this time of year, most people who are home have their lights on all day, or at least by four, when the sun is going down. Question is whether she was a victim of opportunity.”

“What about an alibi? Oscar have one that you know of?”

“He have one that you know of?”

She watched him squeeze as much blood from his finger as he could.

“I’m trying to remember the last time you had a tetanus shot,” she said.

Chapter 14

It hadn’t been difficult searching the NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center and finding the two cases Morales had mentioned. What took a little longer was getting a response from the investigators who had worked them.

Marino was unbuttoning his coat inside his apartment when his cell phone rang at six-twenty. The woman identified herself as Bacardi, like the rum he used to drink mixed with Dr Pepper. He called her back on his landline and gave her a synopsis of the Terri Bridges case, asking if she’d ever heard of Oscar Bane, or if someone fitting his description had been spotted in the area when the homicide in Baltimore had occurred in the summer of 2003.

“Before we go galloping off together on some great big man-hunt,” Bacardi said, “what makes you think the cases are connected?”

“First, let’s start with it wasn’t my idea. This other detective’s name is Mike Morales, and he got hits on our computer system. You know him?”

“Not off the top of my head. So you’re not taking credit. Must be shit, what you got.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Marino said. “There are similarities in the MOs between yours and mine. Same thing in the Greenwich case, which I assume you’re aware of.”

“Went over it until my eyes fell out. Broke up my marriage. He died of cancer last year. Not my ex-husband, the Greenwich investigator. Where are you from? You sound like a Jersey boy.”

“Yeah, from the bad part. I’m sorry about the Greenwich detective. What kind?”

“Liver.”

“If I still had one, that would be what gets me.”

“Here one day, gone the next. Just like my ex and last two boyfriends.”

Marino wondered how old she was and if she was making sure he knew she was single.

“The case here, Terri Bridges?” he said. “She had a gold bracelet on her left ankle. A thin gold chain. I saw it in the pictures. I haven’t actually seen the body. I didn’t go to the scene or the morgue.”

“Real gold?”

“Like I said, I’ve only seen photographs, but on the report it says ten-karat. Must be stamped on the clasp. Don’t know how else you’d know.”

“Hon, I can tell just by looking at it. I can tell you anything you want to know about jewelry. Real, fake, good, bad, expensive, cheap. I used to work property crimes. Plus, I like stuff I can’t afford and would rather have nothing than crap. You know what I mean?”

Marino was aware of his cheap knockoff Italian designer suit, made in China. He felt sure if he got rained on, he’d leave a trail of black dye-stained water, like a squid. He struggled out of the jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair. He yanked off his tie and couldn’t wait to put on jeans, a sweater, and that old fleece-lined leather Harley jacket he’d had forever and had refused to hand over at the bazaar.

“Can you e-mail me a picture of the ankle bracelet Terri Bridges had on?” Bacardi asked him.

Her voice was melodic and happy, and she seemed interested in what she did and interested in him. Talking to her was waking him up in a way he hadn’t felt in a very long while. Maybe it was because he’d forgotten how nice it was to be treated like an equal, or, more important, with the respect he deserved. What had changed in the last few years to make him feel so bad about himself?

Charleston had been an accident waiting to happen, and that was the fact of the matter. It wasn’t about a so-called disease one poured out of a bottle. When he’d come to that realization, he and his therapist Nancy got into their biggest disagreement, an ugly argument. This was right before he’d finished his treatment program. She’d started it by saying that everything dysfunctional in his life was rooted in his alcoholism, and as drunks and junkies got older, they became exaggerated versions of themselves.

She’d even drawn a chart for him when they were alone in the chapel that sunny June afternoon, and all the windows were open, and he could smell the sea air and hear the gulls screaming as they swooped over the rocky coastline on the North Shore, where he ought to have been fishing or riding a motorcycle, or better yet, sitting with his feet propped up, drinking booze instead of blaming his life on it. Nancy had shown him in black and white how after he and beer had become “best friends” when he was twelve, his life had begun a slow deterioration peppered with traumas that she inked heavily and labeled:

Fighting

Poor Perf. in School

Isolation

Sexually Promix.

FX relationships

Risk/boxing/guns/police/motorcy.

Nancy had charted his fuckups for the better part of an hour, using abbreviations that required deciphering. What she basically demonstrated to him was that ever since his first beer, he’d been on an angry, dangerous path of aggression, sexual promiscuity, fractured friendships, divorce, and violence, and the older he got, the closer together his traumas were spaced, because that was the nature of the Disease. The Disease took you over, and as you got older, you physically couldn’t resist its having its way with you, or something like that.

Then she had signed and dated his chart, and even drew a smiley face under her name, and handed the damn thing to him, all five pages, and he said, What do you want me to do? Tape it on my fucking refrigerator?

He’d gotten up from the pew and walked over to the window, and looked out at the ocean crashing against black granite, and spray shooting up and gulls screaming as if whales and birds were gathering and rioting right in front of him, trying to break him out of the joint.

Do you see what you just did?Nancy said to his back, from her pew, while he looked out at the most beautiful day he’d ever seen, wondering why he wasn’t outside in the middle of it. You just pushed me away, Pete. That’s the alcohol talking.

The hell it is,he replied. I haven’t had a fucking drink in a fucking month. That was me talking.

Now as he talked to a woman he’d never met who had a name that made him happy, he realized he hadn’t been doing all that badly, really, until he’d stopped being a real cop. When he’d finally left Richmond PD, and had gone to work as a private investigator for Lucy, and then as a death investigator for Scarpetta, he’d lost enforcement powers and all self-respect. He couldn’t arrest anybody. He couldn’t even have some asshole’s car ticketed or towed. All he could do was muscle his way into situations and issue empty threats. He might as well have had his dick cut off. So what did he do last May? He had to show Scarpetta he still had a dick, because what he was really doing was proving it to himself and trying to take his life back. He wasn’t saying what he’d done was right or should be excused. He’d never said that, and he sure as hell didn’t think it.

“I’ll get you whatever you need,” he said to Bacardi.

“That’d be great.”

He took perverse pleasure in imagining Morales’s reaction. Marino was talking to the Baltimore homicide investigator, doing whatever he wanted.

Fuck Morales.

Marino was a sworn NYPD cop. More than that, he worked for the elite DA squad, and Morales didn’t. What made that poor man’s Puff Daddy in charge? Just because he was on duty last night and responded to the scene?

Marino said to Bacardi, “You sitting in front of your computer?”

“Home alone, Happy New Year. Fire away. You watch the ball drop in the Big Apple? Me? I ate popcorn and watched The Little Rascals. Don’t laugh. I got the complete set of originals.”

“When I was a kid, you could name something Buckwheat and not have Al Sharpton up your ass. I had a cat named Buckwheat. Guess what. She was white.”

He opened a big envelope and pulled out his copies of the police and autopsy reports, and then opened the envelope of photographs, which he pushed around on the Formica countertop, covering a couple of cigarette burns and pot rings, until he found what he wanted. Cordless phone tucked under his chin, he inserted a photograph into the scanner attached to his laptop.

“You should know there’s some political bullshit here,” he said.

“You only got some?”

“Point being, just you and me need to be talking about this right now, and nobody else involved. So if anybody besides me gets in touch—I don’t care if it’s the NYPD police commissioner—I’d appreciate it if you’d not mention me, but let me know. And I’ll handle it. Not everybody in the mix is—”

“You’re telling me the grass is green and the sky is blue. No worries, Pete.”

It felt good to hear her call him Pete. He went into his e-mail to attach the scanned photograph as an image.

“I get any calls,” she said, “I’ll let you know first and foremost. I’d appreciate the reciprocation. There are a lot of people running around who’d love the credit for solving my lady here in Baltimore and the kid in Greenwich. Did I mention how weird people are about getting credit? See, my theory? That’s what led up to the mortgage crisis. Everybody wants credit. I’m not being a comedian.”

“Especially if Morales calls,” Marino added. “I’m surprised he hasn’t. But then, he doesn’t seem to be a follow-up kind of guy.”

“Yup. What I call fuck and run. Shows up for the big moment, then disappears, lets everybody else clean up after him or finish what he started. Sort of like a deadbeat dad.”

“You got kids?”

“Not in the house anymore, happy to report. They turned out pretty good, considering. I’m looking at the picture now. And nobody seems to know why the victim there, Terri Bridges, was wearing the bracelet?”

“That’s the story. Her boyfriend, Oscar, said he’d never seen it before.”

“A bracelet’s not rocket science, but I’m not one of those who ignores circumstantial evidence,” she said. “I guess you can tell I’m over forty and superstitious about putting my entire case in a lab coat pocket. All the young ones? Shit. It’s Forensic Let’s Make a Deal. Behind door number one is a videotape of someone raping and murdering a woman he’s kidnapped. Behind door number two is DNA from a cigarette butt found at the driveway. Which do they choose?”

“Don’t get me started.”

“Yeah, you and me together. I tell them, you know what CSI stands for? It stands for Can’t Stand It. Because when I hear that term or acronym or whatever the hell it is, I think to myself, I can’t stand it. I really can’t stand it. You tell me, Pete. When you was getting started, was there such a thing as a CSI?”

“TV invented it. They was crime scene techs in the real world. Or most times, people like you and me got out our fingerprint kit, camera, measuring tape, and all the rest, and did it our damn self. I didn’t need a friggin’ laser to map a crime scene and get all the dimensions right. Luminol works just as good as all these new chemicals and fancy crime scene lights. Been mixing up luminol in a spray bottle and using it all my life. I don’t need the Jetsons to work a homicide.”

“I won’t go that far. A lot of the new stuff? So much better, there’s no comparison. I can work a scene without totally trashing the place, if nothing else. You know, some old lady gets burglarized, and no more ruining everything she owns with black dusting powder. Technology at least lets me be considerate. But I don’t have a magic box. You got one?”

“I keep forgetting to recharge it,” he said.

“You ever come to Baltimore, Pete?”

“Hadn’t heard that expression in a while,” Marino said. “The case-in-a-lab-coat-pocket thing you said. So guess what? I’m over forty. You have some files landing. You checking your e-mail as we complain? You ever come to New York?”

He was scanning pages of the police report, and Dr. Lester’s preliminary autopsy findings.

“It’s not the way I started,” Bacardi said. “I still believe in talking to people and looking at motive, the old-fashioned way. Sure, I come to New York. Or I can. No big deal. We should exchange yearbook pictures first. But I promise I look better since I had my face transplant.”

Marino grabbed a Sharp’s out of the refrigerator. He had to meet this one. She was something.

“I’m looking at the photograph of the bracelet right now. Jesus—money,” Bacardi said. “It’s the same as the others. All three of them ten-karat. A herringbone design, really thin. Based on the scale in this photo, it looks like your bracelet—just like the other two—is ten inches long. Sort of thing you’d buy in a mall kiosk or on the Internet for forty, fifty bucks. One interesting difference that strikes me right off the bat is in my case and Greenwich, the bodies weren’t indoors. It appears the victims were out looking to score drugs for sex, and got picked up by someone cruising for an opportunity. Your victim—Terri Bridges—have a history of drug abuse or a secret life that might have left her open for that kind of thing happening to her?”

“No information to make me think she was into oxys or anything else. All I can tell you is what you’re looking at. Her STAT alcohol was negative. Too early for drug screens, but no evidence of drugs at her apartment. We also don’t know that in her case, the killer wasn’t cruising for victims. Assuming the boyfriend didn’t do it. Or even if he did, it was New Year’s Eve. She was the only person home in her apartment building. Nobody directly across the street, either, except one lady who wasn’t looking out her window about the time we suspect Terri was murdered. Supposedly. And this same lady had a couple stories that got my antenna going. Like this weird one about a puppy. Who would give a sick puppy to someone as a present? Knowing it’s going to die.”

“Ted Bundy.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“So maybe the guy’s driving around, sees an opportunity last night,” Bacardi said.

“I don’t know,” Marino said. “I need to get a better feel for the neighborhood, plan to go back out in a minute, prowling. But I can tell you already it was pretty deserted last night. That’s New York. Weekends and holidays, and people who live here get the hell out of Dodge. And after all my years of doing this, one thing I’ve learned. There’s never a formula. Maybe our guy was on good behavior and had a relapse. Maybe that guy is Oscar Bane. Maybe it’s somebody else. There’s the small problem of timing. Your two cases was five friggin’ years ago.”

“No figuring out why people do what they do. Or when. But relapse is a good word for it. I think serial killers have a compulsion just like drinking and drugging.”

The refrigerator sucked open as Marino got another Sharp’s.

“Maybe there’s a reason it’s under control for a while,” her friendly voice said in his ear. “Then stress, a breakup, you get fired, get in financial trouble, and off the wagon you go.”

“In other words, everything.”

“Yeah. Everything can do it. I’m looking at what you just sent and right off I’m wondering why the ME’s pended the case. This Dr. Lester isn’t sure it’s a homicide?”

“She and the DA don’t get along.”

“Sounds like you got a problem with the boyfriend, if there’s no homicide.”

“No shit,” Marino said. “Kind of hard to charge someone with pending. But Berger’s brought in another ME for a second opinion. Dr. Scarpetta.”

“You’re lying.” Bacardi sounded like a fan.

Marino wished he hadn’t brought up Scarpetta. Then he reasoned it wasn’t right to withhold information, and having Scarpetta involved was important. Whenever she showed up, everything changed. Besides, if Bacardi was going to turn on him, now was a good time to do it and get it over with.

He said, “She’s all over the Internet at the moment. Not in a good way. I’m only telling you because you’re going to hear about it.”

A long pause and Bacardi replied, “You’re the guy who worked with her in Charleston. It was on the news here this morning. Heard it on the radio.”

It had never occurred to Marino that Internet gossip might end up on the news, and he felt sucker-punched.

“No mention of names,” Bacardi said, and she didn’t sound as friendly. “Just that she was supposedly assaulted by a colleague while she was chief down there. An investigator she worked with for a long time. These shock jocks were talking about it, saying the expected bullshit, mostly making fun of her and getting off on imagining whatever was done to her. I was pretty disgusted.”

“Maybe if you and me are ever sitting down face-to-face, I’ll tell you the story,” he surprised himself by saying.

He’d never told anybody the story, except Nancy. He’d told her as much as he could remember, and she’d listened with that sincere look on her face that started to annoy the living shit out of him after a while.

“You don’t need to explain yourself to me,” Bacardi said. “I don’t know you, Pete. What I do know is people say all kinds of things, and you don’t know what’s true until you decide to make it your mission. It’s not my mission to know what’s true about your life, okay? Just what’s true about what happened to my lady, the kid in Greenwich, and now your lady in New York. I’ll send you my files electronically, what I’ve got, anyway. You ever want to dig through all of it, you’ll need a week locked up in a room with a case of Advil.”

“I’m told there’s no DNA in your case and the kid,” Marino said. “No sign of sexual assault.”

“That’s what’s called the nightmare of multiple choice.”

“Maybe we’ll have some crab cakes in Baltimore, and I’ll tell you,” he said. “Don’t draw conclusions from gossip. Or when you come here. You like steak houses?”

She didn’t answer.

It was as if someone had tethered his emotions to a cinder block, he felt so depressed. He was ruined. That Gotham Gotcha asshole had ruined him. He meets a nice woman named after his favorite rum, and now she’s acting as if he’s got smallpox and spits when he talks.

“These VICAP forms, shit like that?” Bacardi said. “Check the boxes, multiple choice like school when there’s more than one answer? Literally, no sign of sexual assault, except in both cases there was evidence of a lube job. Some Vaseline-type stuff that was negative for sperm. Vaginally in my lady. Anally in the Greenwich boy. A mixture of DNA, contaminated as hell. No hits in CODIS. We figure since they were found nude and dumped outdoors, all kinds of contaminants stuck to the petroleum jelly or whatever it was. Imagine how many people’s DNA would be in a Dumpster? Plus dog hairs, cat fur.”

“Kind of interesting,” Marino said. “Because the DNA’s messed up in this case, too. We got a hit on an old lady in a wheelchair who ran over some kid in Palm Beach.”

“She ran him over in her wheelchair? She was speeding, busted a red light in her wheelchair? I’m sorry. Did somebody put in a different movie and not tell me?”

“What’s also interesting,” Marino said, walking toward the bathroom with the cordless phone, “the DNA from your cases are in CODIS. And the DNA from our case was just run in CODIS. So guess what that means?”

He covered the mouthpiece with his hand while he peed.

“I’m still hung up on the wheelchair,” Bacardi said.

“What it means,” he said, when it was safe to talk again, “is there’s a different mixture of DNA profiles. In other words, you didn’t get a hit on the old lady from Palm Beach, because her DNA wasn’t on your victims. For whatever reason. I think you should come up here and sit down with everyone. As soon as possible, like tomorrow morning,” Marino said. “You got a car?”

“Whenever you guys need. I can be there in a few hours.”

“It’s my belief,” Marino said, “when things are this different, they got something in common.”

Chapter 15

“Nobody’s accusing anybody of anything,” Benton said on the phone, talking to Scarpetta’s administrative assistant, Bryce. “I was just wondering when you looked at it first thing, what might have entered your mind . . . Really . . . That’s a very good point . . . Well, that’s interesting. I’ll tell her.”

He hung up.

Scarpetta was only halfway paying attention to whatever he and Bryce had been discussing. She was far more interested in several photographs of Terri Bridges’s master bathroom, and had placed them in a row on a space she’d cleared on Benton’s desk. They showed a spotless white ceramic-tile floor and a white marble countertop. Next to a sink with ornate gold fixtures was a built-in vanity arranged with perfumes, a brush, and a comb. Attached to the rose-painted wall was a gold-framed oval mirror, and it was askew, but so slightly it was barely perceptible. As far as she could tell, it was the only thing in the bathroom that looked even remotely disturbed.

“Your hair,” Benton said to her as his printer woke up.

“What about it?”

“I’ll show you.”

Another close-up of the body, this one taken from a different angle after the towel had been removed. Terri’s achondroplastic features were more typical than Oscar’s. She had a somewhat flattened nose and pronounced forehead, and her arms and legs were thick and about half the length they ought to be, her fingers thick and stubby.

Benton swiveled around and removed a sheet of paper from the printer, and handed it to her.

“Do I have to look at that again?” she said.

It was the photograph from this morning’s Gotham Gotcha column.

“Bryce said for you to take a good look at your hair,” Benton said.

“It’s covered,” she said. “All I can see is a little fringe of it.”

“His point. It used to be shorter. He showed the photo to Fielding, who shares his opinion.”

She ran her fingers through her hair, realizing what Bryce and Fielding meant. Over the past year, she’d let her hair grow out another inch.

“You’re right,” she said. “Bryce—Mr. Hygiene—is always nagging me about it. It’s that in-between length where I can’t completely cover it, and yet it’s not long enough to tuck in. So there’s always a little fringe of it exposed.”

“He and Fielding both say the same thing,” Benton said. “This photograph was taken recently. As recently as the past six months, because both of them believe this was taken since they started working for you. They’re basing this on the length of your hair, the watch you’re wearing, and the face shield is the same type you use.”

“It’s just a face shield. Not like our fancy safety glasses with different neon-colored frames to cheer up the place.”

“Anyway, I’m inclined to agree with them,” Benton said.

“That says something. Because, obviously, if it was taken in Watertown, they’re on the list of suspects. And they don’t recall noticing anybody else taking it?”

“That’s the difficulty,” Benton said. “Everybody and their brother who’s through your place, as I pointed out earlier, could have done it. You can tell from your demeanor, the expression on your face, that you had no idea it was being taken. A quick picture taken with a cell phone. That’s my guess.”

“It wasn’t Marino, then,” she said. “He’s certainly not been within camera range.”

“I suspect he hates having that column on the Internet even more than you do, Kay. It wouldn’t make any sense to think Marino’s behind this.”

She looked through more photographs of Terri Bridges’s body on the bathroom floor, perplexed by the thin gold chain around her left ankle. She handed a close-up to Benton.

“Oscar told the police he’d never seen it before,” he said. “And since you don’t seem to know where it came from, I’m going to conclude that either Oscar told you he knew nothing about it or he didn’t mention it at all.”

“Suffice it to say, I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “But it doesn’t look like something she’d wear. For one thing, it doesn’t fit. It’s much too tight. Either she’d had the bracelet for a long time and had gained weight, or someone gave it to her without realizing or even caring what size she needed. I don’t think she bought it for herself, in other words.”

“So I’ll make my sexist comment,” Benton said. “A man is more likely to make a mistake like that than another woman. Had a woman bought this for her, she likely would be aware that Terri has thick ankles.”

“Oscar knows all about dwarfism, of course,” Scarpetta said. “He’s extremely body-conscious. He’s less likely to buy the wrong size because he’s intimately familiar with her.”

“That, and he denied having ever seen the bracelet before.”

“If the person you were in love with would see you only once a week at a predetermined time and place of her choosing, what might enter your mind after a while?” Scarpetta said.

“She’s seeing someone else,” Benton said.

“Another question. If I’m asking about the bracelet, what does that imply?”

“Oscar never mentioned it to you.”

“I suspect Oscar has a deep-seated fear that Terri was seeing someone,” Scarpetta replied. “To consciously deal with that would be to inflict an injury he can’t endure. I don’t care how shocked he was when he discovered her body, if that’s really what happened. He should have noticed the ankle bracelet. His not bringing it up says far more than if he had volunteered it, in my opinion.”

“He fears it was a gift from someone else,” Benton said. “Of interest to us, of course, is if she really was seeing someone else. Because that person could be her killer.”

“Possibly.”

“It could also be argued that Oscar killed her because he discovered she was seeing someone else,” Benton said.

“Do you have any reason to think she was?” she asked.

“I’m going to accept that you don’t know the answer, either. But if she was, and he gave her a piece of jewelry, why would she wear it when Oscar was coming over?”

“I suppose she could say she bought it herself. But I don’t know why she’d wear it at all. It didn’t fit.”

She looked at another photograph of clothing in the tub, as if dropped there: pink bedroom slippers, and a pink robe slit open from the collar to the cuffs, and a red lacy bra, unhooked in front with the straps cut.

She leaned across the desk, handing the photograph to him.

“Most likely her wrists were already bound behind her back when the killer removed her robe, her bra,” she said. “That would explain cutting the straps, cutting open the sleeves.”

“Suggesting she was quickly subdued by her assailant,” he said. “A blitz attack. She didn’t see it coming. Whether it was after she opened her door, or after he was already inside her apartment. He bound her so he could control her. Then he dealt with getting her clothing off.”

“He didn’t need to cut her clothing off if his goal was to sexually assault her. All he had to do was open the front of her robe.”

“To induce terror. Total domination. All consistent with a sadistic sexual homicide. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t Oscar. Doesn’t mean it was.”

“And the absence of her panties? Unless they’re simply not mentioned in the report. Rather unusual to have a bra on under your robe, but no panties. I’m assuming they’ll check the scissors for fibers to see if that’s what was used to cut off her clothing. As for any fibers that might be on whatever Oscar was wearing? One would expect fibers from her body, from the towel, to have been transferred to him while he was sitting in there, holding her.”

She found several photographs of kitchen scissors on the floor next to the toilet. Nearby was the flex-cuff, or disposable restraint, that had bound her wrists. It was severed through the loop. Something about it bothered her. She realized what it was, and she handed the photograph to Benton.

“Notice anything unusual?” she asked.

“Back in my early days with the FBI, we used handcuffs, not flex-cuffs. And needless to say, we would never use flex-cuffs on patients.”

It was his way of admitting he wasn’t an expert.

“This one’s colorless, almost transparent,” she said. “Every flex-cuff I’ve ever seen is black, yellow, or white.”

“Just because you haven’t seen it . . .”

“Of course. Doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“Possibly there are new versions of them and new companies making them all the time, especially since we’ve got a war going on. Cops, the military, carry them in clip cases on their belts, have dozens in their vehicles. Great for rapid application to multiple prisoners. Like most things these days, easy to get on the Internet.”

“But extremely difficult to remove,” Scarpetta said. “That’s the point I’m about to make. You couldn’t cut through flex-cuffs with kitchen scissors. Requires special cutters with compound leverage, like a Scarab.”

“Why didn’t Morales say anything?”

“Maybe he’s never tried to cut through flex-cuffs with scissors,” Scarpetta said. “Good chance a lot of cops haven’t. First time I got in a body bound in flex-cuffs, it took a damn rib cutter to get them off. Now I keep a Scarab in the morgue. Homicides, deaths in custody, suicides with flex-cuffs around wrists, ankles, necks. Once you pull the strap through the locking block, there’s no going back. So either the kitchen scissors were staged to make it appear they were used to cut off the flex-cuff, when in fact something else was used, or this colorless strap on the bathroom floor isn’t a flex-cuff. Did the police find any other straps like this one in her house?”

Benton’s hazel eyes watched her closely.

“You know as much or as little as I do,” he said. “Whatever’s in the report and evidence inventory. But clearly, any other straps would have been collected and documented unless Morales is the worst cop on the planet. So I think the answer’s no. Which brings us back to premeditation. The killer brought flex-cuffs to the apartment. Maybe he used the same thing around her neck, maybe not.”

“We can say he all we want,” Scarpetta said. “But Terri Bridges was very small. It’s possible a woman could have subdued her easily. For that matter, a kid could have, male or female.”

“An unusual crime, if a female did it. But it could explain why Terri felt safe opening her door. Unless, once again, Oscar staged the scene to look like a sexual homicide, when in fact it’s something else.”

“The missing ligature,” Scarpetta said. “That doesn’t feel staged. It feels as if the killer took it for a reason.”

“Maybe a souvenir,” Benton said. “The ligature, an item of lingerie such as her panties. A mechanism for the actualization of violent fantasy after the fact. He winds back the tape, replays what he did, because it gives him sexual gratification. A type of behavior rarely associated with domestic homicides. Souvenirs usually indicate a sexual predator who objectifies his victim, a stranger or distant acquaintance. Not a boyfriend, a lover. Unless we’re talking about staging.” He made that point again. “Oscar’s extremely bright. He’s calculating and quick.”

Calculating and quick enough to return to his car and toss in his coat, making sure his story about being attacked as he was entering her house, and his torn T-shirt and injuries, was plausible to the police. But when did Oscar do that, assuming it was true? Scarpetta guessed it was after he raked his nails over his own flesh and struck himself with the flashlight, then realized it wasn’t possible to explain the injuries if they were inflicted while he was wearing a coat.

“Souvenirs,” Scarpetta said. “Maybe a killer who takes souvenirs and leaves one. If we consider the possibility that the ankle bracelet was put on the body by the killer, possibly after the murder. Like the silver rings in that case you had in California years ago. Four coeds, and in each homicide, the killer put a silver ring on the victim’s wedding finger. But the symbolism of a silver ring strikes me as completely different from an ankle bracelet.”

“One is possession—as in, with this ring, I make you mine,” Benton said. “The other is control—as in, I’m putting a shackle around your ankle. I own you.”

More photos: a table set for two. Candles, wineglasses, linen napkins in blue napkin rings, and dinner and bread plates and salad bowls. In the center of the table, a flower arrangement. Great attention to details, everything perfectly appointed, perfectly matched, and centered and straight but lacking in imagination and warmth.

“She was obsessive,” Scarpetta observed. “A perfectionist. But she went to trouble for him. I think Oscar mattered to her. Was there music playing when the police arrived?”

“Nothing in the report.”

“The television on? There’s one in the living room, but it’s off in the photograph. Any hint as to what she might have been doing when someone arrived at her door? Other than cooking at some point during the afternoon?”

“What you see in the photos, what’s in the reports, is pretty much all we know.” He paused. “Because you’re the only one Oscar would really talk to.”

She scanned the report out loud. “Oven set at two hundred, a whole chicken inside, suggesting it was cooked. She was just keeping it warm. Fresh spinach in a pot, hadn’t been cooked yet. Stove off.”

Another photo: a black plastic flashlight on the carpet near the front door.

Another photo: clothing neatly laid out on a bed. A low-cut sweater, red. Looked like cashmere. Red pants. Looked like silk. Shoes? No sign of them. No sign of her panties.

Another photo: no sign of makeup on Terri’s suffused face.

Scarpetta reconstructed: Terri was going to dress festively and provocatively in bright red that was soft to the touch. She had on a sexy bra, a not-so-sexy robe and slippers, perhaps waiting until shortly before Oscar arrived to put on makeup and finish getting dressed, alluringly, in red. Where were her shoes? Maybe she didn’t always wear them indoors, especially in her own apartment. Where were her panties? Some women don’t wear panties. Maybe she was one of them. But if so, Scarpetta found that inconsistent with what Oscar had told her about Terri’s obsession with cleanliness, with “germs.”

“Do we know if she had a habit of not wearing panties?” she asked Benton.

“Got no idea.”

“And shoes. Where are they? She’d gone to so much trouble to pick out what she was going to wear, but no shoes? Three possibilities. She hadn’t picked them out yet. The killer took them. Or she didn’t wear shoes in the house. And that’s curious and a little hard for me to accept. Someone obsessive-compulsive about neatness, cleanliness, isn’t likely to walk around barefoot. And when she was in her robe, she had on slippers. Wasn’t barefoot then. Someone obsessive-compulsive about dirt and bacteria is likely to wear panties.”

“I wasn’t aware she was obsessive-compulsive,” Benton said.

Scarpetta realized she’d revealed something she shouldn’t have.

“Oscar didn’t talk about her when I evaluated him, as you know.” Benton wasn’t going to let go of her indiscretion. “I didn’t pick up on anything that might indicate Terri was obsessive-compulsive, or overly vigilant about cleanliness, neatness. Beyond what you see in the photos. And yes, you can tell she’s very organized and tidy. That’s been suggested, but not to the degree of a compulsion. So if she wasn’t likely to walk around barefoot and without panties, we’re back to the possibility of a killer who took souvenirs. That points away from Oscar. For him to remove those from the scene, then hurry back to be there when the police arrived, strikes me as far-fetched.”

“I’m inclined to agree.”

“You don’t think Oscar did it, do you?” Benton said.

“I think the police had better not make the assumption that the killer is a, quote, deranged little person safely locked up here on the prison ward. That’s what I think,” she said.

“Oscar isn’t crazy—not a nice word, but I’m using it. He doesn’t have a personality disorder. Isn’t sociopathic, narcissistic, borderline. His SCID revealed an inclination toward anger and avoidance, and it appears something triggered paranoia and reinforced his feeling that he needs to disaffiliate himself from others. In summary, he’s afraid of something. He doesn’t know who to trust.”

Scarpetta thought of the CD Oscar claimed to have hidden in his library.

In Murray Hill, Marino walked along a dark, tree-lined street, looking through the eyes of a predator.

Terri Bridges’s brownstone was tucked between a playground and a doctor’s office, both closed last night. Across the street, on either side of her peculiar neighbor’s two-story building, were a French bistro and a bakery, also closed last night. He had checked, had carefully researched the area, and had come to the same conclusion that Morales had: When Terri opened her door to her killer, there was no one watching.

Even if someone happened to walk past, the person probably had no idea what he was looking at when a lone figure climbed the steps and buzzed the front door, or opened it with a key. Marino suspected the truth of the matter was the perpetrator had stayed out of sight until he was sure no one was in the area, and that returned Marino’s thoughts to Oscar Bane.

If his intention was to kill Terri last night, it didn’t matter if he was spotted. He was her boyfriend. He was supposed to have dinner with her, or people would assume he was, and parking his Jeep Cherokee right out front was smart because that would be the normal thing to do if he had no violent intentions. After talking to Bacardi, there was no doubt about what type of crime Marino was dealing with. This was exactly what it appeared to be—a sexually motivated premeditated act committed by someone whose murder kit included bindings, a lubricant, and a ten-karat-gold ankle bracelet.

Either Oscar was innocent or he was going to be hard as hell to catch, because he had every reason to show up at Terri’s house late yesterday afternoon. By all appearances, Terri was expecting him for dinner. By all appearances, she was expecting a romantic evening with him. The crime scene so far seemed virtually useless, because remnants of Oscar would be everywhere, including on Terri’s dead body. The perfect crime? Maybe, were it not for one oddball thing: Oscar’s insistence, which predated Terri’s death by a month, that he was being spied on, brainwashed, that his identity had been stolen.

Marino thought about Oscar’s ranting and raving over the phone. Unless he was psychotic, why would he draw attention to himself like that if he were a serial killer who had already murdered at least two people?

Marino felt guilty and worried. What if he had listened to Oscar more carefully, maybe encouraged him to come to the DA’s office and sit down with Berger? What if Marino had even halfway given him the benefit of the doubt? Would he still be walking down this dark sidewalk on this cold, windy night?

His ears were getting numb, his eyes watering, and he was furious with himself for drinking so many Sharp’s. As Terri’s building came into view, he noticed her apartment lights were on, the drapes drawn, and a marked car was parked in front. Marino imagined the cop sitting inside the apartment, securing the scene until Berger decided to release it. He imagined the poor guy bored out of his mind. What Marino wouldn’t give to borrow the bathroom, but you don’t borrow anything at a crime scene.

At the moment, the only public bathroom was the great outdoors. Marino kept his scan going, looking for a good spot as he walked closer to Terri’s building. He noticed that the lanterns at either side of the entryway were on, and recalled from Morales’s report that they had been off last night when the police had arrived shortly after six.

Marino thought of Oscar Bane again. It made no difference if anyone had seen him well enough to identify him later. He was Terri’s boyfriend, had keys to her building, and he was expected. If the outside lights weren’t on when he arrived, then why not? By five p.m., when he allegedly arrived, it would have been completely dark out.

Marino supposed it was possible that the lights had been on when he’d arrived, and for some reason, he’d turned them off as he’d entered the building.

Marino stopped half a block away from the brownstone, staring at the entrance on East 29th. He imagined himself the killer, imagined what it would have been like to approach Terri’s apartment building. What would he have seen? What would he have felt? Yesterday had been cold and damp, and extremely windy with gusts up to twenty-five miles an hour, making it very unpleasant for people to be out walking, about as unpleasant as it was right now.

By three-thirty in the afternoon, the sun was below the buildings and trees, and the entryway would have been cast in shadows. It was unlikely the lanterns would have been on that early, whether they were on a timer or not. By mid-afternoon, anybody inside the apartment building probably would have had his lights on, making it obvious to a predator which tenant might be home.

Marino hurried to the playground. He was relieving himself against the dark front gate when he spotted a dark, bulky shape on the brownstone’s flat roof. The shape was near the faint silhouette of the satellite dish, and then the shape moved. Zipping up his pants, he reached into his coat pocket for his gun and crept around to the west side of Terri’s apartment. The fire escape was a narrow ladder, straight up, and much too small for Marino’s hands and feet.

He was sure it would pull away from the building and send him plummeting backward to the earth. His heart pounded, and he was sweating profusely beneath his Harley jacket, his Glock forty-caliber pistol in hand as he climbed, one rung at a time, his knees shaking.

He never used to have a fear of heights but had developed one after leaving Charleston. Benton had said it was the result of depression and accompanying anxiety, and had recommended a new treatment that involved an antibiotic called D-cycloserine, just because it had worked on rats in a neuroscience research project. Marino’s therapist, Nancy, said his problem was “an unconscious conflict,” and he’d never determine the exact nature of that conflict unless he stayed sober.

Marino had no doubt about the source of his conflict. At this very moment, it was a goddamn narrow ladder bolted to a brownstone. He pulled himself onto the roof, and his heart lurched and he grunted in surprise as he found himself eye to eye with the barrel of a gun held by a dark figure lying on his belly in a sniper’s position. For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then Mike Morales holstered his pistol as he sat up and whispered furiously, “You stupid fuck! What the hell are you doing?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Marino whispered back. “I thought you were a fucking serial killer.”

He scooted on his butt until he was a safe distance from the roof’s edge.

“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot your fucking head off,” Marino added.

He tucked the Glock back into his coat pocket.

“We just had this conversation,” Morales said. “You don’t get to run around and not tell me what the hell you’re doing. I’m going to get your ass fired. Berger’s probably going to do it anyway.”

His face was almost indistinguishable in the dark, and he wore dark, loose clothing. He looked like a homeless person or a drug dealer.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get back down from here,” Marino said. “You know how old that ladder is? Probably a hundred years old, that’s how old. Back then when people were half the size they are now.”

“What’s the matter with you? You trying to prove something? Because the only thing you’re proving is you ought to go work security in a fucking mall or something.”

The rooftop was concrete, with a boxy HVAC and the satellite dish. In the building across the street where Marino had been earlier today, the only lighted windows were those of the second-floor neighbor’s apartment, and the drapes were drawn across them. Across the street from the back of Terri’s building, there were more people home, and two of them seemed to assume that nobody could see them. An older man was typing on a computer, clueless that he was being watched. One floor below him, a woman in green pajamas was sitting on her living room couch, gesturing as she talked on a cordless phone.

Morales was chewing out Marino for screwing up everything.

“The only thing I’m screwing up is you being a Peeping Tom,” Marino retorted.

“I don’t have to peep to see whatever I want, whenever I want,” Morales replied. “Not saying I wouldn’t look if there’s something to look at.”

He pointed at the dish antenna, angled up about sixty degrees and facing south of Texas where somewhere high in the night sky was a satellite that Marino couldn’t envision.

“On the mounting foot’s a wireless camera I just installed,” Morales said. “In case Oscar shows up. Maybe tries to get back inside her apartment. You know, the old returning-to-the-scene-of-the-crime shit. Or if anybody decides to drop by, for that matter. I’m keeping an open mind. Maybe it’s not Oscar. But my money’s on him. My money’s on him killing the other two.”

Marino wasn’t in the mood to relay his conversation with Bacardi. Even if he weren’t on top of a roof and extremely unhappy about it, he wouldn’t be in the mood.

“The officer securing her apartment know you’re up here?” he asked.

“Shit, no. And you tell him, you’ll find out what a long way down it is, because I’ll throw your ass off the roof. Quickest way to fuck up a surveillance is to tell other cops about it. Including you.”

“Occur to you his marked unit’s right in front like a billboard ad for the NYPD? Maybe you should have him move it, if you’re hoping the killer will come sneaking back here.”

“He’s gonna move it. It was fucking stupid to park there to begin with.”

“Usually the bigger worry is regular people and the media thinking they can poke around. But no marked car? Okay. There goes your deterrent. Have it your way. You got any idea why the entrance lights weren’t on last night?” Marino said.

“I only know that they weren’t. It’s in my report.”

“They’re on now.”

Gusts of wind hit them like invisible waves of a stormy surf, and Marino felt as if he was about to be washed off the roof. His hands were stiff, and he pulled his sleeves over them.

“Then my guess would be the killer turned them off last night,” Morales said.

“Kind of a strange thing to do once he’s already inside the building.”

“Maybe he turned them off when he was leaving. So nobody would see him, in case someone was walking by, driving by.”

“Then you’re probably not talking about Oscar doing it. Since he never left.”

“We don’t know what he did. Maybe he was in and out getting rid of shit. Like whatever was used around her neck. Where’d you park?” Morales asked.

“Couple streets away,” Marino said. “Nobody saw me.”

“Yeah, you’re real subtle, bro. Sounded like a three-hundred-pound cat climbing up the side of the building. Too bad you didn’t get here a little earlier,” Morales said. “See that lady on the phone?”

He indicated the apartment where the woman in green pajamas was still on her couch, gesturing and talking.

“Amazing how many people don’t pull down their shades,” Morales said.

“That’s probably the real reason you’re up here,” Marino said.

“The window to the left? Lights are off now, but maybe thirty minutes ago, blazing as bright as a movie premier, and there she was.”

Marino stared at the dark window as if it would suddenly light up again and show him what he’d missed.

“Out of the shower, off came the towel. Nice tits, I mean real nice,” Morales said. “Thought I would fall off the fucking roof. God, I love my job.”

Marino would forgo seeing fifty naked women if it would spare him having to climb back down the ladder. Morales got to his feet, as comfortable up here as a pigeon, while Marino started scooting back toward the edge, his heart thudding again, and as he inched his way, he wondered what had gotten into him. All those years he flew on Lucy’s helicopters and jets. He used to love glass elevators and expansion bridges. Now he hated climbing up a stepladder to change a lightbulb.

He watched Morales walk off in the direction of the satellite dish and got a weird feeling about him. Morales had gone to fancy schools. He was a doctor, or could be one, if he wanted. He was nice-looking, even if he went out of his way to make people think he was the leader of a street gang or some Latino gangster. He was one big contradiction, and it didn’t make sense he would climb up here to install a camera, with a cop sitting two floors below, securing a homicide scene, and not say anything. What if the cop had heard him up here?

And Marino remembered what the neighbor had mentioned about a roof access, about seeing service people near the satellite dish. Maybe Morales hadn’t climbed up the ladder. Maybe he’d gotten up here another way—an easy way—and was too much of an asshole to let Marino in on the secret.

Cold steel bit into his bare hands as he gripped the rungs and made his way down slowly. He didn’t know he had reached the ground until he felt it beneath his shoes, and he leaned against the side of the brownstone for a moment to calm down and catch his breath. He walked to the entrance and stood at the bottom of the steps, looking up to see if Morales was watching. Marino couldn’t see him.

Attached to his keys was a small tactical light, and he directed the powerful beam at the lanterns on either side of the brownstone’s ivy-covered entrance. He checked the brick steps, the landing, then swept the beam over bushes and trash cans. He called the dispatcher and indicated he needed the officer inside Terri Bridges’s apartment to go to the building’s front door and let him in. He waited a minute, and the front door opened, and it wasn’t the same uniformed cop who had let him in earlier today.

“Having fun yet?” Marino asked, moving past him into the foyer and shutting the door.

“It’s starting to stink in there,” the officer said, and he looked all of sixteen. “Remind me never to eat chicken again.”

Marino found two light switches to the left of the door. He tried them. One was for the outside lights, the other for the foyer.

“You know if these are on a timer?” he asked.

“They’re not.”

“So how’d the entrance lights get on tonight?”

“I turned them on when I got here maybe two hours ago. Why? You want ’em off?”

Marino looked at the dark wooden stairs leading up to the second floor.

He said, “No, leave them on. You been up there? Looks like the other residents aren’t back.”

“I haven’t been anywhere. Stuck on my ass inside the door.” He nodded at the apartment door, which he’d left open a crack. “Nobody’s been inside the building. If it was me, I’d sure take my time coming back, especially if I was a woman living alone.”

“No other women living alone,” Marino said. “Just the one whose apartment you’re babysitting. This one here.” He indicated the door on the other side of the foyer. “Two guys, both of them bartenders. Probably never here at night. Upstairs? Right above Terri Bridges, a guy who goes to Hunter College, supports himself walking dogs. The apartment on the other side, some Italian consultant with a British financial company that’s the actual tenant. In other words, one of those corporate rentals. The guy’s probably never here.”

“Anybody talked to them?”

“Not me, but I’ve run their backgrounds. Nothing jumps out. I get the impression from talking to her parents that she wasn’t the friendly type. She never talked about the other residents and didn’t seem to know them or have any interest. But hey, this ain’t the South. People don’t bake cakes for their neighbors so they can stick their nose into their business. Don’t mind me. I’m going to poke around up there for a few minutes.”

“Just be careful because Investigator Morales is up on the roof.”

Marino stopped on the bottom step and said, “What?”

“Yeah, he went up there maybe an hour ago.”

“He tell you why?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“He tell you to move your car?”

“What for?”

“Ask him,” Marino said. “He’s the big investigator with all the big ideas.”

He climbed the steps, and on the second floor, in the ceiling between the two apartments, was a stainless-steel access hatch with an inside T-handle. Under it was an aluminum stepladder with slip-resistant treads, a fold-up safety bar, and a work tray with several screwdrivers in it. Nearby, a utility closet door was wide open.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

He imagined Morales on the roof, laughing as he’d listened to Marino struggling down the fire escape, when all he’d had to do was direct him to the roof access. Marino could have climbed down five sturdy ladder steps inside a lighted building instead of thirty narrow rungs outside in the frigid dark.

Marino folded the ladder and returned it to the closet.

He was halfway back to his car when his cell phone rang. The display said Unknown, and he was sure it was Morales, pissed as hell.

“Yo,” he answered cheerfully as he walked.

“Marino?” It was Jaime Berger. “I’ve been trying to get hold of Morales.”

There was a lot of background noise, what sounded like traffic, and he knew when she was irritated.

“I just saw him,” he said. “He’s sort of unreachable this very minute.”

“If you happen to talk to him, you might mention I’ve left three messages. I won’t leave a fourth. Maybe you can take care of my problem. Eighteen passwords so far.”

“For just her?” He meant Terri Bridges.

“All the same e-mail provider, but different usernames. For whatever reason. And her boyfriend’s got one. I’m getting out of a taxi now.”

Marino heard her driver say something, and then Berger did, and then the taxi door shut and he could hear her better.

“One second,” he said. “Let me get to my car.”

His unmarked dark blue Impala was parked just ahead.

“Where are you and what are you doing?” she said.

“Long story. Morales mention anything to you about a case in Baltimore and one in Greenwich, Connecticut?”

“I think I just made the point that I haven’t talked to him.”

He unlocked his driver’s door and climbed in. He started the engine and opened the glove box, looking for a pen and something to write on.

“I’ll e-mail some stuff to you, think I can do it from my BlackBerry,” he said. “And Benton should get it.”

Silence.

“If that’s all right with you, I’ll e-mail what I’ve got to him, too.”

“Of course,” she said.

“You don’t mind me saying it, nobody’s talking to each other. An example of what I mean? You got any idea if the cops looked upstairs in Terri’s building last night? Like maybe checked the roof access and the ladder in the utility closet?”

“I have no idea.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Nothing in the report. No photographs,” Marino said.

“That’s interesting.”

“The roof would have been an easy way to get in and out, and nobody sees you. There’s a fire-escape ladder on the west side of the brownstone—like I said, nobody sees you.”

“Morales should know the answer to that.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure the subject will come up. And one other thing. We need Oscar’s DNA run through CODIS right away. Because of Baltimore and Greenwich. Have you gotten my e-mails?”

“Should already be in the works. I’ve asked for answers tonight. Yes, I’ve gotten your e-mails,” Berger said. “Nice of Morales not to bother alerting me about two other possible cases.”

“Meaning Oscar’s in CODIS or will be soon,” Marino said. “I’m sure Morales was going to get around to it.”

“I’m sure,” Berger said.

“I’ll leave word about the DNA with the investigator in Baltimore I hooked up with,” Marino said. “Not that I’m holding my breath we’re going to get a hit with Oscar on those other two cases. I don’t know. Something’s not right about it. Doesn’t work for me thinking he did those. And his girlfriend.”