Scarpetta

Marino always knew when Berger took somebody seriously. She didn’t interrupt or change the topic of conversation. He kept talking because she kept listening, both of them careful about being too specific, since he was on a cell phone.

“These other two cases I’ve sent you info on?” Marino said. “The part I left out is what I was just told over the phone. They got junk DNA. A mixture of other people’s DNA.”

“Like we did in this one here?” Berger asked.

“I don’t want to go into all this now for security reasons,” Marino said. “But if you could maybe get a message to Benton. I know he’s here. I know he’s in the city. Morales says he is and that they’re going to the morgue later. We can all keep hoping we don’t bump into each other. I’m just going ahead and saying it. No point in running around the fat-ass elephant in the room.”

“They’re not at the morgue yet. Dr. Lester’s been delayed.”

“That’s the only kind of laid she’s ever been,” Marino said.

Berger laughed.

“I’d say within the hour everyone will be there,” she said, and her tone was entirely different.

As if she found him interesting and amusing, and maybe didn’t hate him.

“Benton and Kay,” she added.

She was letting Marino know, and in doing so, it was her way of saying she wasn’t his enemy. No, it was better than that. She was telling him she might just trust and respect him.

“But it would be helpful if all of us got together,” he said. “Have a case discussion. I asked the investigator from Baltimore to come. She should be here in the morning. She can be here whenever we want.”

“That’s fine,” Berger said. “What I want right now is for you to get me the passwords and account histories associated with the usernames I’m about to give you. I’ve already faxed a letter instructing the provider to put a freeze on the accounts so they stay active. And one other thing. If anybody else calls for this info, they don’t get it. You make that clear to whoever you talk to. I don’t care if it’s the White House, the passwords aren’t to be given to anybody else. I’m on my cell.”

She must be referring to Oscar Bane. Marino couldn’t imagine who else would know what Terri’s and Oscar’s usernames and e-mail providers were, and without them, one couldn’t get the passwords. The car’s interior light was off, and he left it off. An old habit. He used his flashlight to write down the usernames and other information she gave him.

Marino said, “Is Oscar still on the ward?”

“Obviously, that’s one concern.” She didn’t sound as all-business as she usually did.

She sounded almost friendly, and maybe curious, as if she’d never given Marino much thought, and now she was.

“I don’t think for much longer,” she added. “And there are some other developments. I’ll be at a forensic computer group called Connextions, which I have a feeling you’re familiar with. Here’s the number.”

She gave it to him.

“I’ll try to grab the phone before Lucy does,” Berger said.

Chapter 16

Jet Ranger was almost deaf and quite lame, and was seriously compromised in the potty department. Lucy’s elderly bulldog was not a native New Yorker.

His dislike of concrete and asphalt posed a serious problem in a city where soulless people were known to sprinkle red pepper in sparse patches of dirt or grass that might surround an occasional tree. The first time Jet Ranger got a snootful when sniffing for just the right spot, Lucy figured out correctly that the shop nearest the puny maple was to blame, and handled the matter swiftly and without reprimand or explanation.

She’d walked in early the next morning, flung twenty ounces of crushed red pepper all over the shop, and in case the dumbstruck owner missed the point, dumped a generous dose in the urine-stinking back room on her way out the back door. Anonymously, she reported Save My Sole shoe repair to PETA.

She walked her slow, arthritic bulldog a good half-hour before success, and as a result was late. When she reached her building, a Baggie of poop in hand, Berger was silhouetted in the waving gaslight of lanterns against old brick and iron railings, waiting by the three steps that led up to Lucy’s heavy oak front door.

“They make colorful ones in the little dispensaries,” Berger’s shadowy face said as it looked at the Baggie. “Ones that aren’t transparent.”

Lucy dropped Jet Ranger’s job well done into a trash barrel. She said, “Hope you haven’t been waiting long. He’s not a city boy. Must have had a real grass yard with a white picket fence in an earlier life. His name’s Jet Ranger, as in the first helicopter I ever owned. Jet Ranger, meet Jaime. He doesn’t know any tricks, like shaking hands or high-fives or hovering. He’s pretty simple, aren’t you, boy?”

Berger squatted to rub Jet Ranger’s neck, not seeming to care that her long shorn mink coat spilled around her on the dirty sidewalk and she was blocking foot traffic. People detoured around her in the cold dark as she kissed the top of the bulldog’s head, and he licked her chin.

“That’s impressive,” Lucy said. “He doesn’t like most people. Funny thing about living with an asshole. I don’t mean me. Whoever owned him before me. I’m sorry,” she said to her dog, petting him and touching Berger’s shoulder as she did. “I shouldn’t openly discuss your painful and private past or use the word owned. That was rude of me. I don’t really own him,” she said to Berger. “In fact, I have to pay him a considerable sum to let me feed him, pet him, take him out, sleep with him.”

“How old?” Berger asked.

“Not sure.” Lucy massaged Jet Ranger’s spotted ears. “Not long after I moved here, I was leaving the West Thirtieth heliport after flying in from Boston, and saw him trotting along the West Side Highway. You know that panicky look, when a dog’s lost? He was limping.”

Lucy covered Jet Ranger’s ears so he wouldn’t hear the rest.

“No collar,” she said. “Obviously dumped out of a car, probably because he’s old, got bad hips, half blind. You know, not fun anymore. They usually don’t live past ten. He’s probably pretty close.”

“People suck,” Berger said, getting up.

“Come on,” Lucy said to her dog. “Don’t be upset by Jaime’s coat. I’m sure every one of those poor little minks died of natural causes.”

“We should have the passwords soon,” Berger said. “Maybe that will help explain the rest of it.”

“I don’t know what the rest of it is, since I barely know the first of it. We’re just getting started,” Lucy said. “But there’s enough for me to be worried about my aunt. And I’m worried.”

“I got that when you called.”

Lucy inserted an interactive key into a Mul-T-Lock Mortise cylinder, and the alarm system began to beep as she opened the front door. She entered a code on the keypad and the beeping stopped, and she shut the door behind them.

“When you see what I’m talking about, your first impulse will be to fire me,” Lucy said. “But you won’t.”

Shrew considered herself a crackerjack Web administrator, but she was no programmer. She was no information technology expert.

She sat at her computer, watching the Gotham Gotcha home page continue its maniacal loop while a technician from the Web hosting company told her over the phone that the problem was a buffer overflow. He explained that the number of users attempting to access certain information on the site had exceeded the server’s enormous capacity and at this moment the situation was so out of control, millions of people per minute were clicking on a photograph in the dark room, and this, in the technician’s opinion, could mean but one thing: “A worm,” he said. “Or basically, a virus. But nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s really more of a mutant worm.”

“How could a worm, mutant or otherwise, have infiltrated the programming?” Shrew asked.

“It’s likely that a remote unprivileged user somehow executed arbitrary code and exploited the buffer overflow vulnerabilities of the Web proxy server. Whoever did this is extremely sophisticated.”

He went on to say that typically what happened was someone sent an attachment containing a worm that wasn’t recognized by any virus-detection program known to the industry. This worm mimicked users opening an image that took up a lot of space, “such as a photograph,” he said, adding that “this self-replicating worm mimics millions of people opening the same image at the same time, which causes the server to run out of memory, and in addition, it would appear that this worm is also performing the malicious action of destroying data. In other words, it’s an odd mutation of a worm, a macro virus. And possibly a Trojan horse if, for example, it’s also spreading the virus to other programs, which is what I fear.”

He repeatedly emphasized that the saboteur was someone who really knew what he was doing, as if the technician was secretly envious of whoever was clever enough to create such destruction.

Shrew innocently asked which image was the culprit, and he replied unequivocally that the worm was launched by a photograph of Marilyn Monroe. As he continued to explain the havoc caused by the mutant worm, Shrew was imagining the conspiracy behind it. Whoever was involved in Marilyn Monroe’s murder almost half a century ago still had a vested interest in the public’s not knowing the truth.

That pointed at the government, which implied politics and organized crime. Maybe there were terrorists back then, she considered. Maybe these people were somehow connected and had their eye on Shrew, all because she’d been foolish enough to take a job she knew nothing about and served at the behest of anonymous people who might be criminals.

For all she knew, the technician on the phone was a criminal, a terrorist, or a government agent, and this business about the Marilyn Monroe photograph launching the mutant worm was an attempt to muddy the waters so Shrew didn’t figure out what was really going on: The website had self-destructed like those tape recorders in Mission: Impossible, because without intending to, Shrew had inserted herself into the middle of a massive plot against a world power or an Evil Empire.

She felt extremely confused and overwhelmed by anxiety.

“You realize, I hope,” she said to the alleged technician, “that I have no idea what’s going on. I want no part of it, and never intended to be part of it. Not that I know anything. Because I certainly don’t.”

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Even for us. I’m trying to tell you this is a very sophisticated code someone’s written. Has to be. By code I mean a computer program that’s embedded in something that seems innocuous, such as a data file or an attachment.”

She didn’t care what he meant, and she didn’t care that the mutant worm couldn’t be stopped and that all attempts to shut down and restart the system had failed. She glazed over as the technician suggested they could attempt loading an archived earlier version of the Gotham Gotcha site, but his only other available servers didn’t have much disk space and were much slower, and that also could cause a crash. Possibly, they should purchase a new server, but that couldn’t happen instantly, and he’d have to clear it with the “business office,” and in the UK it was five hours later than it was here, so he wasn’t going to get anyone.

He pointed out that loading an earlier version would also mean Shrew would have to repopulate the website and repost all the latest information, and fans would need to be alerted that e-mails and images they had sent should be resent. The fixes required of Shrew would take days, maybe weeks, and the public was going to be angry, and those who most recently had joined the site wouldn’t be in the older version of the database and would be deeply offended. The website could be down for days. It could be weeks.

When the Boss found out the worm had been launched by the Marilyn Monroe morgue photo, at the very least, Shrew would be out of work. She had no backup plan. It would be like a year and a half ago, only this time there would be no windfall from a job offer made by anonymous strangers. This time she really would have to give up the apartment, which was the same thing as giving up what little she had left of who she used to be. Only worse. Life for virtually all decent people had only gotten harder. She didn’t know what on earth she would do.

She thanked the technician and got off the phone.

She checked to make sure all the blinds were closed, and poured herself another bourbon and gulped it down as she paced, half mad with fear, and near tears, as she thought about what likely would happen next.

The Boss wouldn’t fire her directly but rather would have that UK agent who barely spoke English do it. If the Boss was really tied in with some terrorist sect, then Shrew’s life was in danger. An assassin could find his way inside her apartment while she slept, and she’d never hear him.

She needed a dog.

The more bourbon Shrew drank, the more depressed, scared, and lonely she got. She contemplated the column she’d posted several weeks before Christmas that mentioned the same chain of pet stores Terri had recommended after Ivy had died and she’d offered to pay for a replacement.

Shrew went on the Internet to check.

The Tell-Tail Hearts pet shops’ flagship location happened to be the one nearest her, and it stayed open until nine.

The loft was an expansive open space of exposed beams and brick, and floors of polished tobacco wood, all pristinely restored and modernized. Other than work stations, black swivel chairs, and a glass conference room table, there was no furniture. There was no paper, not a single sheet of it.

Lucy had invited Berger to make herself at home. She had emphasized that Berger was safe and secure. All of the phones were wireless and equipped with scrambling devices, and the alarm system was probably better than the Pentagon’s. Somewhere in here Lucy probably had guns and other lethal weapons that were illegal enough to hang her from the Tappan Zee Bridge like a pirate. Berger didn’t ask, and she didn’t feel safe or secure. Nor did she make an effort to change that. She simply fretted, reflected, and deliberated.

Annie Lennox was playing in the background, and Lucy was in her glass cockpit, surrounded by three video displays as large as most living room flat screens. In the soft light, her profile was well defined, her brow smooth, her nose aquiline, her face intense, as if there was nothing she’d rather do than navigate through what was already giving Berger a headache. A real one. The kind that always ended the same way, with her lying down in a dark room, holding hot compresses over her eyes.

She stood next to Lucy’s chair, rifling through her briefcase, hoping a Zomig might be lurking somewhere, because that was the only medication that worked. The blister pack she found tucked between the pages of a legal pad was empty.

Lucy was explaining more than Berger really wanted to know about what the neural networking program was acquiring from one of the laptops found in Terri Bridges’s apartment, and the technology involved. Berger was frustrated that Lucy refused to start on the second laptop—one that apparently had been solely dedicated to the Internet. She was anxious for Marino to call with the e-mail passwords. The question was whether she would still be here when he did. The bigger question was why she was here at all. A part of her knew, and she was unsettled by everything and nothing, and didn’t know what to do. She and Lucy had a striking problem on their hands. They had more than one.

“Ordinarily, when you delete a file in an operating system, you’ve got a good chance of getting the data back if the recovery is attempted quickly,” Lucy was saying.

Berger sat back down next to her. Bright white bits and pieces of text, fractured sentences and words, reconnected in the blackness of electronic space. She thought about putting on her tinted sunglasses. She had a feeling it wouldn’t help. This was going where it was going, and she wasn’t going to stop it.

Had she sincerely intended to stop it, she wouldn’t have taken a taxi to the Village tonight, no matter the crisis, the urgency, and the logic in what Lucy had told her over the phone, when she’d called to suggest Berger take a look at what was developing. She’d been alone with Lucy before, but that was years ago, when Scarpetta’s astonishingly complicated and high-risk niece was too young and Berger had been too married. One thing she didn’t do was violate contracts or lose cases because of technicalities.

She had no contract now, and Lucy was older, and the only technicality was whatever Berger decided to manufacture.

“But it doesn’t appear Terri ever had a reason to recover anything she deleted,” Lucy said, “which is why you’re seeing some fairly large chunks of intact text mixed with fragments of all sizes, many so small they’re nothing but shards. The longer one waits to recover deleted or corrupted data, the more opportunity for newly created data to occupy areas on the hard disk freed up by the deletions. And that makes it harder for the software to locate what was originally there.”

What they were seeing, in summation, were bits and pieces of a thesis that offered, in part, a historical perspective on forensic science and medicine, and psychiatry, which wasn’t necessarily surprising. Records searches and information from Terri Bridges’s parents indicated she was enrolled at Gotham College, where her father was the dean, and was working on a master’s degree in forensic psychology. Berger watched forensic words and phrases stream by as the familiar pain heated up in her temples and crept toward the backs of her eyes.

She noted references to the Body Farm, and to Bellevue and Kirby psychiatric hospitals, and the names of numerous forensic experts well known in their fields, including Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Repeatedly, there were references to her, and that was why Lucy had made the comment earlier that Berger might be tempted to fire her. She was more than tempted. For a number of reasons, that would be the wisest course of action.

For one thing, it appeared that Terri—or whoever had been using this particular laptop—had collected hundreds of articles, video clips, photographs, and other published media pertaining to Scarpetta. That meant a conflict of interest, and a very serious one, which was further compounded by another problem that probably had been there from day one.

Berger remembered being startled by Lucy the first time they’d met eight years ago in Richmond, startled in a way Berger had found as exciting as it was, realistically speaking, unfortunate back then. Foolishly back then—when she was in her late thirties and had almost convinced herself she’d gotten beyond certain temptations, as evidenced by the life she had prescribed for herself. She could answer no. The fact was—and at age forty-six, she was quite clear about this—she wouldn’t have needed to answer anything had there not been a question.

“The laptops are installed with what I call over-the-counter security software, the settings preprogrammed, preloaded.” Lucy had wandered off on that subject. “Not something I’d use because it recognizes only known viruses, spyware, et cetera. And the known ones aren’t the ones I worry about. She’s got anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, anti-phishing, firewall, and wireless PC protection.”

“Unusual?” Berger rubbed her temples.

“For your average user, yes. She was security-minded, or someone was. But not security-minded the way people like you or I would be. What she’s got here is the type of protection I see with people who are worried about hacking, identity theft, but aren’t real programmers and have to rely on prefab software, a lot of which is expensive and not necessarily what it’s cracked up to be.”

“It may be that she and Oscar Bane had paranoia in common,” Berger said. “They feared someone was out to get them. We know he fears that, at any rate. He certainly made a case for it when he called last month and had a rather unfortunate conversation with Marino. Not really Marino’s fault. Were the same scenario to happen all over again, I still wouldn’t take Oscar Bane’s call.”

“I wonder if it would have changed anything had you taken it,” Lucy said.

“On the surface it wasn’t any different from all the other nutty calls we get every day,” Berger said.

“It’s still too bad. Maybe you could have made a difference.”

Lucy’s hands were strong but graceful on the keyboard. She closed a programming window she had opened on the screen, and once again the deep space was restored and fragmented text streamed through it, moving, finding its missing parts. Berger tried not to look.

“If I played the recording for you, you’d completely understand,” she explained. “He sounds like a nutcase. Almost hysterical, and he goes on and on about somebody or a group of people taking over his mind electronically, and thus far he’s resisted being controlled by them, but they know every breath he takes. At the moment, I feel somebody’s doing the same thing to me. I apologize in advance. On rare occasions I get these headaches. I’m trying like hell not to get this one.”

“You ever gotten cybersick?” Lucy asked.

“I’m not sure what that is,” Berger said.

“What about motion sickness?”

“I do know what that is, and yes. I can’t look at anything in a moving car, and as a kid I always threw up in amusement parks. And I don’t want to think about it right now.”

“Guess you won’t be flying with me.”

“Police helicopters don’t bother me. As long as they don’t take the doors off.”

“Disoriented, nauseated, vertigo, even seizures and migraines,” Lucy said. “Usually associated with virtual reality, but any computer display of motion can do it. Such as watching all this shit. I happen to be one of the lucky ones. Doesn’t affect me. You can throw me into full-scale crash simulation all day long, and it doesn’t bother me a bit. I could be a test dummy at Langley. It’s probably what I should have done in life.”

She leaned back in her chair and tucked the tips of her fingers into the front pockets of her jeans, her physical openness an invitation, somehow, and Berger’s eyes were drawn to her the same way they were to a provocative painting or a sculpture.

“So here’s what you’re going to try,” Lucy said. “You’re going to look at the monitors only when I think you should see something. If you continue to feel bad, I’ll spool off the data I want you to see, and you can look at it in static word-processing format. I’ll even break my rule and print stuff. Anyway, don’t look at the monitor. Let’s go back to what I was saying about what software protections are loaded on the laptops. I was suggesting we should see if we find the same software loaded on Oscar’s home computer. See if we find evidence he’s the one who purchased it. Can we get into his apartment?”

Lucy continued to say we, and Berger didn’t see how there could be a we .

It was completely reckless for there to be a we, Berger kept telling herself, kept trying to talk herself out of it, only to talk herself right back into it.

She shut her eyes and rubbed her temples and said, “It’s easy to assume it was Terri who was researching Kay. But how do we know Oscar wasn’t? Maybe these are his computers and he had them at Terri’s apartment for some reason. And no, right now we can’t get into his computer or computers. Whatever computers he has in his apartment. We don’t have his consent, and we don’t have probable cause.”

“His fingerprints on these laptops?”

They were on a nearby desk, both of them connected to a server.

“Don’t know yet,” Berger replied. “But that wouldn’t necessarily prove anything, since he was in and out of her apartment. Theoretically, we don’t know whose work this is. But what’s certain is Kay is a focus. You’ve made that point.”

“She’s more than a focus. Don’t look, but what’s happening right now? It’s sorting by footnotes. Ibid. this and that, and dates. Footnotes that seem to correlate with quotations from my aunt.”

“You’re saying Terri interviewed her?”

“Someone did, supposedly. Keep your eyes shut. The computer doesn’t need your help or approval. It’s sorting by references, thousands of them in parentheses, from multiple drafts of the same thesis. And hundreds of these parenthetical references pertain to interviews conducted at different times. Alleged interviews with my aunt.”

Berger opened her eyes and saw fragmented words and sentences streaming by and reattaching.

“Maybe they’re transcripts of interviews on CNN or newspaper interviews,” she suggested. “And you’re right. Next time I’ll ask. That just made me dizzy. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I should leave.”

“Can’t be transcripts,” Lucy replied. “Not all of them or even most. Chronologically, that can’t be right. Scarpetta, November tenth, and Scarpetta, November eleventh, then the twelfth and thirteenth. No way. She didn’t talk to her. Nobody talked to her. This is bullshit.”

It was indescribably strange, looking at her looking at the monitors and bickering with her computer creation as if it were her best friend.

Berger realized Jet Ranger was under the desk, snoring.

“References to four different interviews that took place back-to-back, four days in a row,” Lucy said. “And again here. Three days in a row. See, that’s exactly what I mean. She doesn’t come to the city and go on TV every day of the week, and she rarely does newspaper interviews. And this one right here? No fucking way.”

Berger considered getting out of her chair and saying good-night. But the thought of riding in the back of a taxi right now was unbearable. She would be sick.

“Thanksgiving Day? Impossible.” Lucy seemed to be arguing with the data. “We were together in Massachusetts Thanksgiving Day. She wasn’t on CNN, and she sure as hell wasn’t giving an interview to a newspaper or some graduate student.”

Chapter 17

The cold wind was biting, and the half-moon was high and small, illuminating nothing as Scarpetta and Benton walked to the morgue.

The sidewalk was almost deserted, the few people they passed seeming aimless with very little in life. A young man was rolling a joint. Another young man leaned against a wall, trying to stay warm. Scarpetta felt eyes on their backs, and she felt vaguely unsettled. She felt exposed and uneasy for reasons that were too layered for her to readily identify. Yellow taxis sped by, most of their lighted rooftop signs advertising banks and finance and loan companies, typical after Christmas, when people face the consequences of their holiday cheer. A bus boasted a banner ad for Gotham Gotcha, and anger touched Scarpetta like the tip of a spear.

Then she felt fear, and Benton seemed to sense it and he found her hand, and he held it as they walked.

“It’s what I get,” she said, thinking about the gossip column. “I did a pretty good job avoiding the limelight for twenty-something years. Now CNN and now this.”

“It’s not what you get,” he said. “It’s just the way things are. And it’s not fair. But nothing is. That’s why we’re headed where we are. We’re the experts in unfair. ”

“I won’t complain even one more time,” she said. “You’re absolutely right. It’s one thing to walk into the morgue. It’s another thing to be carried in.”

“You can complain all you want.”

“No, thank you,” she said, pulling his arm against her. “I’m all done.”

Lights from passing cars grazed the empty windows of Bellevue’s old psychiatric hospital, and across a side street from its iron gates was the blue-brick Medical Examiner’s office, where two white vans with blacked-out glass were parked along the curb, waiting to be sent on their next sad mission. Benton rang the buzzer as they stood in the cold on the top step at the entrance. He rang again and again, his patience fraying.

“She must have left,” he said. “Or maybe she decided not to show up.”

“That wouldn’t be as much fun,” Scarpetta said. “She likes to make people wait.”

Cameras were everywhere, and she imagined Dr. Lenora Lester watching them on a monitor and enjoying herself. Several more minutes, and just as Benton was determined to leave, Dr. Lester appeared behind the glass front door and unlocked it to let them in. She was wearing a long green surgical gown and round steel-rimmed glasses, her graying hair pinned up. Her face was plain and unlined except for the deep furrow that ran from the top of her nose halfway up her forehead, and her dark eyes were small and darted like squirrels dodging cars.

Inside the tired lobby, a photograph of Ground Zero filled most of a wall, and Dr. Lester told them to follow her, as if they had never been here before.

As usual, she talked to Benton.

“Your name came up last week,” she said, walking slightly ahead of them. “The FBI was here on a case. A couple agents, and one of their profilers from Quantico. Somehow we got on the subject of Silence of the Lambs, and I was reminded you were the head of the Behavioral Science Unit way back then. Weren’t you the main consultant for the film? How many days did they spend at the Academy? What were Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster like?”

“I was working a case somewhere,” he said.

“That’s a shame,” she said to him. “Back then Hollywood’s interest in us was rather refreshing. It was a good thing in many respects, because the public had such ridiculous stereotypes of what we’re like and what we do.”

Scarpetta refrained from saying that the movie hadn’t exactly helped dispel morbid myths, since the famous scene with the moth took place in a funeral home and not a modern autopsy suite. She didn’t point out that if anyone fit the unfortunate Grim Reaper stereotype of a forensic pathologist, it was Dr. Lester.

“Now? Not a day goes by I don’t get a call to consult about this show or that movie. Authors, screenwriters, producers, directors. Everybody wants to see an autopsy and tromp all over a crime scene. I’m so sick of it, I can’t tell you.”

Her long gown flapped around her knees as she walked in quick, clipped steps.

She said, “This case? Already I’ve had, must be a dozen phone calls. I suppose because it’s a dwarf. My first, actually. Very interesting. Mild lumbar lordosis, bowed legs, some frontal bossing. And megalencephaly, which is enlargement of the brain,” she explained, as if Scarpetta wouldn’t know what that was. “Common in people with achondroplasia. Doesn’t affect intelligence. In the IQ department, they’re no different than the rest of us. So it’s not as if this lady was stupid. Can’t blame what happened on that.”

“I’m not sure what you’re implying,” Benton said.

“There very well may be more to this case than meets the eye. It may not be what you think it is. You’ve taken a look at the scene photographs, I hope, and I’m about to give you a set of the ones taken during the autopsy. Typical asphyxia by ligature strangulation. Assuming this is a homicide.”

“Assuming?” Benton said.

“In an unusual case like this, you have to keep every option open. As small as she was, she was more vulnerable to things going awry that might not have with someone else. Four-foot-one. Eighty-nine pounds. If it’s an accident—rough sex, let’s say—she was more at risk for things going too far.”

Scarpetta said, “In several photographs, I noticed blood and contusions on her legs. How might that fit with your suggestion of rough sex?”

“Possibly spanking that got out of control. I’ve seen it before. Whippings, kicking, other types of punishment that go too far.”

They were on the administrative floor now. Old gray linoleum tiles and bright red doors.

“I found no defensive-type injuries,” Dr. Lester went on. “If she was murdered, then whoever did it managed to subdue her instantly. Maybe with a gun, a knife, and she did what she was told. But I can’t dismiss the possibility that she and her boyfriend or whoever she was with last night were engaging in some sort of sex game that didn’t turn out exactly as planned.”

“What evidence, specifically, are you referring to that makes you think we’re possibly dealing with a sex game, as you call it?” Benton asked.

“First of all, what was found at the scene. I understand she liked to play a role, shall we say. And more important, generally, in an attempted rape, the perpetrator makes the victim undress.” Dr. Lester talked without ever slowing her pace. “That’s part of his gratification, forcing her to undress and anticipating what he’s going to do to her. Then he might bind her. To bind her first and then go to all the trouble to cut off her robe and bra sounds more like sex play to me. Especially if the victim enjoyed sexual fantasy, and based on what I’m told, she liked sex.”

“Actually,” Benton said, “cutting her clothing off after she was bound would have been far more terrifying than making her disrobe first.”

“This is the quibble I have with forensic psychology, profiling, whatever you want to call it. It’s based on personal opinion. What you assume is terrifying might be exciting, depending on the individual.”

“I’ll let you know if something I say is based on my personal opinion,” Benton said.

Berger was aware of Lucy’s arm brushing against her, of near touch as she made notes on a legal pad. Bright white fragmented data streamed by, and when she looked, it hurt her eyes, and the real pain followed.

“Do you think we’ll get most of it back?” she asked.

“Yes,” Lucy replied.

“And we’re sure these drafts go back about a year?”

“At least. I’ll be able to tell you specifically when we’re done. We have to get to the very first file she saved. I’ll keep saying she, even though I realize we really don’t know who wrote this.”

Lucy’s eyes were very green, and when she and Berger looked at each other, it was lingering and intense.

“It doesn’t appear she saved files the same way I do,” Berger observed. “In other words, doesn’t appear she was very careful for someone who has all this security software, over-the-counter or not. Every time I work on a brief, for example, I make a copy and give it a new name.”

“That’s the right way to do it,” Lucy said. “But she didn’t bother. She continued to revise and save the same file, overlaying one on top of another. Stupid. But half the world does it. Fortunately, every time she made a change and saved that same file, it got a new date stamp. Even though you can’t see it when you look at her list of documents, it’s in here, scattered all the hell over the place. The computer will find the dates, and sort by them, and do a pattern analysis. For example, how many times in one day did she or someone revise and save the same file? In this instance, the master’s thesis file. What days of the week did this person work on it? What time of day or night?”

Berger made notes and said, “Might give us an idea of where she was and when. Her habits. Which might possibly lead to who she was with. If, for example, she spent most of the time in her apartment working, except on the Saturday nights she saw Oscar. Or did she go to other places to do her writing? Perhaps even another person’s residence. Did she have some other person in her life we don’t know about?”

“I can get you a timeline right up to the last keystroke she ever made,” Lucy said. “But not where she worked. E-mail can be traced to an IP address, saying, for example, she did e-mail off-site, such as in an Internet café. But there’s nothing to trace when we’re talking about her word-processing files. We can’t say for a fact that she always worked on her thesis at home. Maybe she used a library somewhere. Or Oscar might know if she always worked in her apartment. Assuming anything he says is true. For all we know, he’s the one writing this thesis. I’ll continue to remind you of that.”

“The cops didn’t find research materials in Terri’s apartment,” Berger said.

“A lot of people have electronic files these days. They don’t have paper. Some people never print anything out unless it’s absolutely necessary. I’m one of them. I’m not a fan of paper trails.”

“Kay will certainly know how much of what Terri or someone was collecting and writing is accurate,” Berger said. “Can we completely re-create every draft?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that. Better to say I can recover what’s here. Now the computer’s sorting by bibliography. Every time Terri made a new entry or revised or altered anything, a new version of the same file was created. That’s why you see so many copies of what appears to be the same document. Well, you’re not seeing it. I assumed you’re not looking. How are you feeling?”

Lucy looked over at her, looked right at her.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Berger said. “I probably should leave. We have to figure out what we’re going to do about this.”

“Instead of trying so hard to figure out everything, why don’t you wait and see what we’re dealing with. Because it’s too early to know. But you shouldn’t leave. Don’t.”

Their chairs were side by side, and Lucy moved her fingers on the keyboard and Berger made notes, and Jet Ranger’s big head appeared between their chairs. Berger began to pet him.

“More sorting,” Lucy said. “But now by different forensic science disciplines. Fingerprints, DNA, trace evidence. Copied and routed into a folder called Forensic Science.”

“Files that were replaced,” Berger said. “One file copied over another. I’ve always been told that when you copy one file on top of another, the old copy’s gone for good.”

The office phone rang.

Berger said, “It’s for me.”

She placed her hand on top of Lucy’s wrist to stop her from answering it.

Chapter 18

Inside Dr. Lester’s office, everywhere she could fit them, were framed degrees, certificates, commendations, and photographs of herself wearing a hard hat and a white protective suit, excavating The Hole, as those who worked there referred to what was left of the World Trade Center.

She was proud to have been part of Nine-Eleven, and seemed to be personally unfazed by it. Scarpetta hadn’t fared quite as well after spending almost six months at the Water Street recovery site, hand-scanning thousands of buckets of dirt like an archaeologist, screening for personal effects, body parts, teeth, and bone. She had no framed photographs. She had no PowerPoint presentations. She didn’t like to talk about it, having felt physically poisoned by it in a way that was unlike anything she had ever felt before. It was as if the terror those victims had experienced at their moment of certain death had been suspended and fixed in a miasma that enveloped wherever they had been, and later, where remnants of them were recovered and bagged and numbered. She couldn’t quite explain it, but it was nothing to flaunt or brag about.

Dr. Lester retrieved a thick envelope from her desk and gave it to Benton.

“Autopsy photos, my preliminary report, the DNA analysis,” she said. “I don’t know how much of it Mike gave to you. Sometimes he gets distracted.”

She mentioned Mike Morales as if they were close friends.

“The police are calling it a homicide,” Benton said.

He didn’t open the envelope but gave it to Scarpetta, making a point.

“They aren’t the ones who make the determination,” Dr. Lester answered him. “I’m sure Mike isn’t calling it that. Or even if he is, he knows where I stand.”

“And what does Berger say?” Benton asked.

“She doesn’t make the determination, either. People have such a hard time waiting their turn in line. I always say the doomed ones who end up down here aren’t in a hurry, so why should the rest of us be? I’m pending the manner of death for now, especially in light of the DNA. If I was unsure of this case before, well, now I’m completely in limbo.”

“So you don’t foresee determining a manner of death in the near future,” Benton said.

“There’s nothing more I can do. I’m waiting on everybody else,” she said.

It was exactly what Scarpetta didn’t want to hear. Not only was there no evidence that warranted Oscar’s arrest, legally there was no crime. She might be bound to secrecy with him for a very long time.

They left her office, and Dr. Lester said, “For example, she had some sort of lubricant in her vagina. That’s unusual for a homicide.”

“This is the first anyone’s mentioned a lubricant,” Scarpetta said. “It’s not in any of the preliminary reports I’ve seen.”

Dr. Lester replied, “You realize, of course, these DNA profiles in CODIS are nothing but numbers. And I’ve always said, all you need is an error in the numbers, which would result in a totally different chromosomal position. One thing off in a marker or maybe more than one marker, and you’ve got a serious problem. I think it’s possible that what we have here is a very rare false positive due to computer error.”

“You don’t get false positives, not even very rarely,” Scarpetta said. “Not even if there is a mixture of DNA, such as in cases where more than one person sexually assaulted a victim or there’s cross-contamination from multiple people having contact with an item or a substance, such as a lubricant. A mixture of DNA profiles from different people won’t magically be identical to the profile of a woman in Palm Beach, for example.”

“Yes, the lubricant. Which raises another possible explanation,” Dr. Lester said. “Cross-contamination, such as you yourself just suggested. A prostitute who didn’t leave semen, meaning the prostitute could be male or female. What do we know about anybody’s private life until they end up here? That’s why I’m not so quick to call something a homicide, suicide, accident. Not until all the facts are in. I don’t like surprises after I’ve committed myself. I’m sure you saw in the lab report that the presence of seminal fluid was negative.”

“Not unheard of,” Scarpetta said. “Not even unusual. Nor is it unheard of for a lubricant to be used in a sexual assault, by the way. K-Y jelly, Vaseline, sunblock, even butter. I could make you a long list of what I’ve seen.”

They were following Dr. Lester through another corridor that dated back to earlier decades, when forensic pathologists were crudely called meat cutters. It wasn’t all that long ago that science and the dead had little in common beyond ABO blood-typing, fingerprints, and x-rays.

“No evidence of seminal fluid in or on her body or on the clothing found in the tub,” Dr. Lester said. “Or at the scene. Of course, they used UV light, as did I. Nothing fluoresced the distinctive bright white that seminal fluid does.”

“In sexual assaults, some perpetrators wear condoms,” Scarpetta said. “Especially these days, because everybody knows about DNA.”

Fractured data streamed across dark screens, reattaching at mind-numbing speed, as if it were fleeing and being caught.

Maybe Berger was getting acclimated to cyberspace. Her headache had mysteriously vanished. Or maybe adrenaline was the cure. She was feeling aggressive because she didn’t like being bucked. Not by Morales. Certainly not by Lucy.

“We should get started on the e-mail,” Berger said, and it wasn’t the first time she’d said it since Marino had called.

Lucy didn’t seem the least bit interested in Marino or what he was doing, and she wasn’t listening to Berger’s insistence that they turn their attention to e-mail. They had the passwords right in front of them, but Lucy refused to change her focus until she had a better idea why her aunt’s name continued to appear with alarming frequency in the fragmented revisions of the thesis Terri, or perhaps Oscar, had been writing.

“I’m afraid your interest is too personal,” Berger said. “And that’s exactly what I’m worried about. We need to look at e-mails, but you’d rather look at what’s been written about your aunt. I’m not saying it isn’t important.”

“This is where you have to trust that I’m doing things the right way,” Lucy said, not budging.

The legal pad with the passwords written on it remained where it was, on the desk, next to Lucy’s keyboard.

“Patience. One thing at a time,” Lucy added. “I don’t tell you how to run your cases.”

“Seems that’s exactly what you’re telling me. I want to get into their e-mails, and you want to keep reading this thesis or whatever the hell it is. You’re not helping me.”

“Helping you is exactly what I’m doing—by not deferring to you or allowing you to tell me how to do my job. I can’t allow you to have any influence over me and direct me, that’s the point. I know what I’m doing, and there’s a lot you don’t understand yet. You need to know exactly what we’re doing and why and how, because if this becomes the big deal I’m sure it will, you’re going to be asked and attacked. It won’t be me in front of the judge and jury explaining the forensic computer part of this investigation, and you probably won’t be able to call me in as an expert witness for at least one obvious reason.”

“We have to talk about that,” Berger said bluntly.

“The relationship issue,” Lucy said.

“You would be discredited.” Berger seized the opportunity to voice her misgivings and maybe put a stop to things.

Or maybe that’s what Lucy was about to suggest. Maybe Lucy was about to quit and put a stop to things.

“Frankly, I’m not sure what to do,” Berger added. “If you could be objective about it, I’d ask you for a suggestion. You started something not knowing it personally involved you. Now what? You probably don’t want to continue with this, either. I suspect you’re realizing it’s a bad idea and we should shake hands and walk away, and I’ll find another company.”

“Now that we know my aunt’s involved? Are you kidding? The worst idea of all would be to quit and walk away,” Lucy said. “I’m not quitting. You probably want to fire me. I warned you that you would. I also told you there is no other company. We’ve been through that.”

“You could let someone else finish running your program.”

“My proprietary software? Do you have any idea what it’s worth? That’s like letting someone else fly my helicopter with me sitting in the back or letting somebody else sleep with my lover.”

“Does your lover live with you? Do you live in this loft?” Berger had noticed stairs leading to a second level. “It’s risky working where you live. I’m assuming this person doesn’t have access to highly classified—”

“Jet Ranger doesn’t have a password to get into anything, don’t worry,” Lucy said. “What I’m saying, literally, is nobody’s touching my software. It’s mine. And I wrote the code. Nobody’s going to figure it out, and that’s deliberate on my part.”

“We have a major conflict neither you nor I anticipated,” Berger said.

“If you want to make it one. I don’t want to quit, and I won’t.”

Berger scanned data rolling by at a dizzying rate. She looked at Lucy and didn’t want her to quit.

“If you fire me,” Lucy said, “you’ll hurt yourself in a way that isn’t necessary.”

“I have no intention of hurting myself. Or you. I have no intention of hurting the case. Tell me what you want to do,” Berger said.

“I want to teach you a few things about recovering overwritten files, because as you pointed out, people don’t realize it’s possible. You can expect opposing counsel to go after you on this one. As you’ve noticed, I find analogies helpful. So here’s one. Let’s say you visited your favorite vacation spot. Sedona, for example. Let’s say you stayed in a certain hotel with a certain person. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say you stayed with Greg. Images, sounds, smells, emotions, tactile sensations are captured in your memory, much of it not conscious.”

“What are you doing?” Berger asked.

“A year later,” Lucy went on, “you and Greg take the same flight to Sedona on the same weekend, rent the same car, stay in the same room of the same hotel, but the experience isn’t going to be identical. It’s altered by what has gone on in your life since then, altered by your emotions, your relationship, your health, his health, by what preoccupies you, preoccupies him, altered by the weather, the economy, road detours, renovations, every detail right down to the flower arrangements and chocolates on your pillows. Without being aware of it, you’re overlaying old files with new ones that aren’t identical, even if consciously you don’t notice the difference.”

“I’ll state this clearly,” Berger said. “I don’t like people snooping into my life or violating my boundaries.”

“Read what’s out there about you. Some nice, some not so nice. Read Wikipedia.” Lucy held her gaze. “I’m not saying anything that isn’t public information. You spent your honeymoon with Greg in Sedona. It’s one of your favorite places. How is he, by the way?”

“You have no right to research me.”

“I have every right. I wanted to know exactly what I’m dealing with. And I think I do. Even though you haven’t offered much in the way of honesty.”

“What have I said that you think is dishonest?”

“You haven’t said. You haven’t said anything,” Lucy replied.

“You have no reason to distrust me, and you shouldn’t,” Berger said.

“I’m not going to abort what I’m doing because of boundaries or a possible conflict of interest. Even if you order me to,” Lucy said. “I’ve downloaded everything onto my server, so if you want to take the laptops and walk out of here, go right ahead. But you won’t stop me.”

“I don’t want to fight with you.”

“It wouldn’t be smart.”

“Please don’t threaten me.”

“I’m not. I understand how threatened you might feel and how reason might dictate that you should try to remove me from this case, from everything. But the fact is, you don’t have the capabilities to stop me from what I’m doing. You really don’t. Information about my aunt was inside an apartment where a woman was just murdered. A thesis that Terri or someone was constantly working on and revising. I’d use the word obsessively. That should be what you and I are worried about. Not what other people think or whether they’re going to accuse us.”

“Accuse us of what?”

“Of having a conflict of interest. Because of my aunt. Because of anything.”

“I care what people think far less than you imagine,” Berger said. “Because I learned it’s better to make them think what I want them to think than to care about it. I’m pretty good at that. I’ve had to be. I’ve got to be certain Kay isn’t even remotely aware of what’s going on. I need to talk to her.”

“She would have told Benton,” Lucy said. “She would have told you. She never would have agreed to examine Oscar Bane if she was somehow acquainted with him or with Terri Bridges.”

“When I requested that she examine him, she was given virtually no information about the case. Including the name of the victim. So maybe she was acquainted with Terri but didn’t realize it until she got in that room with Oscar.”

“I’m telling you, by now she would have said something.”

“I don’t know about you,” Berger said, “but I find it unusual that a student didn’t make at least some effort to contact sources for a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation. Terri Bridges was writing about Kay and never contacted her or tried? Are we sure? Maybe she did, and Kay just doesn’t remember because she wasn’t interested.”

“She would remember and at the very least would have politely declined. Aunt Kay didn’t know this lady.”

“Do you really think you can be objective? That you can handle this? Or that you want to?”

“I can. And I want to,” Lucy said, her attention suddenly distracted by what was on a video screen.

SCARPETTAby Terri Bridgesstreamed by, the same words repeatedly, in different fonts and different sizes.

“It’s begun sorting by title page,” Lucy said. “Was she fucking crazy?”

Chapter 19

The morgue was located at the lowest level, where it was convenient for vans and rescue vehicles to park in the bay as they brought in the dead and took them away.

The smell of industrial deodorizer was heavy on the air in a silent passageway of abandoned gurneys. Behind locked doors they passed were stored skeletal remains and specimens of brains, and then the grim conveyance of a dull steel elevator that lifted bodies upstairs, where they could be looked at from behind glass. Scarpetta had a special sympathy for those whose last image of someone they loved was that. In every morgue she’d ever managed, glass was unbreakable, and viewing rooms were civilized, with hints of life such as prints of landscapes and real plants, and the bereft were never unchaperoned.

Dr. Lester led them to the decomp room, usually restricted to remains that were badly decomposed, radioactive, or infectious, and a faint, lingering stench reached out to Scarpetta as if a special brand of misery was inviting her inside. Most doctors weren’t eager to work in there.

“Is there a reason you’ve got this body in isolation?” she said. “If so, now would be a good time to let us know.”

Dr. Lester flipped a switch. Overhead lights flickered on, illuminating one stationary stainless-steel autopsy table, several surgical carts, and a gurney bearing a body covered by a disposable blue sheet. A large flat-screen monitor on a countertop was split into six quadrants that were filled with rotating video images of the building and the bay.

Scarpetta told Benton to wait in the corridor while she stepped into the adjoining locker room and retrieved face masks, shoe and hair covers, and gowns. She pulled purple nitrile gloves from a box as Dr. Lester explained she was keeping the body in the decomp room because its walk-in refrigerator happened to be empty at the moment. Scarpetta barely listened. There was no excuse for why she hadn’t bothered to roll the gurney a brief distance away into the autopsy suite, which was much less of a biohazard and had no odor.

The sheet rustled when Scarpetta pulled it back, exposing a pale body with the long torso, large head, and stunted limbs that were characteristic of achondroplasia. What she noticed immediately was the absence of body hair, including pubic hair. She suspected laser removal, which would have required a series of painful treatments, and this was consistent with what Oscar Bane had said about Terri’s phobias. She thought about the dermatologist he had mentioned.

“I’m assuming she came in like this,” Scarpetta said, repositioning one of the legs to get a better look. “That you didn’t shave her.”

She, of course, couldn’t repeat information Oscar had given to her, and her frustration was acute.

“I certainly didn’t,” Dr. Lester said. “I didn’t shave any part of her. There was no reason.”

“The police say anything about it? They find anything at the scene, find out anything from Oscar, maybe from witnesses, about her hair removal or any other procedures she might have been getting?”

“Only that they noticed it,” Dr. Lester said.

Scarpetta said, “So there was no mention of someone she may have gone to, an office where she got this done. A dermatologist, for example.”

“Mike did say something about that. I have the name written down. A woman doctor here in the city. He said he was going to call her.”

“He found out about this doctor how?” Benton asked.

“Bills inside the apartment. As I understand it, he carried out a lot of bills, mail, things like that, and started going through them. The usual things. And it goes without saying, that leads to another speculation, that the boyfriend’s a pedophile. Most men who want a woman to remove all her pubic hair are pedophiles. Practicing or not.”

“Do we know for a fact the hair removal was the boyfriend’s idea?” Benton said. “How do you know it wasn’t her idea, her preference?”

“It makes her look prepubescent,” Dr. Lester said.

“Nothing else about her looks prepubescent,” Benton said. “And pubic hair removal could also be about oral sex.”

Scarpetta moved a surgical lamp closer to the gurney. The Y incision ran from clavicle to clavicle, intersecting at the sternum, and ending at the pelvis, and had been sutured with heavy twine in a pattern that always reminded her of baseballs. She repositioned the head to get a better look at the face, and felt the sawed skull cap move beneath the scalp. Terri Bridges’s complexion was a dark dusky red, the petechiae florid, and when Scarpetta opened the eyelids, the sclera were solid red from hemorrhage.

She had not died mercifully or fast.

Ligature strangulation affects the arteries and veins that carry oxygenated blood to the brain and deoxygenated blood away. As the ligature had been tightened around Terri’s neck, occluding the veins that drain blood away, blood continued to flow into her head but had nowhere to go. Increasing pressure ruptured blood vessels, resulting in congestion and masses of tiny hemorrhages. The brain was starved of oxygen, and she died of cerebral hypoxia.

But not right away.

Scarpetta retrieved a hand lens and a ruler from a cart and studied abrasions on the neck. They were U-shaped, high under the jaw, and angled up behind her head, sharply up on either side of it, and she noted a subtle pattern of linear marks overlapping one another. Whatever was used to strangle her was smooth, with no distinct edges, and its width ranged from three-eighths to five-eighths of an inch. She had seen this before when the ligature was an article of clothing or some other elastic material that became narrower as it was pulled hard, and wider as it was released. She indicated for Benton to come closer.

“This looks more like a garroting,” she said to him.

She traced the partially abraded horizontal marks around the neck and where they stopped just behind the jawbones.

“The angle indicates her assailant was positioned behind and above her, and didn’t use a slipknot or some type of handle to twist the ligature tighter,” she said. “He held the ends of it and pulled back and up with force, and did so multiple times. Rather much like a car moving backwards and forwards when it’s stuck in the snow. It’s running over its own tracks, but not a perfect overlay, and you may or may not be able to count how many times this went on. Note the tremendous florid petechiae and congestion, also consistent with garroting.”

He looked through the lens, his gloved fingers touching the marks on the neck, moving it from one side to the other to get a better view. Scarpetta felt him against her as they looked on together, and she was distracted by an argument of odors and sensations. The chilly, unpleasant dead air contrasted palpably with the warmth of him, and she felt the tension of life in him as she continued to make her case that Terri Bridges had been garroted multiple times.

“Based on the marks I’m seeing—three times, at least,” she added.

Dr. Lester stood back from the other side of the gurney, her arms folded, her face uneasy.

“How long before she was unconscious each time he did it?” Benton asked.

“Could have occurred in as few as ten seconds,” Scarpetta replied. “Death would have followed in minutes unless the ligature was loosened, and that’s what I believe happened. The killer allowed her to regain consciousness, then strangled her into unconsciousness again, and repeated his routine until she could no longer survive it. Or perhaps he got tired of it.”

“Or possibly was interrupted,” Benton suggested.

“Maybe. But this repetitive ritual explains the profound congestion of her face, the abundance of pinpoint hemorrhages.”

“Sadism,” he said.

Dr. Lester stepped closer and said, “Or S-and-M that went too far.”

“Did you check her neck for fibers?” Scarpetta asked her. “Anything that might give us a clue as to the type of ligature we’re dealing with?”

“I recovered fibers from her hair and other areas of her body, sent them to the labs for trace evidence. No fibers from the abrasions on her neck.”

Scarpetta said, “I would expedite everything you can. This isn’t S-and-M gone bad. The reddish, dry deep furrows on her wrists indicate they were lashed together very tightly in a single loop with a binding that had sharp edges.”

“The flex-cuff will be checked for DNA.”

“These marks weren’t made by a flex-cuff,” Scarpetta said. “Flex-cuffs have rounded edges to prevent injury. I’m assuming you’ve already sent—”

Dr. Lester cut her off. “Everything went to the labs. Of course, the binding was brought here first. Mike showed it to me so I could correlate it with the furrows on her wrists and possibly with the marks around her neck, then he took it. But there are several photographs included in the ones I gave you.”

Scarpetta was disappointed. She wanted to see the actual binding, see if it reminded her of anything she’d ever come across before. She found the photographs, and the close-ups told her nothing more than the scene photographs had. The binding Oscar allegedly cut from Terri’s wrists was a colorless nylon strap exactly one-quarter of an inch wide, and twenty and one-half inches long from the pointed tip to the ratchet case lock. One side was scored, the other smooth, the edges sharp. There was no serial number or any other type of marking that might indicate a manufacturer.

“Looks like a cable tie of some sort,” Benton said.

“It’s definitely not a flex-cuff or PlastiCuff, anything that would be used as a type of handcuff,” Scarpetta said.

“Except a lot of cable ties are black,” Benton pondered as he looked at several photographs. “Anything that would be outdoors and could be degraded by UV is going to be black. Not clear or a light color.”

“Possibly a single-use bag tie of some sort,” Scarpetta speculated. “For indoors, since it’s colorless. But we’re talking a large, sturdy bag. This isn’t a typical trash-bag tie.”

She looked across the room at a biohazard waste bag, bright red with the universal symbol, attached to a stainless-steel holder next to a sink.

“Actually,” she said. “Where I have seen this type of tie is right there. For those.”

She pointed to the biohazard waste holder.

“Ours use a twist tie,” Dr. Lester snapped, as if Scarpetta was actually suggesting the binding used on Terri Bridges had come from the morgue.

“What’s important in this,” Scarpetta said, “is people into S-and-M generally don’t bind each other so tightly as to cut off circulation, and they aren’t likely to use sharp-edged straps or mechanical restraints that can’t be easily loosened or removed with a key. And this type of tie”—she indicated the photograph—“can never be loosened once it’s applied. It can only be pulled tighter. She would have been in pain. There was no way to free her without forcing a knife or some other sharp instrument under the ligature. And you can see a small cut here by her left wrist bone. That might be how it happened. Could be from the kitchen scissors, if it’s true that’s what was used. Was there any blood on her body when she was brought in, besides blood from the injuries on her legs?”

“No.” Dr. Lester’s dark eyes stared at her.

“Well, if she was dead when the binding was removed and that’s when she was cut, she wouldn’t have bled, or at least not much,” Scarpetta said. “This was no game. There was too much pain for this to be a game.”

“Seems to me pain is the point of S-and-M.”

“No pleasure was derived from this pain,” Scarpetta said. “Except by the person inflicting it.”

The title page belonged to a revision dated about three weeks ago, December 10.

“A really big file that we’re far from completely recovering yet,” Lucy said. “But this partial chapter gives you the picture.”

She had spooled it into a text file, and Berger began reading to Lucy’s tap-taps of the down-arrow key:

While I’ve got my hands in a dead body, I imagine how I

could have killed the person better. With all I know? Of course I

could commit the perfect crime. When I’m with my colleagues

and throw back enough whiskey, we love to come up with

scenarios that we’d never present at professional meetings or

mention to family, friends, certainly not to our enemies!

I asked her what her favorite whiskey is.

Maybe a toss-up between Knappogue Castle single-malt Irish

whiskey and Brora single-malt Scotch.

Never heard of either.

Why would you? Knappogue is probably the finest Irish

whiskey in the world and costs close to seven hundred dollars.

And Brora is so rare and exquisite, each bottle is numbered and

costs more than your schoolbooks in a year.

How can you afford to drink such expensive

whiskey, and don’t you feel guilty when there are so

many people losing their homes and unable to fill their

cars with gas?

My turning down a magnificent Irish whiskey isn’t going to fill

your car with gas—assuming you have a car. It’s a fact that the

finer labels—whether it’s a Château Pétrus, a single-malt

whiskey, or very fine pure agave tequila—are less damaging to

your liver and brain.

So wealthy people who drink the good stuff aren’t

as affected by alcohol abuse? That’s something I’ve

never heard.

How many human livers and brains have you seen and

sectioned?

How about some other examples from the dark

side? What else do you say behind the scenes,

especially when you’re with your colleagues?

We brag about famous people we’ve autopsied (all of us

secretly wish we’d done Elvis or Anna Nicole Smith or Princess

Diana). Listen, I’m no different from anybody else. I want the

case nobody else gets. I want the Gainesville serial murders. I

want to be the one who arrives at the scene and finds the

severed head on a bookshelf staring at me when I walk through

the door. I would have loved to have been cross-examined by

Ted Bundy when he represented himself at his own murder trial.

Hell, I would have loved to have done his autopsy after he was

executed.

Share some sensational cases you have worked.

I’ve been fortunate to have a number of them. For example,

lightning strikes, where nobody else could figure out the cause of

death, because you’ve got this body lying in a field, her clothes

ripped off and scattered. First thought? Sexual assault. But no

sign of injury at autopsy. Dead giveaways, excuse the pun? The

branching pattern known as the Lichtenberg figures or electrical

treeing. Or if the person was wearing anything ferrous, such as

a steel belt buckle, it would have become magnetized, or the

wristwatch might have stopped at the time of death—I always

check for things like that. Most medical examiners don’t because

they’re inexperienced or naïve or just not very good at what

they do.

You don’t sound as compassionate as I expected.

Let’s face it. Dead is dead. I can show all the empathy in the

world and move any jury to tears. But do I really feel that my

heart has been snatched out of my chest when the latest

tragedy’s rolled in? Do I really care when the cops make

comments that the public never hears?

Such as?

Typically, comments with sexual overtones. The size of the

deceased’s penis—especially if it’s small or huge. The size of the

deceased’s breasts—especially if they’re what I’d call centerfold

material. I know plenty of medical examiners who take souvenirs.

Trophies. An artificial hip from someone famous. A tooth. A

breast implant, and it’s always the men who want those. (Don’t

ask me what they do with them, but they’re usually within easy

reach.) A penile implant—those are amusing.

Have you ever kept a souvenir?

Only one. This was twenty years ago, a case early in my

career, serial murders in Richmond, where I was the brand-new

chief. But the trophy wasn’t from a dead body. It was from

Benton Wesley. The first time we met was in my conference

room. When he left, I kept his coffee cup. You know, one of

these tall Styrofoam cups from a 7-Eleven? I was totally in lust

with him the first minute I saw him.

What did you do with his coffee cup?

I took it home with me and ran my tongue along the rim of it,

as if by tasting it, I was tasting him.

But you didn’t actually sleep with him until, what?

About five years later?

That’s what everybody thinks. But that’s not what really

happened. I called him after that first meeting and invited him

over for a drink—allegedly so we could continue discussing the

cases in private, and the instant my front door shut behind us,

we were all over each other.

Who started it?

I seduced him. That made it less of a moral struggle for him.

He was married. I was divorced and not seeing anyone. His poor

wife. Benton and I had been lovers for almost five years before

he finally admitted it to her, feigning that his adultery had just

begun because their marriage had gotten stale, lifeless.

And nobody knew? Pete Marino? Lucy? Your

secretary, Rose?

I’ve always wondered if Rose suspected it. Just something

about the way she’d act when Benton would show up for yet

another case discussion, or when I was on my way to Quantico

for yet another consultation. She died of cancer last summer. So

you can’t ask her.

Doesn’t sound as if working with the dead makes

you sexually inhibited.

Quite the opposite. When you’ve explored every inch of the

human body so many times that you haven’t the least bit of self-consciousness or revulsion about it, there isn’t anything out of

bounds sexually, and there’s plenty of experimentation to be had. . . .

“Can you forward this to Kay?” Berger said when the section of text abruptly stopped. “So when she gets a chance, maybe she can give it her attention. Maybe she’ll have thoughts, insights we don’t.”

“Supposedly from one of the interviews this past Thanksgiving,” Lucy said. “Which I know she didn’t give. Not that she’d ever talk like this to anyone.”

“I’m noticing a creative use of fonts. Your opinion?”

“The writer, Terri or whoever, does a lot with fonts,” Lucy agreed.

She was doing her best to be calm, but she was outraged. Berger sensed it, and she was waiting. In the past, Lucy’s anger was something to be feared.

“And in my opinion, there’s symbolism involved,” Lucy was saying. “In this phony interview, for example, when Terri’s asking questions, I’m going to say it’s Terri, the font is Franklin Gothic and it’s in bold. Arial in smaller type for my aunt’s phony answers.”

“Then symbolically, Terri has superseded Kay in importance,” Berger said.

“It’s worse than that. For your purists in the word-processing world, Arial has a very bad rep.” Lucy studied text as she talked. “It’s been called homely, common, lacking in character, and is considered a shameless imposter. There are plenty of articles about it.”

She avoided Berger’s eyes.

“An imposter?” Berger prodded her. “As in plagiarism, copyright violation? What are you talking about?”

“It’s considered a rip-off of Helvetica, which was developed in the nineteen-fifties and became one of the most popular typefaces in the world,” Lucy said. “To the untrained eye, there’s no difference between Helvetica and Arial. But to a purist, a professional printer or print designer, Arial’s a parasite. The irony? Some young designers think Helvetica is based on Arial instead of the other way around. Do you see the significance symbolically? Because it’s scary, at least to me.”

“Of course I see it,” Berger said. “It could suggest that Terri and Kay have switched places in terms of their being world-renowned forensic experts. Rather much what Mark David Chap-man did before he killed John Lennon. He was wearing a name tag with Lennon’s name on it. Rather much what Sirhan Sirhan did when he allegedly made the comment that by assassinating Bobby Kennedy, he’d become more famous.”

“The change in fonts is a progression,” Lucy said. “The more recent the drafts, the more pronounced it is, the prominence of Terri’s name and an implied negativity toward my aunt.”

“A change that suggests Terri’s emotional attachment to Kay was turning hostile, dismissive. I should say the author. But for the sake of simplicity, I’ll keep saying Terri,” Berger speculated. “Rather much what happened between Kay and Marino, now that I think of it. He worshipped her. Then wanted to destroy her.”

“It’s not that simple, and it’s not the same,” Lucy said. “Marino had a reason to be in love with my aunt. He knew her. Terri didn’t have a reason to feel anything about her. It was delusional.”

“We’re assuming she was an aficionado of typefaces. Let’s go back to that,” Berger said, continuing her assessment.

Lucy was different—genuinely so. Fiery, yes. But not reactive the way she used to be, and in Berger’s opinion, Lucy used to teeter on the edge of violence. That used to be her default, and it had made her completely unsafe.

“I definitely think she was well versed in fonts,” Lucy said. “She uses different ones for footnotes, the bibliography, chapter headings, table of contents. Most people don’t do that when they’re writing a thesis. They might change point size and use italics but not all this artsy use of fonts. In fact, the most common typeface is usually the default on a number of word-processing packages, including the one Terri was using. For the most part, the actual text is in Times New Roman.”

“Examples,” Berger said, writing on her legal pad. “What fonts does she use, and for what and why? Theoretically.”

“For footnotes, Palatino Linotype, which is highly legible both on a computer screen and when printed. For the bibliography, Bookman Old Style. Also legible. Chapter headings, she picked MS Reference Sans Serif, which is typically used in headlines. Again, it’s rare to find this many different typefaces, especially in an academic paper. What it suggests to me is her writing was highly personalized. It wasn’t just about the writing.”

Berger looked at her for a long moment.

“How the hell do you know all this off the top of your head?” she said. “Fonts? I never even pay attention to them. I can’t even tell you what font I use when I’m writing my briefs.”

“You use the same default for text that Terri did. Times New Roman, designed for the London Times. A typeface that’s narrow, so it’s economical, but very readable. I saw printouts on your desk when I was in your office earlier today. In forensic computer work, what seems the most trivial detail might be significant.”

“Which may be the case here.”

“I can tell you this much with certainty,” Lucy said. “These different fonts were deliberate choices, because she had to select them. Now whether she attached symbolism to them in terms of how she felt about herself or someone else, such as my aunt? Don’t know. But my opinion? The whole thing is sick, and it was well on its way to becoming sicker. If Terri really is the author and she were still around, I would consider her dangerous to my aunt. Maybe even physically dangerous. At the very least, she’s defaming someone she never even met.”

“Kay would have to prove it was untrue. And how would she prove that the anecdote about the coffee cup isn’t true, for example? How do you know it isn’t true?”

“Because she would never do anything like that.”

“I don’t believe you’re in a position to know what Kay does in private,” Berger said.

“Of course I’m in a position to know.” Lucy met her eyes. “So are you. Ask anyone if she’s ever made fun of dead bodies or allowed anyone else to. Ask anyone who’s ever been in the morgue with her or at a crime scene if she enjoys gruesome cases and wishes she’d autopsied people like Ted Bundy. I hope this doesn’t all come out in court.”

“I was talking about the coffee cup. Why does it disturb you to imagine Kay as a sexual person? Have you ever allowed her to be human? Or is she the perfect mother, or worse, one who isn’t perfect enough?”

“I admit I used to have a problem with that, competing for her attention, not allowing her to have flaws or real feelings,” Lucy said. “I was a tyrant.”

“No more?”

“Maybe Marino was the final radiation, the last dose of chemo. Unintentionally, he cured something somewhat malignant in me, and actually, my aunt and I are better off. I realized she has a life quite apart from mine, and that’s fine. It’s more than fine. It’s better. It’s not that I didn’t know it before. But in retrospect, I didn’t feel it. And now she’s married. If Marino hadn’t done what he did, I don’t think Benton would have gotten around to getting married.”

“You act as if the decision was his alone. She had no input?” Berger studied her.

“She’s always let him be what he is. She would have continued to. She loves him. She probably couldn’t be with anybody else, in truth, because there are three things she can’t abide and won’t tolerate. Being controlled, betrayed, or bored. Any one of them, and she’d rather be alone.”

“Sounds like a few other suspects I know,” Berger said.

“Probably true,” Lucy said.

“Well,” Berger said, returning her attention to what was on the computer screen. “Unfortunately, what’s on these laptops is evidence, and people involved in the case will read it. And yes, it could become public.”

“It would destroy her.”

“It won’t destroy her,” Berger said. “But we’ve got to find out where this information came from. I don’t think it was fabricated from whole cloth. Terri, or whoever wrote this, knows too much. Benton and Kay’s first meeting in Richmond twenty years ago, for example.”

“They didn’t start their affair then.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because I was staying in her house that summer,” Lucy said. “Benton never came over, not once. And when she wasn’t at the office or at a scene, she was with me. I was a screwed-up pudgy little brat, mad as hell and desperate for her attention. In other words, just looking to get into trouble, and not in a position to really understand that the kind of trouble she dealt with caused people to end up raped and murdered. She didn’t run around and leave me alone, not for a minute, not with a serial killer terrorizing the city. I never saw a Seven-Eleven coffee cup, just so you know.”

“It means nothing that you didn’t see one,” Berger said. “Why would she show it to you, much less explain why she’d carried it home from her office conference room?”

“She wouldn’t have,” Lucy said. “But I’m sort of sorry I didn’t see one. She was really all alone back then.”

Chapter 20

Scarpetta turned Terri Bridges’s body on its side to look at it, front and back.

Other than the marks on the neck and a small cut on one wrist, the only injuries Scarpetta saw began mid-thigh, anteriorly, or on the front. These were long, narrow bruises with multiple linear abrasions that would have bled, most of them horizontal, as if she had been struck with something like a board that had a flat surface with an edge.

Her knees were badly bruised and abraded, as were the tops of her feet, and under the magnification of the hand lens, Scarpetta discovered tiny blondish splinters as fine as hair embedded in each. The vivid redness and lack of swelling of the wounds indicated all of them had been inflicted close to the time of death. That could have been minutes. It could have been an hour.

Dr. Lester’s response to the discovery of the splinters anteriorly, on the knees, on the feet, was that perhaps, at some point, the body was dragged, and only those areas of it had been in contact with a wooden surface, a floor. Scarpetta remarked that few wooden floors were rough enough to cause splinters, unless the wood was untreated.

“You aren’t going to get me to rule out an accident yet,” Dr. Lester stubbornly asserted. “Bondage, beatings, whippings, severe spanking. And sometimes things go too far.”

“What about a struggle?” Benton said. “Does that also factor into your theory that this might be an accident?”

“Writhing, screaming in pain. I’ve seen it on videotapes that profilers like you show at meetings,” Dr. Lester said, and the crease between her eyebrows seemed deeper, like a crevice dividing her forehead. “Couples turn the camera on, never knowing their perverted rituals will end in death.”

“If you could go through the photographs,” Scarpetta said to Benton. “The ones from the scene. Let’s look at a few things.”

He retrieved an envelope from a counter and together they arranged photos of the bathroom. She pointed to one that showed the vanity, and directly above it, the oval mirror that was slightly askew.

Scarpetta said, “The injuries to her legs were caused by moderate to severe blunt force with an object that is flat and has an edge. The edge of the vanity and the underside of its drawer, maybe? If she’d been seated in front of the vanity? That could explain why all of her injuries are anterior and from the mid-thigh down. Nothing posterior, or on any area of her upper body. Nothing on her back or buttocks, which are usually the preferred target for spanking.”

“You know if police found any weapon at the scene that might have caused these bruises and abrasions?” Benton asked Dr. Lester.

“Not that I’ve been told,” she replied. “That doesn’t surprise me. If whoever she was with left the scene with whatever was used around her neck, maybe he also left with whatever was used to beat her. If she were beaten. Frankly, I’d lean more toward homicide if she’d been raped. But there’s no evidence of that. No inflammation, no lacerations, no seminal fluid . . .”

Scarpetta returned to the gurney and moved the surgical lamp over the pelvis.

Dr. Lester watched her and said, “As I’ve told you, I took swabs.”

She was beginning to sound unnerved and defensive.

“I also took the initiative to make several slides, which I examined microscopically for sperm,” she said. “Negative. And samples went to the DNA lab, and you’re aware of those results. Doesn’t seem likely intercourse occurred, in my opinion. Doesn’t mean that wasn’t the intention. I think we have to at least be sure she wasn’t planning something consensual, and the foreplay involved bondage.”

“Was there lubricant at the scene? Something, perhaps, in her bathroom or by her bed that might indicate the source of it might have been the victim? I didn’t see anything like that listed in the police report, as I’ve said,” Scarpetta said.

“They say no.”

“Well, that’s extremely important,” Scarpetta said. “If there’s no source of it in her apartment, that might suggest whoever she was with brought it with him. And there are a plethora of reasons intercourse could have occurred or been attempted and there’s no sperm or semen. The most obvious is erectile dysfunction, which isn’t uncommon in rape. Other possible scenarios? He’d had a vasectomy, or suffered from azoospermia, resulting in a complete absence of sperm cells. Or a blocked ejaculatory duct. Or retrograde ejaculation, when the sperm and semen flow backward into the bladder instead of out of the penis and into the vagina. Or medications that interfere with the formation of sperm.”

“Again, I’ll remind you of what I said earlier. Not only is there no sperm, but under UV, nothing fluoresced that might indicate the presence of semen, either. Whoever she was with, it doesn’t appear he ejaculated.”

“Depends on if the semen was deep in the vaginal canal or rectum,” Scarpetta said. “Without dissection or some type of forensic fiber-optic technology that can incorporate UV, you’re not going to see anything. Did you try the light source on the inside of her mouth? You did swab her rectum and her mouth?”

“Of course.”

“Fine. I’d like to take a look.”

“Help yourself.”

The more determined Scarpetta got, the less combative and self-assured Dr. Lester sounded.

Scarpetta opened a cabinet and found a speculum still in its wrapper. She put on fresh gloves and went through the same procedure with the body that a gynecologist did during a routine pelvic exam. She inspected the external genitalia and saw no injury or abnormalities, then, with the speculum, spread open the vaginal canal, where she found enough lubricant for several swabs, which she smeared on slides. She swabbed the rectum. She swabbed the inside of the mouth and throat, because it’s not uncommon for a victim to aspirate or swallow seminal fluid while being orally sodomized.

“Stomach contents?” Scarpetta asked.

“A small amount of brownish fluid, about twenty cc’s. She hadn’t eaten for hours, at least,” Dr. Lester said.

“You kept it?”

“No point. I’m having the usual body fluids screened for drugs.”

“I wasn’t thinking about drugs as much as the possibility of semen,” Scarpetta said. “If she was orally sodomized, you might find semen in the stomach. Might even find it in the lungs. Unfortunately, we have to think creatively.”

She retrieved a scalpel from a cart and snapped in a new blade. She began incising contusions on Terri’s knees, and could feel the broken patellae beneath the abraded skin. Each kneecap was fractured into several pieces—a typical injury in car accidents where knees impact the dashboard.

“If you’ll make sure I have electronic images of all x-rays,” she said.

She incised contusions on the thighs and discovered ruptured blood vessels more than an inch deep, all the way to muscle. Using a six-inch ruler as a scale, she got Benton to help with photographs, and she made notes on body diagrams she retrieved from cubbyholes above the counter.

With forceps, she removed splinters from the knees and the tops of the feet and placed them on several dry slides. Seating herself before the compound microscope, she manipulated light and contrast and moved the slide on the stage. At a magnification of 100X, she could see the tracheids, the water-conducting cells of the wood, and determine that areas of them had been roughly crushed at bondline surfaces where veneers had been glued together with a very strong adhesive.

The splinters had come from abrasively planed plyboard. She and Benton looked again at the eight-by-ten photograph of Terri’s nude body on the bathroom floor. In the background was the white marble countertop that included the built-in vanity and a small gold metal chair with heart-shaped back and black satin-upholstered bottom. On top of the vanity was a mirrored tray of perfumes, a brush, and a comb. Everything was perfectly neat and straight except for the oval mirror, and as Scarpetta looked closely at the photo and studied it under a lens, she confirmed that the edge of the countertop was squared off where the vanity was built in. It was sharp.

She looked through more photographs of the bathroom, taken from different angles.

“It’s all one unit.” She showed a photograph to Benton. “The counter built around the sink, cabinets, and the vanity with its drawer are one unit. And if you look here, this picture taken at floor level, you can see the counter has a white-painted plyboard back that’s against the tile wall. Very similar to desks built into kitchen counters. However, often with plyboard built-ins, the underside that’s not visible isn’t painted. It’s possible the underside of the vanity drawer isn’t, in other words. Microscopically, we can tell the splinters recovered from her knees and the tops of her feet are from unpainted plyboard. We need to go to the scene.”

Dr. Lester was behind them, looking on silently.

Scarpetta explained, “I think it’s possible he forced her to sit in the chair and watch herself in the mirror while he garroted her, and when she struggled—kicking violently—her legs struck the edge of the counter, causing the linear abrasions, the deep contusions on her thighs. Her knees struck the underside of the vanity so violently her patellae were shattered. If the underside of the vanity is unpainted plyboard, that would explain the splinters in the knees, and also the tops of her feet. As short as her legs are, her feet wouldn’t have reached the wall. They would have struck the underside of the drawer.”

“If you’re right,” Dr. Lester conceded, “it will have a bearing. If she was kicking and struggling that hard, and someone was making her sit and look in the mirror, that’s a different story.”

“An important question is what the bathroom was like when Oscar first got there and found the body,” Benton said. “Assuming his story is true.”

“I think we can get some measurements and figure out if his story is true,” Scarpetta said. “Depending on the chair. If Terri was sitting in it and Oscar was standing behind her, I don’t believe he could have pulled up high enough with the ligature to achieve the angle of the mark on her neck. But we need to go to the scene. We need to go there quickly.”

“First thing I’m going to do is outright ask him,” Benton said. “Maybe he’ll talk to me if he thinks new evidence has turned up and it’s in his best interest to cooperate. I’ll call the ward, see if he’ll be reasonable.”

Lucy was going through e-mail as Scarpetta explained over speakerphone why she wanted swabs from Terri Bridges’s orifices, and an entire chair, to be flown to the National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

“I have friends at Y-Twelve,” Scarpetta said to Berger, whose approval she wanted. “I think we could get a very rapid turnaround on this. Once they have the evidence, it’s just a matter of hours. The longest part will be vacuuming down the chamber, because that’s going to be slower than usual. The petroleum-based lubricant has a lot of moisture.”

“I thought they made nuclear weapons,” Berger said. “Didn’t they process the uranium for the first atomic bomb? You’re not suggesting Terri Bridges had connections that might have to do with terrorism or something like that?”

Scarpetta said that while it was true that Y-12 produced components for every weapon in the United States’ nuclear arsenal and also had the largest stockpile of enriched uranium, her interest in the place was because of its engineers, chemists, physicists, and especially its materials scientists.

“Are you familiar with their Visitec Large Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope?” she asked.

“I assume what you’re getting at is we don’t have one here,” Berger said.

“I’m afraid at present there’s no forensic lab on the planet that has a ten-ton microscope with a magnification of two hundred thousand X, and detectors for EDX and FTIR, energy dispersive X-ray detection, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy,” Scarpetta said. “One-stop shopping to get the morphology, and elemental and chemical compositions, of a sample as small as a macromolecule or as large as an engine block. It’s possible I might want to put an entire chair in the chamber. But we need to see. I’m not going to ask Lucy if she’ll let us borrow her jet and have police fly evidence down to Tennessee and receipt it to one of my scientist friends in the middle of the night unless I’m sure there’s a reason.”

“Tell me more about the chair,” Berger said. “Why you think it’s so important?”

“From her bathroom,” Scarpetta said. “I believe she was sitting in it when she was murdered—a theory at this point that I can’t begin to verify without a hands-on examination. I have reason to believe she was nude when she was sitting on it, and since we know the lubricant is contaminated with an admixture of DNA, it may be contaminated with traces of other organic and inorganic substances as well. We don’t know what the lubricant originally was used for, where it came from, or what’s in it. But the LC-SEM might help tell us, and tell us quickly. I’d like to go to the scene, to Terri’s apartment, as soon as possible.”

“There’s an officer in her apartment around the clock,” Berger said. “So it’s not a problem getting you inside. But I’d like an investigator with you. I also need to ask you again if you had any prior connection to Terri or Oscar.”

“None.”

“We’re finding things on a computer from her apartment that make it appear you did. At least with her.”

“I didn’t. We’ll be finished up here in fifteen, twenty minutes,” Scarpetta said. “Then all we have to do is drop by Benton’s office to pick up a few things. If someone could meet us in front of the hospital.”

“How would you feel if that someone is Pete Marino?” Berger was deliberately bland.

“If what I’m considering might have happened to Terri Bridges is right,” Scarpetta said, and she was bland, too, as if she had been expecting Berger to suggest what she did, “we’re dealing with a sexual sadist who may have killed before. Possibly two other people in 2003. Benton’s gotten e-mails, the same ones you’ve seen, from Marino.”

“I haven’t looked at my e-mail in the past few hours,” Berger said. “We’re actually just getting started on Terri Bridges’s e-mail right now. Hers and Oscar Bane’s.”

“If my suspicion’s correct, I don’t see how he could have done what I’m thinking the killer did. Of course, his DNA hasn’t been run through CODIS yet. But what I can say is if he was standing behind Terri while she was sitting, they would have been almost the same height. Unless he was standing on top of something like a step stool, and for him to maintain his balance while doing all the rest of it would have been difficult, if not impossible.”

“What did you just say?”

“Because of their achondroplasia,” Scarpetta said. “Their torsos are a normal length but their arms and legs aren’t. I’ll have to show you with measurements, but if someone suffering achondroplasia is four-foot-one, let’s say, and is sitting in front of someone standing who’s about the same height, their heads and shoulders will be almost level with each other.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying. It sounds like a riddle.”

“Does anybody know where he is? Someone should check on him, to make sure he’s safe. He may have good reason to be paranoid if he’s not the killer, and I’m having my doubts. Serious doubts.”

“Jesus,” Berger said. “What do you mean ‘where he is’? Don’t tell me he’s left Bellevue.”

Scarpetta said, “Benton just called the prison ward. I assumed you knew.”

Chapter 21

Tell-Tail Hearts’s flagship pet store was on Lexington Avenue, a few blocks west of Grace’s Marketplace, and as Shrew walked through the blustery dark, she kept thinking of the column she’d posted several weeks ago.

She recalled descriptions of cleanliness, and a staff in lab coats who offered the highest level of care, whether it was a nutritious diet, medical attention, or affection. All of the chain’s pet shops were open seven days a week, from ten in the morning until nine at night, ensuring that the puppies, in particular, with their delicate constitutions, weren’t left alone for long periods. After hours, the heat or air-conditioning wasn’t turned down to save on oil or electricity, and music was piped in to keep the little babies company. Shrew had done plenty of research after Ivy died and knew how critical it was for puppies to be kept hydrated and warm, and not to languish from loneliness.

When the store came in view just up on the left, it wasn’t at all what Shrew expected, much less what had been described in the column the Boss had written. The display window was filled with untidy shredded newspaper, and a red plastic fire hydrant was precariously tilted to one side. There were no puppies or kittens in the window, and the glass was dirty.

Tell-Tail Hearts was sandwiched between In Your Attic, which by the looks of it sold junk, and a music store called Love Notes, which was having a going-out-of-business sale. A sign hanging on the pet store’s dingy white front door read Closed, but all the lights were blazing, and on the counter was a big foil bag of take-out barbecue from Adam’s Ribs, three doors down. Parked in front was a black Cadillac sedan, with a driver in it and the engine on.

The driver seemed to be watching Shrew as she opened the front door and walked into an invisible fog of air freshener, the spray can on top of the cash register.

“Hello?” she called out, not seeing anyone.

Puppies began to bark and stir and stare at her. Kittens snoozed in beds of wood shavings, and fish fluttered lazily in tanks. A counter wrapped around three walls, and behind it, reaching almost to the water-stained ceiling, were wire cages filled with tiny representatives of every breed of pet imaginable. She avoided making eye contact with any of them. She knew better.

Eye contact led straight to the heart, and the next thing she knew, she was carrying someone home she hadn’t intended to get, and she couldn’t have all of them. And she wanted all of them, the poor, pitiful things. She needed to research her selection intelligently, ask questions, and be convinced of what would be the best choice before anyone removed a puppy from its cage and placed it in her arms. She needed to talk to the manager.

“Hello?” she called out again.

She walked tentatively toward a door in back that was slightly ajar.

“Anybody here?”

She opened the door the rest of the way. Wooden stairs led down to the basement, where she could hear a dog barking, then several others began barking. She started down, one slow step at a time, careful because the lighting was poor and she’d had too much bourbon. Walking all the way here had helped a little but not nearly enough. Her thoughts were dull and sluggish, and her nose felt numb the way it got when she was tipsy.

She found herself in a storage area that was thick with shadows and stunk like sickness, feces, and urine. Amid piled boxes of pet supplies and bags of dry food were cages filled with filthy shredded paper, and then she saw a wooden table with glass vials and syringes, and red bags with Biohazard Infectious Waste stamped on them in black, and a pair of heavy black rubber gloves.

Just beyond the table was a walk-in freezer.

Its steel door was open wide, and she saw what was inside. A man in a dark suit and a black cowboy hat and a woman in a long gray frock coat had their backs to her, their voices muffled by loud blowing air. Shrew saw what they were doing, and she wanted to get out as fast as she could, but her feet seemed stuck to the concrete floor. She stared in horror, and then the woman saw her and Shrew turned around and ran.

“Hold on!” a deep voice yelled after her. “Whoa now!”

Heavy footsteps sounded after her, and she missed a step on the stairs and whacked her shin hard. A hand grabbed her elbow, and the man in the cowboy hat was escorting her back into the bright lights of the store. Then the lady in the gray frock coat was there, too. She glared disapprovingly at her but looked too worn-out to do anything about Shrew’s transgression.

The man in the cowboy hat demanded, “What the hell do you think you’re doing sneaking around in here like that?”

His eyes were dark and bloodshot in his dissipated face, and he had big white sideburns and plenty of flashy gold jewelry.

“I wasn’t sneaking,” Shrew said. “I was looking for the manager.”

Her heart pounded like a kettledrum.

“We’re closed,” the man said.

“I came in to buy a puppy,” she said, and she started to cry.

“There’s a closed sign in the door,” he said while the woman mutely stood by.

“Your door’s unlocked. I came downstairs to tell you. Anybody could walk right in.” Shrew couldn’t stop crying.

She couldn’t stop envisioning what she’d seen in the freezer.

The man looked at the woman, as if demanding an explanation. He walked over to the front door and checked, then muttered something. It probably dawned on him that Shrew had to be telling the truth. How else would she have gotten in?

“Well, we’re closed. It’s a holiday,” he said, and she guessed him to be about sixty-five years old, maybe seventy. He had a Midwest drawl that seemed to crawl off his tongue.

She had a feeling he’d been doing the same thing she was a little earlier, drinking, and she noticed that the big gold ring he wore was shaped like a dog’s head.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I saw the lights on and came in, thinking you were open. I really am sorry. I thought I might buy a puppy, and some food and toys and things. Sort of a New Year’s present to myself.”

She picked up a can of food off a shelf.

Before she could stop herself, she said, “Wasn’t this banned in that Chinese-import melamine scare?”

“Believe you have that confused with toothpaste,” the man said to the woman in the gray frock coat, who had a lifeless jowly face and long dyed black hair straying from a barrette.

“That’s right. Toothpaste,” she said, and she had the same accent. “A lot of people got liver damage from it. Of course, they never tell you the rest of the story. Like maybe they were alcoholics, and that’s why they had liver damage.”

Shrew wasn’t uninformed. She knew about the toothpaste that had killed several people because it had diethylene glycol in it, and the man and woman knew that wasn’t what Shrew was talking about. This was a bad place—maybe the worst in the world—and she’d come at a bad time, the worst time imaginable, and she’d seen something so awful she’d never be the same.

What was she thinking? It was the evening of New Year’s Day, and no pet store in the city was going to be open, including this one. So why were they here?

After being down in the basement, she knew why they were here.

“It’s important to clear up confusion,” the man said to Shrew. “You had no business down there.”

“I didn’t see anything.” A clear indication she’d seen everything.

The man in the cowboy hat and gold jewelry said, “If an animal dies from something contagious, you do what you got to do, and you got to do it fast to make sure the other animals don’t catch it. And once you do the merciful thing, you have to deal with temporary storage. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

Shrew noticed six empty cages with their doors open wide. She wished she’d noticed them when she first walked in. Maybe she would have left. She remembered the other empty cages in the basement, and what was on the table, and then what was in the freezer.

She started to cry again and said, “But some of them were moving.”

The man said to her, “You live around here?”

“Not really.”

“What’s your name?”

She was so scared and upset, she stupidly told him, and then stupidly said, “And if you’re thinking I’m some kind of inspector for the Department of Agriculture or some animal group?” She shook her head. “I just came in to get a puppy. I forgot it’s a holiday, that’s all. I understand about pets getting sick. Kennel cough. Parvovirus. One gets it, they all get it.”

The man and woman silently looked at her as if they didn’t need to talk to come up with a plan.

He said to Shrew, “Tell you what. We’re getting a new shipment tomorrow, all kinds to choose from. You come back and pick out whatever you want. On the house. You like a springer spaniel, a shih tzu, or what about a dachshund?”

Shrew couldn’t stop crying, and she said, “I’m sorry. I’m a little drunk.”

The woman retrieved the can of air freshener from the top of the cash register and headed back to the basement door. She closed it behind her, and Shrew could hear her on the stairs. Shrew and the man in the cowboy hat were alone. He took her arm and walked her out of the shop, where the black Cadillac sedan was parked. The driver in his suit and cap got out and opened the back door for them.

The man in the cowboy hat said to Shrew, “Get in and I’ll drop you off. It’s too cold to be walking. Where do you live?”

Lucy wondered if Oscar Bane was aware that his girlfriend had eighteen e-mail usernames. He was far less complicated and probably more honest. He had only one.

“Each of hers was for a specific purpose,” Lucy was telling Berger. “Voting in polls, blogging, visiting certain chat rooms, posting consumer reviews, subscribing to various online publications, a couple of them for getting online news.”

“That’s a lot,” Berger said, glancing at her watch.

Lucy could think of few people she knew who had a harder time being still. Berger was like a hummingbird that never quite landed, and the more restive she got, the more Lucy slowed things down. She found that quite the irony. Almost always it was the other way around.

“It’s really not a lot these days,” Lucy said. “Her e-mail service, like most of them, was free as long as she didn’t want additional options. But basic accounts? She could open as many as she wanted, all virtually untraceable because she didn’t need a credit card, since there’s no fee, and she wasn’t required to divulge any personal information unless she chose to. All anonymous, in other words. I’ve come across people who have hundreds, are a one-person crowd, their aliases talking to each other, agreeing, disagreeing, in chat rooms, comments sections. Or maybe they’re ordering things or buying subscriptions they don’t want easily linked to them, or who knows what. But with rare exception, no matter how many aliases a person has, usually there’s just one that’s really them, so to speak. The one they use for their normal correspondence. Oscar’s is Carbane, rather straightforward—as it’s the last part of Oscar appended to his surname, unless his hobby is organic chemistry and he’s referencing the systematic analogue of the mononuclear hydride CH-four, or he builds airfield models and is alluding to the carbane struts mounted to biplane wings. Which I sort of doubt. Terri’s is Lunasee, and we should look at those e-mails first.”

“Why would a forensic psychology graduate student pick a username like that?” Berger said. “Seems extremely insensitive to make an allusion to lunatics or lunacy or any other disparagement from the Dark Ages. In fact, it’s worse than insensitive, it’s cold-blooded.”

“Maybe she was an insensitive, cold-blooded person. I’m not one to deify the dead. A lot of murder victims weren’t necessarily nice people when they were alive.”

“Let’s start with mid-December and work our way up to the most recent ones,” Berger directed.

There were one hundred and three e-mails since December 15. Seven were to Terri’s parents in Scottsdale, and all the rest were between Terri and Oscar Bane. Lucy sorted them by time and date, without opening them, to see if there was a pattern of who wrote most often and when.

“Far more from him,” she said. “More than three times as many. And it looks like he wrote her at all hours. But I’m not seeing any e-mails from her that were sent later than eight p.m. And in fact, most days of the week, nothing from her after four in the afternoon. That’s really strange. You’d think she had a night job.”

“It could be they talked on the phone. Hopefully, Morales has already started on phone records,” Berger said. “Or he should have. Or maybe he went on vacation and didn’t tell me. Or maybe he’d better start looking for a new career. I like the last option best.”

“What’s his problem, anyway? And why do you put up with it? He treats you with complete disrespect.”

“He treats everyone with complete disrespect and calls it prioritizing.”

“What do you call it?” Lucy continued opening e-mails.

“I call it cocky and irritating as hell,” Berger said. “He thinks he’s smarter than everyone, including me, but what makes it complicated is he is smarter than most people. And he’s good at what he does if he chooses to be. And in most cases, his priorities end up making sense and he gets things done in a fraction of the time it takes someone else. Either that or somehow he manages to get people to do the work for him, then finagles accolades for it while managing to get that person into trouble. Which is probably what he’s doing now.”

“To Marino,” Lucy said.

It was as if she had decided it was easiest to think of Marino as just another detective she really didn’t know. Or maybe she didn’t hate him as much as Berger had assumed.

“Yes, he’s putting Marino out on a limb,” Berger said. “Marino seems to be the only one doing anything that matters.”

“He married?” As Lucy opened e-mails. “Obviously, I’m not talking about Marino.”

“He’s not exactly the commitment type. Screws anything that stands still. Maybe even if it doesn’t stand still.”

“I’ve heard rumors about the two of you.”

“Oh, yes. Our famous Tavern on the Green tryst,” Berger said.

They skimmed through the typical mundane electronic exchanges that people fire back and forth.

“That murder in Central Park last fall,” Lucy said. “The marathon runner raped and strangled. Near the Ramble.”

“Morales drove me to the scene. Afterwards, we stopped by Tavern on the Green for coffee and to talk about the case. Next thing, it’s all over the city that we’re an item.”

“That’s because it was in Gotham Gotcha. One of the infamous sightings. Including a photograph of the two of you looking cozy,” Lucy said.

“Don’t tell me you have search engines chugging after me morning, noon, and night.”

“My search engines don’t chug,” Lucy said. “They’re a little faster than that. The source of information for that gossip column is mainly what the readers send in. Almost always anonymously. How do you know he didn’t?”

“That would have been pretty clever of him. Taking a photograph of both of us while we were sitting across the table from each other.”

“Or getting somebody else to,” Lucy said. “Quite a feather in his cap. The superstud detective having a cozy tryst at Tavern on the Green with the superstar DA. Be careful of him.”

“In case you missed the important point, we weren’t having a tryst,” Berger said. “We were having coffee.”

“I have a funny feeling about him. Maybe recognize certain traits even though I haven’t met him. Someone who should have complete power over him, outranks him, outclasses him, and he, quote, prioritizes. He makes you wait your turn in line? Makes himself the center of your attention in a negative way, because he aggressively trips you up at every chance? Who’s got the power? A tried-and-true trick. Assert dominance, be disrespectful, and next thing, the big boss is in your bed.”

“I didn’t realize you’re such an expert,” Berger said.

“Not that kind of expert. When I’ve had sex with a guy, it’s never been because he dominated me. It’s always been because I made a mistake.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I did,” Berger said.

She skimmed through e-mails. Lucy fell silent.

“I apologize,” Berger again said. “Morales makes me angry because, you’re right, I can’t control him and I can’t get rid of him. People like him shouldn’t go into policing. They don’t blend with the rank and file. They don’t take orders. They’re not team players, and everybody hates them.”

“That’s why I had such a stunning career with the Feds,” Lucy said quietly, seriously. “Difference is, I don’t play games. I don’t try to overpower and belittle people so I can get what I want from them. I don’t like Morales. I don’t have to know him. You should be careful of him. He’s the sort of person who could cause you real trouble. It worries me that you never really know where he is or what he’s doing.”

She got interested in four e-mails on a split screen—e-mails between Terri and Oscar.

“I don’t think they were talking on the phone,” she then said. “Sent at eight-forty-seven, sent at nine-ten, sent at ten-fourteen, sent at eleven-nineteen. Why would he be writing her almost every hour if he’s talking to her on the phone? Notice that the ones from him are long, while hers are short. Consistently.”

“One of those instances when what isn’t said matters more than what is,” Berger observed. “No references to phone calls, to any responses from her, any contacts with her. He’s saying things like I’m thinking of you. Wish I were with you. What are you doing? You’re probably working. There doesn’t seem to be any back-and-forth between them.”

“Exactly. He’s writing to his lover several times a night. She’s not writing back.”

“He’s obviously the more openly romantic of the two,” Berger said. “Not saying she wasn’t in love with him, because I don’t know. We don’t know. We may never know. But her e-mails are less demonstrative, more reserved. He’s comfortable making sexual references that are almost pornographic.”

“Depends on your definition of pornographic.”

Berger went back to an e-mail Oscar had written to Terri not even a week ago.

“Why is that pornographic?” Lucy asked.

“I think what I meant was sexually explicit.”

“You work sex crimes?” Lucy said. “Or do I have you mixed up with a Sunday-school teacher? He’s writing about exploring her with his tongue. He’s writing about how writing about it arouses him.”

“I think he was trying to have cybersex with her. And she was rebuffing him by not responding. He’s getting angry with her.”

“He was trying to tell her how he felt,” Lucy pointed out. “And the less she responded, maybe the more he persisted out of insecurity.”

“Or anger,” Berger emphasized. “And his increased sexual references are manifestations of his anger and aggression. That’s not a good combination when the person these feelings are directed at is about to get murdered.”

“I could see how working sex crimes might take its toll. Maybe make it difficult to tell the difference between erotica and pornography, between lust and lewdness, between insecurity and rage, and accept that some instant replays are a celebration and not a degradation,” Lucy said. “Maybe you’re jaded because everything you see is disgusting and violent, and therefore all sex is always a crime.”

“What I don’t see is any allusion whatsoever to rough sex, bondage, S-and-M,” Berger said as they read. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d refrain from analyzing me. Amateurishly, I might add.”

“I could analyze you, and it wouldn’t be amateurishly. But you’d have to ask me first.”

Berger didn’t ask, and they kept reading.

Lucy said, “So far, no allusions to anything, quote, kinky, I agree. Nothing rough. Not a hint of handcuffs, dog collars, all that good stuff. Certainly no allusion to anything like the lubricant Aunt Kay told you about a little while ago. No body lotions, massage oils, nothing like that, and by the way, I text-messaged my pilots, and they’ll be waiting at La Guardia if there’s evidence to be flown to Oak Ridge. What I was saying, though, is lubricants aren’t compatible with oral sex unless they’re, bluntly put, edible. And what Aunt Kay described sounds more like a petroleum-based lubricant, which most people aren’t going to apply if they plan on having oral sex.”

“The other puzzling part? The condoms in Terri’s nightstand,” Berger said. “Lubricated ones. So why would Oscar use a petroleum-type lubricant, saying he did?”

“Do you know what type she had in her nightstand?”

Berger opened her briefcase and pulled out a file. She looked through paperwork until she found a list of evidence collected from the scene last night.

“Durex Love Condoms,” she said.

Lucy Googled it and reported, “Latex, twenty-five percent stronger and a larger size than standard condoms, easy to roll on with one hand, good to know. Extra headroom with a reservoir tip, also good to know. But not compatible with a petroleum-based lubricant, which can weaken latex and cause it to break. That and the fact that no petroleum-based lubricant was found in her apartment, and you can read my mind. You ask me, everything keeps pointing away from Oscar and toward someone else.”

More e-mails, getting closer to the day Terri was murdered. Oscar’s frustration and unrequited sexual love were becoming increasingly apparent, and he was beginning to sound more irrational.

“A lot of excuses,” Lucy said. “Poor guy. He sounds miserable.”

Berger read more and commented, “It’s almost annoying, makes me not like her very much and feel rather sorry for him, I must confess. She doesn’t want to rush into anything. He needs to be patient. She’s overwhelmed by work.”

“Sounds like someone who has a secret life,” Lucy said.

“Maybe.”

“People in love don’t see each other only one night a week,” Lucy said. “Especially since neither of them had physical work-places outside the home. That we know of. Something’s not right. If you’re in love, in lust, you don’t sleep. You can hardly eat. You can’t concentrate on your work, and you sure as hell can’t stay away from each other.”

“As we get closer to her murder, it gets worse,” Berger said. “He’s sounding paranoid. Really upset with how little time they spend together. Seems to be suspicious of her. Why will she see him only once a week? And only on Saturday nights, and why does she basically kick him out of bed before dawn? Why does she suddenly want to see his apartment when she’s never been interested in the past? What is it she thinks she’ll find in there? It’s not a good idea, he says. He would have told her yes in the beginning. But not now. He loves her so much. She’s the love of his life. He wishes she hadn’t asked to see his apartment because he can’t tell her why the answer’s no. One day in person he’ll tell her. God. This is weird. After three months of dating each other, sleeping with each other, she’s never set foot inside his apartment? And now suddenly she wants to go in there? Why? And why won’t he let her? Why won’t he explain it unless he does so in person?”

“Maybe the same reason he never tells her where he’s been or what he’s doing,” Lucy said. “He doesn’t tell her his plans—if he’s going to run errands on a given day, for example. He says he walked x number of miles but doesn’t give specifics as to where or when he plans to do it next. He writes the way one would if he’s worried that someone else might be reading his e-mails or watching him.”

“Jump back earlier to last fall, last summer or spring,” Berger said. “And let’s see if the pattern’s similar.”

They skimmed for a while. Those e-mails between Terri and Oscar weren’t at all like the recent ones. Not only were they less personal, but the tone and content of his were much more relaxed. He mentioned libraries and bookstores that were his favorites. He described where he liked to walk in Central Park, and a gym he’d tried a few times, but a lot of the machines weren’t the right fit. He included a number of details that revealed information he wouldn’t have been open about were he worried that someone else was reading his e-mails or, in other words, spying on him.

“He wasn’t scared back then,” Berger said. “What Benton’s concluded seems right. He says Oscar is afraid of something now—right now. A perceived threat—right now.”

Lucy typed Berger’s name into a search field and said, “I’m curious to see if there’s any mention anywhere of his phone call to your office last month. His fears of being under electronic surveillance, followed, his identity stolen, and so on.”

She got a hit on Jaime Berger’s name, but the e-mail in question had nothing to do with Oscar’s recent phone call to the DA’s office:

Date: Mon, 2 July 2007 10:47:31

From: “Terri Bridges”

To: “Jaime Berger”

CC: “Dr. Oscar Bane”

Subject: “Interview with Dr. Kay Scarpetta”

Dear Ms. Berger,

I’m a graduate student writing a master’s thesis on the evolution of forensic science and medicine from earlier centuries to modern times. It’s tentatively titled “Forensic Follies.”

In brief: We’ve come full circle, gone from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the quackery of phrenology, physiognomy, and the image of the murderer captured by the retina of the victim’s eye to the “magic tricks” of modern movies and TV dramas. I’ll happily explain further if you might be so gracious as to answer me. E-mail is preferable. But I’m including my phone number.

I’d love your thoughts, of course, but my real reason for writing is I’m trying to contact Dr. Kay Scarpetta—who better for the topic, I’m sure you agree! Perhaps, if nothing else, you’ll give her my e-mail address? I’ve tried to contact her several times at her office in Charleston, but with no success. I know you’ve had professional connections in the past, and assume you’re still in touch with each other and friends.

Sincerely,

Terri Bridges

212-555-2907

“Obviously, you never got this,” Lucy said.

“Sent to New York City Government-dot-org from someone who called herself Lunasee?” Berger replied. “I wouldn’t get that in a million years. A more important question to me is why Kay didn’t know Terri was trying to get hold of her. Charleston isn’t exactly New York City.”

“It may as well have been,” Lucy said.

Berger got out of her chair and collected her coat, her briefcase.

“I have to go,” she said. “We’ll probably have a meeting tomorrow. I’ll call you when I know the time.”

“Late last spring, early summer,” Lucy said. “I can see why my aunt never got Terri’s message, if that’s what happened. And likely, it is.”

She got up, too, and they walked through the loft.

“Rose was dying,” Lucy said. “Mid-June to early July, she lived in my aunt’s carriage house. Neither of them went to the office anymore. And Marino wasn’t there. Aunt Kay’s new practice was small. She was only about two years into it. There really was no other staff.”

“No one to take a message, and no one to answer the phone,” Berger said as she put on her coat. “Before I forget, if you’d forward that e-mail to me so I have a copy. Since you don’t seem to print things around here. And if you find anything else I should know about?”

“Marino had been gone since early May,” Lucy said. “Rose never knew what happened to him, which was really unfair. He vanished into thin air, and then she died. No matter what, she cared about him.”

“And you? Where were you while the phones rang and no one picked up or noticed?”

“It all seems like a different life, as if I wasn’t there,” Lucy said. “I almost can’t remember where I was or what I did toward the end, but it was awful. My aunt put Rose in the guest room and stayed with her around the clock. She spiraled down really quickly after Marino disappeared, and I stayed away from the office and the labs. I’d known Rose all my life. She was like the cool grandmother everyone wants, just so cool in her proper suits with her hair pinned up, but a piece of work and not afraid of anything whether it was dead bodies or guns or Marino’s motorcycles.”

“What about dying? Was she afraid?”

“No.”

“But you were,” Berger said.

“All of us were. Me most of all. So I did a really brilliant thing and suddenly got busy. For some reason it seemed urgent that I do a refresher in advanced executive protection training, attack recognition and analysis, tactical firearms, the usual. I got rid of one helicopter and found another, then went to the Bell Helicopter school in Texas for several weeks when I really didn’t need to do that, either. Next thing I knew, everybody had moved up north. And Rose was in a cemetery vault in Richmond, overlooking the James, because she loved the water so much, and my aunt made sure she’d have a water view forever.”

“So somehow what we’re dealing with now, in a way, started back then,” Berger said. “When nobody was paying attention.”

“I’m not sure what started,” Lucy said.

They stood near the front door, neither one of them particularly keen to open it. Berger wondered when they would be alone again like this, or if they should be, and what Lucy must think of her. She knew what she thought of herself. She had been dishonest, and she couldn’t leave it like that. Lucy didn’t deserve it. Neither of them did.

“I had a roommate at Columbia,” Berger said, fastening her coat. “We shared this slum of an apartment. I didn’t have money, wasn’t born with it, married into it, and you know all that. During law school we lived in this most God-awful place in Morningside Heights, it’s a wonder both of us weren’t murdered in our sleep.”

She tucked her hands into her pockets while Lucy’s eyes held hers, both of them leaning their shoulders against the door.

“We were extremely close,” Berger added.

“You don’t owe me any explanations,” Lucy said. “I completely respect who you are and why you live the way you do.”

“You don’t know enough to respect anything, actually. And I’m going to give you an explanation, not because I owe it but because I want to. She had something wrong with her, my roommate. I won’t say her name. A mood disorder, which I had no understanding of at the time, and when she got ugly and angry I thought she meant it. I fought with her when I shouldn’t have, because that made matters only worse, unbelievably worse. One Saturday night, a neighbor called the police. I’m surprised you didn’t dig that up somewhere. Nothing was done about it, but it was rather unpleasant, and both of us were drunk and looked like train wrecks. If I ever run for office, you can imagine, if there are stories like that.”

“Why would there be?” Lucy asked. “Unless you plan on getting in fights when you’re drunk and looking like a train wreck.”

“There was never a threat of that with Greg, you see. I don’t think we ever yelled at each other. Certainly never threw anything. We coexisted without rancor or much of anything. A relatively pleasant détente, much of the time.”

“What happened to your roommate?”

“I suppose it depends on how you measure success,” Berger said. “But nothing good, in my opinion. It will only get worse for her because she lives a lie, meaning she doesn’t live at all, and life is very unforgiving if you don’t live it, especially as you get older. I’ve never lived a lie. You may think so, but I haven’t. I’ve simply had to figure things out as I’ve gone along, and I’ve respected decisions I’ve made, right or wrong, no matter how hard that’s been. Many things remain irrelevant as long as they remain theoretical.”

“Meaning there wasn’t someone and hasn’t been when there shouldn’t have been,” Lucy said.

“I’m no Sunday-school teacher. Far from it,” Berger said. “But my life is nobody’s business, and it’s mine to mess up, and I don’t intend to mess it up. I won’t let you mess it up, nor do I intend to mess up yours.”

“Do you always start with disclaimers?”

“I don’t start,” Berger said.

“This time you’re going to have to,” Lucy said. “Because I’m not. Not with you.”

Berger slid her hands out of her coat pockets and touched Lucy’s face, then reached for the door but didn’t open it. She touched Lucy’s face again and kissed her.

Chapter 22

Nineteen floors below the prison ward, in the parking lot across East 27th, Marino was a lone figure obscured by hydraulic lifts, most of them empty at this hour, no valet in sight.

He watched them in the bright green field of a long-range night-vision monocular, because he needed to see her. He needed to look at her in person, even if it was covertly and from a distance and for only a moment. He needed to somehow feel reassured that she hadn’t changed. If she was still the same, she wouldn’t be cruel to him when she saw him. She wouldn’t disgrace or humiliate or shun him. Not that she would have in the past, no matter how much he deserved it. But what did he know about her anymore, except what he read or saw on TV?

Scarpetta and Benton had just left the morgue and were taking a shortcut through the park, back to Bellevue. It was dizzying to see her again, and unreal, as if she’d been dead, and Marino imagined what she’d think if she knew how close he’d come to dying. After what he’d done, he hadn’t wanted to be here anymore. While he lay in the guest bed of her carriage house the morning after he’d hurt her, he’d started going through a list of possibilities, intermittently fighting off nausea while the worst headache of his life hammered his brain to pulp.

His first thought was to drive his truck or maybe his motorcycle off a bridge and drown himself. Then again, he might survive, and he was terrified of not being able to breathe. That meant smothering wasn’t a good choice, either, using a plastic bag, for example, and he couldn’t stomach the thought of hanging, of twisting and thrashing after kicking the chair out from under himself and then changing his mind. He’d briefly considered sitting in a bathtub and slashing his throat, but with the first spurt of blood from his carotid, he’d want to take it back and it would be too late.

As for carbon monoxide poisoning? It gave him too much time to think. Poison? Same thing, and it was painful, and if he chickened out and called 911, he’d end up with his stomach pumped and a complete loss of respect from all who knew about it. Jumping off a building? Never. His luck, he’d survive and be maimed beyond recognition. Last on the list was his nine-millimeter pistol. And Scarpetta had hidden it.

As he’d lain in her guest room bed trying to figure out where she might have tucked it out of sight, he decided he’d never find it, was too sick to find it, and he could always shoot himself later because he had a couple extra guns in his fishing shack, but it would have to be a precision shooting because the worst scenario of all was to end up in an iron lung.

When he’d eventually contacted Benton at McLean and confessed all this, Benton matter-of-factly informed him that if an iron lung was the only thing stopping him, he had no worries unless he tried to kill himself with polio. That was exactly what he’d said, adding that most likely, if he did a bad job shooting himself, he’d end up with brain damage that profoundly compromised him but left him vaguely aware of why he’d wanted to off himself in the first place.

What would be really shitty luck, Benton had said, was an irreversible coma that became a discussion among Supreme Court justices before someone got the go-ahead to pull the plug. While he’d said it wasn’t likely Marino would have any awareness that this was going on, no one knew for sure. You’d have to be the person who was brain-dead to know for sure, he’d said.

You mean I could hear people saying they were going to take me off that . . . ?Marino had asked.

Life support,Benton had said.

So it wouldn’t breathe for me anymore, and I might be aware of it but nobody knows I am?

You wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore. And it’s within the realm of possibility you might be aware that you were about to be taken off the respirator. Have the plug pulled, in other words.

Then I could literally watch the person walk to the wall and pull it out of the socket.

It’s possible.

And I’d instantly start smothering to death.

You wouldn’t be able to breathe. But hopefully loved ones would be there helping you through it, even though they wouldn’t know you were aware of them.

Which brought Marino right back to his fear of smothering, and the grim reminder that the only loved ones he had were the very people he’d just fucked over, most of all, her, Scarpetta. It was at this point in a motel room near the Boston Bowl Family Fun Center where he and Benton had been having this discussion that Marino decided not to kill himself but to take the longest vacation he’d ever had in his life, at the treatment center on Massachusetts’s North Shore.

If he showed improvement once the alcohol and the male-performance-enhancement drugs had been completely flushed out of his system, and if he stuck with therapy and was sincere about it, then the next step would be finding him a job. So here he was, about half a year later, in New York, working for Berger and hiding in a parking lot just to catch a glimpse of Scarpetta before she got into his car and they drove to a crime scene, business as usual.

He watched her move silently, eerily in bright green, her gestures familiar as she talked, every detail vivid but so far removed from him, he felt as if he were a ghost. He could see her but she couldn’t see him, and her life had gone on without him, and knowing her as well as he did, he was sure that by now she had gotten over what he’d done to her. What she wouldn’t have gotten over was his disappearing the way he did. Or maybe he was giving himself too much importance, he decided. It could very well be that she never thought about him anymore, and when she saw him, it wouldn’t matter. She wouldn’t feel anything, would scarcely remember the past.

So much had happened since. She’d gotten married. She’d left Charleston. She was the chief of a big office just outside Boston. She and Benton actually lived together like a couple, for the first time, in a beautiful old house in Belmont that Marino had driven past at night once or twice. Now they had a place in New York, too, and sometimes he walked along the Hudson several blocks west of Central Park and stared at their building, counting the floors until he was pretty sure he knew exactly which apartment was theirs, and he imagined what it must look like inside and the beautiful view they must have of the river, and of the city at night. She was on television all the time, was really famous, but whenever he tried to envision people asking her for her autograph, he drew a blank. That part he didn’t get. She wasn’t the type to like that sort of attention, or at least he hoped she wasn’t, because if she was, she had changed.

He watched her through the powerful night-vision scope that Lucy had given to him for his birthday two years ago, and was lonely for the sound of Scarpetta’s voice. He recognized her mood by the way she moved, shifting her position, slightly gesturing her dark-gloved hands. She was understated. People said that about her all the time, that she said and did less, rather than more, and because of it made her point more loudly, so to speak. She wasn’t histrionic. That was another word Marino had heard. In fact, he remembered, Berger had said it when describing how Scarpetta conducted herself on the witness stand. She didn’t need to raise her voice or flail away but could just sit there calmly and shoot straight with the jurors, and they trusted her, believed her.

Through the scope, Marino noticed her long coat and the shape of her neatly styled blond hair, a little longer than she used to wear it, a little bit over her collar and brushed straight back from her forehead. He could make out her familiar strong features, so hard to compare to anyone he could think of, because she was pretty and she wasn’t, her face too sharply defined to be of beauty-pageant quality or to fit in with the sticklike women in designer clothes who cruised the runways of fashion shows.

He thought he might throw up again, just like he had that morning in her carriage house. His heart began to pound as if it were trying to hurt itself.

He longed for her but as he hid in his rust-smelling, filthy shadowy space, he realized he didn’t love her the way he once did. He had driven the stake of self-destruction into the part of him where hope had always hidden, and it was dead. He no longer hoped she would fall in love with him someday. She was married, and hope was dead. Even if Benton was out of the picture, hope was dead. Marino had killed hope and killed it savagely, and he had never done anything like that in his life, and he had done it to her.

On his most disgusting, drunken dates, he had never forced himself on a woman.

If he kissed her and she didn’t want his tongue in her mouth, he withdrew. If she pushed his hands away, he didn’t touch her again uninvited. If he had a hard-on and she wasn’t interested, he never pushed himself against her or shoved her hand between his legs. If she noticed his soldier wouldn’t settle down, he’d make his same old jokes. He’s just saluting you, baby. He always stands up when there’s a lady in the room. Hey, babe, just ’cause I got a stick shift don’t mean you gotta drive my car.

Marino might be a crude, poorly educated man, but he wasn’t a sex offender. He wasn’t a bad human being. But how was Scarpetta supposed to know? He didn’t fix it the morning after, didn’t make even a feeble attempt at it when she appeared in the guest bedroom with dry toast and coffee. What did he do? He faked amnesia. He complained about the bourbon she kept in her bar, as if it was her fault for having something in her house that could cause such a wicked hangover and a blackout.

He acknowledged nothing. Shame and panic had made him mute because he wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, and he wasn’t going to ask. Better if he figured it out on his own, and over weeks and months of investigating his own crime, he finally fit the pieces together. He couldn’t have gone but so far, because when he awakened the next morning, he was fully dressed, and the only body fluid detectable was his cold, stinking sweat.

With clarity, he remembered only fragments: pushing her against the wall, hearing the ripping of fabric, feeling the softness of her skin, her voice saying he was hurting her, and she knew he didn’t want that. He clearly remembered she didn’t move, and now he understood it and wondered how her instincts could have been so right. He was completely out of control, and she was smart enough not to incite him further by fighting. He remembered nothing else, not even her breasts, except his vague recollection that he had been surprised by them but not unpleasantly. Rather, after decades of elaborate fantasies, they didn’t look quite the way he had envisioned them. But then, no woman’s did.

It was a realization that came with maturity and had nothing to do with intuition or common sense. As a horny little boy whose only point of reference was the dirty magazines his father hid in the tool shed, Marino couldn’t possibly know what he eventually discovered. Breasts, like fingerprints, have their own individual characteristics that aren’t necessarily discernible through clothes. Every breast he’d ever been intimate with had its own unique size, shape, symmetry, slope, with the most obvious variable being the nipple, which really was what the timeless attraction was about. Marino, who considered himself a connoisseur, would be the first to say that big was better, but once he got beyond the ogling and fondling, it was all about what he put in his mouth.

In the green field of the night-vision monocular, Scarpetta and Benton walked out of the park, onto the sidewalk. She had her hands in her pockets, wasn’t carrying anything, meaning she and Benton would be making at least one stop, most likely his office. He noticed they weren’t talking much, and then, as if they read Marino’s thoughts, they held hands and Benton leaned down and kissed her.

When they reached the street, so close that he didn’t need light intensification to make out their faces, they were looking at each other as if they’d meant the kiss and that there would be more to come, Marino thought. They reached First Avenue and faded out of sight.

Marino was about to abandon his safe haven of triple-stacked hydraulic lifts when he noticed another figure appear in the park, walking briskly. Then he saw yet another figure enter the park from the direction of the DNA building. In the bright green field of the night-vision monocular, Investigator Mike Morales and Dr. Lenora Lester sat next to each other on a bench.

They said things Marino couldn’t hear, and she gave him a large envelope. Probably information about Terri Bridges’s autopsy. But it was a peculiar handoff, as if they were spies. He entertained the notion that the two of them were having an affair, and his stomach flopped as he imagined her grim, pinched face, imagined her birdlike body naked on a wad of sheets.

That couldn’t be it.

It was far more likely that Dr. Lester had called Morales as fast as she could so she could take credit for whatever Scarpetta had discovered in the morgue. And he would want the information before anybody else got it, including Marino and, most of all, Berger. That must mean Scarpetta had found out something important. Marino watched until Dr. Lester and Morales got up from the bench. He disappeared around a corner of the DNA building, and she headed in Marino’s direction, toward East 27th, walking her fast walk, her eyes on the BlackBerry in her bare hands.

She hurried through the cold wind toward First Avenue, where she would probably catch a cab, then take the ferry back home to New Jersey. It appeared she was text-messaging someone.

Museum Mile used to be Shrew’s favorite walk. She’d set out from her apartment with a bottle of water and a granola bar, and choose the Madison Avenue route so she could window-shop as anticipation built and accelerated her feet.

The highlight was the Guggenheim, where she was thrilled by Clyfford Still, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, and of course Picasso. The last exhibition she’d seen there was Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper, and that had been two years ago this spring.

What had happened?

It wasn’t as if she had a time clock to punch, or a life, really. But after she’d gone to work for the Boss, little by little she’d stopped going to museums, to the theater, to the galleries, to newsstands or Barnes & Noble.

She tried to remember the last time she’d tucked herself into the pages of a good book or outsmarted a crossword puzzle or patronized musicians in the park or been mindless in a movie theater or drunk on a poem.

She’d become a bug in amber, trapped in lives she didn’t know or care about. Gossip. The tawdry, banal goings-on of people who had the heart and soul of paper dolls. Why did she care what Michael Jackson wore to court? What difference did it make to her or anyone else that Madonna had fallen off her horse?

Instead of looking at art, Shrew had started looking into the toilet of life, taking delight in other people’s shit. She began to realize a number of truths as she thought about her dark ride home along the River Styx of Lexington Avenue in the black Cadillac sedan. The man in the cowboy hat had been nice to her, even patted her knee as she’d gotten out of his car, but he’d never given her his name, and common sense had warned her not to ask.

She’d walked right into evil tonight. First Marilyn Monroe, then the worm, then the basement. Maybe God had just administered spiritual electroshock therapy of sorts, by showing her the truth about the heartless way she lived, and she looked around her rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment, and possibly for the first time since her husband was no longer in it, she saw what it really looked like, and that it hadn’t changed.

The corduroy sofa and matching chair were unpretentious and comforting, and the worn nappy texture brought her husband back to the living room. She saw him sitting in the recliner, reading the Times, chewing on the butt of a cigar until it was slimy, and she smelled the smoke that used to saturate every molecule of their lives. She smelled it now as if she’d never brought in professional cleaners.

For several seasons, she couldn’t muster up the courage to clear out his clothes and tuck away items she couldn’t bear to look at or part with.

How often had she lectured him not to cross the street just because the white man on the traffic signal assured him it was fine?

How was that any less stupid than standing on the sidewalk because the red hand forbade him to walk, even though the cross-street was barricaded, not a car in sight?

In the end, he’d been beckoned to by the white man instead of listening to Shrew, and one day she had a husband she was constantly nagging about cigars and not picking up after himself, and the next day and the ones after that she had nothing but his odors and his clutter, and the memory of the last words they’d exchanged on his way out the door.

How we doing for coffee cream?As he put on his silly wool deerstalker’s cap.

She’d bought it for him in London several decades back, and he’d never figured out she didn’t really mean for him to wear it.

I don’t know how we’re doing for coffee cream, since you’re the only one who drinks coffee with cream in it.That was what she’d said.

The last words of hers in his ears.

The words of a shrew who had come to live with them that same cruel month of April, when they’d outsourced her job to someone in India and the two of them were knee-to-knee inside their small place, day after day, and worried sick about money. Because he was an accountant, and he had done the math.

She’d scripted their last moment together on this earth, revised it every way imaginable, wondering if there was something she could have done or mentioned that might have altered fate. If she’d said she loved him and would he like his favorite lamb chops and a baked sweet potato for dinner, and had she bought a potted hyacinth for the coffee table, might his mind have been on one or the other or all of it instead of whatever it was on when he didn’t look both ways?

Was he irritable and distracted because of her shrewish remark about the coffee cream?

What if she’d sweetly reminded him to be careful, would that have saved him and her and them?

She fixed her attention on the flat-screen TV and imagined him smoking his cigar, watching the news with that skeptical look on his face, a face she saw every time she closed her eyes or saw something in the corner of them—a shadow or laundry piled on a chair or she didn’t have her glasses on. And she would see him before he was gone. And she would remember he was gone.

He would look at her fancy TV and say, Dearest, why the TV? Who needs a TV like that? It probably wasn’t even made in America. We can’t afford a TV like that.

He would not approve. Oh, Lord, not of anything she’d done and gotten since he’d been gone.

The recliner was empty, and the worn spot made by him caused her to feel such despair as more memories rushed back at her:

Reporting him missing.

Feeling as if she were living a scene in a hundred movies as she clutched the phone and begged the police to believe her.

Believe me. Please believe me.

She told the oh-so-politic female police officer that her husband didn’t go to bars or wander off. He wasn’t having a little memory problem or a little affair. He always came right back like a Boy Scout, and if he’d gotten “adventurous” and “ornery,” he would have called Shrew.

And simply told me to fuck off, that he’d be home when he got around to it, just like he’d done last time he’d gotten goddamn adventurous and ornery,Shrew had said to the politic police officer, who’d sounded like she was chewing gum.

Nobody was in a panic except Shrew.

Nobody cared.

The detective, yet someone else in the landmass of the NYPD, who finally called with the news was regretful.

Ma’am, I’m very sorry to inform you . . . At around four p.m. I responded to a scene. . . .

The policeman was polite but quite busy and said he was sorry several times, but didn’t offer to escort her to the morgue the way a well-behaved nephew might escort his stricken aunt to a wake or a church.

The morgue? Where?

Near Bellevue.

Which Bellevue?

Ma’am, there’s only one Bellevue.

There most certainly isn’t. There’s the old one. And then there’s the new one. What Bellevue is the morgue near?

She could go there at eight a.m. and identify the body, and she was given the address, lest she confuse the location of one Bellevue with the other, and she was given the name of the medical examiner:

Dr. Lenora Lester, LL.B., M.D.

Such an unfriendly, unpleasant woman for all her education, and how unfeeling she was when she hurried Shrew into that little room and drew back the drape.

His eyes were closed, and he was covered up to his chin with a papery blue sheet.

No sign of any injury, not a scratch, not a bruise, and for an instant Shrew hadn’t believed anything had happened.

There’s nothing broken. What happened? What really happened? He can’t be dead. There’s nothing wrong with him. He looks fine. Just pale. He’s so pale, and I’ll be the first to agree he doesn’t look well. But he can’t be dead.

Dr. Lester was a stuffed dove under glass and her mouth didn’t move as she explained, very briefly, that he was a textbook pedestrian fatality.

Hit from behind while upright.

Thrown over the hood of the taxi.

Struck the back of his head on the windshield.

He had massive fractures of the cervical vertebrae, the doctor’s stiff white face had said.

The severity of the impact had fractured both of his lower extremities, the stiff white face had said.

Extremities.

Her beloved’s legs that wore socks and shoes, and on this cruel April afternoon, corduroy slacks almost the same tawny brown as his recliner and the couch. Slacks that she had picked out for him at Saks.

The stiff white face said in that small room: He looks pretty good because his most profoundly mutilating injuries are to the lower extremities.

Which were covered—the lower extremities, his lower extremities—by the papery blue sheet.

Shrew left the morgue, and she left her mailing address, and later she wrote the check and got a copy of Dr. Lester’s final report after it had been pended for about five months, awaiting toxicology. The official autopsy results were still sealed inside their official envelope, in a bottom drawer of her desk, under a box of her husband’s favorite cigars that she’d sealed in a freezer bag because she didn’t want to smell them, yet she couldn’t bring herself to toss them out.

She put another glass of bourbon next to the computer and sat down, working later than usual and not wanting to go to bed anytime soon or ever again. It occurred to her that all had been bearable until she’d opened that Marilyn Monroe photograph earlier today.

She thought of a punishing God as she envisioned the man with the mutton-chop sideburns and flashy jewelry, and his offer of a free dachshund or a shih tzu or a springer spaniel puppy, and then the ride home. He was trying to silence her through the bribery of a kindness that hinted what it would be like if he weren’t inclined to be kind at all. She’d caught him red-handed, and they both knew it, and he wanted her to feel friendly toward him. For their own good.

She went on the Internet and searched until she found a story that had run in the Times just three weeks ago, the very same week that the Boss had written such nice things about Tell-Tail Hearts’s main pet shop on Lexington Avenue. The article was accompanied by a photograph of the white-haired man with the big sideburns and dissipated face.

His name was Jake Loudin.

This past October, he had been charged with eight counts of animal cruelty after one of the pet shops he owned in the Bronx was raided, but several weeks ago, in early December, he’d gotten off scot-free:

CHARGES AGAINST PUPPY MILL KING DROPPED

The New York County District Attorney’s office has dropped eight counts of aggravated animal cruelty against a Missouri businessman who animal-rights activists call “The Puppy Pol Pot,” comparing Jake Loudin to the Khmer Rouge leader responsible for the slaughter of millions of Cambodians.

Loudin could have received up to sixteen years in prison had he been convicted and given the maximum sentence for all eight felony counts. “But there just wasn’t a way to prove the eight deceased animals discovered in the pet store’s freezer were alive when placed there,” said Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger, whose recently formed animal-cruelty task force raided the shop last October. She added that the judge didn’t feel the police had supplied sufficient evidence to prove a lack of justification for the euthanization of these same eight companion animals, all of them puppies ranging from three to six months in age.

Berger said it is commonly known that some pet shops “eliminate” dogs, cats, and other pets if they can’t sell them, or if for some reason they become a commercial liability.

“A sick puppy, or one that’s three or four months old, loses its ‘doggie in the window’ appeal,” she said. “And far too many of these stores are notoriously negligent in supplying medical care or even the most basic necessities such as warm, clean cages and sufficient water and food. One of the reasons I started this task force is because the people of New York have had enough, and I am making it my mission to bury some of these offenders under the jailhouse.” . . .

It was the second time tonight Shrew called 911.

Only she was drunker and more unraveled now.

“Murderers,” she said to the operator, repeating the Lexington address. “The little ones being locked in there—”

“Ma’am?”

“He forced me into his car after the event, and my heart was under my feet. . . . He had a red sullen face and a frosty silence.”

“Ma’am?”

“You’ve tried to put him in jail before, for the same thing! Hitler! Yes, Pol Pot! But he got away. Tell Ms. Berger. Please. Right away. Please.”

“Ma’am? Would you like an officer to respond to your residence?”

“Someone from Ms. Berger’s dog squad, please. Oh, please. I’m not crazy. I promise I’m not. I took a picture of him and the freezer with my cell phone.”

She hadn’t.

“They were moving!” she cried. “They were still moving!”

Chapter 23

The dark blue Impala was waiting at the hospital’s entrance when Benton and Scarpetta walked out into the night.

She recognized the fleece-lined leather jacket, then realized it was Marino who was wearing it. The trunk popped open, and he took the crime scene case from Benton and started talking about coffees he’d picked up for them, that the two coffees were in the backseat.

That was how he said hello after all this time, after all that had happened.

“I stopped at Starbucks,” he was saying, shutting the trunk. “Two Ventis,” which he didn’t pronounce correctly. “And some of those sweeteners in the yellow wrapper.”

He meant Splenda. He must have remembered that Scarpetta didn’t touch saccharin or aspartame.

“But no cream because it’s in those pitchers, so I couldn’t get it. I don’t think either of you drink it with cream, unless that’s changed. They’re in the console in back. Jaime Berger’s up front. You might not be able to see her, it’s so dark, so don’t start talking about her.”

Trying to be funny.

“Thank you,” Scarpetta said as she and Benton got into the car. “How are you?”

“I’m doing good.”

He slid behind the wheel, his seat back so far it was touching Scarpetta’s knees. Berger turned around and said hello, and she didn’t act as if the situation was unusual. That was better. It was easier.

Marino pulled away from the hospital, and Scarpetta looked at the back of his head, at the collar of the black leather bomber-style jacket. It was classic Hogan’s Heroes, as Lucy used to tease him, with its half-belt, sleeve zippers, and plenty of antique brass hardware. On and off over the twenty years Scarpetta had known him, he’d get too big to wear it, especially around the gut, or more recently, too bulked up from the gym and, in retrospect, probably steroids.

During the interim without Marino in her life, she’d had a lot of space to think about what had happened and what had led up to it. Insight came to her one day not that long ago, after she’d reconnected with her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, and hired him. Fielding had practically ruined his life with steroids, and Marino had been witness to much of it, but as he had gotten more disgruntled and frightened about a growing sense of powerlessness that Scarpetta couldn’t seem to do anything about, he’d become obsessed with his own physical strength.

He’d always admired Fielding and his bodybuilding physique, all the while critical of the illicit and destructive means he used to obtain it. She was convinced Marino began taking steroids several years before the more recent sexual-performance drugs, which would help explain why he turned aggressive and, frankly, mean, long before his violent eruption in her carriage house last spring.

The sight of him pained her in ways she hadn’t anticipated and probably couldn’t explain, bringing back memories of the long span of their lives spent together when he’d let his graying hair grow long and would comb it over his baldness, Donald Trump-style, only Marino wasn’t the sort to believe in gels or hairspray. The slightest stir and long strands would drift below his ears. He’d started shaving his head and wearing a sinister-looking do-rag. Now he had fuzz shaped like a crescent moon, and he wasn’t wearing an earring and didn’t look like a hard-riding Outlaw or Hells Angel.

He looked like Marino, only in better shape but older, and on forced good behavior, as if he was taking the parole board on a drive.

He turned onto Third Avenue, toward Terri Bridges’s apartment, which was only a few minutes from the hospital.

Berger asked Scarpetta if she remembered Terri contacting her Charleston office last spring or early summer—or ever.

Scarpetta said no.

Berger fooled around with her BlackBerry and muttered something about Lucy’s opposition to paper, and then read an e-mail Terri had written to Berger last year, asking for assistance in contacting Scarpetta.

“July second,” Berger said. “That’s when she sent this e-mail to the Bermuda Triangle of New York City government’s general e-mail address, hoping it would get to me because she hadn’t been able to get to you. It appears she never got to either of us.”

“I’m not surprised, with a username like Lunasee,” Benton replied from the dark backseat while he looked out his window at the quiet neighborhood of Murray Hill, where so far Scarpetta had seen only one person out, a man walking a boxer.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the username was the Pope’s,” Berger replied. “But I didn’t get it. Question is, Kay, are you absolutely sure you don’t recall her calling your office in Charleston?”

“I’m absolutely sure I was never aware of it,” Scarpetta said. “But last spring and early summer my office was rather much of a Bermuda Triangle, too.”

She didn’t want to elaborate, not with Marino sitting directly in front of her. How was she supposed to talk about what it had been like for her after he disappeared without a word or a trace, and then Rose had gone into such a rapid decline that she no longer had the proud stubbornness to resist Scarpetta’s moving her and taking care of her, eventually spoon-feeding her, changing her gowns and sheets when she soiled the bed, and then the morphine and oxygen at the very end when Rose decided she’d suffered enough, and death was in her eyes?

How would Marino feel if he knew how angry Rose was with him for abandoning everyone in his life, especially her, when he knew she wasn’t long for this world? Rose had said it was wrong of him, and would Scarpetta please tell him that someday.

Rose had said, You tell him for me I’ll box his ears.

As if she’d been talking about a two-year-old.

You tell him for me I’m mad at Lucy, too, just mad as hell at both of them. I blame him for what she’s doing right now. Up there at Black-water or some training camp like that, shooting guns and kneeing huge men in the kidneys as if she’s Sylvester Stallone, because she’s too scared to be home.

Those last weeks Rose got disinhibited, her talk wild and loose, but nothing she said was utter nonsense.

You tell him when I’m on the Other Side it will only be easier for me to find him and take care of business. And I’m going to take care of it. You watch.

Scarpetta had set up a portable hospital bed, and had the French doors open so they could look at the garden and the birds, and hear the stirring of live oaks that had been there since before the Civil War. She and Rose would talk in that lovely old living room with its view, while the bracket clock on the mantel tick-tocked like a metronome measuring the final rhythm of their days together. Scarpetta never did go into detail about what Marino had done, but she did tell Rose something important about it, something she’d not told anyone.

She’d said, You know how people say if they could live something again?

You don’t hear me saying it,Rose had replied, propped up in bed, the morning light turning the sheets very white. Doesn’t do a damn bit of good to say something silly like that.

Well, I wouldn’t say it because I wouldn’t mean it, you’re exactly right. I wouldn’t live that night again if offered the chance, because it wouldn’t change anything. I can try to rewrite it all I want. Marino would still do what he did. The only way I could stop him would be to start the process years earlier, maybe a decade or two earlier. My culpability in his crime is I didn’t pay attention.

She’d done to him what he and Lucy had done to Rose in the end. Scarpetta hadn’t looked, had pretended not to notice, had absented herself by suddenly being busy and preoccupied or even in the midst of some crisis, instead of confronting him. She should have been more like Jaime Berger, who wouldn’t hesitate to tell some big cop with the appetites and insecurities that Marino had to stop looking down her blouse or up her skirt—to get over it because she wasn’t going to have sex with him. She wasn’t going to be his whore, his madonna, his wife, or his mother, or all of the above, and all of the above was what he’d really always wanted, what most men have always wanted because they don’t know any better.

She could have told Marino something to that effect when she’d first been appointed chief in Virginia and he’d gone out of his way to give her such a hard time, acting like a nasty little boy with a crush. She’d been so afraid of hurting him, because ultimately her biggest flaw was her overriding fear of hurting anyone, and so she’d hurt the hell out of him and herself and all of them.

What she’d finally admitted was she was selfish.

Scarpetta had said to Rose, I’m the most selfish person there is. It goes back to feeling shamed. I was different, not like other people. I know what it is to feel ostracized and shunned and shamed, and I’ve never wanted to do it to anyone else. Or have it done to me again. And the last thing I just said is what’s most important. It’s about my not wanting discomfort more than it’s really about anyone else. What a dreadful thing to know about yourself.

You’re the most different person I’ve ever met,Rose had said, and I can see why those girls didn’t like you, and why most people didn’t like you and maybe still don’t. It’s about people being small and your reminding them of it without trying to, and so they go out of their way to make you small as if that will somehow make them bigger. You know exactly how all that works, but who has the wisdom to figure it out while it’s going on? I would have liked you. If I’d been one of those nuns or one of the other girls, you would have been my favorite.

I probably wouldn’t have been.

You certainly would have. I’ve been following you around for twenty damn years, almost. And not because of the plush work conditions and all the jewelry and furs you give me and exotic vacations you take me on. I’m crazy about you. Was the first time you walked in that office. Do you remember? I’d never met a woman medical examiner and assumed the obvious. What a strange and difficult and unpleasant person you must be. Why else would a woman do this for a living? I hadn’t seen a picture of you and was sure you’d look like some creature that had just climbed out of a black lagoon or a plague pit. I’d already been planning on where I might go, maybe the medical college. Somebody over there would hire me. Because I didn’t think for a minute I’d stay with you, until I met you. Then I wouldn’t have left you for the world. I’m sorry I’m doing it now.

“I’m sure we could go back and check phone records, the office e-mail,” Scarpetta said in the car, to Benton, to Marino, to Berger.

“Not a priority this moment,” Berger said, turning around. “But Lucy’s been forwarding information to you that you’re going to want to look at when you get the chance. You need to see what Terri Bridges was writing, or we might assume it was her. Hard to say, since Oscar Bane could just as easily have a hand in it, or even be Lunasee, for all we know.”

“I got a list of evidence collected that corresponds to markers inside,” Marino said as he drove. “And scene diagrams. A set for each of you so you know what was where.”

Berger handed back two copies.

Marino turned onto a dark neighborhood street with lots of trees and old brownstones.

Benton observed, “Not well lit, and a lot of people appear to still be out of town for the holidays. Not a high-crime area.”

“Nope,” Marino said. “Nothing around here. Last complaint before the murder was someone playing music too loud.”

He parked behind an NYPD cruiser.

“One new wrinkle in this,” Berger said. “Based on some of the e-mails Lucy and I have been looking at, one has to wonder if Terri might have been seeing someone else.”

“Looks like nobody’s bothering to hide their damn police car,” Marino said, turning off the engine.

“Hide it?” Berger asked.

“Morales said he didn’t want them in plain view. In case the bogeyman came back. Guess he forgot to tell anyone who matters.”

“You mean cheating on Oscar,” Benton said, opening his door. “That maybe Terri was cheating on Oscar? I think we should leave our coats in the car.”

Blasts of cold air grabbed at Scarpetta’s suit and hair as she took off her coat, and then Marino climbed out, talking on his cell phone, obviously alerting the officer who was stationed inside the apartment that they had arrived. It was still an active crime scene and should be in the exact condition it was in when the police left shortly after one a.m., according to the reports Scarpetta had read.

The building’s front door opened, and Marino, Benton, Berger, and Scarpetta climbed up five steps and entered the foyer, where a uniformed officer was very serious about his assignment.

Marino said to him, “I see your car’s parked in front. I thought the latest order from headquarters was not to have your unit in plain view.”

“The other officer wasn’t feeling good. I think the smell, which isn’t much until you sit there for a while,” said the officer. “When I relieved him, I didn’t get instructions about not parking in front. You want me to move it?”

Marino said to Berger, “You got an opinion? Morales didn’t want it to look like there’s a police presence. Like I said. In case the killer returns to the crime scene.”

“He installed a camera on the roof,” the officer said.

“Glad it’s such a big friggin’ secret,” Marino said.

“The only person who could return to this apartment,” Benton said, “would be Oscar Bane, unless there are other people running around who have keys. And I have a hard time believing, as paranoid as he is, that he would show up here and try to get in.”

“Someone in his state of mind is more likely to show up at the morgue, in hopes of getting a last look at their person,” Scarpetta said.

She’d decided she’d had enough of being completely close-mouthed. There were ways to communicate necessary information without breaking patient-physician confidentiality.

Marino said to the officer, “Maybe it would be a good idea to step up patrol around the area of the ME’s office. In case Oscar Bane shows up, but do me a favor and don’t transmit nothing about him over the air so some reporter hears it, okay? We don’t need every dwarf on the East Side being stopped and questioned.”

As if the area around the Medical Examiner’s office was a popular hangout for little people.

“You need to get something to eat or do whatever, this is a good time,” Marino said.

“As much as I’d like to take you up on that, no, thank you,” the officer said, glancing at Berger. “My orders are to stay here. And I’ll need you to sign the log.”

“Don’t be so damn professional. Nobody bites, even Ms. Berger doesn’t,” Marino said. “And we need a little elbow room. You can hang out in the foyer, suit yourself. Or you can make a pit stop. I’ll give you a fifteen-minute heads-up before we’re ready to leave. Just don’t go to Florida or nothing.”

The officer opened the apartment door, and Scarpetta smelled cooked chicken that was well on its way to turning ripe. He collected his jacket from the back of a folding chair, and a copy of Philipp Meyer’s American Rust from the oak floor under it. Beyond that point the officer wasn’t allowed to venture for any reason, and should he be tempted, the small blaze-orange cones marking locations where evidence had been collected were a bright reminder. Didn’t matter if he needed water or food, or was desperate to use the bathroom, he had to call for a backup to cover for him while he took care of himself. He couldn’t even sit unless he brought his own chair.

Scarpetta opened her crime scene case just inside the door and retrieved a digital camera and a notepad and pen, and gave each person a pair of gloves. She took her usual survey without moving closer or speaking, noticing that except for the evidence markers, there was nothing out of place, and not the slightest indication that anything remotely violent had happened. The apartment was impeccable, and everywhere she looked, she saw traces of the rigid, obsessive woman who had lived and died here.

The floral upholstered couch and side chair in the living room straight ahead were perfectly arranged around a maple coffee table, and on top of it were magazines impeccably fanned, and in a corner a standard-size Pioneer flat screen that looked new and was precisely positioned to face the exact center of the sofa. Inside the fireplace was an arrangement of silk flowers. The ivory Berber rug was straight and clean.

Other than the cones, there was barely a hint that the police had been all over this place. In this new age of crime scene management, they would have been suited up in disposable clothing, including shoe covers. Electrostatic dust lifters would have been used to recover any impressions from the polished wood floors, and forensic lights and photography would have taken precedence over messy black powders. In sophisticated departments such as the NYPD, crime scene scientists neither created nor destroyed.

The living room flowed into the dining area and kitchen, the apartment small enough that Scarpetta could see the table set for dinner, and the makings of it on a countertop near the stove. No doubt the chicken was still in the oven, and God knows how long it would stay there, didn’t matter how rancid anything got by the time the landlord or Terri’s family were allowed free access to the place. It wasn’t the responsibility or the right of law enforcement to clean up the gore left in the wake of a violent death, whether it was blood or an uneaten holiday dinner.

“Let me ask the obvious question,” Scarpetta said to no one in particular. “Is there any possibility she wasn’t the intended victim? Even remotely possible? Since there’s another apartment across from this one, and what? Two more upstairs?”

“I always say everything’s possible,” Berger replied. “But she opened the doors. Or if someone else did, he or she had keys. There would seem to be a connection between her and the person who killed her.” To Marino she said, “You mentioned the roof access? Anything new about that?”

“A text message from Morales,” he replied. “He said when he got to the scene last night, the ladder was exactly where he found it after installing the roof camera. In the utility closet.”

Marino had a look on his face as he said that, as if he knew a joke he wasn’t about to share.

“I’m assuming nothing new. Nobody of interest in terms of a possible suspect or witness among the other tenants?” Berger asked Marino, continuing the conversation just inside the apartment door.

“According to the landlord, who lives on Long Island, she was a real quiet lady except when she had a complaint. One of those who had to have everything just right,” Marino said. “But what’s a little interesting is, it was something she couldn’t take care of herself, she’d never let the landlord in to fix it. She’d say she’d get someone to take care of it. He said it was like she was making notes of all the problems in case he got any ideas about raising the rent.”

“Sounds like the landlord might not have been too fond of her,” Benton said.

“He called her demanding more than once,” Marino said. “Always e-mailed him, though. Never called, as if she was building a court case, is the way he put it.”

“We can get Lucy to locate those e-mails,” Berger said. “We know which of her eighteen usernames she used for complaining to the landlord? I don’t think it was Lunasee, unless we just didn’t come across anything to or from him while I was with Lucy a little while ago. And by the way, I’ve asked her to forward anything to me she might find. So all of us are rather much online with her while she continues to go through the laptops removed from this apartment.”

“It’s the one called Railroadrun, like running her railroad. My interpretation,” Marino said. “The landlord said that’s the e-mail address he’s got for her. Anyway, point being, it appears she was a royal pain in the butt.”

Scarpetta said, “Also appears she had somebody who helped her when she needed something fixed.”

“Well, I have my doubts it was Oscar,” Berger said. “No references to anything like that in the e-mails we’ve seen so far. Nothing—such as her asking him to come over and unstop the toilet or change a lightbulb in the ceiling. Although his height might have made at least a few tasks rather difficult.”

“There’s the ladder in the closet upstairs,” Marino said.

Scarpetta said, “I’d like to wander through alone first.”

She found the tape measure in her crime scene case and slipped it into her suit jacket pocket, and looked at the evidence inventory that told her which cone corresponded to which item that had been removed from the scene. Some six feet inside the door, to her left, was cone number one, and this was where the flashlight had been found, described as a black metal Luxeon Star with two Duracell lithium batteries, and in working condition. It wasn’t plastic, as Oscar had described, which may or may not be of any consequence, except that a metal flashlight would be a serious weapon, suggesting Oscar hadn’t struck himself very hard at all to cause the bruises she’d examined.

The cones numbered two through four corresponded to shoe prints lifted from the hardwood floor, described only as having a running shoe-type tread pattern with the approximate dimensions of six and a half by four inches. That was small, and as Scarpetta scanned the list, she noted that a pair of sneakers had been removed from Terri’s closet. Size five, women’s Reeboks, white with pink trim. A size-five woman’s shoe would not be six and a half inches from heel to toe, and as Scarpetta recalled looking at Terri’s feet in the morgue, she remembered them as smaller than that, because of her disproportionately short toes.

She suspected the shoewear impressions recovered near the door were Oscar’s, and likely had been left when he’d gone in and out of the apartment, back to his car, to leave his coat and do whatever else he might have done after discovering the body.

That was assuming his story was true, for the most part.

Other impressions lifted from the floor were of interest because they had been left by bare feet, and Scarpetta recalled seeing several photographs that had been taken in oblique lighting. She had assumed the bare footprints were Terri’s, and the location of them was significant.

All were clustered just outside the master bathroom where Terri’s body had been found, and Scarpetta wondered if Terri had put on body lotion or oil, perhaps after her shower, and that’s why the bare footprints had been visible on the hardwood floor, all in close proximity to one another. She wondered what it might mean if Terri hadn’t taken her slippers off until she’d been about to enter the area of the apartment where she was murdered. Had she been attacked the instant she’d opened her front door, and had she resisted or been forced to the master bedroom in back, wasn’t there a good chance her slippers would have come off earlier?

In all of her years working homicide scenes, it had been Scarpetta’s experience that bedroom slippers, one or both, rarely stayed on once the violent encounter occurred. People literally were scared out of them.

She walked as far as the dining room, and from here the smell of cooked chicken was stronger and more unpleasant, the kitchen just ahead, and then the guestroom/office, according to the detailed computer-aided drafting or CAD of the apartment’s interior and its dimensions that was included in the paperwork Marino had assembled.

The dining room table was meticulously set, blue-rimmed plates on two starchy spotless blue mats opposite each other, the stainless flatware shiny and exact in its placement, everything just right to the extreme of fussiness, of obsessiveness. Only the flower arrangement was less than perfect, the button poms beginning to hang their heads, and petals had fallen from the larkspur like tears.

Scarpetta pulled out chairs, checking the blue-velvet cushions for indentations left by someone kneeling to compensate for a dramatically shortened reach. If Terri had climbed up to set the table, she had groomed the nap afterward. All of the furniture was the standard size, the apartment not handicap-equipped. But as Scarpetta began opening closets and cupboards, she found a step stool with a handle, a grabbing tool, and another tool similar to a fireplace poker that Terri probably had used for prodding and pulling.

In the kitchen, there was chaos in the corner beneath the microwave, drips of blood and smears that had dried a blackish-red, presumably from Oscar cutting his thumb while grabbing a pair of kitchen shears that were no longer here. The wooden block of knives was gone and, like the shears, most likely sent to the labs. On the stove was the pot of uncooked spinach, the handle turned inward, the way people do when they are safety-minded. The chicken in the oven smelled pungent and was stuck to the bottom of the deep aluminum pan, grease coagulated around it like yellow wax.

Cooking utensils and pot holders were in a neat line on the counter, as were basil, a set of salt and pepper mills, and cooking sherry. In a small ceramic bowl were three lemons, two limes, and a banana that was turning a speckled brown. Nearby was a cork pump, which Scarpetta considered a gadget that ruined the ritual and romance of opening a bottle, and an unopened chardonnay, a decent one for the money. Scarpetta wondered if Terri might have removed the wine from the refrigerator an hour or so before Oscar was due to arrive, again assuming she had been killed by someone other than him. If she had, a possible explanation was she’d done some research and knew that white wine should be served cool, not cold.

Inside the refrigerator was a bottle of champagne, also a decent one for the money, as if Terri had followed every recommendation she could find, possibly on the Internet, as if her Bible was Consumer Reports. Apparently, no purchase she made was based on passion or playfulness. Whether it was a TV or stemware or china, all of it was the selection of a well-informed shopper who did nothing in a hurry or on a whim.

In refrigerator drawers were fresh broccoli, peppers, onions, and lettuce, and deli packages of sliced turkey and Swiss cheese that according to their labels had been purchased from a grocery store on Lexington Avenue, several blocks from here, on Sunday, along with the food for last night’s dinner. Salad dressings and condiments in the refrigerator door were low-calorie. In cupboards were crackers, nuts, soups, all low-sodium. The liquor, like everything else, was the best brand for the price: Dewar’s. Smirnoff. Tanqueray. Jack Daniel’s.

Scarpetta removed the rim from the trash can, not surprised it was brushed steel, which would neither rust nor show finger smudges. To open its lid, one stepped on a pedal and didn’t have to touch anything that might be dirty. Inside the custom-fit white polyethylene bag were wrappers from the roaster chicken and the spinach, and an abundance of crumpled paper towels, and the green paper from the flowers on the table. She wondered if Terri had used the kitchen shears to snip off about three inches of the stems, which were still bound in their rubber band, then cleaned the shears and returned them to the cutlery block.

There was no receipt because the police had found it last night, and it was listed in the inventory. Terri had bought the flowers for eight dollars and ninety-five cents yesterday morning at a local market. Scarpetta suspected the rather pitiful little spring bouquet had been an afterthought. She found it sad to think of someone so lacking in creativity, spontaneity, and heart. What a hellish way to live, and what a shame she had done nothing about it.

Terri had studied psychology. She certainly would have known she could have been treated for her anxiety disorder, and had she chosen that course, it might have changed her destiny. It was likely her compulsions had led, even if indirectly, to the reason strangers were now inside her apartment and investigating every aspect of who she was and how she had lived.

Beyond the kitchen, on the right, was the small guest room that was an office. There was nothing in it but a desk, an adjustable chair, a side table with a printer, and, against a wall, two filing cabinets that were empty. Scarpetta stepped back out into the hallway and looked toward the apartment door. Berger, Marino, and Benton were in the living room, examining the evidence inventory and discussing the significance of the small orange cones.

“Does anybody know if these filing cabinets were empty when the police got here?” Scarpetta asked.

Marino flipped through his list and said, “Mail and personal papers, is what it says they took. A file box of stuff like that was removed from the closet.”

“Meaning nothing was taken from actual filing cabinets,” Scarpetta supposed. “That’s rather interesting. There are two of them in here with nothing in them, not even an empty folder. As if they’ve never been used.”

Marino came toward her and asked, “What about dust?”

“You can look. But Terri Bridges and dust weren’t compatible. There’s no dust, not a speck.”

Marino entered the guest room office and opened the filing cabinets, and Scarpetta noted the indentations his booted feet left in the deep-pile dark blue wall-to-wall carpet. She realized there were no other indentations at all, except those left by her when she’d walked in, and that was odd. The police might be fastidious about not tracking dirt and evidence in and out of a scene, but they weren’t about to bother brushing the carpet when they were done.

“It’s as if no one was in here last night,” she said.

Marino closed file drawers.

He said, “Doesn’t look to me like anything was in there, unless someone wiped down the bottom of the drawers. No dust outline of any hanging files that might have been there. But the cops was in here.”

He finally met her eyes, and his were tentative.

“You can see on the list the file box was taken out of the closet in here.” He frowned, looking at the carpet, apparently noticing the same thing she had. “Well, that’s fucking weird. I was in here this morning. That closet there”—he pointed—“is where her suitcases were, too.”

He opened the closet door, where draperies in dry-cleaning bags hung from the rod and more luggage was neatly upright on the floor. Everywhere he stepped, he flattened the pile of the carpet.

“But it’s like nobody walked in here or else came in after the fact and swept the carpet,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Scarpetta said. “But what I’m hearing you say is nobody has walked through this apartment since last night except you. When you came in earlier today.”

“Well, maybe I lost weight, but I don’t float off the ground,” Marino said. “So where the hell are my footprints?”

On the floor near the desk, a magnetic power connecter was plugged into the wall, and Scarpetta found this curious, too.

“She packed her laptops for the trip home to Arizona and left a power connecter behind?” she said.