Scarpetta

“Somebody’s been in here,” Marino said. “Probably that fucking Morales.”

Chapter 24

Lucy was alone in her loft, her old bulldog asleep by her chair.

She read more e-mails from Terri and Oscar as she talked to Scarpetta over the phone:

Date: Sun, 11 November 2007 11:12:03

From: “Oscar”

To: “Terri”

See, I told you Dr. Scarpetta wasn’t that kind of person. Obviously, she just didn’t get your earlier messages. Amazing how what’s under your nose and obvious sometimes works. Are you going to copy me on the e-mails?

Date: Sun, 11 November 2007 14:45:16

From: “Terri”

To: “Oscar”

No. That would be a violation of her Privacy.

This project has now risen to the stars. I’m in awe! So happy!

“What’s under her nose and obvious? It’s like she tried something, or he did, and got what he or she or both of them wanted,” Lucy said into her jawbone wireless earpiece. “What the hell’s she talking about?”

“I don’t know what was under her nose, but she’s mistaken. Or not being truthful,” Scarpetta replied.

“Probably untruthful,” Lucy said. “Which was why she wouldn’t let Oscar see e-mails from you.”

“There can’t be any e-mails from me,” Scarpetta said again. “I need to ask you about something. I’m standing in the middle of Terri Bridges’s apartment, and it’s not a good place for us to be having this conversation. Especially over cell phones.”

“I got you your cell phone. Remember? It’s special. You don’t have to worry. Neither do I. Our phones are secure.”

Lucy talked as she opened each e-mail account and looked in the e-mail trash for anything useful that might have been deleted.

She said, “May have given Oscar a reason to resent you as well. His girlfriend’s obsessed with her hero, who finally has answered her—he’s led to believe. And she won’t let him see the e-mails. Sounds like you might have created a problem you didn’t know anything about.”

“Or have anything to do with,” Scarpetta said. “What type of power supplies do her laptops use? That’s my simple question.”

One of Terri’s e-mail accounts was empty, and Lucy had saved that one for last, assuming Terri had created it but simply never gotten around to using it. As Lucy opened the trash folder, she was stunned by what she found.

“Wow,” Lucy said. “This is unbelievable. She deleted everything yesterday morning. One hundred and thirty-six e-mails. She deleted them one right after another.”

“Not a USB but a magnetized power cord? What was deleted?” Scarpetta asked.

“Hold on,” Lucy said. “Don’t go anywhere. Stay on with me and we’ll look at this together. You might want to get Jaime, Benton, Marino in there and put me on speakerphone.”

All of the deleted e-mails were between Terri and another user with the name Scarpetta612.

Six-twelve—June 12—was Scarpetta’s birthday.

The Internet service provider address was the same as that of the eighteen accounts that were assumed to be Terri’s, but Scarpetta612 wasn’t listed in the history. It hadn’t been created on this laptop, nor was that account accessed by this laptop or—based on the dates of the e-mails Lucy was already seeing—Scarpetta612 would be listed in the history along with the other eighteen accounts.

It would be in the history if Terri had created Scarpetta612. But there was no evidence she had, not so far.

“Scarpetta six-twelve,” Lucy said, scrolling through text. “Someone with that username was writing to her—to Terri, I’m presuming. Can you get Jaime and Marino so we can get the password to that account?”

“Anybody could come up with some permutation of my name, and my date of birth is no big secret, if anybody cares,” her aunt said.

“Just give Jaime the username. Scarpetta appended to the numbers six one two.”

Lucy gave her the e-mail service provider and waited. She could hear Scarpetta talking to someone. It sounded like Marino.

Then Scarpetta said to Lucy, “It’s being taken care of.”

“Like right now,” Lucy said.

“Yes, right now. I was asking if either of the laptops you have might use a magnetized power supply.”

“No,” Lucy said. “USB, recessed five pin port, eighty-five-watt. What you’re talking about wouldn’t be recognized by Terri’s laptops. The IP for Scarpetta six-twelve traces to eight-ninety-nine Tenth Avenue. Isn’t that John Jay College of Criminal Justice?”

“What IP? And yes. What’s John Jay got to do with anything? Jaime and Marino are still here. They want to listen to what you’re saying. I’m putting you on speakerphone. What’s Benton doing?” she asked them.

Lucy could hear Berger’s voice in the background say something about Benton being on the phone with Morales. It bothered Lucy to hear Berger say anything about Morales, and she wasn’t sure why unless it was her sense that he was interested in Berger, that he wanted her sexually, and maybe it seemed he had a way of getting what he wanted.

“Whoever was writing to Terri and saying she was you was doing so from that IP address, from John Jay,” Lucy said.

She continued going through deleted e-mails sent by someone who was clearly impersonating her aunt.

“I’m going to forward some of these,” she said. “Everybody should look at them, then I need the password, okay? This most recent one was sent by Scarpetta six-twelve to Terri four days ago, December twenty-eighth, at close to midnight. The day after Bhutto was assassinated, and you talked about it on CNN, Aunt Kay. You were here in New York.”

“I was, but that’s not me. That’s not my e-mail address,” Scarpetta insisted.

The e-mail read:

Date: Fri, 28 December 2007 23:53:01

From: “Scarpetta”

To: “Terri”

Terri,

Again, I owe you an apology. I’m sure you understand. Such a terrible tragedy, and I had to get to CNN. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I don’t keep my word, but I don’t have much say about my schedule when somebody dies or other inconveniences interfere. We’ll try again!—Scarpetta

P.S. Did you get the photograph?

Lucy read it over the phone and said, “Aunt Kay? When did you leave CNN that night?”

“Other inconveniences?” Berger’s voice talking to Scarpetta. “As if you would refer to an assassination or any other act of violence as an inconvenience? Who the hell is doing this? Sound like anybody you might know?”

“No.” Scarpetta’s voice answering Berger. “Nobody.”

“Marino?” Berger again.

His voice. “Got no idea. But she wouldn’t say nothing like that,” as if Scarpetta needed him to stick up for her character. “I don’t think it’s Jack, if that’s entered anybody’s head.”

He meant Jack Fielding, and it was unlikely he would have entered anybody’s head. He was a solid forensic pathologist and meant well and in the main was loyal to Scarpetta, but he was a musclebrain with ragged moods and an assortment of physical problems such as high cholesterol and skin disorders from his years of pumping iron and pumping himself full of anabolic steroids. He didn’t have the energy to parade as Scarpetta on the Internet, and he wasn’t cunning or cruel, and to give Terri Bridges the benefit of the doubt, if she wasn’t Scarpetta612, then it was cruel of somebody to lead her on. In the beginning, at least, she’d idolized Scarpetta. She’d tried hard to get in touch with her. If she finally thought Scarpetta was responding to her, that had to be a thrill until her hero started to diss her.

Lucy said, “Aunt Kay? You left CNN on the night of December twenty-eighth and were within two blocks of John Jay. And you walked back to the apartment, just like you always do?”

The apartment was on Central Park West, and very close to CNN and John Jay.

“Yes,” Scarpetta said.

Another e-mail, this one dated yesterday. Again, the IP traced to John Jay.

Date: Mon, 31 December 2007 03:14:31

From: “Scarpetta”

To: “Terri”

Terri,

I’m sure you realize my time in NY is unpredictable and I have so little control over the OCME because I’m certainly not the chief, just a low-level consultant there.

I was thinking, why not meet in Watertown where I make the rules? I’ll give you a tour of my office, and no problem about seeing an autopsy or anything else you need. Happy New Year and look forward to seeing you soon.—Scarpetta

Lucy forwarded it to all of them as she read it out loud.

“I wasn’t in New York yesterday afternoon,” Scarpetta said. “I couldn’t have e-mailed this from John Jay. Not that I would have. And I don’t give tours of the morgue.”

“The emphasis about your not being the chief here in New York,” Berger said. “Someone is belittling you with your own lips, so to speak. Of course, I’m wondering about Terri being Scarpetta six-twelve and sending the e-mails to herself as if they’re from Scarpetta. Think what a coup that would be for her thesis. My question, Lucy, is do you see any reason we should completely dismiss the possibility that the imposter was Terri?”

As Lucy listened to Berger’s voice, she thought she heard a special warmth in it.

It had happened so swiftly, and Berger had been surprisingly sure of what she wanted. She had been surprisingly bold. Then the bitter wind had rushed in as Berger had opened the door and left.

Lucy said over the phone to her aunt, “These e-mails to Terri, allegedly from you, would explain why she quoted you in her thesis and seemed to think she knew you.”

“Kay? Did you get any indication of this from Oscar?” Berger asked.

“I can’t tell you what he said to me. But I won’t deny that I got such an indication.”

“So you did.” Berger’s reply. “So he definitely knew about this correspondence. Whether he saw it or not is another matter.”

“If Terri’s not the imposter,” Marino said, “who deleted all of the e-mails? And what for?”

“Exactly,” Berger said. “Right before she was murdered. Right before Oscar was supposed to come over for dinner. Or did someone else make the deletions and put the laptops in the closet?”

Lucy said, “If Terri made the deletions because she was worried about someone seeing them, she should have emptied the damn trash. Even an idiot knows you can recover deleted files from the trash, especially if the deletions are recent.”

“This much I think we can be sure of,” Scarpetta said. “No matter why she or someone else deleted the e-mails, Terri Bridges wasn’t expecting to be murdered last night.”

Lucy said, “No. She couldn’t have been expecting her own death. Unless she planned to commit suicide.”

“And then removed the ligature from her neck after the fact? I don’t think so,” said Marino, as if he’d taken Lucy literally.

“There was no ligature to remove,” Scarpetta said. “She was garroted. Nothing was tied or locked around her neck.”

Lucy said, “I have to find out who Scarpetta six-twelve is, and which photograph this person supposedly sent. There are no photographs, no JPEG images in the trash. It’s possible she deleted it before she deleted all these other e-mails, and flushed her cache.”

“Then what?” Berger’s voice.

“Then we’ll have to try recovering it from this laptop the same way we’re recovering her text files from the other one,” Lucy said. “Do the same thing you were watching earlier when you were here with me.”

“Any other possible explanation about the photograph?” It was Scarpetta who asked.

Lucy said, “If she, assuming we’re talking about Terri, accessed an attached e-mailed photograph from a different device—such as a BlackBerry or another computer somewhere—then it won’t be on the laptop she used for the Internet.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Scarpetta said. “There’s a power cord in her office that doesn’t go to either of the laptops you have. There must be another one somewhere.”

“We should go from here to Oscar’s apartment.” Marino’s voice, to the others. “Morales had the key. He’s still got it?”

“Yes,” Berger said. “He has it. Oscar could be there. We don’t know where he is.”

“I don’t believe for a minute he’s there.” Benton’s voice now.

“You were just talking to Morales? What did he want?” Berger asked him.

“He suspects Oscar figured he was about to get arrested—said one of the guards told him that Oscar didn’t do well after Kay left. Morales said, and remember to consider the source, that Oscar feels betrayed by Kay. Feels lied to and disrespected, and he’s glad Terri didn’t witness how abusive Kay was to Oscar during the examination. She supposedly put chemicals on Oscar and caused him a lot of pain.”

“Abuse?” Scarpetta asked.

They were having this conversation as if they’d forgotten Lucy was on the phone. She continued to search through deleted e-mails.

“That was the word Morales used,” Benton’s voice.

“I certainly wasn’t abusive, and whoever this Morales is, he knows damn well I can’t say what went on in there.” Scarpetta talking to Benton. “He knows Oscar’s not under arrest. So I really can’t defend myself if he starts tossing around words like that.”

“I don’t believe Oscar made those comments,” Benton said. “He knows you can’t repeat anything. So if he really didn’t trust you, he would assume that you would defend yourself if he did start misrepresenting you. He would assume you would breach confidentiality because you have no integrity. And I’ll talk to the guard, myself.”

“I agree,” Berger said. “Morales is probably the source of the comments.”

“He’s a shit stirrer,” Marino said.

“He has a message for you,” Benton said.

“Yeah, I bet he does,” Marino said.

“The witness you interviewed earlier today, the woman across the street?” Benton said, and it seemed they had forgotten that Lucy was listening.

“I hadn’t talked to him about it,” Marino said.

“Well, he knows about it,” Benton said to him.

“I had to get the dispatcher to talk the lady into letting me in. She thought I was an ax murderer and called nine-one-one. Maybe he heard about it that way.”

“Apparently, she called nine-one-one again,” Benton told him. “Just a little while ago.”

“She’s scared shitless,” Marino said. “Because of what happened to Terri.”

“To report animal abuse,” Benton said.

“Don’t tell me. Because of her dead puppy?”

“What?”

“That’s what I’m asking,” Marino said. “What are you talking about?”

“Apparently, the woman told the nine-one-one operator to pass on the message to Jaime that it was the same man who, quote, got off the hook earlier this month. And she, the lady who called, said she took a picture with her cell phone and can prove he’s at it again.”

“Jake Loudin,” Berger said. “Who’s this claiming she took a picture of him?”

“All I know is the nine-one-one operator passed on the message to Morales. I guess because of his connection with Jaime.”

Lucy popped open a Diet Pepsi, listening and reading as Jet Ranger snored.

“What damn connection?” Marino sounded angry. “Tavern on the goddamn Green? I’m telling you, I don’t like that guy. He’s an asshole.”

“He says you might want to go talk to your witness again, long and short of it,” Benton said. “And maybe Jaime will want to, since it seems related to her big animal-cruelty case. But maybe first all of us should meet him at Oscar’s apartment while we’ve got the chance.”

“The lady lives across the street,” Marino said. “She was drinking when I saw her this afternoon. She started talking about getting another dog. I don’t know why she wouldn’t have said something about Loudin earlier. We were talking about dogs and Jaime’s anti-cruelty task force. We could go see her first, since we’re right here, then go to Oscar’s. He’s on the other side of the park, not far from where your apartment is. Not far from John Jay.”

“I think we should split up.” Berger’s voice. “You two go to Oscar’s. Marino and I will stay here.”

“I’d like to get back to John Jay,” Scarpetta said. “How does it work if the IP traces to John Jay? Wouldn’t the person who sent the e-mails have to be located there?”

Silence.

Scarpetta repeated her question and said, “Lucy? You still with us?”

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “I forgot I was here.”

“I didn’t know she was on the phone,” Benton said. “Maybe you could set your cell phone on the desk. I’m sorry, Lucy. Hello, Lucy.”

The cell phone clunked as Scarpetta set it down.

Lucy said, “Whoever Scarpetta six-twelve is would have had to be physically within range of John Jay’s wireless network to join it. For example, the person would have to be there using one of the college’s computers—which isn’t likely at almost midnight, when the buildings were locked, and that’s when the last e-mail was sent, right before midnight on December twenty-eighth. Or the person could have brought his or her own laptop or something smaller such as a BlackBerry, an iPhone, a PDA, some device that’s capable of logging on to the Internet. And that’s what I’m thinking—that this individual had something like a PDA and just stood on the sidewalk in front of one of the buildings and hijacked the wireless network. I’m assuming the cops found Terri’s cell phone? Or a BlackBerry or PDA if she had one? The photograph Scarpetta six-twelve sent? It could have been sent by a BlackBerry, a PDA, something like that, as I’ve mentioned.”

“Her cell phone’s being gone through.” It was Marino. “No other phones, BlackBerries, or devices you could use for the Internet. Assuming the inventory we got here is correct. Just the one phone. Plain vanilla flip phone. Was on the kitchen counter, plugged in, recharging. That and the earpiece. Also recharging.”

All of them continued to discuss and speculate, and then there was a brief lapse as Marino and Berger contacted the e-mail provider for Scarpetta six-twelve.

They got the information Lucy needed.

“The password’s stiffone, all one word.” Berger spelled it for Lucy over the phone. “Marino, maybe you could get with John Jay’s security to find out if they noticed anyone in front of the classroom building late on the night of December twenty-eighth, and again yesterday, mid-afternoon?”

“In both instances, the twenty-eighth and last night,” Benton said, “the building would have been closed due to the hour and the holiday.”

“Are there security cameras?” Berger asked.

Lucy said, “You know what I’m thinking. I’m thinking the IP’s deliberate to make it look like the e-mails are really from Aunt Kay. She’s connected with John Jay, so why wouldn’t she be sending e-mails from their wireless network? Point is, whoever’s stolen Aunt Kay’s identity by sending these e-mails doesn’t care if the IP was traced, and likely hoped or even assumed it would be. Otherwise, this person would have used an anonymous proxy—a program on a remote server that grabs files for you and disguises your real address. Or some other type of anonymizer that gives you a temporary address every time you send an e-mail, so people can’t find your real IP.”

“That’s my big battle.” Berger made her favorite complaint about the Internet.

It was one Lucy liked to hear. The devil Berger fought was one Lucy knew.

“White-collar crime, stalking, identity theft,” Berger added. “I can’t tell you my aggravation.”

“What about the account information for Scarpetta six-twelve?” Marino was asking Lucy, as if nothing dysfunctional had ever gone on between them.

He was just more guarded, which made him somewhat polite, for once.

“Anything more than the generic they gave me?” he asked.

“Name’s listed as Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Address and phone number are her office in Watertown. All public information,” Lucy said. “No profile, no options that would have required the person who set up the account to use a credit card.”

“Same thing as Terri’s accounts.” Berger’s voice.

“Same thing with a million accounts,” Lucy said. “I’m in Scarpetta six-twelve right now, and the only e-mails sent or received were to and from Terri Bridges.”

“Don’t you think that might hint it was Terri who opened that account to make it look as if Kay were writing to her?” Berger suggested.

“What about the MAC, the machine access code?” Benton asked.

Lucy said, as she scrolled through e-mails, “Doesn’t match either of these laptops, but all that means is Terri or someone didn’t carry one of these laptops to John Jay and send the e-mails from that network. But you’re right. The sole purpose of Scarpetta six-twelve seems to be for an imposter to correspond with Terri Bridges, which would have added credence to the theory that the imposter and Terri were the same person, were it not for one thing.”

The one thing she was talking about was on her screen.

“I’m talking as I’m going through the Scarpetta six-twelve account,” she said. “And this is something that’s really important. Really, really important.”

So important, Lucy almost couldn’t believe it.

She said, “At eight-eighteen last night, Scarpetta six-twelve wrote an e-mail that was saved as a draft and never sent. I’m forwarding it to all of you, and I’m going to read it out loud to you in a sec. This rules out Terri or Oscar writing it. Do you hear what I’m saying? This e-mail I’m talking about rules out either one of them being Scarpetta six-twelve.”

“Shit.” Marino’s voice. “Someone wrote an e-mail while this place was crawling with cops? Fact is, her body was probably already at the morgue by then.”

“Her body arrived at the morgue at around eight, as I recall,” Scarpetta said.

“So someone writes an e-mail to Terri and decides not to send it for some reason.” Lucy tried to work it out. “As in maybe the person somehow found out Terri was dead right while in the middle of writing to her? And then just saved the e-mail as a draft?”

“Or wanted us to find it and make that assumption, draw some sort of conclusion from it,” Scarpetta said. “Remember, we don’t know how much of this is intended to deliberately lead us or, better put, mislead us.”

“That’s my hunch.” Berger’s voice. “This is deliberate. Whoever’s behind it is smart enough to know we’d see these e-mails eventually. The person wants us to see what we’re seeing.”

“To jerk us around,” Marino said. “And it’s working. I’m feeling jerked around as hell.”

“Two things are indisputable,” Benton said. “Terri had been dead for hours by the time that e-mail was written and saved as a draft. And Oscar was already at Bellevue, so he definitely wasn’t sending e-mails to anyone. So he couldn’t have written the one you’re talking about. Lucy? Can you read it, please?”

She read out loud what was on her screen:

Date: Mon, 31 December 2007 20:18:31

From: “Scarpetta”

To: “Terri”

Terri,

After three glasses of champagne and some of that whiskey that costs more than your books, I can be candid. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and be brutally candid with you. It’s my New Year’s resolution—to be brutal.

While I think you’re bright enough to have an excellent grasp of forensic psychology, I don’t think you could ever do anything but teach, if you insist on staying in the field. The sad fact? Suspects, inmates, victims would never accept a dwarf, and I don’t know how jurors would respond, either.

Would you ever consider being a morgue assistant where your appearance is immaterial? Who knows? Maybe one day you could work for me!

—Scarpetta

Lucy said, “The IP’s not John Jay. Not an address we’ve seen so far.”

“I’m glad she never got that.” Scarpetta sounded solemn. “That’s terrible. If she wasn’t sending them to herself, after all, she probably really did think they were from me. And Oscar probably thought so, too. I’m glad neither she nor Oscar ever read that, glad it was never sent. How incredibly cruel.”

“That’s what I’m getting at,” Marino said. “The person’s a piece of shit. Is playing games, having fun with us. This is for our benefit, to fuck with us, rub our noses in it. Who else was going to see this unsent e-mail except those of us investigating Terri’s murder? Mainly it’s for the Doc’s benefit. You ask me, somebody’s really got it in for the Doc.”

“Any idea where that IP traces? What the address is, if not John Jay?” Benton asked Lucy.

She said, “All I’ve got is a range of numbers from the Internet service provider. They aren’t going to tell me anything unless I hack into the mainframe.”

“I didn’t hear that,” Berger said to her. “You didn’t just say that.”

Chapter 25

For the first time since Marino had attacked her last spring, Scarpetta found herself alone with him.

She set down her crime scene case outside the bathroom doorway in the master bedroom, and she and Marino both looked at the stripped mattress beneath a window that had draperies drawn across it. They examined photographs of what the bed had looked like when the police had arrived last night, and the soft, sexy clothing that had been laid out on top of it. There was an uneasiness between the two of them now that they were inches from each other, with no one else around and no one to overhear them.

His big index finger began tapping an eight-by-ten of the clothing on the perfectly made bed.

He said, “You think it’s possible the killer did this, like maybe he was going through some fantasy shit after the fact? Like maybe he was playing out a fantasy of her dressing up for him in red or something?”

“I doubt it,” Scarpetta said. “If that was his intention, why didn’t he do it? He could have forced her to dress any way he’d wanted.”

She pointed at the clothing on the bed in the photograph, and her index finger was smaller than his pinkie.

“The clothes are laid out the way they would be if someone extremely organized was planning what to wear last night,” she explained. “Just as she had set up everything else for the evening, with methodical deliberation. I think that’s how she went about her normal routines. She’d timed her dinner preparation, perhaps had taken the wine out a few hours earlier so it would be the temperature she wanted. She’d set the table and had arranged flowers that she’d bought at a market earlier in the day. She was in her robe, perhaps had just showered.”

“Did it look to you like she’d just shaved her legs?” he asked.

“There wasn’t anything to shave,” Scarpetta said. “That’s not how she removed her hair. She went to the dermatologist for that.”

Photographs made sliding sounds as he shuffled them around, looking for ones that showed the interior of Terri’s closets and drawers, which the police had not left in their original ordered state. He and Scarpetta started looking through socks and hose, under garments and gym clothes, everything jumbled up and in disarray from multiple pairs of gloved hands digging through them and sliding hangers around. The police had rooted through quite a variety of high-heel platform pumps and sandals with stiletto heels, rhinestones, chains, and ankle straps, in different sizes, ranging from three to five.

“Finding ones that fit is one of the biggest challenges,” Scarpetta commented, looking at the pile of shoes. “An ordeal, and I’m going to venture a guess she did a lot of her shopping over the Internet. Possibly all of it.”

She returned a pair of studded flip-flops to the carpet beneath a hanging rod, which, unlike everything else she’d noticed in the apartment, had been installed lower than usual, so Terri could reach it without a tool or a step stool.

She said, “I’ll also stick with my theory that she was influenced by consumer reviews. Possibly even for her provocative tastes.”

“I’d give this maybe three stars,” Marino said, holding up a thong he’d just pulled out of a drawer. “But you ask me, the thing about rating underwear? It all depends on who’s wearing it.”

“Victoria’s Secret. Frederick’s of Hollywood,” Scarpetta observed. “Open mesh and fishnet. Lace teddies, crotchless panties. A corset. She was wearing a red lace shelf bra under her robe, and it’s very difficult for me to imagine she wasn’t wearing panties to match.”

“I don’t think I know what a shelf bra is.”

“It rather much does what the name implies,” she said. “The object of the game, to enhance and accentuate.”

“Oh. The one he cut off her. Doesn’t look like it would cover anything important.”

“It wouldn’t, and wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “That’s why she would have been wearing it to begin with, assuming it wasn’t the killer’s idea.”

Scarpetta returned the lingerie to its drawer and for a moment couldn’t look at Marino as she remembered the sounds and smells of him, and his shocking strength. It wasn’t until later that she’d felt him, when pain mapped out where he’d been in damaged flesh that burned and throbbed all the way to the bone.

“That and all the condoms,” Marino said.

He had his back to her, opening drawers in a nightstand. The condoms had been collected by the police.

“You see from the pictures, she must have had a hundred condoms in this top drawer,” he said. “Maybe this is a Benton question, but if she was a neat freak—”

“Not if.”

“In other words, she was uptight. Everything had to be exactly right. So does it make sense for someone like that to have this wild side?”

“You mean for someone obsessive-compulsive to like sex?”

“Yeah.”

Marino was sweating, and his face was red.

“Makes perfect sense,” Scarpetta said. “Sex was a way to relieve her anxiety. Perhaps the only acceptable way for her to be uninhibited, to give up control. Or better put, to delude herself into thinking she was giving up control.”

“Yeah. She gave it up as long as it was according to her plan.”

“Meaning she never really gave it up. She couldn’t possibly. That’s not how she was programmed. Even when she appeared to be giving up control—during sex, for example—she wasn’t. Because it wasn’t Oscar or someone else who decided what she would buy. I doubt it was he or any of her partners who decided what she would wear or whether she would have body hair. Or even whether Oscar would have body hair. My guess is she decided what they would and wouldn’t do. And where and when and how.”

She remembered what Oscar had said about Terri’s liking his body perfectly sculpted and perfectly clean and smooth. She liked sex in the shower. She liked to be dominated, to be tied up.

“She called the shots,” Scarpetta said. “Until the end. That was the fun part for the person who killed her—controlling her absolutely.”

“It makes you wonder if Oscar finally couldn’t take it anymore,” Marino said, stopping short of whatever else he was about to say.

Scarpetta stood in the bathroom doorway and looked in at the white marble and French gold fixtures, and the corner soaking tub with its showerhead and curtain pulled back. She looked at the polished, veined grayish stone floor and imagined the contusions Terri would have had if her assailant had sexually assaulted her on it, and was fairly certain that didn’t happen. The weight of the assailant, even if the person were a hundred and nine pounds, like Oscar, would have caused contusions in areas that contacted the floor, especially if her wrists were tightly bound behind her.

Scarpetta outlined her thoughts to Marino as she studied the gilt-framed oval mirror above the vanity, and the chair with the gold metal back shaped like a heart. Her reflection looked back at her. Then Marino’s chest was in the mirror as he looked at everything she was looking at.

“If he wanted to watch her die,” Marino said, “maybe he also wanted to watch her being raped. But as I’m standing here looking at the mirror, I don’t see how that could have happened if he was a normal-size person. If he’d been standing behind her, I’m saying. Well, I don’t see how he could have.”

“I’m also not so sure she could have been raped without exhibiting at least some injury,” Scarpetta said. “If her wrists had been strapped together behind her back and he had gotten on top of her, even if it was on the bed, she likely would have had abrasions or contusions or both, posteriorly. Not to mention the bed didn’t look touched, based on the photographs. And the clothing on them didn’t look disturbed.”

“She had no injuries to her back.”

“None.”

“You’re pretty sure her wrists was already bound.”

“I can’t prove it. But his cutting her robe and bra off suggests she was bound at the time.”

“What makes you so sure she was bound behind her back instead of in front? I know that’s what Oscar told the police. Is that what you’re basing it on?”

Scarpetta held out her wrists, the left one on top of the right, as if they were bound by a single strap.

“I’m basing it on the pattern of the furrow on her wrists, where the groove was the deepest, where there was sparing, et cetera,” she said. “If she’d been bound in front, it’s likely the strap would have been inserted under this wrist”—she indicated her right one—“with the locking block a little to the right of her right wrist bone. If they’d been bound behind her back, the position would have been reversed.”

“The killer right-handed or left-handed, in your opinion?”

“Based on the direction he pulled the strap during tightening? Consistent with someone left-handed, assuming he was facing her when he bound her. For what it’s worth, Oscar’s dominant hand is his right one. And I probably shouldn’t tell you that.”

She and Marino put on fresh gloves, and she stepped inside the bathroom and lifted the vanity chair and set it in the middle of the floor. She measured the height of it from its turned-up metal foot to the black fabric seat, which had darker areas, stained areas, that added to her theory.

“Possibly residues of the lubricant,” she said. “Nobody noticed because it was never considered that she might have been sitting in this chair when she was garroted, in front of the mirror. Maybe some tissue and blood on the legs from her thrashing. Let me see.”

She looked with a magnification lens.

“I can’t tell. But maybe not. Not really surprised. Since her injuries are to the tops of her legs, not the backs of them. You still carry those little tactical lights that can blind people?”

Marino dug into his pocket and pulled out his flashlight and gave it to her. She got down on her knees and shone the light under the vanity, illuminating smears of dark dried blood under the counter’s edge, not visible unless one was on the floor, looking. She found more blood on the underside of the vanity drawer, which was unpainted plywood. Marino squatted, and she showed him.

She took photographs.

“I’m going to swab all this, but not the chair,” she said. “What we’re going to do is wrap it up, and it goes to La Guardia. Can you step out for a minute and tell Jaime we need an officer who can escort this chair to Lucy’s jet and be on that jet and receipt it to Dr. Kiselstein at the airport in Knoxville? Lucy can set it up. In fact, knowing her, she already has.”

She studied the chair.

She decided, “The lubricant is moist, so we don’t want anything plastic like poly tubing or basically shrinkwrap. I think paper so it continues to air-dry, maybe a Mammoth Bag, and then place the entire thing in a large evidence storage box. Be as creative as you can. I don’t want any chance of bacteria, and I don’t want anything rubbing against any surface of it.”

Marino left, and Scarpetta retrieved a roll of string, a roll of blue evidence tape, and a pair of small scissors from her crime scene case. She set the chair against the tile wall and began measuring and cutting string to correlate with Oscar’s and Terri’s heights, and the lengths of their legs and also their torsos. She taped the strings to the wall directly above the chair as Marino reappeared in the doorway. Berger was with him.

“If you can give Jaime my notepad and pen so she can take notes and you can free up your hands. What I’m about to show you,” Scarpetta said, “is why I don’t believe Oscar could have committed this murder. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I’m going to show you why it’s unlikely. A little simple math.”

She directed their attention to the different lengths of string taped to the tile wall above the chair.

“This is all based on the theory that Terri was seated in this chair. What’s relevant is the length of her torso, which is eighty-four and a quarter centimeters. . . .”

“The metric system ain’t my thing,” Marino said.

“About thirty-four and an eighth inches,” she said. “I measured her in the morgue, and as you know, people with achondroplasia have abnormally short limbs, but their torsos and heads are relatively the same size as a normal adult’s, which is why they seem disproportionately larger. That’s why little people can drive cars without sitting on cushions but need extended pedals so their feet can reach the accelerator, the brake, the clutch. In Terri’s case, her torso is about the same length as Jaime’s and mine. So I’ve taped a segment of string to the wall”—Scarpetta showed them—“that’s exactly the length of Terri’s torso, and positioned it so it begins at the seat of the chair and ends here.”

She pointed to the piece of blue tape fastening the top end of the string to the wall.

“The distance between the chair cushion and the floor is twenty-one inches,” she continued to explain. “So if you add thirty-four and an eighth and twenty-one, you get fifty-five and one-eighth inches. Oscar Bane is four feet tall. In other words, forty-eight inches tall.”

She pointed to the string that represented his height.

Berger commented as she wrote, “Not even as tall as Terri was when she was sitting.”

“That’s right,” Scarpetta said.

She lifted the “Oscar string,” as she called it, from the wall and held it out parallel to the floor, and did the same with the “seated Terri string.” She asked Marino to hold both, level and parallel to the floor.

She took more photographs.

Then Benton was behind Berger, and a uniformed officer was with him.

The officer said, “Someone need a chair escorted to a private jet headed to the bomb factory in Oak Ridge? The chair’s not going to explode or nothing, right?”

“You bring the evidence packaging I asked for?” Marino asked him.

“Just like UPS,” the officer said.

Scarpetta asked Marino to continue holding the Oscar and Terri strings while she explained to Benton what they were doing.

“And his arms are very short, about sixteen inches from his shoulder joint to the tips of his fingers, which would have given him less leverage,” she added, looking at Benton. “Your reach is a good eight inches more than that, and if you’d been standing behind Terri while she was seated, you would have towered over her by almost twenty inches, giving you tremendous leverage. As opposed to Oscar. Imagine someone his size trying to pull up and back with force while the victim is thrashing about in the chair.”

“And he’s not even level with her when he’s doing it? I don’t really see how he could,” Marino agreed. “Especially if he kept doing it to her over and over again, allowing her to regain consciousness, then strangling her into unconsciousness again, like you said. I don’t care how much he can bench-press.”

“Actually, I don’t think there’s any way he could have done it,” Berger said.

“I’m worried about him,” Scarpetta said. “Has anybody tried to call him?”

“When I talked to Morales,” Benton said, “I asked him if anybody knew where Oscar was or had heard from him. He says the police have Oscar’s cell phone.”

“He voluntarily gave that up?” Scarpetta asked.

“Along with a lot of other things, yes,” Benton said. “Which is too bad, at least about the phone. I wish he had it, because he’s not answering his apartment phone, which doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know how we’re going to reach him.”

“I think what we ought to do is split up, as I suggested earlier,” Berger said. “Benton? You and Kay meet Morales at Oscar’s apartment and take a look. Marino and I will make sure this chair gets packaged properly. We’ll make sure the swabs you just took and any other evidence goes directly to the labs. Then we’ll head across the street and see what the neighbor has to say about Jake Loudin.”

Scarpetta carried the chair out of the bathroom and set it down for the officer who was to package and escort it.

Berger said to her, “If you’re still at Oscar’s apartment when we’re done, we’ll meet you there. Lucy said she’ll call me if she finds out anything else important on her end.”

Chapter 26

Oscar Bane lived on Amsterdam Avenue in a ten-story building of insipid yellow brick that reminded Scarpetta of Mussolini’s fascist constructions in Rome. Inside the lobby, the doorman wouldn’t let them near the elevator until Morales showed his badge. He looked Irish, was portly and elderly, wearing a uniform the same green as the awning outside.

“I haven’t seen him since New Year’s Eve,” the doorman said, his attention fixed to Scarpetta’s big crime scene case. “I guess I know why you’re here.”

Morales said, “That so? Tell me why we’re here.”

“I read about it. I never saw her.”

“You mean Terri Bridges?” Benton said.

“Everybody’s talking about it, as you might imagine. I hear they let him out of Bellevue. It’s not nice the names they’re calling him. You gotta feel sorry for anyone made fun of like that.”

No one had heard from Oscar, as far as Scarpetta knew. No one seemed to have a clue where he was, and she was extremely worried someone might harm him.

“There’s five of us who work the door, and we all say the same thing. She’d never been to this building or one of us, at least, would know. And he’d gotten strange,” the doorman said.

He directed his attention to Scarpetta and Benton because he obviously didn’t like Morales and wasn’t trying very hard to hide it.

“Now, that wasn’t always the case,” the doorman continued, “and I know that for a fact because I’ve worked here for eleven years, and he’s been in the building about half that time. He used to be friendly, a real nice guy. Then all of a sudden he changed. Cut his hair and dyed it the color of a marigold, got quieter and quieter, stayed in his apartment a lot. When he’d come out to walk or whatever, it was at odd times and he was as nervous as a cat.”

“Where does he keep his car?” Morales asked.

“An underground parking garage around the block. A lot of the tenants park there.”

“When was this?” Benton asked. “When you noticed something different about him.”

“I’d say it was the fall. October or so when it started becoming obvious that something was going on. Knowing what I do now, I have to wonder what he got tangled up with, you know, with the girl. Put it this way, when two people get together and one of them changes for the worse? You figure it out.”

“Is someone on the door around the clock?” Benton asked him.

“Twenty-four-seven. Come on. I’ll take you up. You got a key, right?”

“I assume you have one?” Benton said.

“Funny you would mention that.” His green gloved finger pressed the elevator button. “Mr. Bane took it upon himself to change his lock some months back, around the time he started acting odd.”

They boarded, and he tapped the button for the tenth floor.

“He’s supposed to give us a key. We got to have a key in case of an emergency, and we’ve kept asking him, and we still don’t have one.”

“Sounds to me like ol’ Oscar doesn’t want anybody in his place,” Morales said. “I’m surprised you didn’t kick him out.”

“It was getting to where there was going to be a confrontation with the building manager. Nobody wanted that. We kept hoping he’d get around to it. Sorry it’s so slow—slowest elevator in the city. You’d think we got someone on the roof pulling us up with a rope. Anyway, Mr. Bane keeps to himself. Never has visitors. Has never caused any problems around here, but like I said, he started acting a little unusual, and about the same time he changed his locks. I guess you just never know about people.”

“Is this the only elevator?” Scarpetta asked.

“There’s a freight elevator. We ask the residents to use it when they take out their dogs. Not everybody wants to be on an elevator with a dog. Poodles are the worst. The big standard ones? They scare me. I’m not getting on an elevator with one of those. Rather ride with a pit bull.”

“If someone took the freight elevator, would you be aware of it?” Morales asked. “Like if somebody tried to slip by you?”

“Don’t see how they could. They’d still have to come in and out of the front of the building.”

“No other access at all? I mean, we’re sure Oscar hasn’t come in tonight, and nobody saw him?” Morales asked.

“Not unless he climbed up the fire escape and came through the roof,” the doorman said, as if Oscar would have to be Spider-Man.

Scarpetta recalled noticing a zigzag of horizontal platforms connected by stairs on the west side of the building.

The elevator stopped, and the doorman stepped out into a hallway of old green carpet and pale yellow walls. Scarpetta looked up at a steel-framed plastic dome in the ceiling that wasn’t an ordinary skylight.

“That’s the roof access you mean?” she said to the doorman.

“Yes, ma’am. You’d have to have the ladder. Either that or use the fire escape and come through somebody’s window.”

“And the ladder’s kept where?”

“In the basement somewhere. That’s not my department.”

“Maybe you could check and make sure it’s still there,” Benton said.

“Sure, sure. But obviously he didn’t come in or out that way, or the ladder would be under the roof hatch, right? You’re starting to make me nervous now. Like maybe we should have some cops on the roof. Since they let him out of Bellevue, now you’re giving me the willies a little.”

He led them down to the end of the hall, to Oscar’s dark wooden door, the number on it 10B.

“How many apartments on this floor?” Scarpetta asked. “Four?”

“That’s right. His neighbors work, aren’t around during the day. Out a lot at night because they’re single, got no kids. For two of them, this isn’t their only residence.”

“I’ll need their information,” Morales said. “Not just them but a list of everybody who lives in the building.”

“Sure, sure. There’s forty units, four per floor. Obviously, this is the top floor. I won’t call it a penthouse, because the apartments aren’t any nicer up here than on the other floors. But the view’s better. From the ones in the back you can see the Hudson pretty good. I gotta tell you how shocked I am. Mr. Bane sure doesn’t seem like the type to do something like that. But you know what they say. They never do, right? And then he did start getting weird. I’ll check on the ladder.”

“A little reminder, pal,” Morales said to him. “Mr. Oscar Bane’s not been charged with a crime. Nobody’s saying he killed his girlfriend. So be careful what you spread around, got it?”

They had reached Oscar’s door, and Morales had a key that Scarpetta recognized as belonging to a high-security Medeco lock. She noticed something else that she didn’t want to draw attention to while the doorman was standing there—a strand of black thread, maybe eight inches long, on the carpet directly below the bottom door hinge.

“I’ll be downstairs,” the doorman said. “You need me? There’s a house phone in the kitchen. A white wall phone. Just dial zero. Who do I call about the ladder?”

Morales gave him his card.

The doorman looked like he didn’t want it, but he had no choice. He walked back toward the elevator, and Scarpetta set down her crime scene case, opened it, and handed out gloves. She picked up the piece of thread and examined it under a magnifying lens, noticing a thick knot on one end that had been coated with what appeared to be a flattened bit of colorless soft wax.

She suspected she knew the purpose of the knotted thread, but the door was almost twice as tall as Oscar, and he couldn’t possibly have reached the top of it without assistance.

“What you got?” Morales said.

He took the thread from her, looked at it under the lens.

“If I had to guess,” she said, “it’s something he draped over the top of the door so he could tell if it had been opened in his absence.”

“What a clever little guy. Guess we better find out about that ladder, huh? How did he reach the top of the door?”

“We know he’s paranoid,” Benton said.

Scarpetta placed the thread in an evidence bag she labeled with a Sharpie as Morales unlocked the door and opened it. The alarm started beeping, and he stepped inside and entered a code he had written on a napkin. He turned on the lights.

“Well, look here, we got another ghostbusting gizmo,” he said flippantly, bending down to pick up a straightened coat hanger on the floor just inside the door. “Either that or Oscar was roasting marshmallows. I’m looking for a line of flour across the floor like the crazies do to make sure aliens haven’t entered their houses.”

Scarpetta examined both ends of the straightened coat hanger, then looked at the small flattened piece of wax inside the plastic bag.

“It’s possible this is how he’d get the thread on the top of the door,” she said. “He’d stick the waxy knot on the tip of the coat hanger. There’s an indentation consistent with the diameter of the wire. Let’s see if I might be right.”

She shut herself out of the apartment, and there was just enough space between the door and the floor for the coat hanger to fit. She slid it back inside the apartment, and Morales opened the door.

“Looney Tuney,” he said. “I don’t mean you, of course.”

The living room was immaculate and masculine, with walls painted a deep shade of blue and hung with a fine collection of original Victorian maps and prints. Oscar had a fondness for dark antiques and English leather, and an obsession with anti-mind-control devices. They were strategically placed everywhere, inexpensive spectrometers, radio frequency field strength and TriField meters, for the supposed detection of various surveillance frequencies such as infrared, magnetic, and radio waves.

As they walked around the apartment, they discovered antennas and strips of vinyl-coated lead, and buckets of water, and odd contraptions like aluminum foil-lined metal plates wired to batteries and homemade copper pyramids, and hard hats lined with soundproofing foam and topped by small sections of pipe.

An aluminum foil tent completely enclosed Oscar’s bed.

“Wave-jamming devices,” Benton said. “Pyramids and hats to block out sound waves, beamed energies, including psychic energies. He was trying to create a bubble force field around himself.”

Marino and a uniformed officer were carrying a box the size of a washing machine as Lucy got out of a cab in front of Terri Bridges’s brownstone.

Lucy slung a nylon satchel over her shoulder, paid the fare, and watched them load the box into the back of a police van. She hadn’t seen Marino since she’d threatened to blow his head off last spring in his fishing shack, and decided the best approach was to walk right up to him.

“This the officer who’s going to be on my jet?” she said.

“Yeah,” Marino said.

“You got the tail number and the pilots’ names, right?” she said to the officer. “It’s Signature at La Guardia, and when you go inside, Brent should be waiting for you. He’s the PIC, will be in a black suit, white shirt, blue striped tie, and has on pants.”

“What’s a PIC?” The officer slammed the back of the van shut. “What do you mean he has on pants?”

“Pilot in command, sits in the left seat, your trivia for the night. Make sure he knows you’ve got a gun, just in case he forgot his glasses. He’s blind as a bat without his glasses. Which is why he wears pants.”

“That’s supposed to be a joke, right?”

“There are two pilots. FAA regs—only one needs to see, but both must have on pants.”

The officer looked at her.

He looked at Marino and said, “Tell me she’s kidding.”

“Don’t ask me,” Marino said. “I don’t like to fly. Not anymore.”

Berger emerged from the building and came down the steps, in the cold, blustery wind, with no coat on. She pushed her hair out of her face and pulled her suit jacket together, folding her arms against the cold.

“We’d better get our coats,” Berger said to Marino.

She didn’t say anything to Lucy but touched her hand as the two of them walked with Marino to his dark blue Impala.

Lucy said to Marino, “I’m going to check out the wireless network Terri was using. If you’d make sure whoever’s securing her apartment doesn’t have a problem with my being in there so I don’t end up cuffed and on the floor—or maybe he doesn’t. I may not need to go inside her apartment if the entire building’s on the same network, but I’ve got a couple of interesting things to pass along.”

“Why don’t we get out of the cold and sit in the car,” Berger said.

She and Lucy got into the back, and Marino climbed into the front. He started the engine and turned on the heat as the van with Terri Bridges’s vanity chair pulled away from the curb. Lucy unzipped her satchel and pulled out her MacBook. She opened it.

“Two important things,” she said. “First is how Terri hooked up with whoever Scarpetta six-twelve is. The John Jay website. This past October ninth, about a month after Benton and Kay became visiting lecturers, Terri—or whoever was signed on as Lunasee—posted a notice on a John Jay website bulletin board asking if anybody knew how she might get in touch with Aunt Kay.”

Berger was putting on her coat, and Lucy caught the subtle scent of spices and bamboo, and the oil of bitter orange blossoms—Berger’s fragrance, from a perfume house in London. Lucy had asked about it earlier, hoping it wasn’t one more lovely thing about Berger that was left over from Greg.

“The posting is archived, obviously,” Lucy said.

“How’d you find it?” Marino turned around, his face almost indistinguishable in the dark.

“Looks like you’ve lost a lot of weight,” Lucy said to him.

“I quit eating,” he said. “Don’t know why other people haven’t thought of it. I could write a book, make a lot of money.”

“You should. A book with blank pages in it.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. No food and nothing in the book. It works.”

Lucy could feel his scrutiny of her, of Berger, of the two of them sitting close. Marino had sensors that told him where people were in relation to each other, and where they were in relation to him. It was all connected, in his way of thinking.

Lucy watched Berger read what was on the MacBook’s screen:

Hi Everyone,

My name’s Terri Bridges, and I’m a forensic psych grad student trying to get hold of Dr. Kay Scarpetta. If anybody has any connection with her, could you please pass on my e-mail address? I’ve been trying to track her down since last spring to interview her for my thesis. Thanks.

—TB

Lucy read it out loud to Marino.

She opened another file, and the photograph of Scarpetta from this morning’s column in Gotham Gotcha filled the display.

“This was on the same bulletin board?” Berger asked.

Lucy held up the laptop so Marino could see the off-putting photograph of Scarpetta in a morgue, pointing a scalpel at someone.

“The original image,” Lucy said. “So the background’s not been Photoshopped out. As you recall, in the photo on Gotham Gotcha, it’s just my aunt and you got no idea about the context, except you assume she’s in a morgue. But when we get the background back, we see a countertop with a monitor for security cameras, and beyond is a cinder-block wall with cabinets. But when I did some image enhancement of my own”—she touched the trackpad and opened another file—“I got this.”

She showed them an enlargement of the transparent plastic shield covering Scarpetta’s face. Reflected in it was the vague image of another person.

Lucy moved her finger over the trackpad and opened another file, and the image reflected in the face shield was more refined.

“Dr. Lester,” Berger said.

“That figures,” Marino said. “Someone like her would hate the Doc.”

Lucy said, “We can establish a few things that may or may not be related. The photograph on the Internet this morning was taken in the New York ME’s office during a case or cases when Dr. Lester was present, and that’s who my aunt was talking to. Obviously, Dr. Lester didn’t take the photograph, but my guess is she knows who did, unless she just didn’t notice when it was being done. . . .”

“She would know,” Berger said decisively. “She watches her fiefdom like a vulture.”

“And no,” Lucy said. “I didn’t find the image on the John Jay website, although it’s possible this photograph is floating around out there on the Internet and a fan sent it in to Gotham Gotcha. ”

“How do you know Dr. Lester didn’t send it to Gotham Gotcha ?” Marino asked.

“I’d have to get into her e-mail to figure that out,” Lucy said.

“And you won’t,” Berger said. “But it’s not Lenora’s style. Her MO at this stage in her unhappy life is to dismiss people, treat them as if they don’t matter. Not draw attention to them. The only person she’s desperate to draw attention to is herself.”

“I saw the two of them being real cozy with each other earlier tonight,” Marino said. “Her and Morales in the park at Bellevue, next to the DNA building. They met on a bench for a few minutes after Benton and the Doc left the morgue. I happened to see it because I was waiting to pick them up. My read on it is Dr. Lester wanted to update Morales on what the Doc did in the morgue, what she found out. But for what it’s worth, Dr. Lester was text-messaging somebody when she walked off in the dark.”

“I’m not sure that means anything,” Berger said. “Everybody text-messages these days.”

“That’s bizarre,” Lucy said. “She meets with him in a dark park? Are they . . . ?”

“I tried to imagine it,” Marino said. “I couldn’t.”

“He has a way of sidling up close to people,” Berger said. “They might be friendly. But not the other. No. I’d say she’s not his type.”

“Not unless he’s a necrophile,” Marino said, as if there were such a word.

“I’m not going to make fun of anyone,” Berger said, and she meant it.

“Point being,” Marino said, “I guess it sort of surprised me because I don’t think of her as having anything personal enough with anybody to merit her text-messaging them.”

“It’s more likely she was text-messaging the chief medical examiner,” Berger said. “Just speculation. But that would be like her to pass on information to him, especially if she could take credit for what somebody else did.”

“Covering her ass because she probably missed stuff,” Lucy said. “So she wanted to call the chief right away. I’d have to get into his e-mail to figure it out.”

“And you’re not going to do that,” Berger said.

Her shoulder was solidly against Lucy’s as she said it.

Lucy was so aware of Berger’s every motion, sound, and scent, she could be on LSD, based on what she’d read about it: an increased heart rate and higher body temperature, and crossover sensations such as “hearing” colors and “seeing” sounds.

“It might be something like that,” Marino was saying. “She’s a pilot fish. Has to swim after the sharks to get the leftovers they drop. I’m not making fun of her. It’s the truth.”

“What’s the Terri connection in all this?” Berger asked.

Lucy replied, “The photograph was sent to her, specifically, to the user account called Lunasee.”

“Sent by?” Berger asked.

“Scarpetta six-twelve sent it to her the first Monday of December, the third, and what’s not making much sense is for some reason Terri, I’m going to say it was Terri, deleted it, and whoever sent it also deleted it, which is why it wasn’t in the trash. I had to restore it with the neural networking programming.”

Marino said, “You’re telling us the photo was sent December third, and both parties immediately deleted it that same day?”

“Yes.”

“Was there a message with it?” Berger asked.

“Showing you that right now.”

Lucy moved her finger on the trackpad.

“This,” she said.

Date: Mon, 3 December 2007 12:16:11

From: “Scarpetta”

To: “Terri”

Terri,

I know you like primary source material, so consider this an early Christmas present—for your book. But I do not want to be credited with having given this to you, and will deny it if asked. Nor will I tell you who took it—wasn’t with my permission (the idiot gave me a copy, assumed I’d be pleased). I’m asking that you move the photo to a Word file and delete it from your e-mail as I’ve just now deleted it from mine.—Scarpetta

“Terri Bridges was writing a book?” Marino asked.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “But based on what Jaime and I have seen of this master’s thesis? Could very well be that’s where it was headed.”

Berger said, “Especially if she really believed all this material was coming from Kay, and I do think she believed that. I think Lunasee was Terri. For the record. Although I know it’s speculative.”

“I do, too,” Lucy said. “Obviously, the critical question is whether whoever’s been posing as my aunt in these e-mails to Terri has anything to do with her murder.”

“What about the IP?” Marino asked.

“When can you guys get the info from the ISP—the Internet service provider—to identify the customer? Because the address I get is a twenty-something block of the Upper East Side that includes the Guggenheim, the Met, and the Jewish Museum. That’s not real helpful.”

Lucy knew the exact location but wasn’t going to be forthcoming about it. Berger didn’t like her to break the rules, and Lucy had her friends in the world of ISPs, some of them going back to her federal law-enforcement years, and others further back than that, who knew people who knew people. What she’d done was no different from cops getting a warrant after they’d already opened the trunk of a car and discovered a hundred kilos of cocaine inside.

She said, “Also right around in that area, which is basically Museum Mile, is Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s dermatology practice.”

Berger’s face was close to hers in the dark backseat, her fragrance a spell.

Berger said, “Right around in that area? How right around are we talking about?”

“The dermatologist to the stars has an apartment that’s the entire thirtieth floor in the building where her office is,” Lucy said. “She’s away for the holidays. Her office doesn’t reopen until Monday the seventh.”

Chapter 27

Scarpetta waited to go inside the library until she could find an excuse to be alone, and Lucy’s call provided it.

Leaving Morales and Benton in the bedroom, she walked back toward the living room and entered the library as Lucy told her over the phone about a posting on the John Jay website and asked if she was aware of it. Scanning shelves of old psychiatric volumes, Scarpetta told her that she wasn’t.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Scarpetta added. “Everything I’m hearing makes me feel sorry, really sorry. I wish I’d known she was trying to get hold of me.”

She didn’t see the book Oscar had told her about, The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor, where he claimed to have hidden the CD. Her doubts about him proliferated. What kind of game was he playing with her?

“And the photograph on the Internet this morning,” Lucy said. “Taken in the morgue here in New York. You were talking to Dr. Lester. Does that sound familiar?”

“I have no recollection of anybody taking my picture when I’ve been there or I would have thought of it when I first saw the photo today.”

“When you look at the photo again, fill in the background with a countertop and a security camera video display. Maybe you can figure out where the person might have been standing. Maybe that will tell you something.”

“It would have been from the direction of an autopsy table. There are three of them in the autopsy suite, so maybe it was somebody there for another case. I promise I’ll think about it carefully, but not right now.”

All she could think about right now was talking to Oscar again and telling him the book wasn’t here. She could imagine his reply. They must have gotten hold of the CD. That would explain the thread on the floor outside his door. They had gotten in. That’s what he would say. She hadn’t mentioned the book or the hidden CD to Morales or Benton. She couldn’t tell them the book and CD were there, and she couldn’t tell them that they weren’t. She was Oscar Bane’s physician. What had gone on between the two of them, within reason, remained confidential.

“You got something to write with?” Lucy asked. “I’m giving you Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s phone numbers. The dermatologist.”

“I know who she is.”

Lucy explained that the photograph was e-mailed to Terri Bridges on December 3, at around noon, from an Internet coffee shop across the street from Dr. Stuart’s office. She gave Scarpetta a cell phone number, and also a number for a time-share presidential suite at the St. Regis in Aspen, Colorado, and said Dr. Stuart always stayed there under her husband’s name, which was Oxford.

“Ask for Dr. Oxford,” Lucy said. “Amazing what people will tell you, but I didn’t pass along all this to anyone else. Jaime has this thing about going through legal channels, imagine? Anyway, can you ask Morales something for me and then tell Benton to call me?”

“I’m walking that way now.”

“I’m in the foyer of Terri’s brownstone, logged on to the wireless network, which is accessible to all the apartments,” Lucy said. “And it’s broadcasting, meaning it’s visible to anybody on it. There’s a device on it.”

Oscar’s home gym was in the master bedroom, his foil-tented bed in the midst of it, and Benton and Morales were talking.

“What is it you want me to ask him, exactly?” Scarpetta said.

She could see why Morales was popular with women and be-grudgingly respected but resented by just about everybody else, including judges. He reminded her of a couple of the star athletes on scholarship at Cornell when she was there as an undergraduate, these scrappy, supremely self-assured young men who compensated for their relatively small stature by being wiry and fast, brazen and outrageous. They listened to no one, had little regard for their team or coaches, and were intellectually lazy but scored points and were crowd pleasers. They weren’t nice people.

“Just ask him if he’s aware that there’s a camera,” Lucy was saying.

“I can answer that,” Scarpetta said. “He installed a surveillance camera on the roof. Marino knows about it. Is Jaime with you?”

Scarpetta didn’t realize why she’d asked until the words were out. It was something she sensed, maybe had sensed it the first time she’d seen them together when Lucy was scarcely more than a child, at least in Scarpetta’s mind, practically a child. Berger was a good fifteen years older than Lucy.

Why did it matter?

Lucy certainly wasn’t a child.

She was explaining to Scarpetta that Berger and Marino had gone across the street to talk to a witness. She hadn’t been with them for a good half-hour.

Maybe it was the simple logic that a prosecutor as busy and important as Jaime Berger was unlikely to spend her evening inside a Greenwich Village loft watching a computer run a program. Anything Lucy discovered could have been relayed over the phone or electronically. While it was true that Berger was known for being hands-on and extremely energetic and fierce when it came to absorbing crime scenes in person and directing the evidence to be analyzed and quickly, and on occasion showing up at the morgue if there was an autopsy she wanted to see and Dr. Lester wasn’t the ME doing it, she didn’t watch computers. She didn’t pull up a chair in the labs and watch gas chromatography, microscopy, trace evidence examination, or low copy number DNA amplification in the works.

Berger gave marching orders and had meetings to go over the results. It bothered Scarpetta to think of Lucy and Berger alone in that loft for hours. Scarpetta’s uneasiness about it likely went back to the last time she’d seen them together, five years ago, when she’d appeared unannounced at Berger’s penthouse.

She hadn’t expected to discover Lucy there, confiding in Berger about what had happened in that hotel room in Szczecin, Poland, offering details that to this day Scarpetta didn’t know.

She’d felt she was no longer the center of her niece’s life. Or perhaps she had seen it coming, that one day she wouldn’t be. That was the truth, her selfish truth.

Scarpetta told Benton that Lucy needed to talk to him. He hesitated, waiting for a signal from her that she was all right.

“I’m going to check his cabinets,” she said, and that was her signal.

Benton should leave the bedroom so he could have a private conversation.

“I’ll be down the hall,” Benton said, entering a number on his cell phone.

Scarpetta could feel Morales watching her as she walked into Oscar’s bathroom. The more she saw of the way he lived, the more depressed she was by his obvious deteriorated mental state. Bottles in the medicine cabinet made it clear he believed his own nightmares, and the date on several prescription bottles validated the timeline, too.

She found l-lysine, pantothenic and folic and amino acids, bone calcium, iodine, kelp, the sort of supplements taken by people who had suffered radiation damage or feared they had. Beneath the sink were large bottles of white vinegar that she suspected he was adding to his baths, and early last October he had filled a prescription for eszopiclone, which was used to treat insomnia. Since then, he had refilled the prescription twice, most recently at a Duane Reade pharmacy, on December twenty-seventh. The name of the prescribing doctor was Elizabeth Stuart. Scarpetta would call her, but not now and not here.

She began going through a small closet where Oscar kept the expected over-the-counter medications and first-aid necessities such as Band-Aids, rubbing alcohol, gauze—and a lubricant called Aqualine. She was looking at it when Morales walked in. The price sticker was missing from the unopened jar, so she had no idea where it had been purchased.

“Isn’t that sort of like Vaseline?” he asked.

“Sort of,” she replied.

“You think the labs can tell if this is the same stuff that was recovered from her vagina?”

“It’s more commonly used as a healing ointment,” Scarpetta said. “To treat burns, irritated or cracked skin, atopic dermatitis, eczema, that sort of thing. None of which Oscar has, by the way. Popular with runners, bikers, race walkers. Rather ubiquitous. You can get it at any pharmacy and most grocery stores.”

It almost sounded as if she was defending Oscar Bane.

“Yeah. We know little Oscar’s quite the little walker, flat-footed fella that he is. The doorman says he goes out in his little warm-ups almost every day, no matter the weather. The ladder’s on the roof, how about that for strange? The building’s got no idea why. I’m thinking the little guy climbed up the fire escape and came in one of his windows, then went out through the roof access and pulled the ladder up behind him. That explains why it’s on the roof.”

“Why might he do that?”

“To get in.” Morales stared intensely at her.

“And opening his window wouldn’t set off the alarm?” she asked.

“It was set off. I called the alarm company to inves-ti-gate. Not long after Oscar checked out of Bellevue, yup, the alarm went off. The service called his apartment, and a man answered and said it was an accident and gave the password. It’s not that loud. The building wouldn’t have heard it, especially if it was deactivated quickly. So what do you think?”

“I don’t have a thought about it.”

“Shit, you have thoughts about everything, Dr. CNN. That’s what you’re known for. You’re known for all these amazing thoughts you have.”

He walked to the closet she was searching. He bumped against her as he picked up the jar of Aqualine.

“Chemically,” he said, “we could tell if this is the same stuff recovered from her body, correct?”

“Certainly,” she said, “you could determine what it’s not, such as K-Y jelly, which has certain antiseptic and preservative additives like sodium hydroxide and methylparaben. Aqualine is preservative-free, mainly mineral oil and petrolatum. I’m pretty sure nothing like this was found in Terri’s apartment. At least it’s not on the evidence inventory, and I checked the medicine cabinet, looked around when I was just there. You would know better than anybody.”

“Doesn’t mean he didn’t bring it in his murder kit, and leave with it. I’m not saying Oscar did, I’m saying the killer did. But I’m also not saying they aren’t the same person, either.”

Morales’s brown eyes were intense on hers. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and at the same time angry.

“But you’re on the money about nothing being in her apartment,” he said. “Last night I didn’t know we were looking for a lubricant because the autopsy hadn’t been done yet. But I did look when I went back.”

This was the first she’d heard that he’d gone back, and she thought about Terri’s guest room office and Marino’s comment that it appeared someone had groomed the carpet in there.

“After your buddy Marino found her laptops, I went back and checked out the place to make sure there wasn’t anything else missed,” Morales said. “By then I knew the autopsy results, had talked to Pester Lester. So I poked around for a lubricant. Nope, not there.”

“We noticed the carpet in her office,” she said.

“I bet you did,” he said. “My mama taught me to clean up after myself, straighten the fringe on the rug, be dutiful and responsible. Speaking of, guess I’d better bag up a few of these things. Did I tell you I got a search warrant just in case we found something good?”

He flashed her a bright, toothy smile and winked.

They returned to the bedroom with its gym equipment and foil tent. She opened a closet and scanned a shelf that had more foam-lined helmets and several antennas. She rifled through clothing, most of it casual, and noted plastic panels in the pockets of several blazers, yet another type of shield, and she remembered Oscar’s anxious comment in the infirmary about not having any protection with him.

On the floor were pairs of small snow boots, dress shoes, Nikes, and a wicker basket filled with hand grips, jump ropes, ankle weights, and a deflated fitness ball.

She picked up the Nikes. They looked old and not suitable for a serious athlete with potential joint and foot problems.

“These are the only running shoes?” she asked Morales. “Seems like he would have a better pair than this. In fact, multiple pairs.”

“I keep forgetting what they call you,” he said.

He moved next to her.

“Eagle eye,” he said. “Among other things.”

He was close enough for her to see faint reddish freckles scattered over his light brown skin, and she smelled his loud cologne.

“Wears a Brooks Ariel made especially for people who overpronate and need a lot of stability,” he said. “Kind of an irony.”

He waved his hand around the bedroom.

“I’d say your fan Oscar could use all the stability he can get,” Morales added. “Good for flat-footed people. Wide-bodied, unique tread pattern. I got the pair he was wearing last night and dropped it off at the labs. With his clothes.”

“Meaning he wore what, exactly, when he checked himself out of Bellevue a little while ago?” she asked.

“Another eagle-eye question.”

She kept inching away from him, and he continued to crowd her. She was almost in the closet, and she placed the Nikes back on the floor and stepped around and away from him.

“Last night when I agreed to take him to the crazy hotel,” Morales said, “I made a little deal. I said if he’d let me have his clothes, we’d stop by his apartment first so he could get a jump-out bag. Then he’d be all set when he was ready to leave.”

“Sounds like you were expecting he wouldn’t stay long.”

“I was expecting exactly that. He wasn’t going to stay long because his reason for being there was to see Benton and, most of all, you. He got his dream come true and he boogied.”

“He came in here by himself last night to get his so-called jump-out bag of clothes?”

“Wasn’t under arrest. Could do what he wanted. I waited in the car, and he went in, took him maybe ten minutes. Max. Maybe that’s why his little booby trap thread was on the floor. He forgot to drape it over the top of the door when he was leaving. He was a little upset.”

“Do we know what was in his jump-out bag?”

“One pair of jeans, a navy blue T-shirt, another pair of his Brooks running shoes, socks, underwear, and a zip-up wool coat. The ward’s got an inventory. Jeb went through it. You met Jeb.”

She didn’t say anything as they stood near the aluminum-foil tent, eye to eye.

“The corrections officer outside your door this afternoon. Making sure you were safe,” he said.

She was startled by Rod Stewart singing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

The music ringtone on Morales’s personal digital assistant, a hefty and expensive one.

He pressed his Bluetooth earpiece and answered, “Yeah.”

She walked out and found Benton inside the library, his gloved hands holding a copy of a book, The Air Loom Gang.

Benton said, “About a machine controlling someone’s mind back in the late seventeen hundreds. You okay? I didn’t want to interfere. Figured you’d yell if you needed me to crush him into a cube.”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Read that loud and clear.”

He returned the book to its empty slot on a shelf.

“I was telling you about The Air Loom Gang ,” he said. “This apartment’s like a scene out of it. Bedlam.”

“I know.”

Their eyes met, as if he was waiting for her to tell him something.

“Did you know Oscar had a bag packed with clothing on the ward, in case he got the urge to leave?” she said. “And that Morales brought him over here last night?”

“I knew Oscar could leave whenever he chose,” he replied. “We’ve all known that.”

“I just think it’s uncanny. Almost as if Morales was encouraging him to leave, wanted him out of the hospital.”

“Why would you think that?” Benton asked.

“Some things he said.”

She glanced around at the open doorway, worrying Morales might suddenly walk in.

“A feeling there was a fair amount of negotiating going on last night when he drove Oscar away from the scene, for example,” she said.

“That wouldn’t be unusual.”

“You understand the predicament I’m in,” she said, scanning old books again, and disappointed again.

Oscar said the book with the CD would be in the second bookcase, left of the door, fourth shelf. The book wasn’t there. The fourth shelf was stacked with archival boxes, each of them labeled Circulars.

“What should he have in his collection that he doesn’t, in your opinion? To make it more complete.” Benton said it for a reason.

“Why do you ask?”

“There’s a certain corrections officer named Jeb who tells me things. Unfortunately, Jeb tells a lot of people things, but he sure didn’t want you getting hurt today when you were in the infirmary, and he wasn’t happy at all with your making him step outside. When I called and found out Oscar was gone, Jeb and I had a chat. Anyway, what’s Oscar missing in here?”

“I’m surprised he doesn’t have The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor. By Littleton Winslow.”

“That’s interesting,” Benton said. “Interesting you would come up with that.”

She tugged his sleeve and they got on the floor in front of the second bookcase.

She started pulling archival boxes off the bottom shelf, and was beginning to feel unhinged, as if she’d lost her GPS, anything that might tell her which direction was the right one. She didn’t know who was crazy and who wasn’t, who was lying or telling the truth, who was talking and to whom, or who might turn up next that she wasn’t supposed to see.

She opened an archival box and found an assortment of nineteenth-century pamphlets about mechanical restraints and water cures.

“I would have thought he’d have it,” she said.

“The reason he doesn’t is because there’s no such book,” Benton said, his arm against hers as they looked at pamphlets.

His physical presence was reassuring, and she needed to feel it.

“Not by that author,” Benton added. “ The Experiences of an Asylum Doctorwas written by Montagu Lomax about fifty years after Littleton Winslow, son of Forbes Winslow, wrote his famous Plea of Insanity, his Manual of Lunacy.”

“Why would Oscar lie?”

“Doesn’t trust anyone. Truly believes he’s being spied on. Maybe the bad guys will hear where he’s hidden his only proof, and so he’s cryptic with you. Or maybe he’s confused. Or maybe he’s testing you. If you care about him enough, you’ll come into this library just as you have, and figure it out. Could be a number of reasons.”

Scarpetta opened another archival box, this one filled with circulars about Bellevue.

Oscar had said that she and Benton would be interested in what he’d collected about Bellevue.

She lifted out a manual on nursing, and an in-house published directory of the medical and surgical staff between 1736 and 1894. She picked up a stack of circulars and lectures going back to 1858.

At the bottom of the box was a thumb drive attached to a lanyard.

She pulled off her gloves, wrapped the thumb drive in them, and handed them to Benton.

She got up and felt Morales before she saw him, in the doorway. She hoped he hadn’t seen what she’d just done.

“We got to leave right now,” Morales said.

He was holding a paper bag of evidence, the top of it sealed with red tape.

Benton returned the archival box to its bottom shelf and got up, too.

She saw no sign of the glove-wrapped thumb drive. He must have slipped it into his pocket.

“Jaime and Marino are across the street—not here, across the street from Terri’s apartment in Murray Hill,” Morales said, keyed up and impatient. “The witness who called in the animal-cruelty report? She’s not answering her phone or the intercom. The light’s out at the building’s entrance, and the outer door’s locked. Marino said when he was there earlier, the outer door wasn’t locked.”

They were walking out of Oscar’s apartment. Morales didn’t bother resetting the alarm.

“Apparently, there’s a fire escape ladder and a roof hatch,” he said, tense and impatient. “The roof hatch is propped open.”

He didn’t bother with the deadbolt, either.

Chapter 28

One tenant had returned home since Marino was here earlier, the man in 2C, the second floor. When Marino had walked around to the side of the building a few minutes ago, he could see lights on and the flickering of a TV behind opaque shades.

He knew the tenant’s name because he knew the names of everyone. So far, the tenant, Dr. Wilson, a twenty-eight-year-old resident physician at Bellevue, wasn’t answering the intercom.

Marino tried again, while Berger and Lucy stood by in the cold wind, watching and waiting.

“Dr. Wilson,” Marino said, holding in the intercom button. “This is the police again. We don’t want to force our way into the building.”

“You haven’t said what the problem is.” A man’s voice, presumably Dr. Wilson’s, answered through the speaker by the door.

“This is Investigator Marino, NYPD,” Marino repeated himself, tossing Lucy his car keys. “We need to get into Two-D. Eva Peebles’s apartment. If you look out your window, you’ll see my unmarked dark blue Impala, okay? A female officer is going to turn on the grille lights so you can see for a fact it’s a police car. I understand your being reluctant to unlock the door, but we don’t want to forcibly enter the building. When you came in, did you see your neighbor?”

“I can’t see anything. It’s too dark out,” the voice replied.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Marino said to nobody in particular, the button released so Dr. Wilson couldn’t hear him. “He’s been smoking pot, what you want to bet? So he doesn’t want to let us in.”

“Is this Dr. Wilson?” Marino asked over the intercom.

“I don’t have to answer your questions and I’m not going to unlock the front door. Not after what happened across the street. I almost didn’t come back.”

One of his windows slid up, and the shade moved.

Marino was sure the guy was stoned, and he remembered what Mrs. Peebles said about her neighbor who smoked pot. Son of a bitch. More worried about getting charged with possession than about whether the elderly widow in the apartment across from his might be in trouble.

“Sir, I need you to unlock the front door right now. If you look out the window, you’re going to see the entrance light is out. Did you turn the light out when you came in earlier?”

“I didn’t touch any lights,” the man’s voice said, and now he sounded nervous. “How do I know you’re police?”

“Let me try,” Berger said, and she pushed the intercom button on the panel to the right of the door while Marino shone his flashlight on it, because they were completely in the dark.

“Dr. Wilson? This is Jaime Berger with the district attorney’s office. We need to check on your neighbor, but we can’t do that if you don’t let us into the building.”

“No,” the voice came back. “You get some other real police cars here, maybe I’ll think about it.”

“That probably made things worse,” Marino said to her. “He’s been in there smoking weed, I guarantee it. That’s why he opened his damn window.”

Lucy was inside Marino’s car, and the high-intensity red and blue flashing lights started bouncing off glass.

“I’m unmoved,” the voice came back again, even more resolute. “Anybody can buy those.”

“Let me talk to him,” Berger said, shielding her eyes from the rapid bursts of blinding blue and red.

“Tell you what, Dr. Wilson,” Marino said into the intercom. “I’m going to give you a number I want you to call, and when the dispatcher answers, you tell him there’s a guy outside your building who says he’s Investigator P. R. Marino, okay? Ask him to verify it, because they know I’m right here right now with Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger.”

Silence.

“He’s not going to call,” Berger said.

Lucy trotted back up the steps.

Marino said to her, “How ’bout doing me another favor while I stand here and babysit.”

He asked her to return to his car and radio the dispatcher. She asked him what happened to his portable radio, or were police not bothering with portable radios anymore. He said he’d left his in the car and maybe she could grab it for him while she was requesting an unmarked backup unit and an entry tool kit, including a battering ram. She said it was an old door and they probably could pry it open with a Gorilla Bar, and he said he wanted more than just a Gorilla Bar, and that he wanted the prick doctor who was stoned on the second floor to get an eyeful of a Twin Turbo Ram like they used to bust in doors at crack houses, and maybe then they wouldn’t need to use it because the asshole would buzz them in. Marino told her to request an ambulance, just in case Eva Peebles needed one.

She wasn’t answering her phone or the intercom. Marino couldn’t tell if any lights were on inside her apartment. The window that her computer was in front of was dark.

He didn’t need to give Lucy radio codes or any further instructions. Nobody needed to teach Lucy a damn thing about being a cop, and as he watched her duck inside his car, he felt a tug from the past. He missed the old days when the two of them rode motorcycles together, went shooting, worked investigations, or chilled out with a six-pack, and he wondered what she was carrying.

He knew she was carrying something. For one thing, there was no way in hell Lucy would run around unarmed, even in New York. And he knew a Pistol Pete jacket when he saw one, and he’d noticed hers the instant she’d gotten out of the cab while he and the other officer were loading the packaged chair into the back of the van. What looked like a black leather motorcycle jacket had an outside breakaway pocket big enough to hold just about any pistol imaginable.

Maybe she was carrying the forty-caliber Glock with a laser sight that he’d given to her a year ago this past Christmas, when they were both in Charleston. Well, wouldn’t that be typical of his lousy luck. He’d never gotten around to transferring the title over to her before he’d vanished from her life, so if she did anything that was whacked out, the damn gun would be traced straight back to him. All the same, the idea that she might care enough about the gun to risk breaking New York law and maybe going to jail made him feel good. Lucy could have any gun she wanted. She could buy an entire gun factory, probably several of them.

She climbed back out of his unmarked car as if it belonged to her, and jogged back to them, and he was thinking he should come right out and ask her if she was carrying, and if so, what, but he didn’t. She stood next to Berger. There was something between them and it hadn’t escaped his notice any more than the Pistol Pete jacket did. Berger didn’t stand or sit close to people. She never let anybody break through the invisible barrier that she had to have around her, or believed she had to have around her. She touched Lucy, leaned against her, and watched her a lot.

Lucy handed Marino his portable radio.

“You must be a little rusty. Been out of real policing too long?” Lucy said to him with a serious tone and straight face, what little he could see of her face in the dark. “Bad idea leaving your radio in the car. Little oversights like that? Next thing, somebody gets hurt.”

“If I want to take one of your classes, I’ll sign up for it,” he said.

“I’ll see if I have room.”

He got on his portable radio and called the unit en route to find out where he was.

“Coming around the corner now,” came the reply.

“Hit your lights and siren,” Marino said.

He pressed the intercom button.

“Hello?” the voice answered.

“Dr. Wilson. Unlock the door right now or we’re going to break it down!”

A siren screamed, and he heard a buzz and he shoved open the door. He flipped a switch, turning on a light inside the small foyer, and directly ahead were the polished old oak stairs leading up, and he slid out his pistol as he got back on the air and told his backup to cut the lights and siren and stay put and watch the front of the building. He ran up the steps, Lucy and Berger right behind him.

He could feel the cold air coming in from the open roof hatch when they reached the second floor, and the lights were out there, too. Marino searched the wall to flip them on. He could see the night sky through the opening in the ceiling, and he didn’t see a ladder, and his sense of urgency and his premonition grew. Most likely, the ladder was on the roof. He stopped at 2D and noticed the door wasn’t completely shut. He guided Berger to one side and briefly met Lucy’s eyes. His system was on high alert as he pushed the door open with his foot and it softly thudded against the inside wall.

“Police!” he yelled, and he had his gun out, gripped in both hands, the barrel pointed up. “Anybody here? Police!”

He didn’t have to tell Lucy to shine her light into the room. She was already doing it, and then her arm snaked past his shoulder and she flipped a switch, and an old, ornate chandelier cast the room in a soft glow. Marino and Lucy stepped inside and motioned for Berger to stay behind them. Then nobody moved for a moment. They looked around, and sweat was cool as it rolled down Marino’s back and sides, and he wiped his forehead with his sleeve as his eyes darted to the tan corduroy recliner he’d been sitting in earlier, and the couch where Mrs. Peebles had been drinking her bourbon. The wall-mounted flat-screen TV was on, the volume off, and the Dog Whisperer was silently talking to a snarling beagle.

Old wooden Venetian blinds were drawn in all the windows. Lucy was close to the computer on the desk, and she tapped a key. The computer screen filled with what looked like the Gotham Gotcha website gone berserk.

Gotham Gotcha!was rearranging into OH C THA MAGGOT! And the New York skyline was black against flashing red, and the Christmas tree from Rockefeller Center was upside down in Central Park, and a snowstorm struck and lightning flashed and thunder clapped inside FAO Schwarz right before the Statue of Liberty seemed to blow up.

Berger quietly stared at it. She stared at Lucy.

“Go on,” Lucy told Marino, indicating she’d cover Berger and him while he began clearing the apartment.

He checked the kitchen, a guest bath, the dining room, and then he faced the closed door leading into what he assumed was the master area. He turned the cut-glass knob and pushed the door open with his toe as he swept the bedroom with his gun. It was empty, the king-size bed neatly made and covered with a plaid quilt with dogs embroidered on it. On the nightstand was an empty glass, and in a corner was a small pet carrier but no sign of a dog or cat.

Lamps had been removed from the two nightstands and placed on either side of an open doorway, illuminating the edge of black-and-white tile. He positioned himself to one side of the bathroom as he quietly approached, and swung his gun around and pointed it as he noticed a slight movement before he could see what it was.

Eva Peebles’s frail nude body was suspended by satiny gold rope that was looped once around her neck and tied to a chain in the ceiling. Her wrists and ankles were tightly lashed with translucent plastic straps, her toes barely touching the floor. Cold air blowing through an open window had created an eerie oscillation, the body slowly twirling in one direction, then the other, as the rope twisted and untwisted, again and again.

Scarpetta feared that the person who murdered seventy-two-year-old Eva Peebles had also killed Terri Bridges. She feared that person might be Oscar Bane.

The thought had entered her mind the minute she’d entered the bedroom and seen the lamps on the floor and the body suspended by a gold rope that had been removed from a drapery in the dining room and attached to a short length of iron chain. The alabaster half-globe light fixture that had been attached to the chain’s S-link was inside the tub, on top of folded clothing that she could tell from where she was taking photographs in the doorway had been cut open at the seams and removed from the victim after her ankles and wrists were bound, most likely while she was still alive.

On the shut white toilet lid were several unmistakable shoeprints no bigger than a boy’s, with a distinctive tread pattern. It appeared the assailant had stood there to access the overhead fixture, and from that height, someone four feet tall could have managed quite well, especially if the person was strong.

If Oscar Bane was the killer after all, Scarpetta had misinterpreted and misjudged, in part based on what a tape measure had told her, and she’d been steered by her integrity as a physician, and there was no room for mistakes or confidentiality when people were dying. Maybe she should have kept her opinions to herself and encouraged the police to find Oscar immediately or aggressively prevented his release from Bellevue to begin with. She could have given Berger cause to arrest him. Scarpetta could have said a number of things, not the least of which was that Oscar had faked his injuries, had lied to the police about them, lied about an intruder, lied about why his coat was in the car, lied about a book and a CD in his library. The ends would have justified the means, because he’d be off the street, and possibly Eva Peebles wouldn’t be dangling from her ceiling.

Scarpetta had been acting too much like Oscar’s goddamn doctor. She’d made the mistake of caring about him, of feeling compassion. She should stay away from suspects, restrict herself to people who can’t suffer anymore and therefore are easier to listen to, to question, to examine.

Berger returned to the bedroom and stood at a sensible distance, because she was experienced with crime scenes and wasn’t wearing the disposable protective clothing that covered Scarpetta from head to toe. Berger wasn’t the sort to allow her curiosity to override her coolheaded judgment. She knew exactly what to do and what not to do.

“Marino and Morales are with the only person currently at home,” Berger said. “A guy you’d never want for your family doctor, whose apartment, as I understand it, is about fifty degrees because the windows are open. You can still smell the pot in there. We’ve got officers outside to make sure nobody else enters the building, and Lucy’s dealing with the computer in the living room.”

“The neighbor,” Scarpetta asked. “He didn’t notice the damn roof hatch was open and all the lights were out? When the hell did he get home?”

She was still surveying before touching anything, the body slowly twirling in the uneven light of the lamps.

“What I know so far is this,” Berger said. “He says he returned home around nine, at which time the lights weren’t out and the roof hatch wasn’t open. He fell asleep in front of the TV and didn’t hear a thing, assuming someone entered the building.”

“I’d say it’s a safe assumption that someone entered the building.”

“The ladder to the roof hatch is kept in a utility closet up here—same scenario as across the street. Benton says the ladder is definitely on the roof. It appears the assailant was either familiar with this building or with buildings set up like this one, like Terri’s, and found the ladder. He went out through the roof and pulled the ladder up after him.”

“And the theory about how he got in?”

“Theory of the moment is she must have let him in. Then he turned out the lights on his way up to her apartment. She must have known him or had reason to trust him. And the other thing. The neighbor says he didn’t hear any screams. Which is interesting. Possible she didn’t scream?”

“Let me tell you what I’m seeing,” Scarpetta said. “And then you can answer your own question. First, even without moving any closer, I can tell by her suffused face, her tongue protruding from her mouth, the sharp angle of the noose high under her chin and tightly knotted behind her right ear, and the absence of any other apparent ligature marks, that the cause of death is probably going to be asphyxiation by hanging. In other words, I don’t think we’re going to find that she was garroted or strangled by a ligature first, and then her dead body was suspended by a drapery cord from a light-fixture chain.”

“I still can’t answer my question,” Berger said. “I don’t know why she wouldn’t have screamed bloody murder. Someone straps your wrists behind your back, your ankles—tight as hell with some sort of flex-cuff. And you’re nude. . . .”

“Not flex-cuffs. Looks like the same type of strap used on Terri Bridges’s wrists. And also like Terri’s case? The clothes were cut off.” Scarpetta pointed to what was in the tub. “I think he wants us to know the chronology of what he does. Seems to go out of his way to make it pretty clear. Even left the lamps where he’d set them so we could see, since the only light in here, in the bathroom, is the one he removed and placed in the tub.”

“You’re conjecturing he set up the lamps like that for our benefit?”

“For himself first. He needed to see what he was doing. Then he left them. Made it more of a rush for whoever found her. The shock effect.”

“Sort of like Gainesville. The severed head on a bookshelf,” Berger said, looking past her, at the body slowly twirling in its infernal, mocking pirouette.

“Sort of,” Scarpetta said. “That and the body winding and unwinding, which may very well be the reason the window’s open. I’m guessing it was his final brushstroke on his way out.”

“To artificially speed up the cooling of the body.”

“I don’t think he gave a damn about that,” Scarpetta said. “I think he opened the window so the air blowing in would do exactly what it’s doing. To make her dance.”

Berger silently watched the body slowly dance.

Scarpetta retrieved her camera and two LCD chemical thermometers from her crime scene case.

“But since there are buildings everywhere around us,” Scarpetta said in a hard voice, “he would have, at the very least, had the blinds shut while he was doing his handiwork in here. Otherwise, someone might have seen the entire ordeal. Maybe filmed it with a cell phone. Posted it on YouTube. So he was callous enough to draw up the blinds before he left, to make sure the wind blew in and created his special effects.”

“I’m sorry you had to encounter Marino like this,” Berger said, aware of Scarpetta’s anger but not the reason for it.

Scarpetta’s mood had nothing to do with Marino. She’d dealt with that drama earlier and felt quite done with it for the time being. It wasn’t important right now. Berger was unfamiliar with Scarpetta’s demeanor at crime scenes because she had never worked one with her, and had no clue what she was like when confronted with such blatant cruelty, especially if she was worried that a death might have been prevented, that maybe she could have helped prevent it.

This had been an awful way to die. Eve Peebles had suffered physical pain and abject terror while the killer had his sadistic fun with her. It was a wonder and a pity she didn’t die of a heart attack before he’d finished her off.

Based on the sharp upward angle of the rope around her neck, she wasn’t rendered unconscious quickly, but likely suffered the agony of not being able to breathe as the pressure of the rope under her chin occluded her airway. Unconsciousness due to a lack of oxygen can take minutes that seem forever. She would have kicked like mad had he not bound her ankles together, which might be why he’d done so. Maybe he’d refined his technique after Terri Bridges, realizing it was better not to let his victims kick.

Scarpetta saw no sign of a struggle, just an abraded bruise on the left shin. It was very recent, but that was as much as she could say about it.

Berger said, “Do you think she was already dead when he hung her from the chain?”

“No, I don’t. I think he bound her, cut her clothes off, placed her in the tub, then slipped the noose around her neck and hoisted her up just far enough for the weight of her body to tighten the slipknot and compress her trachea,” Scarpetta said. “She couldn’t thrash but so much because of her bindings. And she was frail. At most she’s five-foot-three and weighs a hundred and five pounds. This was an easy one for him.”

“She wasn’t in a chair. So she didn’t watch herself.”

“This time, I don’t think so. That’s a good question for Benton as to why. If we’re talking about the same killer.”

Scarpetta was still taking photographs. It was important she capture what she was seeing before she did anything else.

Berger asked, “Do you have a doubt?”

“What I feel or think doesn’t matter,” Scarpetta said. “I’m staying away from that. I’ll tell you what her body’s telling me, which is there are profound similarities between this case and Terri’s.”

The shutter clicked and the flash went off.

Berger had moved to one side of the doorway, her hands clasped behind her back as she looked in and said, “Marino’s in the living room with Lucy. She thinks the victim might have something to do with Gotham Gotcha. ”

Scarpetta said without turning around, “Crashing the site wasn’t a good way to deal with it. I hope you’ll impress that upon her. She doesn’t always listen to me.”

“She said something about a morgue photograph of Marilyn Monroe.”

“That wasn’t the way to handle it,” Scarpetta said to the flash of the camera. “I wish she hadn’t.”

The body slowly turned, the rope winding and unwinding. Eva Peebles’s blue eyes were dull and open wide in her thin, wrinkled face. Strands of her snowy hair were caught in the noose. The only jewelry she had on was a thin gold chain around her left ankle—just like Terri Bridges.

“She admitted to it?” Scarpetta asked. “Or is it the process of elimination?”

“She’s admitted nothing to me. I’d prefer it stay that way.”

“All these things you’d rather she not tell you,” Scarpetta said.

“I have plenty to say to her without doing so in a way that might be disadvantageous,” Berger said. “But I get your point completely.”

Scarpetta studied the black-and-white tile floor before stepping her paper-booted feet inside. She set one thermometer on the edge of the sink, and tucked the other under Eva Peebles’s left arm.

“From what I gather,” Berger said, “whatever virus brought down the website also enabled her to hack into it. Which then allowed her to hack into Eva Peebles’s e-mail—don’t ask me to explain it. Lucy’s found an electronic folder containing virtually every Gotham Gotcha column ever written, including the one posted this morning and a second one posted later in the day. And she’s found the Marilyn Monroe photograph, which Eva Peebles apparently opened. In other words, it seems this woman”—she meant the dead one—“didn’t write them. They were e-mailed to her from IP addresses that Lucy says have been anonymized, but since this is yet another violent death that is possibly related to e-mails, we won’t have any trouble getting the service provider to tell us who the account belongs to.”

Scarpetta handed her a notepad and pen and said, “You want to scribe? Ambient temp is fifty-eight degrees. Body temp is eighty-nine-point-two. Doesn’t tell us a whole lot, since she’s thin, unclothed, the room’s been steadily cooling. Rigor’s not apparent yet. Not surprising, either. Cooling delays its onset, and we know she called nine-one-one at what time, exactly?”

“Eight-forty-nine, exactly.” Berger made notes. “What we don’t know is exactly when she was in the pet shop. Only that it was approximately an hour before she called the police.”

“I’d like to hear the tape,” Scarpetta said.

She placed her hands on the body’s hips to stop its slow, agitated turns. She examined it more closely, exploring it with the flashlight, noting a shiny residue in the vaginal area.

Berger said, “We know she said she believed the man she encountered was Jake Loudin. So if he’s the last person to see her alive . . . ?”

“Question is whether he literally was the last person. Do we know if there might be any personal connection between Jake Loudin and Terri Bridges?”

“Just a possible connection that might be nothing more than a coincidence.”

And Berger began telling her about Marino’s earlier interview, about a puppy that Terri didn’t want, a Boston terrier named Ivy. She continued to explain that it was unclear who had given the sick puppy to Terri, perhaps Oscar had. Perhaps someone else. Perhaps it originally had come from one of Jake Loudin’s shops, hard to know, maybe impossible to know.

“I don’t need to tell you that he’s very upset,” Berger said, and she meant Marino. “Always the biggest thing any cop fears. You talk to a witness, and then the person is murdered. He’s going to worry he could have done something to prevent it.”

Scarpetta continued to hold the body still as she got a closer look at the gelatinous material clumped in gray pubic hair and in the folds of the labia. She didn’t want to close the window—not before the police processed it with whatever forensic methods they deemed best.

“Some sort of lubricant,” she said. “Can you ask Lucy if her plane has already left La Guardia?”

They were three rooms away from each other, and Berger called her.

“Bad luck is good luck in this case. Tell them to hold off,” Berger said to Lucy. “We’ve got something else that needs to go down there . . . Great. Thanks.”

She ended the call and said to Scarpetta, “A wind shear warning in effect. They’re still on the ground.”

Chapter 29

The shoe impressions recovered from the toilet seat in Eva Peebles’s bathroom were an exact match to the tread pattern of the shoes that Oscar Bane had been wearing last night when he’d allegedly discovered Terri’s body.

More incriminating were fingerprints lifted from the glass light fixture that the killer had removed from the ceiling and placed in the tub. The prints were Oscar’s. At shortly past midnight, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and an all points bulletin went out over the air and over the Internet.

The “Midget Murderer” was now being called the “Midget Monster,” and police nationwide were looking for him. Morales had also alerted Interpol, in the event Oscar somehow managed to evade airport and border security and escaped the country. There had been plenty of reported sightings. In fact, the latest news break as of the three a.m. broadcast was that some little people, especially young men, were staying home for fear of harassment or worse.

It was now almost five o’clock Wednesday morning, and Scarpetta, Benton, Morales, Lucy, Marino, and a Baltimore investigator who insisted on being called her surname, Bacardi, were in Berger’s penthouse apartment living room, and had been, for about four hours. The coffee table was covered with photographs and case files, and cluttered with coffee cups and bags from a nearby all-night deli. Power supply cords ran from wall outlets to the laptops they were plugged into, everybody tapping keys and looking at files as they talked.

Lucy was sitting cross-legged in a corner of the wraparound couch, her MacBook in her lap, and every now and then she glanced up at Morales, wondering how she could be right about what she was thinking. Berger had a bottle of Knappogue Castle single-malt Irish whiskey and a bottle of Brora single-malt Scotch. They were clearly visible behind glass in the bar directly across from her. She’d noticed the bottles immediately when everyone had first gotten here, and when Morales had noticed her noticing, he’d walked over to look.

“A girl with my taste,”he’d said.

The way he’d said it had given Lucy a sick feeling she couldn’t shake, and she’d had a hard time concentrating on anything since. Berger had been sitting next to her in the loft when they’d read the alleged interview in which Scarpetta supposedly told Terri Bridges that she drank liquor that cost far more than Terri’s schoolbooks. Why hadn’t Berger said anything? How could she have the same extremely rare and expensive whiskeys in her own bar and not mention that detail to Lucy?

It was Berger who drank the stuff. Not Scarpetta. And more unsettling than that was Lucy’s fear about who Berger might drink it with. That was what had entered her mind when Morales had noticed her noticing the bottles in the bar. He was almost smirking, and whenever he looked at her now, there was a glint in his eyes as if he’d won a contest Lucy knew nothing about.

Bacardi and Scarpetta were arguing, and had been at it for a while.

“No, no, no, Oscar couldn’t have done my two.” Bacardi was shaking her head. “I hope I’m not offending anybody when I say dwarf, but I can’t get used to saying little people or little person. Because I’ve always called myself a little person because I’m not the longest drink of water, like we say down south. I’m an old dog. No new tricks, can barely hang on to the ones I got.”

She might be relatively short, but she wasn’t little. Lucy had seen countless Bacardis in her life, almost all of them on Harleys, women on the downhill side of five feet who insisted on having the biggest touring bike, about eight hundred pounds of metal, their boots barely touching the pavement. In one of her earlier manifestations with the Baltimore PD, Bacardi had been a motorcycle cop, and she had a face that went with it, one that had enjoyed too much intimacy with the sun and wind. She squinted a lot, and did a fair amount of scowling, too.

She had short dyed red hair and bright blue eyes, was sturdy but not fat, and probably thought she’d gotten dressed up when she’d decided on her brown leather pants, cowboy boots, and snug scoop-neck sweater that exposed the tiny butterfly tattooed on her left breast and plenty of cleavage whenever she’d bend over to dig into her briefcase on the floor. She was sexy in her own way. She was funny. She had an Alabama accent as thick as fudge. She wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, and Marino hadn’t stopped looking at her since she’d walked through the door carrying three boxes of files from the homicides that had been committed five years ago in Baltimore and Greenwich.

“I’m not attempting to make the point that a little person could or couldn’t have done anything,” Scarpetta replied.

Unlike most people, she was always polite enough to stop typing, to unglue her eyes from her computer screen when she talked to someone.

“But he couldn’t have,” Bacardi said. “And I don’t mean to keep interrupting like Old Faithful going off, but I just had to get this out and make sure all of you are hearing me. Okay?”

She looked around the room.

“Okay,” she answered herself. “My lady, Bethany, was almost six feet tall. Now, unless she was lying down, there’s no way someone four feet tall could have garroted her.”

“I’m simply pointing out she was garroted. Basing that on the photographs you’ve shown me and the autopsy findings I’ve reviewed,” Scarpetta patiently said. “The angle of the marks on her neck, and the fact there are more than one of them, et cetera. I’m not saying who did or didn’t do it—”

“But that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying who did or didn’t. Bethany didn’t kick or struggle, or if she did, by some miracle she didn’t scrape or bruise herself. I’m telling you, someone normal size was behind her, and both of them were standing up. I think he raped her from behind while he was doing it, because that’s what got him off. And same thing with Rodrick. The kid was standing up, and this guy was behind him. The advantage the perp had in my cases is he was big enough to control them. He intimidated them into letting him bind their hands behind their backs. It doesn’t appear they struggled with him at all.”

“I’m trying to remember how tall Rodrick was,” Benton said, and his hair was very messy, his face covered with stubble that reminded Lucy of salt.

Two all-nighters, back-to-back, and he looked like it.

“Five-foot-ten,” Bacardi said. “One hundred and thirty-six pounds. Skinny and not strong. And not much of a fighter.”

“We can say all of the victims have one thing in common,” Benton then said. “I should say all of the victims we know about. They were vulnerable. They were impaired or at a disadvantage.”

“Unless the killer’s Oscar,” Berger reminded everybody. “Then the odds change. I don’t care if you’re a skinny kid on oxys. You’re not at a disadvantage, necessarily, if your assailant is only four feet tall. And I hate to keep saying it, but unless there’s another logical explanation for how his fingerprints turned up at Eva Peebles’s crime scene? And prints made by a size-five women’s shoe, a Brooks Ariel? And Oscar just happens to wear that exact same shoe, and he buys it in a size-five women’s?”

“Can’t overlook the fact he’s disappeared, either,” Marino said. “He’s got to know we’re looking for him, and he’s choosing to be a fugitive. He could turn himself in. It would be in his best self-interest. He’d be safer.”

“You’re talking about someone profoundly paranoid,” Benton said. “There is nothing on earth that would convince him it’s safe to turn himself in.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” Berger said, looking at Scarpetta.

She was going through autopsy photographs and didn’t notice Berger’s thoughtful stare.

“I don’t think so,” Benton said, as if he knew what was on Berger’s mind. “He wouldn’t do it, not even for her.”

Lucy decided that Berger must be hatching a plan for Scarpetta to make an appeal to Oscar.

Morales said, “Don’t know how we’d get the message to him, anyway. Unless she calls his home phone. Maybe he can’t resist, is checking his messages.”

“Never happen,” Benton said. “Be Oscar for a minute, get inside his mind. Who’s going to call him that he wants to hear from? The only person who mattered to him, the only person he seemed to trust, is dead. And I’m not sure how much he trusts Kay anymore. No matter. I don’t believe he’s checking his voicemail remotely. He already thinks he’s being monitored, spied on, which is the main reason he’s hiding, in my opinion. The last thing he’s going to do is take the chance he might end up on the enemy’s radar again.”

“What about e-mail?” Morales asked. “Maybe if she sent him an e-mail? Sent it from Scarpetta six-twelve. I mean, he believes that really is you.”

He looked at Scarpetta, who was looking up at everyone now, listening to them strategize about what she might do that could convince Oscar to turn himself in to the police. Lucy could tell by the look on her face that she wasn’t interested in playing bait and switch with Oscar Bane. Except now she could. Confidentiality didn’t matter anymore. Oscar was a fugitive from justice. There were warrants out for his arrest and, barring some miracle, when he was apprehended, he would go to trial and he would be convicted. Lucy didn’t want to think about what might happen to him in prison.

Lucy said, “I think he would assume we’ve been in his e-mail. He’s not going to log on to his account. Not unless he’s stupid or desperate or losing control. I agree with Benton. You want my suggestion? Try television. Unless he believes people can find him when he turns on a TV in a Holiday Inn, that’s probably the only thing he’s monitoring. He’s watching the news.”

“You could make an appeal to him on CNN,” Berger said.

“I think that’s genius,” Morales agreed. “Go on CNN and tell Oscar to please turn himself in. That it’s the best plan for his useless life, under the circumstances.”

“He can call his local FBI field office,” Benton suggested. “Then he doesn’t have to worry about falling into the hands of some rural sheriff’s department that doesn’t know what the hell is going on. Depending on where he is.”

“He calls the FBI, they’ll take the credit for his arrest,” Morales said.

“Who gives a flying fuck who takes the credit,” Marino said. “I agree with Benton.”

“So do I,” Bacardi said. “He should call the FBI.”

“I appreciate everybody deciding on that for me,” Berger said. “But actually, I tend to agree with you. It’s much riskier if he ends up in the wrong hands. And if by some chance he’s no longer in the U.S., he can still call the FBI. As long as he ends up back here, I don’t care who gets him.”

Her eyes found Morales.

She added, “Credit isn’t an issue.”

He stared back at her. He looked at Lucy and winked. The mother-fucking prick.

Scarpetta said, “I’m not going on CNN and asking him to turn himself in. That’s not who I am. It’s not what I do. I don’t take sides.”

“You’re not serious,” Morales said. “You telling me you don’t go after the bad guys? Dr. CNN always gets the bad guy. Come on. You don’t want to ruin your reputation over a dwarf.”

“What she’s telling you is she’s the advocate of the victim,” Benton said.

“Legally, that’s correct,” Berger said. “She doesn’t work for me or the defense.”

“If everybody’s finished speaking on my behalf and has no further questions, I’d like to go home,” Scarpetta said, getting up and getting angrier.

Lucy tried to remember the last time she’d seen her aunt as angry as she was right now, especially before an audience. It wasn’t like her.

“What time do you expect Dr. Lester to start Eva Peebles’s case? I mean really start it. I’m not asking what time she said she’d start it. I don’t intend to show up down there and sit around for hours. And unfortunately, I can’t start the case without her. It’s unfortunate she’s doing it at all.”

Scarpetta looked directly at Morales, who had called Dr. Lester from the scene.

“I don’t have control over that,” Berger said. “I can call the chief medical examiner, but that’s not a good idea. I think you understand. They already think I’m a meddler down there.”

“That’s because you are,” Morales said. “Jaime the Meddler. Everybody calls you that.”

Berger ignored him and got up from her chair. She looked at her very expensive watch.

She said to Morales, “Seven o’clock is what she said, is that right?”

“That’s what Pester Lester said.”

“Since you seem to be so chummy with her, maybe you could check and make sure she really is going to start the case at seven, so Kay doesn’t take a taxi down there after being up all night, and then sit.”

“You know what?” Morales said to Scarpetta. “I’ll go pick her up. How ’bout that? And I’ll call you when we’re en route. I’ll even swing by and get you.”

“That’s the best idea you’ve had in a while,” Berger said to him.

Scarpetta said to both of them, “Thanks, but I’ll get myself there. But yes, please call me.”

When Berger returned from seeing Scarpetta and Benton to the door, Marino wanted more coffee. Lucy followed Berger into her spacious kitchen of stainless steel, wormy chestnut, and granite, deciding she had to say something now. How Berger responded would determine if there was a later.

“You heading out?” Berger’s tone turned familiar as she met Lucy’s eyes and opened a bag of coffee.

“The whiskeys in your bar,” Lucy said, rinsing the coffeepot and refilling it.

“What whiskeys?”

“You know what whiskeys,” Lucy said.

Berger took the pot from her and filled the coffeemaker.

“I don’t,” she said. “Are you telling me you want an eye opener? I wouldn’t have thought you’re the type.”

“There’s nothing funny about this, Jaime.”

Berger flipped up the on switch and leaned against the counter. She really didn’t seem to know what Lucy was talking about, and Lucy didn’t believe her.

Lucy mentioned the Irish whiskey and the Scotch that were in her bar.

“They’re on the top shelf behind glass, in your own damn bar,” Lucy said. “You can’t miss them.”

“Greg,” Berger said. “He collects. And I did miss them.”

“He collects? I didn’t know he was still around,” Lucy said, feeling worse, maybe the worst she’d ever felt.

“What I mean is those are his,” Berger said with her usual calm. “If you start opening cabinets in there, you’ll see a fortune in small-batch this and single-malt that. I did miss them. They never entered my mind, because I don’t drink his precious whiskeys. Never did.”

“Really?” Lucy said. “Then why does Morales seem to know you have them?”

“This is ridiculous, and it’s neither the time nor the place,” Berger said very quietly. “Please don’t.”

“He looked right at them as if he knew something. Has he ever been here before this morning?” Lucy said. “Maybe the Tavern on the Green gossip is more than that.”

“I not only don’t have to answer that, I won’t. And I can’t.” Berger said it without an edge, almost gently. “Maybe you could be so kind as to ask who wants coffee and what they might want in it?”

Lucy walked out of the kitchen and didn’t ask anyone anything. She unplugged her power supply. She calmly looped the cord around her hand and tucked it into a pocket of her nylon case. Then the MacBook went inside.

“Got to head back to my office,” she said to everyone as Berger returned.

Berger asked about coffee, as if everything was fine.

“We haven’t listened to the nine-one-one tape,” Bacardi suddenly remembered. “I want to hear it, anyway. Don’t know about everyone else.”

“I should hear it,” Marino said.

“I don’t need to hear it,” Lucy said. “Someone can e-mail the audio file to me if they want me to hear it. I’ll be in touch if I have any new information. I’ll see myself out,” she said to Jaime Berger without looking at her.

Chapter 30

“Poor doormen,” Scarpetta said. “I think I spooked them more than usual.”

When they arrived at their luxury apartment building, one glimpse of her crime scene case and the doormen always stayed clear. But this early morning, the reaction was stronger than usual because of the news. A serial killer was terrorizing New York’s East Side, and may have killed before, years earlier, in Maryland and Connecticut, and Benton and Scarpetta looked pretty scary themselves.

They stepped onto the elevator and rode up to the thirty-second floor. The minute they were inside the door, they started undressing.

“I wish you wouldn’t go down there,” Benton said.

He yanked off his tie as he took off his jacket, his coat already draped over a chair.

“You’ve gotten swabs, you know what killed her. Why?” he said.

Scarpetta replied, “Maybe just once today people will treat me as if I have a mind of my own or even half the one I used to have.”

She dropped her suit jacket and blouse into the biohazard hamper near the door, a practice so normal for them, it only rarely occurred to her what an odd sight they would be if anybody was watching, perhaps with a telescope. Then she thought of the new helicopter the NYPD had gotten, something Lucy had mentioned. It had a camera that could recognize faces up to two miles away, or something like that.

Scarpetta unzipped her pants and tugged them off, and she grabbed a remote from the Stickley mission oak coffee table in a living room full of Stickleys and Poteet Victory oils on canvas. She closed the electronic blinds. She felt rather much like Oscar, hiding from everyone.

“I’m not sure you agreed with me,” she said to Benton, both of them in their underwear and holding their shoes. “And by the way, this is us. Are you happy? This is what you married. Someone who has to change when she comes through the door because of the antisocial places she visits.”

He took her in his arms and buried his nose in her hair.

“You’re not as bad as you think,” he said.

“I’m not sure how you mean that.”

“No, I did agree with you. Or yes, I did. If it weren’t—” He held out his left arm behind her head, still holding her close, and looked at his watch. “Quarter past six. Shit. You might have to leave in a minute. That part I don’t agree with you about. No. Babysitting Dr. Lester. I’m going to pray for a big storm that prevents you from going anywhere. See your favorite painting in here? Mister Victory’s Balancing Elements? I’m going to pray to the Great Spirit that the elements will be balanced, and you’ll stay home and take a shower with me. We can wash our shoes together in the shower like we used to do after crime scenes. And then you know what we did after that.”

“What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing.”

“So you agree about my not going on television,” she said. “And please do pray. I don’t want to babysit her. Everything you said is true. I know what happened to Eva Peebles. She and I discussed it in her bathroom. I don’t need to discuss it with Dr. Lester, who doesn’t listen and isn’t as open-minded as Eva Peebles was. I’m tired and stressed out and sound like it. I’m angry. I’m sorry.”

“Not at me,” he said.

“Not at you,” she said.

He stroked her face, her hair, and looked deep into her eyes, the way he did when he was trying to find something he’d lost, or perhaps thought he’d lost.

“It’s not about protocols or whose side you’re on,” he said. “It’s about Oscar. It’s about everybody who’s been brutalized. When you’re not sure who’s doing what or how or why, it’s better to stay behind the scenes. This is a good time to stay away from Dr. Lester. To carry on quietly. Jesus,” he suddenly said.

He returned to the hamper and fished out his pants. He reached into a pocket and pulled out the thumb drive still wrapped in the pair of purple gloves.

“This,” he said. “This is important. Maybe the Great Spirit just heard my prayer.”

Scarpetta’s cell phone rang. It was Dr. Kiselstein at Y-12.

She said to him before he could say anything, “Lucy said it got there safely. I apologize a thousand times. I hope you weren’t waiting. I’m not sure where.”

Dr. Kiselstein’s German-accented voice in her earpiece: “Since I usually don’t receive samples from private jets, I treated myself and listened to music on the iPod my wife gave me for Christmas. So small, I could wear it as a tie clip. It was no problem. I know McGhee-Tyson, the Air National Guard base, except, as I said, usually not the jet of a millionaire. Usually a C-one-thirty or some other cargo plane bringing us something from Langley that NASA won’t admit to. Like faulty heat shields. Or prototypes, which I like much better because nothing bad has happened. Of course, when they are strange deliveries from you, it’s always bad. But I do have some results, as this is timely, I realize. No official report of the analysis. That will be a while.”

Benton gave up hovering. He touched her cheek and headed to the shower.

“What we have, basically, is an ointment that is mixed with blood, possibly sweat, and silver salts, and along with this are fibers of wood and cotton,” Dr. Kiselstein said.

Scarpetta moved toward the sofa. She got a pen and notepad from an end-table drawer and sat down.

“Specifically, silver nitrate and potassium nitrate. And carbon and oxygen, as you would expect. I’m e-mailing images to you, taken at different magnifications up to one thousand-X. Even at fifty-X you can see the blood, and the silver-rich regions are quite bright due to their higher atomic number. You can also see silver nitrate in the wood—small, whitish silver-rich specks evenly dispersed over the surface.”

“Interesting it’s evenly dispersed,” she said. “Same with the cotton fibers?”

“Yes. Visible at higher magnifications.”

To her an even dispersement implied something that might have been manufactured as opposed to a random transference due to contamination. If what she suspected was correct, however, they were likely dealing with both.

She asked, “What about skin cells?”

“Yes, definitely. We are still at the lab, and this will be going on for a day or two. No rest for the wicked. And this is very difficult because you sent many samples. What I’m calling you about is just two of them. One from each case. The chair and a swab. You might think the cotton and wood fibers are from the swabs you used on the body, and yes, maybe no. I can’t tell you. But not so with the chair, because you didn’t swab the chair seat?”

“No. That wasn’t touched.”

“Then we can conclude the cotton and wood fibers in the material on the chair cushion are there for another reason, perhaps transferred by the ointment, which presents a challenge as it’s nonconductive. That requires us to use variable pressure, which maintains the high vacuum in the gun needed to create the electron beam as the rest of the chamber is backfilled with dry filtered air. And we have reduced the scattering of the electron beam by minimizing the working distance. I suppose I am making excuses. The ointment is difficult to image because the electron beam actually melts it, I’m afraid. It will be better when it dries.”

“Silver nitrate applicators for cauterizing skin, possibly? That’s what comes to my mind right away,” she said. “Which might explain the presence of blood, sweat, skin cells. And a mixture of different DNA profiles if we’re talking about a communal jar of a healing ointment. If we’re talking about a source being, perhaps, a medical office? For example, a dermatologist?”

“I won’t ask about your suspects,” Dr. Kiselstein said.

“Anything else interesting about the chair?”

“The frame is iron with trace elements of gold in the paint. There was no one sitting in it when we placed it in the chamber. Suspects and punishment aren’t my department.” They hung up.

Scarpetta tried Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s numbers and got voicemail. She didn’t leave a message and stayed on the sofa, thinking.

She believed she was dealing with Marino just fine until she decided to call him and realized she didn’t have his cell phone number. So she called Berger, and the way the prosecutor answered, it was as if she knew who it was and that the call was personal.

“It’s Kay.”

“Oh,” Berger’s voice. “It said restricted. I wasn’t sure.”

When Lucy called, it came up as restricted. Scarpetta had a feeling something was going on with them that wasn’t good. Lucy had been very subdued during the meeting. Scarpetta hadn’t tried to call her, was assuming she was still with Berger. Maybe not.

Berger said, “Morales called a few minutes ago, said he’s getting your voicemail.”

“I’ve been on my phone, with Y-Twelve. I’m not going to be able to head to the morgue right this minute.”

She gave Berger a quick summary.

“Then that’s a common denominator,” Berger decided. “The dermatologist. Terri went to her. And you said Oscar does. Or did.”

Scarpetta had revealed that detail during the meeting just a little while ago, because she no longer was bound by patient-physician confidentiality. It wasn’t right not to divulge the information, but she’d felt uncomfortable doing it. Just because the situation had changed legally didn’t mean it felt that way to her. When Oscar had talked to her and wept so bitterly, he really hadn’t anticipated the day when she’d betray him, no matter how many times she’d warned him and encouraged him to get a good lawyer.

She was so conflicted. She resented him, was incensed by him, because she felt she should be someone he could trust. And she resented him, was incensed by him, because she didn’t want his goddamn trust.

“I need to tell Marino what Y-Twelve has discovered,” Scarpetta said to Berger. “I don’t know how to reach him.”

Berger gave her two numbers and said, “Have you heard anything from Lucy?”

“I thought she might be with you,” Scarpetta said.

“Everybody left about a half-hour ago. She left right after you and Benton did, minutes after you did. I thought she might have caught up with you. She and Morales weren’t getting along.”

“He’s not somebody she would like.”

After a pause, Berger said, “That’s because she doesn’t understand a number of things.”

Scarpetta didn’t respond.

“We get older and there really aren’t absolutes,” Berger said. “There never were.”

Scarpetta wasn’t going to help her.

“You’re not going to talk about it, and that’s fine.” Berger’s voice, still calm, but something else was in it.

Scarpetta shut her eyes and pushed her fingers through her hair, realizing how helpless she felt. She couldn’t change what was happening, and it was foolish and wrong to try.

“Maybe you could save me a little time,” Scarpetta said. “Perhaps you could call Lucy and let her know about the Y-Twelve results. You do it instead of me, and I’ll try to find Marino. And while you have her on the phone, perhaps you might try a different tactic. Be very, very honest with her, even if you think she’ll get incredibly upset or might use it against you. Just give her the facts even if you think it might ruin your case, cause you to lose something. That’s hard for people like us, and that’s all I’m going to say. I’m wondering if Bacardi—God help me, I can’t get used to calling any real person that—would know if either Bethany or Rodrick was seeing a dermatologist in Baltimore or Greenwich in 2003. I noticed in the police report that he was taking Accutane for acne.”

“Implying a dermatologist,” Berger said.

“I would hope so. That’s not an insignificant medication.”

“I’ll pass all this on to Lucy. Thank you.”

“I know you will,” Scarpetta said. “I know you’ll tell her whatever she needs to hear.”

Benton was out of the shower and wrapped in a thick robe, stretched out on the bed. He was scrolling through something on his laptop, and Scarpetta moved it out of the way and sat next to him. She noticed the red thumb drive plugged into a port.

“I’m not clean yet,” she said. “I probably smell like death. Would you still respect me if I told a lie?”

“Depends on who it’s to.”

“To another doctor.”

“Well, then, that’s fine. For future reference, lawyers are preferable if you’re going to lie to someone.”

“I went to law school and don’t appreciate lawyer jokes,” she said, smiling.

She combed her fingers through his hair. It was still damp.

She added, “I’ll tell my lie in front of you, and it won’t seem as much a sin. I can’t wait to get in the shower and brush my teeth. And these . . .”

Realizing she still had her dirty shoes in one hand while she touched his hair with the other.

“I thought you were going to wait and take a shower with me,” she said. “And we’d wash our shoes.”

“I planned to take a second one,” he said. “I haven’t washed my shoes yet.”

Scarpetta got up from the bed and used the landline.

This time she didn’t call Dr. Stuart’s presidential suite directly or her cell phone, she tried the St. Regis front desk. She said she was from CNN and trying to reach Dr. Stuart, who she realized stayed there under the name of Dr. Oxford.

“Hold on, please.”

And then Dr. Stuart was on the line.

Scarpetta told her who she was, and Dr. Stuart said brusquely, “I don’t discuss my patients.”

“And I generally don’t discuss other doctors on television,” Scarpetta said. “But I might make an exception.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it means, Dr. Stuart. At least one of your patients has been murdered in the past twenty-four hours, and another one is being accused of that murder and another murder, and more charges could follow, and he’s vanished. As for Eva Peebles, who also was murdered last night? I don’t know if she’s one of your patients. But what I do know is that forensic evidence indicates you’d be wise to be helpful. For example? I’m wondering if a certain woman from Palm Beach who has a home in New York might also be your patient.”

Scarpetta gave her the name of the paraplegic whose DNA was found in Terri Bridges’s vagina.

“You absolutely know I can’t release information about my patients.”

Dr. Stuart said it in a way that confirmed the woman was her patient.

“I absolutely know how it works,” Scarpetta said, and to be sure, she added, “Just tell me no if she’s not your patient.”

“I’m not going to say no to anything.”

Scarpetta went through the same routine with Bethany and Rodrick, without telling Dr. Stuart why she wanted to know. If the dermatologist had been acquainted with them, she wouldn’t need Scarpetta to tell her the two had been murdered five years ago. She would know that.

“As you might imagine, I have plenty of patients from the Greenwich area, because I have an office in White Plains,” Dr. Stuart said as Scarpetta leaned against Benton and looked at what he was scrolling through.

It looked like sections of maps someone had been e-mailing to Oscar—allegedly.

“I’m not saying whether those two people have ever been seen by anyone in my practice,” Dr. Stuart said. “I will tell you that I remember the young man’s death. Everyone was shocked. Just as we are by what’s just happened in New York. I saw it on the news last night. But the reason I remember Greenwich is because the Aston Martin dealership—”

“Bugatti,” Scarpetta said.

“I use the Aston Martin dealership. It’s very close to Bugatti,” Dr. Stuart said. “That’s why the boy’s murder hit home. I’ve probably driven within a block of the spot where he was found or killed. When I’ve taken my Aston Martin in for service. That’s the reason I remember, if you understand what I’m saying. Actually, I don’t have that car anymore.”

She was hinting that neither Rodrick nor Bethany had been her patient and that she would have been aware of a sadistic sexual homicide because it had reminded her of a car that cost more than some people’s homes.

“Do you have anybody working for you or somehow connected with your practice who the police should be aware of?” Scarpetta asked. “Or let me ask it in a way easier to answer. What might you be thinking if you were me?”

“I’d be thinking about the staff,” she said. “In particular, part-timers.”

“Which part-timers?”

“Part-time techs, residents, particularly those who do menial things in the offices and come and go. For example, work at one of my offices during their summer breaks or after hours. It could be anything from cleaning up to answering the phones and paging the physician on call. I have one who’s also a vet tech. But has never been a problem. It’s just he’s more of an unknown, and I don’t work with him personally. He’s rather much a cleaner-upper and assists other doctors. I have a huge practice. More than sixty employees at four different locations.”

“Vet tech?” Scarpetta said.

“I believe that’s what he does for his full-time job. I know he has something to do with pet stores, because he’s gotten a few of my staff puppies. A vet tech who helps with the pets in these places. Probably not in a way I want to know about, truth be told,” Dr. Stuart said. “He’s an odd duck, tried to give me a puppy once, on my birthday last summer. One of those Chinese crested dogs that has no fur except on its head, tail, and feet. This was maybe an eight-week-old puppy that looked deformed, as if it had alopecia, and all it did was shiver and cough. He wrote in a card that I could tell everyone I was doing hair removal on dogs now, that I was adding pet dermatology to my practice, or something like that. It was peculiar and I wasn’t amused and made him take the puppy back. Frankly, it was an extremely upsetting experience.”

“Did you ever ask him what happened to the puppy?”

“I have a good idea.”

She said it ominously.

“He likes to give injections, put it like that,” Dr. Stuart said. “He’s very good with needles, has some phlebotomy training. Look, this is making me very upset. His name is Juan Amate.”

“That’s his full name? Often Hispanic names include the mother’s maiden name, not just the surname.”

“That I don’t know. He’s worked out of my Upper East Side office for the last several years. Maybe three or four years, not sure. I don’t know him personally, and he’s not allowed in the room when I’m with a patient.”

“Why?”

“Frankly? Most of the patients I see personally are VIPs, and I don’t allow part-time techs to assist me. I have my regular assistants, who are accustomed to dealing appropriately with very well-known people. You don’t have a part-time tech drawing blood from an A-list movie star.”

“Did you personally see Terri Bridges or Oscar Bane, or would that have been one of your other doctors?”

“I wouldn’t have reason to know them personally. But I do have a few other little people who are patients, since obesity is one of the most common problems, and an unfortunate side effect of dieting can be skin problems. Acne, premature lines and creases on the face and neck, and if one doesn’t have the proper fat intake, the skin doesn’t hold moisture as well, so now we add dry flakiness to the list.”

She didn’t see Terri or Oscar personally. They weren’t important enough.

“Is there anything else you can tell me about Juan Amate?” Scarpetta said. “I’m not saying he’s done anything wrong. But I don’t want anyone else hurt or dead, Dr. Stuart. Do you know where he lives, anything like that?”

“Have no idea. I doubt he has much money. Olive complexion, dark hair. Hispanic. Speaks Spanish, which is helpful. Speaks English fluently, which is a requirement in my practice.”

“Is he a U.S. citizen?”

“He should be. But that’s not for me to check on. I suppose the answer is I don’t know.”

“Anything else you can tell me? For example, do you have any idea where the police might find him right now, to ask questions?”

“No idea whatsoever. I know nothing else. I just didn’t like it when he gave me that Chinese puppy,” she said. “I felt there was something mean about the gesture. As if he were jerking me around somehow—of all people? To give me an extremely ugly dog with hair and skin problems? I just remember it being very upsetting, and then I looked bad to my staff because I made him take the pathetic little thing out of there immediately, and he said he didn’t know what he’d do with it, as if I was sentencing the pitiful creature to . . . Well, it’s as if he wanted to make me look heartless, and I think I actually started almost thinking about firing him after that. Obviously, I should have.”

Benton had placed his hand on Scarpetta’s bare thigh, and when she ended the call, he put his arm around her and directed her attention to what he had been looking at while she was on the phone.

He scrolled through maps, scores of them.

“Track logs,” Benton said. “These thick colored lines, the dark pink ones?” He traced one that ran from Amsterdam to an Upper East Side location on Third Avenue. “An actual track mapped by a GPS.”

“Simulated or real?” Scarpetta asked.

“I think these are real tracks. It appears they’re recordings of routes Oscar took, hundreds of them. Some kind of recording process was on while he was going to various locations. As you can see.”

He scrolled through about a dozen maps.

“Most of them either begin or terminate at the address of his apartment building on Amsterdam. Based on what I’m seeing, these track logs began this past October tenth and ended December third.”

“December third,” Scarpetta said. “The same day the morgue photograph of me appears to have been simultaneously deleted in Scarpetta six-twelve’s and also Terri’s e-mail.”

“And the same day Oscar called Berger’s office and ended up on the phone with Marino,” Benton said.

“What the hell is going on here?” Scarpetta said. “Was he walking around with some kind of bracelet or something that has a GPS chip, and maybe using a PDA that has a GPS, and downloading all of his movements and perhaps e-mailing it to himself? To make it appear he’s being followed, spied on, all those things he’s said?”

“You saw his apartment, Kay. Oscar believes this stuff. But if someone else has been sending these track logs to him, can you imagine?”

“No.”

Benton scrolled through more of them. Locations for grocery stores, several gyms, office-supply stores, or as Benton put it, just locations where he might have walked but didn’t actually go inside the restaurant, bar, or other business.

“And as you can see,” Benton said, rubbing her back, “as time goes on, his destinations become more erratic and variable. He’s changing his locations daily. None of the tracks are the same. You can actually see his fear, the way he’s zigzagging, literally all over the map. Or his simulated fear. If, once again, he’s staged all this. But his fear seems real. His paranoia isn’t faked, I really don’t think so.”

“You can imagine how this will look to a jury,” Scarpetta said, getting up. “It will look like the mad cyber professor manufactured this elaborate plan to make it appear he’s the target of some clandestine organization or hate group or God knows what. It will look as if he followed himself, so to speak, with a GPS, and planted all sorts of bizarre devices all over his apartment, and carried them on his person and in his car.”

She finished undressing, because she had to get into the shower. There was so much to do. And Benton’s eyes were intense on her as he got off the bed.

“No one on earth will believe him,” she said as Benton put his hands on her and kissed her.

“I’ll help you take your shower,” he said, guiding her in that direction.

Chapter 31

The wind buffeted Lucy as she sat on concrete as cold as ice on the brownstone’s roof and took photographs of the camera attached to the footing of the satellite dish.

It was an inexpensive Internet camera that included audio, and was connected to the building’s wireless network and served any tenant who wished to join it.

It also served somebody else. It served Mike Morales, and not in the way everybody thought, which was why it hadn’t occurred to Lucy to check. And she was furious with herself.

Since it was known that another device was connected to the network—the camera that Morales said he had installed himself—it hadn’t entered Lucy’s mind to access the log to the wireless router. It hadn’t occurred to her she ought to check the router’s admin page.

Had she done that last night, she would have discovered what she now knew, and she tried Marino again. For the past half-hour, she’d tried him and Berger, and had gotten voicemail.

She didn’t leave a message. She wasn’t about to leave a message the likes of the one she had.

This time Marino answered, thank God.

“It’s me,” she said.

“You in a wind tunnel, or what?” he said.

“The camera you saw Morales install up here on this roof, where I’m right now sitting? He wasn’t installing it when you surprised him up here. He was probably removing it.”

“What are you talking about? I saw him . . . Well. Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t actually see him do anything. I just got off the phone with your aunt, let me tell you real quick, because she’s trying to get hold of you. Something about our person of interest being tracked by a GPS or something? And he might work as a vet tech at Dr. Stuart’s office? Long and short of it, Terri might have known the killer through the dermatologist’s office, some Hispanic guy . . .”

“Listen to me, Marino! This fucking camera’s been up here for fucking three weeks! And it’s motion-sensitive, so every time it records something it’s e-mailing it to someone who’s about to get hacked into. I’ve got Morales’s damn IP. I’ve got his fucking machine access code, and it’s the same fucking one as Scarpetta six-twelve. Do you understand what that means?”

“I’m not fucking retarded.”

Just like the old days. How many times had he said that to her over the years?

“It means whoever set up this camera and is getting images e-mailed from it is the same person sending e-mails to Terri, pretending to be my aunt. Probably some type of PDA, and the asshole stands out in front of John Jay, hijacks their wireless network, so that’s what the IP comes back to. The machine access code is also the same one for the device used to e-mail the photograph to Terri—the photograph e-mailed from the Internet café near Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s office. Morales is the one who instructed Terri to delete that photograph on December third. . . .”

“Why?”

“He plays fucking games, that’s why. He was probably in the morgue when the damn photo was taken, probably is behind it. Just like the photo of Jaime at Tavern on the Green. He probably orchestrated that and sent it to Gotham Gotcha .”

“Then he’s probably connected to Gotham Gotcha .”

“Got no idea, but I do know Eva Peebles worked for whoever Gotham Gotcha is. And I doubt she could tell you who Gotham Gotcha is, if she were still alive to tell us anything, poor lady. Nothing in her computer identifies who it is. I’m setting up sniff packets even as we speak, looking at info at junction points. Fuckhead Morales. He’s probably your fucking Hispanic vet tech, too. Fucking piece of shit. I’m about to pay him a home visit.”

She was typing on her MacBook as she talked, doing a port scan. Marino had gotten deadly quiet.

“You still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“You want to tell me why the fuck a cop would put up a surveillance camera three weeks before a murder?” she said.

“Jesus Christ. Why would he be sending shit pretending to be her?”

Lucy heard a woman’s voice in the background. Bacardi.

“Why don’t you ask him,” Lucy said. “He’s probably the one who gave Terri the brilliant idea to post something on the John Jay site about her needing to get in contact with my aunt. And Terri does, and then, miracle of miracles, guess who writes her? He obviously knew Terri or he wouldn’t have been e-mailing her. He’s probably the fucking vet tech, like I said, and she knew him because of the dermatologist.”

“He probably gave her the sick puppy. Thought it was funny.” Marino’s voice, muttering. “Then Eva Peebles gets it. The puppy dies. She dies. What’d she do to deserve any of this? Wonder if he’s the one who fixed things in Terri’s apartment. What the landlord was talking about. That would be like him to be a pal, a confidant, to someone who could use a big strong pissant like him. Be like him to get someone like Terri, a forensic psych grad student, to post something on a website, to fuck with everyone. But why the Doc?”

“Because he’s a failed doctor, and my aunt isn’t. I don’t know why. Why does anybody do anything?”

“You’re not going to remove the camera, right? We don’t want him knowing it’s down.”

“Of course not,” Lucy said as the wind ripped at her, as if trying to rip her off the roof. “He’d probably come up here to remove the damn thing, and last thing he expected was you climbing up the fire-escape ladder. Now he has to cover his ass. So he puts on the big act that he’s installing a surveillance camera in case the perp returns to the scene of the crime. Well, bullshit. I’ve got the log open right here on my laptop. This camera’s e-mailed over ten thousand images in the past three weeks and is still grinding away even as we speak. According to the tab status, the asshole’s accessing the network right now. You’ll be happy to know I’ve disabled the audio function. Not that you’d hear a damn thing up here but wind.”

“You absolutely sure about this?” Marino said.

“And I’m in. This is completely illegal,” Lucy said.

“Oh, God,” she said, shocked, as she scrolled through video files.

Video files in Mike Morales’s personal e-mail account. His username was Forenxxx.

She landed on a video file that had been recorded by an entirely different device than the rooftop camera. She opened it and clicked play.

“Oh, Christ,” she said. “A recording made New Year’s Eve. Only this one isn’t from the roof, it’s from inside Terri’s apartment. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”

Berger’s penthouse was two levels, the master area on the upper one, where she and Lucy watched the murder of Terri Bridges on a huge plasma flat screen in a sitting area off the bedroom.

It was almost more than either one of them could stomach, and there was virtually nothing either of them hadn’t seen. They sat rigidly on a sofa, watching Terri’s face in her vanity mirror as a pair of latex-gloved hands garroted her from behind with a rubbery blue tourniquet, the type used in doctor’s offices when blood is being drawn. Victim and assailant were nude, her hands bound behind her back as she kicked savagely from the chair with the heart-shaped back, while he almost lifted her off it as he strangled her into unconsciousness.

Then he would release the pressure and, when she was revived, start again.

She said nothing the entire time, just made the expected awful guttural gagging sounds as her eyes bulged and her tongue protruded from her mouth and spittle ran down her chin. It took exactly twenty-four and a half minutes for her to finally die, because that’s how long it took for him to ejaculate and finish her off, because he had no further interest.

He flushed the condom down the toilet, and he turned off the camera.

“Let’s start it again,” Berger said. “I want to listen a little more carefully to what’s said when he takes her into the bathroom. I’m getting the impression they’d had sex before. And the other things said suggest maybe why he did this. The premeditation factor. He may have had motive that went beyond his sexually sadistic compulsions. Did she call him Juan? Or was that just a sound she made?”

“I suspect she’d been having sex with him long before she had it with Oscar,” Lucy said. “Based on the familiarity, the comments he’s making. She would have known him from Dr. Stuart’s office—for a couple of years. I don’t care if we don’t yet know for a fact that he’s Juan Amate. I’m telling you they’re the same person. They have to be. I think she might have said Juan. I agree, hard to tell.”

She pressed the play button on the remote. The film began mid-sentence with a shot of the vanity and Terri’s terrified face in the oval mirror. Behind her was a man’s naked body. He moved, adjusting himself and the camera angle, exposing his erect condom-sheathed penis, poking it between her shoulder blades as if it were the barrel of a gun. He was visible only from the waist down.

“Just our usual, baby, with a little extra hot sauce thrown in,” the killer’s voice said.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice quavering as his gloved hand held up a scalpel in the mirror and twirled it, and its steel blade caught the light.

The sound of fabric slitting as he cut open her robe, her lacy red bra. It was a shelf bra, and her breasts protruded from it, her nipples exposed. He slit off her matching red lacy panties. He turned the camera on the pink robe and pink slippers and the bra as he dropped them into the tub. His gloved hands waved the cut lacy red panties in front of the camera lens.

“Capturing the flag.” His Hispanic voice. “In my pocket so I can enjoy later, right, little girl?”

“Let’s don’t,” she said. “I don’t think I can.”

“Should have thought about that when you told the little man all our secrets.”

“I didn’t tell him. You sent the e-mails. That’s how.”

“Now, that was a really big mess you made. How’s that going to work? He complained to the fucking DA. How’s that going to work, baby? I trusted you. I did you a favor. And you told him.”

“I never told him. He told me. You were sending him the e-mails, and finally he told me. He got freaked out. Why? Why are you doing this?” And it sounded as if she said Juan.

“You gonna ask me why anything?” The scalpel stroking the air, almost touching her cheek, then withdrawing and vanishing.

“No.”

“So, who’s your man? The little one. Or me?”

“You are,” her terrified face said to the mirror, his gloved hands pinching her nipples.

“Now you know that’s not right, or you wouldn’t have told him.” The killer’s voice chiding her.

“I promise I didn’t. He found out because of the e-mails, those maps you sent him. He told me. You scared him.”

“Now, baby.” Pinching her nipples harder. “I don’t want to hear no more of your lies. And now I gotta figure out how to get that fucking thing out of his ass before somebody else does.”

Lucy hit pause, and the recording froze on a blurry image of Terri’s wide-eyed face talking while his hands squeezed her breasts in the mirror.

“Right there,” Lucy said. “The way he says it. Possible he’s hinting he’s going to murder Oscar? He’s going to be the one to retrieve the thing out of his ass?”

“I’m wondering the same thing,” Berger said.

She triple-underlined a key phrase in notes on her legal pad: Terri’s idea—GPS?

She said to Lucy, “I don’t think there’s any doubt about how this started—that Terri asked Morales to follow Oscar, because she was a jealous, controlling person. It wasn’t her nature to trust anyone, and before she’d even considered making any sort of a commitment to him or perhaps telling her family about him, she wanted proof he was honorable.”

“If one can make psychopathology logical.”

“We have to. Jurors expect reasons for things. You can’t just say someone’s evil or felt like it.”

“She may have said something about wanting to know what Oscar was up to, but I doubt an implanted GPS was her idea,” Lucy said. “I don’t think she ever imagined Morales would do her the favor, and then take it a little further by anonymously e-mailing GPS track logs to Oscar to drive him crazy, to torment the living hell out of him. The e-mailing of the tracking logs stopped when Oscar finally said something about it to Terri, and she obviously must have flown all over Morales about it.”

“Right. That’s what Morales is referring to.” Berger indicated the frozen image on the TV screen. “She did the wrong thing and complained to Morales, berated him, perhaps. A guy like this? You insult his narcissism? And then he’s the typical psychopath and blames it on her because she’s the one who wanted Oscar spied on. Suddenly, it’s her fault that Oscar called my office and reported everything.”

“To Marino, on December third,” Lucy said. “And at that point, Oscar destroyed his computer’s hard drive and hid the thumb drive in his library, where my aunt and Benton found it. And Morales stopped e-mailing the logs to him, because Terri knew, and the gig was up.”

“Kay mentioned the thread on the carpet outside Oscar’s apartment door. The roof access and fire escape. I’m wondering if Morales went in there trying to find this log, and while he was at it, planted a jar of Aqualine. I’m wondering if he came in through the window, set off the alarm, then left through the roof access so the doorman didn’t see him. He had a key and the alarm code, the password. After killing Terri, he got some unexpected surprises. Oscar demanded to go to Bellevue. He demanded to see Benton and Kay. Now the stakes have been raised considerably. Morales has some worthy adversaries to deal with. Including you. He wants that damn tracking log so it’s not traced back to him by someone like you. And he wanted Oscar to take the fall for at least four homicides.”

“A classic case of someone who’s decompensating,” Lucy said. “Morales didn’t need to kill Eva Peebles, not really. For that matter, he didn’t need to kill Terri. He used to be smart and stick with strangers. What I still can’t figure out is why would Oscar let anybody do that?”

“You mean the implant.”

“We just listened to him say it. He stuck something in Oscar’s ass and has to get it back. What else could that mean? I’m thinking there’s only one thing. But you don’t just walk up to someone and say, hey, can I implant a GPS microchip under your skin?”

Berger placed her hand on Lucy’s bare knee and leaned against her to pick up the cordless phone. She called Scarpetta for the second time in the past hour.

“Us again,” Berger said. “Maybe you and Benton should just come over here.”

“I can. He can’t,” Scarpetta said.

Berger put her on speakerphone and set the handset upright on the coffee table inside her handsome sitting area of leather and glass, and Agam polymorphic paintings and serigraphs that seemed to change and shimmer as Berger moved.

Greg’s room.

Where he used to plant himself in front of the TV while Berger was alone in bed, in the adjoining room, sleeping or working. It took her a while to figure out that one of the reasons he started keeping such strange hours, as if he were on UK time, was because he was on UK time. He’d sit in this room, and at some point after midnight New York time, he’d call his friend the barrister, who would just be waking up in London.

“Benton’s with Marino and Bacardi,” Scarpetta said. “They went out. He was rather cryptic about it. I’ve not heard anything from Dr. Lester. Still. I’m assuming you haven’t.”

Morales had dropped off Dr. Lester at the ME’s office earlier, because he didn’t know then what Lucy was about to find out. Now he was aware people were looking for him, because Berger had contacted him. All she’d had to say was, “I think you need to explain some things.”

She’d gotten as far as mentioning silver nitrate and Dr. Stuart, when he hung up on her.

“I suppose someone will tell me if I need to go down there,” Scarpetta said. “Although I seriously doubt it’s an issue, she really should x-ray Eva Peebles carefully. I’m repeating myself, because you don’t want her body leaving the morgue until every inch of it has been x-rayed. Same thing with Terri’s body. X-rayed again, every inch of it.”

“That’s what I’m getting around to,” Berger said. “This idea of the microchip implant. When you talked to Oscar, did you get any idea that might lead you to believe he’d ever, for any reason, allow something like that? Lucy and I are watching this God-awful video again, and that’s what the killer is implying. Morales, I mean. We know it’s him.”

“Oscar would never allow that,” Scarpetta said. “What’s far more likely is he complained about painful treatments, specifically, laser hair removal. And he has had hair removed from his back, possibly from his buttocks. He has no hair at all except on his face, his head. And he has pubic hair. He mentioned Demerol to me. If someone came in with scrubs and a mask on, and Oscar was on his belly, he would never have seen the tech or necessarily recognize him later. At Terri’s apartment, for example, when Morales encountered Oscar at the crime scene? Oscar wouldn’t necessarily connect him with some backroom tech at Dr. Stuart’s office.”

“In the video, we think Terri calls him Juan. We’re not sure. You need to listen,” Berger said.

Scarpetta said, “They’re doing R-and-D with wireless GPS glass-encapsulated chips that have miniature antennas and a power supply that can last up to three months. About the size of a grain of rice, maybe smaller. One of them could have been implanted into his buttocks and he’d never know, especially if it’s migrated, buried itself in deeper, which happens. We could find it with an x-ray, if we can find him. And by the way, he’s not the only one paranoid about this sort of thing. The U.S. government has a number of pilot programs, and a lot of people fear that mandatory chipping is on the horizon.”

“Not me,” Berger said. “I’ll move.”

“You’ll have plenty of company. That’s why some call it Mark of the Beast Six-Six-Six technology.”

“But you didn’t see anything like that in Terri’s x-rays?”

“I’ve been looking,” Scarpetta said. “I have the electronic files of that and everything else, and I’ve been doing nothing but work on all of this since we last spoke. The answer’s no. It’s very important that Dr. Lester get more films, and I want to see them. Especially focusing on the back, the buttocks, the arms. People who have been implanted with microchips usually get them in their arms. Morales would know a lot about microchip technology for the simple reason it’s used to tag animals. He would have seen microchips implanted in pets at the vet’s office. He may have done the implanting himself, a simple procedure that requires nothing more than the chip and an implant gun fitted with a fifteen-gauge needle. I can be there in maybe half an hour.”

“That would be fine.”

Berger reached across Lucy again and ended the call. She returned the handset to its charger. She scribbled more notes and underlined words and phrases. She looked at Lucy for a long moment, and Lucy looked back, and Berger wanted to kiss her again, to resume what had begun when Lucy first appeared at her door and Berger had pulled her by the hand straight up here. Lucy didn’t even have time to take off her coat. Berger didn’t know how she could think about something like that right now, with that hideous image frozen on the big flat screen. Or maybe that was why she was thinking about it. Berger didn’t want to be alone.

“That’s what makes the most sense,” Lucy finally said. “Morales implanting the GPS chip in Oscar while he’s in the dermatologist’s office. Probably thought he was getting a shot of Demerol in his butt. Terri probably had said something to Morales about Oscar, about not knowing if she could trust him, probably when she and Oscar first started dating. And Morales did his thing and acted like her best friend, her confidant.”

“Big question. Who did Terri think Morales was? Juan Amate or Mike Morales?”

“I’m betting Juan Amate. Way too risky if she knew he was an NYPD cop. I think she did call him Juan. I do think that’s what I heard.”

“I think you’re right.”

“If she was screwing around with him, does that compute?” Lucy said. “Morales wouldn’t care if she was seeing someone else?”

“No. As I just said, he acts like your best friend. Women confide in him. Even I have, to an extent.”

“To what extent?”

They had never returned to the subject of the whiskeys in her bar.

“I shouldn’t have to say it,” Berger said. “But Morales and I didn’t have that, and I don’t think you believed we did or you wouldn’t be sitting here. You wouldn’t have come back. The Tavern on the Green rumors. That’s all they are—rumors. And yes, no doubt he started them. He and Greg liked each other.”

“No way.”

“No, no. Not that way,” Berger said. “One thing Greg doesn’t have any ambivalence about is what he likes to fuck, and it definitely isn’t men.”

Chapter 32

Scarpetta refilled coffees and carried them out on a tray with a few things to eat. She believed that sleep deprivation was healed by good food.

She set down a platter of fresh buffalo mozzarella, sliced plum tomatoes, and basil dribbled with cold-pressed unfiltered olive oil. In a sweetgrass basket lined with a linen napkin was crusty homemade Italian bread that she urged everyone to pass around, to break it with their hands, to tear off pieces. She told Marino he could start, and he took the basket, and she placed small plates and blue-checked napkins in front of him, then one in front of Bacardi.

Scarpetta set her own place on the coffee table next to Benton’s, and she sat next to him on the couch, leaning forward, because she could stay only a minute.

“Just remember,” Benton said to her, “when she hears about it, and you know she will, you don’t talk about what I’m about to do. Either before or after I’ve done it.”

“Damn right,” Marino cut in. “Her damn phone will start ringing off the hook. I gotta tell you I don’t feel so hot about this. I wish I could think about it some more.”I

“Well, we can’t,” Benton said. “We don’t have the luxury of time to think about much of anything. Oscar’s out there somewhere, and if Morales hasn’t gotten to him already, he will. All he has to do is track him down like a hunted animal.”

“Like he’s been doing,” Bacardi said. “Now a guy like that makes you believe in the death penalty.”

“Much better if we get a chance to study them,” Benton said matter-of-factly. “Killing them serves no useful purpose.”

He was impeccably dressed in one of his hand-tailored suits that he never wore on the ward, a deep blue with a lighter blue pinstripe, a light blue shirt, and silvery blue silk tie. The makeup artist at CNN wouldn’t need more than fifteen minutes with him. There was little Benton needed to improve his appearance, maybe a little powder and a breath of spray on his platinum hair, which needed a trim. To Scarpetta, he looked the same way he always had, and she hoped he was doing the right thing. That both of them were.

“I won’t say anything to Jaime. I’ll stay out of it,” she said, and she realized she had started calling her Jaime about the same time Jaime had started spending so much time with Lucy.

All these years, and she usually referred to her as Berger, which was rather distant and perhaps not particularly respectful.

Scarpetta said to Benton, “I’ll tell her she can take that up with you. It’s not my network and, contrary to popular opinion, I don’t run your life.”

Marino’s cell phone rang. He lifted his PDA and squinted at the display.

“IRS. Must be about all my charitable trusts,” he said, pressing his flashing blue earpiece to answer. “Marino . . . Yup . . . Just hanging out. You? . . . Hold on. I’m going to start writing.”

Everyone got quiet so he could talk. He set down the PDA on the coffee table and placed his notepad on his wide knee. He started scribbling. Upside down or right side up, Marino’s writing looked about the same. Scarpetta had never been able to read it, at least not without tremendous annoyance, because he had his own version of shorthand. No matter the cracks he made, in truth, his writing was far worse than hers.

“I don’t mean to be a smart-ass about it,” Marino said. “But first off, when you said Isle of Man, where the hell is that? I assume it’s one of these Caribbean tax havens or maybe one of those islands near Fiji. . . . Now, that’s something. Never heard of it, and I’ve been there before. I mean to England. . . . I realize it isn’t exactly in England. I know Isle of Man’s a fucking island, but in case you flunked geography, England’s a fucking island.”

Scarpetta leaned close to Benton’s ear and wished him good luck. She felt like telling him she loved him, which was unusual with people around. But for some reason she wanted to say it, but she didn’t. She got up and hesitated, because Marino seemed about to get off the phone.

“No offense, but we knew that. We got that address,” Marino said.

He looked at Bacardi and shook his head as if the IRS agent he was talking to was dumber than a bag of hammers—one of Marino’s favorite expressions.

He said, “That’s right . . . Nope, you must mean One-A. So it’s Terri Bridges. I know it’s an LLC and you don’t got a name yet, but that’s her apartment . . . No. Not Two-D. She’s in One-A.” He frowned. “You sure, I mean damn sure? . . . Wait a minute. That guy’s a Brit, right? Well, he’s Italian but lives in the UK, is a UK citizen . . . Okay. So it fits with the Isle of Man shit, I guess. But you’d better be right, because in maybe half an hour, that fucking door’s getting kicked in.”

Marino touched his earpiece and disconnected the IRS without a thanks or a good-bye.

He said, “ Gotham Gotcha? We don’t have the name of whoever it is, but we know where the person has an apartment. Upstairs from Terri Bridges. Two-D. Unless something’s changed and nobody told us, still nobody home in that building. Tenant’s an Italian financial guy named Cesare Ingicco, domicile is Isle of Man, where his company is actually located, and Isle of Man’s not the Caribbean, just so you know. The LLC renting his apartment is this offshore one that Lucy dug up info about. Guarantee the guy doesn’t actually live there, that it’s someone else working out of that apartment or maybe no one working out of it. So sounds like we need a warrant and should go in there. Or maybe we go in and then get a warrant. Whatever. We don’t waste time, since Eva Peebles indirectly worked for this Cesare Ingicco guy across the street but probably not the one who actually lives across the street, probably on his island and we’re going to find—you watch—that he dealt with Eva over the phone, long distance. Eva didn’t know shit, whatever the case. How fucked up is that?”

“Why don’t I hook up with some of your guys over there,” Bacardi said. “I think you should hang around this area. When Benton goes live on the air, all hell might break loose.”

“I agree,” Benton said. “Morales is going to know, if he had any doubt at all, that we think he might be after Oscar, and the rest of the world is after him, after Morales.”

“You think there’s any chance at all Oscar and Morales are partners in all this?” Bacardi asked. “Maybe I’m crazy, but how do we know they don’t work as a team, sort of like Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. And to this day there are plenty of people who think the Son of Sam didn’t act alone, either. You just never know.”

“Extremely unlikely,” Benton said as Scarpetta put on her coat by the door. “Morales is far too narcissistic to work with anyone. He can’t work with anyone else no matter what he’s doing.”

“You got that right,” Marino said.

“But what about Oscar’s shoe prints and fingerprints we found in Eva Peebles’s apartment?” Bacardi made a good point. “I don’t know if we should just ignore them and assume they were doctored or there’s a mistake.”

“Guess who collected the shoeprints and fingerprints?” Marino said. “Fucking Morales. Plus, he has a pair of Oscar’s sneakers, from when he took his clothes the other night.”

“Anybody witness him lifting the prints off the light fixture?” Bacardi went on. “It’s not easy to cheat. I mean, it’s one thing if it’s a pair of sneakers you took from the suspect. But it’s another to take his fingers and leave prints, so to speak. My point is you got to have a pretty clever conspiracy to process prints at a crime scene and have them get a hit in the computer system. In IAFIS.”

“Yeah, well, Morales is a clever guy,” Marino said.

Bacardi got up and said, “I’m going to go on over to Murray Hill. Who’s meeting me?”

“Sit back down.” Marino tugged softly on the back of her belt. “You ain’t taking a damn cab. You’re a homicide detective. I’ll drop you off and head right back here. I got a battering ram in the trunk you can have. I pinched it last night when they brought me one at the Peebles scene, special order. Oops. I forgot to give it back.”

“I’m going,” Scarpetta said. “Everybody be careful, please. Mike Morales is an evil man.”

“Actually?” Berger said to Lucy. “And I’ve never told anybody this before.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Lucy said.

“I think Morales may have broken in the barrister for Greg, and in typical fashion, Morales goes from being the philanderer to the confidant you can tell your troubles to. The more I think about it, he’s very bizarre that way, among other ways. To say the least.”

“You think Greg knew?”

“No, I sure don’t. Should I get us more coffee?”

“How do you know Morales was screwing around with the barrister?”

“It’s not hard to tell these things when you’re in an office with other people. I don’t pay much attention, or maybe it appears I don’t, but it registers. In retrospect, it becomes clear. Morales has probably done this sort of thing countless times, practically under my nose, or I’ve heard stories. He seduces someone into cheating on the boyfriend, the husband, and next thing, Morales has a bedside manner if not caretaking relationship with his victim. Helps her patch things up. Or he gets to know the man he fucked over, who doesn’t know he’s been fucked over, because Morales loves being pals with someone who has no idea he’s the devil. Sadistic games and more sadistic games. He and Greg used to sit downstairs and drink his expensive liquor and talk. Probably about me, at least some of the time. Not in a good way.”

“How long ago?”

“Morales got transferred into investigations about a year ago. It was right about that time. Toward the end. Not long before Greg moved to London. I’m sure Morales encouraged it. Might even have been his idea—for Greg to just end it with me.”

“Maybe so Morales could start something with you?”

“Finish me and start me. He’d get off on that,” Berger said.

“Then Greg is how Morales would have gotten the idea for the Irish whiskey and Scotch he wrote about in that phony interview he sent to Terri, when he was pretending to be my aunt,” Lucy said. “And Greg shouldn’t have let himself be talked into anything. Fuck that. He made his choice. And Morales won’t be finishing or starting anything, except he’s going to finish himself. You watch.”

“If you check the bottles downstairs,” Berger said, “my guess, he and Greg put a hefty dent in both of them. Morales would want the most expensive thing in the bar. That’s him, all right. And it was a nasty dig to imply Kay routinely drinks whiskey that costs five, six, seven hundred dollars a bottle and say it was more than Terri’s schoolbooks. He was painting quite the portrait of her, and if she’d finished her thesis, her so-called book? That would have been extremely unfortunate. I’m sure it’s occurred to you he might be Gotham Gotcha. Seems that sort of thing would be right up his alley.”

“The IP of whoever writes those columns is anonymized, and the Internet service provider has an account that traces to an LLC with an address in the Isle of Man,” Lucy said. “Which has one of the strongest offshore trust jurisdictions in the world. The machine access code doesn’t match anything I’ve seen so far, so those columns aren’t written on any laptop or any other device we’re familiar with, nor is it one used to send any e-mails we’ve been looking at. Problem is, jurisdictions like the Isle of Man, Nevis, Belize offer such stringent privacy protection, it’s very difficult to penetrate the shield and find out who’s behind an LLC. I’ve got a contact at the IRS pulling some strings for me. Interesting it’s the UK. I would have expected the Caymans. As in about seventy-five percent of all hedge funds registered. But I don’t think Morales is Gotham Gotcha .”

“The implication, of course, is whoever it is, this person has a lot of money parked offshore,” Berger said.

“Of course she would,” Lucy said. “Her endorsements alone, her product promotions. She’s probably getting staggering kick-backs wired into accounts that are sheltered. My hope is she’s a little too clever about bypassing certain tax laws, and that’s what will lead us to a physical address. I mean, she rents, she owns, she’s paying bills, or someone is on her behalf, and she’s likely got a place in this city and was paying an employee in this city, and we know that for a fact. Someone was wiring Eva Peebles money from the UK on behalf of Gotham Gotcha. This agent who used to be ATF and now is IRS, I gave him Marino’s name, too, and he’s tying down more info from Eva Peebles’s bank. I want to know who Gotham Gotcha is and where the hell she is. And if she’s screwing the IRS? Oh, well. Have fun in prison.”

“She? Her?”

“After that first column came out, I ran language analysis on maybe fifty archived ones. No, I really don’t think it’s Morales who writes those columns and has a site like that. Would require too much maintenance, too much work. He’s a hit-and-run guy, just like everybody says. He’s got a careless streak in him, and that’s going to be what nails him in the end.”

“You ran this analysis on the website about the same time you crashed it?” Berger said.

“I didn’t crash it. Marilyn Monroe crashed it.”

“A subject for another day. For the record, I don’t approve of infecting sites with worms,” Berger said.

“Same words and phrases constantly pop up, and allusions, metaphors, similes.” Lucy was talking about the language analysis she ran.

“How can a computer possibly recognize a simile?” Berger asked.

“An example. Search for the words like and as, then the computer searches for those followed by adjectives, nouns. Like the long hard leg of a chair—as if he had three of them. And here are a few more good ones from Gotham Gotcha ’s purple prose. Gently curved like a firm banana inside Calvin Kleins that seemed melted on him. Then let me see if I remember. Her tiny tits as flat as cookies, her nipples as small as raisins.