Scarpetta

Berger said, “And your computer recognizes a metaphor how, exactly?”

“Discrete bodies of information with nouns and verbs that are inconsistent with each other. My skull hibernated in the wet nest of my hair. Skull and hibernate in the same sentence would be flagged as an inconsistency. As would nest and hair, if you look at them literally. But what you have metaphorically is a line from the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. I’m sure you knew that wasn’t purple prose.”

“So your neural networking software reads poetry when it’s not busy tracking assholes on the Internet.”

“What it’s telling me is the author of Gotham Gotcha is likely female,” Lucy said. “One who’s snide, petty, resentful, and angry. A woman competitive with other women. A woman who so intensely loathes other women, she’ll mock one who was sexually assaulted. She’ll humiliate and degrade the victim all over again. Or try.”

Berger picked up the remote and pressed play.

Terri’s panicky face in the mirror talking as latex-gloved hands kneaded her breasts. Her eyes were watering. She was in pain.

Her voice shook badly as she said, “No. I can’t. I’m sorry. Don’t be angry with me. I don’t want us to do this.”

Her lips and tongue made sticky sounds, her mouth was so dry.

The killer’s voice. “Sure you do, baby. You love being tied up and fucked, don’t you? So this time we’re going for the jackpot, you know?”

Gloved hands set a jar of Aqualine on the counter, screwing off the lid, and his fingers dug into it. He smeared it into her vagina while she stood with her back to him, and he took his time, his condom-sheathed erect penis pushing hard into her upper back. He sexually assaulted her with the lubricant and his fingers. He raped her with fear. Unless he’d penetrated her with his penis off camera, that wasn’t what he did. It wasn’t what he wanted.

The chair scraped across tile as he made her sit.

“Look how pretty you are in the mirror,” he said. “Sitting all pretty. Almost the same height as when you’re standing. Who else can I say that about, right, little girl?”

“Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t. Oscar’s going to be here any minute. Please stop. My hands are numb. Please take it off. Please.”

She was crying but trying to act as if this was just that—an act. She was trying to act as if he really wasn’t doing anything harmful. It was a sex game, and based on references and demeanor, it seemed a certainty they’d had sex before, and domination might have been part of the drama. But nothing like this. Nothing even close. A part of her knew she was about to die, and die horribly, but she was doing her best to will it not to be so.

“He gets here at five, poor little punctual Oscar. It’s your fault, you know,” Morales’s voice said to her face in the mirror. “From now on, baby, it’s what you created. . . .”

Berger turned it off again. She wrote down a few more of her thoughts.

It all added up. But they couldn’t prove one damn bit of it. They had yet to see Mike Morales’s face, not once. Not in this video recording or the one he’d made when he’d murdered Bethany in his crappy Baltimore apartment the summer he’d finished medical school at Johns Hopkins in 2003, and not in the recording he made months later when he murdered Rodrick and dumped his graceful young boy’s body near the Bugatti dealership in Greenwich, where Rodrick probably found his way onto Morales’s radar because of the vet’s office where Morales had worked part-time. It was probably where he’d met Bethany, only a different vet’s office, that one in Baltimore.

In both those cases he’d done the same thing he’d done to Terri. He bound the victims’ wrists. He was wearing surgical gloves when he penetrated them digitally, using the same type of lubricant. Back then, five years ago, he was about to start the NYPD police academy, and his part-time work was with veterinarians, not dermatologists. But veterinarians use cauterizing applicators and lubricants like Aqualine. Morales’s pilfering a partially used jar of lubricant from his workplace was part of his MO, perhaps going back to his first murder.

Berger had no idea how many people he’d killed, but she wondered if the reason he used the lubricant was to confound police with a mixture of different DNA profiles.

“He would think that was funny,” she said to Lucy. “He must have been thrilled when one of the profiles actually got a hit in CODIS and turned out to be the paraplegic from Palm Beach. What a big ha-ha that must have been.”

“He won’t get away with it,” Lucy said.

“I don’t know.”

The police not only hadn’t found Morales yet, but at the moment there was no warrant for his arrest. The overwhelming problem, which would continue to be a problem, was proof. The scientific evidence did not prove Morales had killed anyone, and recovering his DNA at Terri’s crime scene and even from her body meant nothing, since he was inside the apartment and had actually touched her when he’d checked her vitals. He was the lead investigator in her case and had touched everything and everyone connected to it.

And his face wasn’t on the video recordings. And he wasn’t on video coming into or leaving Terri’s apartment building because he probably had used the roof access night before last, pulling the ladder up after him. Then returning it to its closet later. Prior to that, when he’d been with her, probably it was somewhere else. Not Terri’s apartment. That was too risky. Someone might have remembered seeing him in the area. Morales was too smart to take a chance like that.

It was possible, Berger considered, he used the roof then, too. She wouldn’t rule it out, and she might never know.

Morales was smart as hell. He’d finished Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins. He was a sadistic sexual psychopath, perhaps the most outrageous and dangerous one Berger had ever come across. She thought of the times she’d been alone with him. In his car. In Tavern on the Green. And in the Ramble, when she’d paid a retrospective visit to that crime scene where the marathon runner had been raped and manually strangled, and now Berger had to wonder about her. Did Morales kill that woman, too?

She suspected it. Couldn’t prove it. A jury wasn’t likely to trust any identification based on the sound of his voice, which, like O.J. and the bloody glove, could be altered on demand so he didn’t sound exactly like the murderer in the recordings. That man spoke with a heavy Spanish accent. Morales, when speaking normally, had no discernible accent. A case wasn’t going to be won solely based on forensic voice analysis, either. Didn’t matter how sophisticated the software.

It wasn’t likely anyone—certainly not a prosecutor as seasoned as Berger—was going to suggest anything as ridiculous as making a comparison of Morales’s penis with the penis in the video recordings, a normal penis, uncircumcised, nothing unusual about it, nothing remarkable one way or another, and wearing a condom over it was reminiscent of someone having a stocking over his face. Were there any identifying features, so much as a freckle, they were masked .

The most the cops could do—or Lucy could do—was prove these violent, seemingly damning videos were in his e-mail account, but where did he get them? Having them didn’t prove he’d killed anyone or even done the filming with a camcorder he must have set up on a tripod. Lucy was the first to say that getting jurors to understand IP addresses, machine access codes, anonymizers, cookies, packet sniffing, and about a hundred other terms that were part of her easygoing vernacular was like a throw-back to the early days, the late eighties and early nineties, when people like Berger were first trying to explain DNA to judges and jurors.

Eyes glazed over. Nobody trusted it. She’d spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on satisfying the Frye standard whenever she tried to admit DNA evidence into court. In fact, DNA hadn’t helped her marriage, not that much could have. But with the proliferation of new scientific techniques had come new pressures and demands, the likes of which no one had ever anticipated or seen. Maybe if forensic science had stayed where it was when she was still at Columbia, living with a woman who eventually broke her heart and scared her straight into Greg’s arms, she would have had something left over for her private life. Gone on more vacations, or even gone on one when she didn’t bring a briefcase. Gotten to know Greg’s children, really gotten to know them. Gotten to know people she worked with, like Scarpetta, who’d never received so much as a card from Berger after Rose died, and Berger had known about that.

Marino had told her.

Maybe Berger would have gotten to know herself.

“Kay will be here in a second. I’ve got to get dressed,” she said to Lucy. “Actually, maybe you should get dressed.”

Lucy was in a Jockey undershirt and briefs. Both of them had been watching what were called snuff films in some markets, and neither of them had on much in the way of clothing. It was still early, not even ten a.m., but seemed more like late afternoon. Berger felt as if she had jet lag. She was still in the silk pajamas and robe she’d put on after getting out of the shower minutes before Lucy had shown up at her building.

In the space of less than five hours since Scarpetta, Benton, Marino, Bacardi, and Morales had been in her living room, Berger had learned the grotesque truth and had watched it as if it was happening before her eyes. She’d witnessed the tortured deaths of three people who had fallen prey to a man who was supposed to protect them: a doctor who never was, who shouldn’t have become a cop, who shouldn’t have ever been allowed within a mile of any living creature.

So far, only Jake Loudin had been located. He wasn’t about to admit he might know Mike Morales, might actually use him to euthanize pets that didn’t sell or God knows what he used him for. Maybe Morales went by the name of Juan Amate when he entered the basements of pet shops and added yet one more layer of misery to the world, for a fee. Maybe Berger would get lucky and find a way to coax Loudin into admitting, in exchange for a reduced sentence, that he’d called Morales last night after Eva Peebles was in the wrong place at the wrong time, a pet store basement. Berger really didn’t think that Loudin had asked Morales to murder anyone. But Eva Peebles’s existence was becoming an inconvenience that gave Morales the excuse to have a little more fun.

The intercom buzzed as she finished getting dressed, and Lucy was sitting on the bed, because they had been talking nonstop.

Berger picked up the house phone as she buttoned her Oxford cloth shirt.

“Jaime? It’s Kay,” Scarpetta’s voice said. “I’m at your door.” Berger pressed the zero on the keypad and remotely unlocked it, and said, “Come in, I’ll be down in a minute.”

Lucy said, “All right with you if I take a quick shower?”

Chapter 33

Marino watched Headline News on his PDA as he walked swiftly along Central Park South, leading with his shoulder, weaving through other pedestrians like a football player with the goal in sight.

Benton, in his blue pinstriped suit, was sitting at a table across from a correspondent, Jim somebody. Marino couldn’t remember, because it wasn’t one of the more famous ones at this hour in the day. Below Benton’s name in bold block letters was:

DR. BENTON WESLEY, FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST,

MCLEAN HOSPITAL

“Thanks for joining us. And with us is Dr. Benton Wesley, former chief of the FBI’s behavioral science unit at Quantico, and you’re now, actually, at Harvard, and here at John Jay?”

“Jim, I want to get straight to the point because this is extremely urgent. We’re appealing to Dr. Oscar Bane to please contact the FBI. . . .”

“Let me just back up and tell our viewers this is in reference to cases that you can’t miss, no matter where you look—the two absolutely appalling homicides committed in New York over the past couple of nights. What can you tell us about those?”

Just ahead was Columbus Circle and the Time Warner skyscrapers, where Benton was in the studio this very second. This was a bad idea. Marino understood why Benton didn’t think there was a choice, and why he didn’t want to ask Berger first. He didn’t want her held accountable, and Benton didn’t answer to her. He didn’t answer to anyone. Marino understood, but now that Benton was making his appearance on international TV, something didn’t sit well about it.

“What we’re asking is if he’s listening, to please call the FBI.” Benton’s voice on live TV, through Marino’s earpiece. “We have reasons to be very concerned about Dr. Bane’s safety, and he is not—and I repeat—is not to contact local police or deal with any other authorities. He’s to call the FBI, and he will be escorted to safety.”

One of the things Scarpetta always said is never push somebody until that person has nothing to lose or nowhere to go. Benton always said it, too. So did Marino. Then why were they doing this? First, Berger had called Morales, and Marino had thought that was a terrible idea. She’d basically given him a head’s-up, maybe gloating a little as she stuck it to him. The brilliant Morales busted, caught. Berger was one hell of a prosecutor. She was tough, all right. But she shouldn’t have done that, and Marino still wasn’t sure why she had.

He had a funny feeling it was personal, at least in part. Scarpetta didn’t do anything like that, and she’d had her chance. When they were in Berger’s living room from midnight on, Scarpetta could have said a lot of things to taunt Morales, whom she didn’t like or trust any more than Marino did, even though they didn’t yet know his hobby was starring in his own damn snuff films. But Scarpetta had been completely professional, her usual self, with Morales sitting right there. If she’d thought he was a murderer but didn’t have a shred of proof, she would have kept her thoughts to herself. That’s who she was.

“I have to say, Dr. Wesley, this is probably the most unusual plea I’ve ever heard. I mean, maybe plea isn’t the right word, but why . . .”

Marino glanced down at the tiny figures bantering on his PDA. Berger’s building was maybe two more blocks away. She wasn’t safe. You push someone like Morales too far and rub his face in it, then what? Then he’s going to do something. Who’s he going to do it to first? The same lady he’s been trying to conquer ever since he became an investigator. The same lady he lies about, giving everybody the bullshit impression he has sex with the sex crimes DA. Not true. Not even close.

Morales wasn’t her type.

Marino had had a feeling he’d figured out who Berger’s type was, some rich guy like Greg. But as he’d watched Berger and Lucy together while everyone was in Berger’s living room, then watched Lucy follow her into the kitchen and suddenly leave the apartment, he’d changed his mind and had no doubt whatsoever.

Berger’s weakness, her passion, wasn’t men. Emotionally, physically, she was hardwired a different way.

“Oscar has every reason in the world not to trust anybody right now,” Benton was saying. “We have reason to believe certain fears he’s voiced to authorities about his own safety have merit. We’re taking them very, very seriously.”

“But hold on. There are warrants out for his arrest, for murder. Excuse me, but it sounds like you’re protecting the bad guy here.”

“Oscar, if you’re listening to me”—Benton faced the camera—“you need to call the FBI, whatever field office is local, wherever you might be. You’ll be escorted to safety.”

“Seems like everybody else ought to be worried about their safety, don’t you think, Dr. Wesley? He’s the one police suspect killed those—”

“I’m not going to discuss the case with you, Jim. Thank you for your time.”

Benton unclipped his mike and got up from the table.

“Well, this has been an unusual moment in the New York crime investigation. Two murders have rocked this New Year, and the legendary—I guess I can use the word legendary— profiler Benton Wesley is appealing to the man everybody thinks did it . . .”

“Shit,” Marino said.

No way Oscar was going to call the FBI, God, or anyone else after hearing that.

Marino logged out and closed his browser as he walked fast. He was sweating under his old leather Harley jacket, and the cold air was making his eyes water. The sun was trying to escape heavy, dark clouds. His cell phone rang.

“Yeah,” he answered, dodging people as if they had leprosy, not looking at any of them.

“I’m going to talk to a couple agents in the field office here. About what we’re doing,” Benton said.

“I guess it went okay,” Marino said.

Benton hadn’t asked for a critique, and he didn’t respond to it.

“I’ll make a few calls here at the studio, then head over to Berger’s,” Benton said, and he sounded down in the dumps.

“It went good, I think,” Marino said. “Oscar will hear it. No doubt about it. He’s got to be in a motel or something, and that’s all he’s got is TV. They’ll keep playing the segment all day and night, that’s for sure.”

Marino looked up at the fifty-two-story glass-and-metal building, fixing on the penthouse facing the park. The grand entrance had TRUMP in huge gold letters. But then, so did everything expensive around here.

“If Oscar doesn’t ever see it on TV”—Marino seemed to be talking to himself now, Benton had gotten so quiet—“then I don’t want to think about why that might be. Unless he’s done surgery on himself, his every move is tracked by GPS—you know whose GPS, right? So you did a good thing. The only thing you could do.”

He continued until he realized the call had been lost. Marino had no idea he’d been talking to no one.

The gun barrel jammed against the base of Scarpetta’s skull didn’t evoke the fear she would have imagined. She really couldn’t comprehend it.

There seemed to be no synapse between her actions and consequence, cause and effect, if and then, now and later. All she was vividly aware of was a dismay of biblical proportions that it was her fault Morales was inside Jaime Berger’s penthouse, and that at the end of Scarpetta’s life she had managed to commit the only sin that was unforgivable. She was to blame for tragedy and pain. Her weakness and naïveté had done unto others what she had always warred against.

Everything was her fault, after all. Her family’s poverty and the loss of her father. Her mother’s unhappiness, her sister Dorothy’s borderline personality and extreme dysfunction, and every harm that had ever befallen Lucy.

“He wasn’t there when I rang the bell.” She said it again, and Morales laughed at her. “I wouldn’t have let him in.”

Berger’s eyes were unblinking and fastened to Morales as she stood motionless at the foot of her spiral staircase, her cell phone in hand. Above her was a gallery displaying magnificent works of art in her magnificent penthouse, the New York skyline all around them beyond a curved wall of spotless glass. Ahead was the sunken living room with furniture in fine woods and earth-tone upholsteries where all of them had sat not that long ago, allies, friends, together in a campaign against the enemy, who now was revealed and was here again.

Mike Morales.

Scarpetta felt the barrel of the revolver leave her skull. She didn’t turn around. She kept her eyes on Berger, hoping she understood that when she’d gotten off the elevator and rung the bell and announced herself, she was alone. Then suddenly, a force out of hell grabbed her arm and escorted her through Berger’s door. The only reason she might have been the slightest bit forewarned was a comment one of the concierges had made when Scarpetta had entered the building a few minutes ago.

The lovely young woman in her lovely suit had smiled at her and said, “The others are waiting for you, Dr. Scarpetta.”

What others?

Scarpetta should have asked. Dear God, why hadn’t she? All Morales had to do was show his badge, but even that hadn’t been necessary, most likely. He’d been here hours earlier. He was charming, persuasive, didn’t like to be told no.

Morales’s eyes looked around, his pupils dilated, and his latex-gloved hands dropped a small gym bag to the floor. He unzipped it. Inside were the retracted legs of a tripod and colorless nylon ties, and other items Scarpetta couldn’t discern, but it was the ties that caused her heart to pump harder. She knew what those ties could do, and she was afraid of them.

“Just let Jaime go and do what you want to me,” she said.

“Oh, shut up.”

As if he found her tedious.

In one snap, he lashed Berger’s wrists behind her first, and led her to the couch and pushed her down hard, making her sit.

“Behave,” he said to Scarpetta, and he lashed her wrists next, very tightly.

Instantly, her fingers contracted and the pain was terrific, as if something metal was clamped around her wrists, compressing blood vessels and biting into bone. He pushed her down on the couch, next to Berger, as a cell phone started ringing upstairs.

His eyes slowly moved from the cell phone he had removed from Berger’s grip to the gallery upstairs and the rooms beyond it.

The cell phone rang, then stopped, and water was running somewhere. And it stopped. And Scarpetta thought about Lucy the same time Morales did.

“You can stop this now, Mike. You don’t need to do this . . .” Berger started to say.

Scarpetta was on her feet and Morales shoved her hard, and she fell back onto the couch.

He bounded up the spiral stairs, his feet scarcely seeming to touch them.

Lucy toweled off her very short hair and breathed in a lungful of steam inside one of the nicest showers she’d been in for a while.

Greg’s. Glass-enclosed, with rain-forest showerheads, body jets, steam bath, surround-sound music, a heated seat if you wanted to just sit and listen to music. Berger had Annie Lennox in the CD player. Maybe it was a coincidence, since Lucy had played it last night in the loft. Greg and his whiskeys, and his fine things, and his barrister, and Lucy was baffled by a man who truly knew how to live but had chosen someone he could never do it with, all because of a slight genetic murmur.

Sort of like being one digit off in math. By the time you finished the long, complicated equation, you were light years from the answer, and you failed. Berger was the right person but the wrong answer. Lucy felt a little sorry for him but not for herself. For herself she felt a happiness that was indescribable, unlike anything she’d ever known before, and it seemed all she did was relive and relive.

It was like listening to the same intoxicating piece of music again and again, as she’d just done in the rain shower, every touch, every look, every accidental intention that resulted in a grazing of bodies that was so erotic and at the same time so moving because it really meant something. It wasn’t cheap. It wasn’t guilt-ridden or headed into shame. It felt perfectly right, and she simply didn’t believe it could be happening to her.

This was a dream she’d never known enough to have, because no part of her had ever feared or wanted it any more than she had nightmares about extraterrestrials or fantastic dreams about flying machines and race cars. Those didn’t exist or were real and within reach. Jaime Berger wasn’t an impossibility or a possibility that had ever crossed Lucy’s mind, although certainly during early encounters she’d felt a giddiness, a nervousness, on the rare occasions she’d been around her, as if she were being offered an opportunity to toy with a very large, undomesticated cat, like a cheetah or a tiger, that she would never be in the same room with, much less pet.

Lucy stood up inside the steam-filled shower, unable to see through the clouded glass, contemplating how best to have an open conversation with her aunt, to explain, to just talk.

She pushed open the door at the same time a shape moved in front of it, and steam dissolved around Mike Morales’s face. He smiled at her, a pistol pointed inches from her head.

“Die, bitch,” he said.

The door yielded to one blow of the battering ram and slammed against the wall.

Bacardi and a uniformed officer whose name she thought was Ben walked into the soft music of Coldplay as they entered apartment 2D and were confronted by Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

“What the hell?” Bacardi said.

Scarpetta was all over the walls. Posters, some of them from ceiling to floor, not poses but newsy photos of her on the set of CNN or walking through Ground Zero or in the morgue, preoccupied and unaware that someone was taking what Bacardi called a “thinking action shot.” Didn’t mean the person was doing something powerful, but he or she was doing it mentally.

“It’s like a freakin’ shrine,” said Ben, or whatever his name was.

The apartment at the back of the building, one floor above Terri Bridges’s, was unfurnished except for a simple maple desk facing a wall and, tucked under it, a small office chair. On the desk was a laptop, one of those new PowerBooks or AirBooks or whatever they were called, expensive and weighing almost nothing. Bacardi had heard stories about people accidentally throwing them away with a stack of newspapers, and could see how that might happen. The laptop was plugged into a charger, and “Clocks” was playing on iTunes—the volume turned low, playing over and over again, God knows for how long, because someone had selected repeat on the menu.

Also on the desk were four bud vases, cheap cut glass, and in each one a withered rose. She went to the desk and pulled down one of the rose petals.

“Yellow,” she said.

Officer Ben, as she now thought of him, was too busy looking around at the shrine to Scarpetta to care about a few dead roses, or to understand that from the female perspective, yellow mattered. Bacardi’s need of reassurance wanted red when it came to roses, but her instinct knew better. A man who gave you yellow roses was one you’d never have, and that’s the one you wanted and should move heaven and earth to get. She glanced at Officer Ben, for an instant fearing she just might have said that out loud.

“Well, guess what?” she said, her voice bouncing off old plaster walls as she walked on bare hardwood floors, going from room to room. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, because it looks like the only thing in here’s a computer and toilet paper.”

When she walked back in, Officer Ben was still looking around at photographs of Scarpetta that were as big as Times Square in proportion to their location. He shone his flashlight on them as if that might tell him something.

“While you gawk,” Bacardi said, “I’m going to call Pete— Investigator Marino to you—and find out just what the hell we’re supposed to do with Gotham Gotcha. You got any idea how to arrest a website, Ben?”

“Ban,” he corrected her. “For Bannerman,” he said.

His light trailed over the huge posters like a comet on its last legs.

“If I were Dr. Scarpetta,” he said, “I might hire a couple body-guards.”

Chapter 34

The house phone rang, and Berger told Morales it was the intercom.

“It’s probably security,” she said from the couch, and she was pale and in pain.

Her hands were cherry-red behind her back. Scarpetta couldn’t feel her own hands at all now. They could be rocks.

“They probably heard the gunshot.” If a voice could be gray, Berger’s was gray.

When Morales had bounded up the stairs after the cell phone sounded up there, the ring tone a familiar one, Scarpetta had asked the question that would change eternity for her.

She’d said to Berger, “Is Lucy up there?”

Berger’s answer was her wide eyes, and then they heard the gunshot .

It had sounded like a metal door slamming shut, almost like the steel barrier doors at Bellevue.

And silence.

And now Morales was back, and at this point, Scarpetta no longer cared about anything in this world except Lucy.

“Please get an ambulance,” she said to him.

“Let me tell you what’s up, Doc.” He waved the pistol and was becoming more bizarre. “What’s up is your little superhero niece has a fucking bullet in her fucking head. You imagine the IQ I’m killing off this morning, whew.”

He picked up the unzipped gym bag and walked around the couch, to the front of it. Displayed on the PDA clipped to his low-riding jeans was a GPS track log, a heavy pink line snaking through a map of someplace.

He dropped the gym bag on the coffee table and squatted next to it. His latex-gloved hands reached inside the bag, and he pulled out a small pair of Brooks running shoes and a plastic Baggie containing the polyvinyl impressions Scarpetta had made of Oscar’s fingertips. The Baggie was greasy, as if Morales had oiled or lubricated the polyvinyl impressions. He balanced the revolver on his thigh.

He removed the impressions from the Baggie and slipped them over the fingers of his left hand, and that was the first time Scarpetta realized he was left-handed.

He held the gun with his other hand, and stood up and splayed his left hand with its freakish irregular white rubbery fingertips, and he grinned, his pupils so dilated it was as if he had black holes for eyes.

“I won’t be around to reverse the reverse of them,” he said. “These are reversed.”

Slowly moving his rubbery fingertips and enjoying himself.

“Right, Dr. Sher-lock? You know what I’m talking about. How many people would think of it?”

He meant that since the prints were from an impression, they would be reversed when they were transferred to a surface. Morales must have remedied that when he’d photographed the prints he’d planted on the light fixture in the tub at Eva Peebles’s apartment. Whoever photographed and lifted the prints in Berger’s apartment would discover a reverse-sequence arrangement, a mirror image of what was expected, and wonder how that could have happened. A fingerprints examiner would have to make adjustments, display different perspectives to make an accurate geometric analysis for a comparison of these planted prints with Oscar’s prints in IAFIS.

“You answer when I talk to you, bitch.” Morales got up and loomed so close Scarpetta smelled his sweat.

He sat down next to Berger and stuck his tongue between her lips and slowly rubbed the gun between her legs.

“Nobody would think of it,” he said to Scarpetta as he fondled Berger with the barrel of the revolver and she didn’t move.

“Nobody would,” Scarpetta said.

He got up and started pressing various silicone fingertips on the glass coffee table. He went to the bar, flicked open a glass door, and plucked out the Irish whiskey. He picked out a colorful tumbler that looked like hand-blown Venetian glass, and he poured whiskey into it. He left Oscar’s prints all over the bottle and the tumbler as he drank in gulps.

The apartment phone rang again.

Again, Morales ignored it.

“They have a key,” Berger said. “They hear something in this building and you don’t answer, they’ll finally come in. Let me answer it and tell them we’re fine. Nobody else needs to be hurt.”

Morales drank some more. He swished whiskey in his mouth and waved his gun at Berger.

“Tell ’em to go away,” he said. “You try anything, everybody’s dead right now.”

“I can’t pick it up.”

Morales exhaled an exasperated breath as he came close and picked up the cordless phone and held it against her mouth and ear.

Scarpetta noticed tiny specks of red on his light-skinned face, like his freckles but not his freckles, and something moved inside her like plates of the earth sliding before a huge quake.

The pink line on the map on the PDA snaked, moving. Someone or something moving fast. Oscar.

“Please call an ambulance,” she said.

Morales mouthed Sor-ry, and shrugged.

“Hello?” Berger said into the phone he held. “Really? You know what? Probably the TV. A Rambo movie or something he’s got on. Thanks for your concern.”

Morales removed the phone from her drained face.

“Hit zero,” she said with no inflection. “To disconnect the intercom.”

He hit zero and dropped the cordless phone into its charger.

Marino touched the door with his index finger and pushed it open an inch as he slid his Glock out of a pocket in his leather jacket and the alarm-system chime sounded its warning tone that a door or window had been breached.

Marino swung himself around inside Berger’s penthouse, the pistol in both hands. He crept forward, and through an archway he saw the sunken living room that reminded him of a spaceship.

Berger and Scarpetta were on the couch, their arms behind their backs, and he knew by the looks on their faces that it was too late. An arm snaked up from behind the wraparound couch and poked a gun in the back of Scarpetta’s head.

“Drop it, asshole,” Morales said as he stood up.

Marino was pointing his Glock at Morales, who had a gun buried in the back of Scarpetta’s blond hair, his finger on the trigger.

“You hear me, Gorilla Man? Drop the fucking gun or you’re going to see genius brains all over this penthouse apartment.”

“Don’t do it, Morales. Everybody knows it’s you. You can quit,” Marino’s mouth said while his thoughts streaked through possibilities that kept pinning him against the same wall, a wall he couldn’t get away from no matter what.

He was trapped.

He could pull the trigger, and Morales would pull the trigger. Maybe Morales would be dead, leaving Berger and Marino. But Scarpetta would be dead.

“You got a little problem with proof, Gorilla Man. Anybody ever call you that?” Morales said. “I like that. Gorilla Man.”

Marino couldn’t tell if he was drunk or high. But he was on something.

“Because . . . because”—he sniggered—“you’re the proverbial knuckle dragger, now, aren’t you. Va-nil-la Go-ril-la. How you like that?”

“Marino, don’t drop your gun,” Scarpetta said with amazing steadiness, but her face looked dead. “He can’t shoot everyone at once. Don’t drop your gun.”

“You know, she’s such a hero, ain’t she?” Morales jammed the barrel hard against her skull, and she winced silently. “One brave lady, having all these stiffs for patients who can’t thank her or complain.”

He bent over and touched her ear with his tongue.

“Poor thing. Couldn’t work with living people? That’s what they say about doctors like you. That and you gotta have the air-conditioning on fifty or you can’t sleep. Put the fucking gun down!” he yelled at Marino.

Their eyes locked.

“Okay.” Morales shrugged. He said to Scarpetta, “Sleepy time, and you get to see your precious little Lucy again. Did you tell Marino I blew her brains out upstairs? Say hello to everyone in heaven for me.”

Marino knew he meant it. He knew people meant it when they really didn’t care, and Morales didn’t care. Scarpetta was nothing to him. Nobody was anything to him. He was going to do it.

Marino said, “Don’t shoot. I’m going to put my gun down. Don’t shoot.”

“No!” Scarpetta raised her voice. “No!”

Berger said nothing, because there was nothing she could say that would make a difference. It was better for her to say nothing, and she knew it.

Marino didn’t want to put his gun down. Morales had killed Lucy. He would kill every one of them. Lucy was dead. She must be upstairs. If Marino kept his gun, Morales couldn’t kill all of them. But he’d kill Scarpetta. Marino couldn’t let him do that. Lucy was dead. All of them would be dead.

A tiny red laser dot landed on Morales’s right temple. The little dot flickered and was shaking badly, then slowed and moved just a little, like a ruby-red firefly.

“I’m putting my gun down on the floor,” Marino said, squatting.

He didn’t look up or back. He didn’t let on he saw anything as he set his Glock on the Oriental rug, his eyes never leaving Morales’s.

“Now stand up real slow,” Morales said.

He raised the pistol away from Scarpetta’s head and pointed it at Marino as the red firefly crawled around his ear.

“And say Mommy,” Morales said as the laser dot went perfectly still on his right temple.

The gunshot was a loud spit from the gallery, and Morales dropped. Marino had never actually seen that for real, someone dropping like a puppet with its strings cut, and he bolted around the couch and grabbed the gun off the floor as blood poured out of the side of Morales’s head, spreading across the black marble floor. Marino grabbed the phone and called 911 as he ran into the kitchen for a knife, and changed his mind and grabbed a pair of poultry shears out of the cutlery block, and snapped through the ties around Scarpetta’s and Berger’s wrists.

Scarpetta ran upstairs and couldn’t feel her own hand on the railing.

Lucy was just inside a doorway that led from the gallery into the master bedroom, blood everywhere, great smears of it from where she’d crawled across the bathroom floor, then across hardwood, to where she’d shot Morales with the Glock forty-caliber pistol next to her. She was sitting up, leaning against the wall, and shivering, a towel in her lap. She was so bloody, Scarpetta couldn’t tell exactly where’d she been hit, but it was her head, possibly the back of her head. Her hair was soaked with blood, and blood was running down her neck and her naked back, pooling behind and around her.

Scarpetta struggled out of her winter coat, then her blazer, and got on the floor next to her, and her hands felt dead as she touched the back of Lucy’s head. She pressed her blazer against Lucy’s scalp and Lucy complained loudly.

“It’s going to be all right, Lucy,” Scarpetta said. “What happened? Can you show me where you’ve been shot?”

“Right there. Ow! Jesus Christ! Right there. Fuck! I’m okay. I’m so cold.”

Scarpetta ran her hand down Lucy’s slippery neck and back, couldn’t feel anything, and her hands were beginning to burn and tingle, but her fingers didn’t seem to belong to her.

Berger appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Get towels,” Scarpetta said to her. “Lots of them.”

Berger could see Lucy was alert, she was all right. Berger hurried toward the bathroom.

Scarpetta said to Lucy, “Is any spot tender back here? Tell me where you feel pain.”

“Nothing back there.”

“You sure?” Scarpetta did the best she could, gently palpating with a hand that wasn’t working right. “Making sure you’ve got nothing going on with your spine.”

“It’s not back there. It feels as if my left ear’s gone. I can hardly hear anything.”

She scooted behind Lucy so that she was sitting behind her, her legs stretched out on either side of her, her back against the wall, and she carefully felt the back of Lucy’s heavily bleeding scalp.

“My hand’s pretty numb,” Scarpetta said. “Guide my fingers, Lucy. Show me where it hurts.”

Lucy reached back and took her hand and guided it to a spot.

“Right there. Goddamn that hurts. I think it might be under the skin. Shit that hurts. God, don’t press on it, that hurts!”

Scarpetta didn’t have her reading glasses on and couldn’t see anything but a blur of bloody hair. She pressed her bare hand against the back of Lucy’s head and Lucy yelled.

“We have to stop the bleeding,” Scarpetta said very calmly, kindly, almost as if she was talking to a child. “The bullet must be right under the scalp, and that’s why it’s hurting when we apply pressure. You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be just fine. The ambulance will be here any minute.”

There were furrows around Berger’s wrists, and her hands were bright red and were very stiff and awkward as she opened several large white bath sheets and tucked them around Lucy’s neck and under her legs. Lucy was naked and wet and must have just stepped out of the shower when Morales shot her. Berger got down on the floor next to them, and blood got all over her hands and her blouse as she touched Lucy and told her repeatedly that she would be fine. Everything was going to be fine.

“He’s dead,” Berger told Lucy. “He was about to shoot Marino, to shoot all of us.”

The nerves in Scarpetta’s hands were waking up and angry, a million pins sticking, and she vaguely perceived a small, hard lump at the back of Lucy’s skull, several inches to the left of the midline of it.

“Right here,” she said to Lucy. “Help me, if you can.”

Lucy lifted her hand and helped her find the perforation, and Scarpetta worked the bullet out, and Lucy complained loudly. It was medium- to large-caliber, semi-jacketed, and deformed, and she handed it to Berger and pressed a towel firmly against the wound to stop the bleeding.

Scarpetta’s sweater was soaked with blood, the floor around her slippery with it. She didn’t think the bullet had penetrated the skull. She suspected it had struck at an angle and expended most of its kinetic energy within a relatively small space within milliseconds. There are so many blood vessels close to the surface of the scalp, it bleeds alarmingly, always looks worse than it is. Scarpetta pressed the towel very firmly against the wound, her right hand on Lucy’s forehead, holding her.

Lucy leaned heavily against her and shut her eyes. Scarpetta felt the side of her neck and checked her pulse, and it was rapid but not alarmingly so, and she was breathing fine. She wasn’t restless and didn’t seem confused. There were no signs she was going into shock. Scarpetta held her forehead again, pressing hard against the wound to stop the bleeding.

“Lucy, I need you to open your eyes and stay awake. You listening? Can you tell us what happened?” Scarpetta said. “He ran upstairs and we heard a gunshot. Do you remember what happened?”

“You saved everybody’s life,” Berger said. “You’re going to be fine. All of us are fine.”

She was stroking Lucy’s arm.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I remember being in the shower. Then I was on the floor and my head felt as if someone hit me with an anvil. Like I got hit with a car in the back of my head. For a minute I was blind. I thought I was permanently blind, and suddenly I saw light, and images. I heard him downstairs, and I couldn’t walk. I was dizzy, so I crawled over to the chair, kind of slid myself over the wood to where my coat was and got the gun out of it. And I started to see again.”

The bloody Glock was on the bloody floor near the railing of the gallery, and Scarpetta remembered it was one Marino had given to Lucy for Christmas. It was Lucy’s favorite gun. She’d said it was the nicest thing he’d ever given to her, a pocket-size forty-caliber pistol with a laser sight and boxes of high-velocity hollowpoints to go with it. He knew what she liked. He was the one who’d taught her to shoot when she was a child, when the two of them would disappear in his pickup truck, and later Lucy’s mother—Scarpetta’s sister, Dorothy—would call and curse, usually after several drinks, and scream at Scarpetta for ruining Lucy, threatening to never let Lucy see her again.

Dorothy probably never would have allowed Lucy to visit were it not for the minor problem that she didn’t want a child, because Dorothy was a child who would always want a daddy to take care of her, to dote on her, to adore her the way their father had doted and depended on Scarpetta.

She pushed Lucy’s forehead with one hand and held the cloth against the back of her head with the other, and her hands felt hot and swollen now, her pulse pounding in them. The bleeding had slowed considerably, but she resisted looking. She continued the pressure.

“Looks like a thirty-eight,” Lucy said, shutting her eyes again.

She must have noticed the bullet when Scarpetta had handed it to Berger.

“I want you to keep your eyes open and stay awake,” Scarpetta said. “You’re fine, but let’s just stay awake. I think I hear something. I think the rescue squad’s here. We’re going to the ER and we’ll do all those fun tests you like so much. X-rays. MRI. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I hurt like shit. I’m okay. Did you see his gun? I’m wondering what it was. I don’t remember seeing it. I don’t remember him.”

Scarpetta heard the door open downstairs, and the clatter and confusion of tense voices as the squad came in, and Marino hurried them up the stairs, all of them talking loudly. He stepped out of the way, looking at Lucy in her bloody bath sheets, then at the Glock on the floor, and he leaned over and picked it up. He did the one thing you never do at a crime scene. He held it in his bare hands and walked off with it, disappeared into the bathroom with it.

Two paramedics were talking to Lucy and asking her questions, and she was answering as they buckled her into the stretcher, and Scarpetta was so busy with that, she didn’t notice Marino had somehow ended up back downstairs, and was there with three uniformed officers. Other EMTs were lifting Morales’s body onto yet another stretcher, nobody bothering with CPR because he had been dead for a while.

Marino was dropping the magazine out of the Glock—Lucy’s Glock—it seemed, and clearing the chamber while an officer held a paper bag open. Marino was telling them about Berger remotely unlocking the apartment door and letting him in without Morales knowing. Marino was making up a story about him creeping as close as he could, then deliberately making a sound so Morales would look up.

“Giving me just enough chance to get off a round before he shot someone,” Marino lied to the cops. “He was behind the Doc with his revolver pointed at her.”

Berger was with them, and she said, “We were right here on the couch.”

“A hammerless thirty-eight,” Marino said.

He was pointing all this out, taking the blame, not the credit, for killing someone, and Berger was going along with it flawlessly. It seemed her new role in life was keeping Lucy out of trouble.

Legally, Lucy absolutely couldn’t have a handgun in New York City, not even inside a residence, not even for self-defense. Legally, the handgun still belonged to Marino because he’d never gotten around to the paperwork, to transferring his gift over to Lucy’s ownership, because so much had gone on after that Christmas a year ago in Charleston. Nobody had been happy with one another, and then Rose wasn’t herself and no one knew why for a while, and Scarpetta wasn’t capable of fixing their world as it seemed to fly apart, like an old golf ball that’s lost its skin. It had been the beginning of what she’d decided, not all that long ago, was the end of them.

Her bloody hand held Lucy’s bloody hand as the paramedics clattered the stretcher toward the elevator, one of them talking on the radio to the ambulance in front of the building. The doors opened and Benton was stepping out in his pinstripe suit, looking just like he did on CNN when she’d watched him on her BlackBerry as she’d walked to Berger’s apartment.

He took Lucy’s other hand and looked into Scarpetta’s eyes, and the sadness and relief on his face was as deep as anything could possibly be.

Chapter 35

JANUARY 13

Scarpetta’s well-known name was not what got her a table at Elaine’s, where it wasn’t possible for anyone to be important enough to earn indulgences or sovereign immunity if the legendary restaurateur didn’t like the person.

When Elaine took up residence every night at one of her tables, an expectation drifted up like cigarette smoke from an earlier day when art was adored, criticized, redefined—anything but ignored—and anybody in any condition might walk through the door. Contained within these walls were echoes of a past that Scarpetta mourned but didn’t miss, having first set foot in here decades earlier, on a weekend getaway with a man she’d fallen in love with at Georgetown Law.

He was gone, and she had Benton, and the décor at Elaine’s hadn’t changed: black except for the red-tile floor, and there were hooks for hanging coats, and pay phones that as far as Scarpetta knew weren’t used anymore. Shelves displayed autographed books that patrons knew not to touch, and photographs of the literati and film stars filled every spare inch of wall all the way to the ceiling.

Scarpetta and Benton paused at Elaine’s table to say hello—a kiss on each cheek, and I haven’t seen you in a while, where have you been? Scarpetta learned she had just missed a former Secretary of State, and last week it was a former Giants quarterback she didn’t like, and tonight, a talk show host she liked even less. Elaine said she had other guests coming, but that wasn’t news, because the grande dame knew everybody expected in her salon on any given night.

Scarpetta’s favorite waiter, Louie, found just the right table.

He said to her as he pulled out her chair, “I shouldn’t bring it up, but I’ve heard everything that’s gone on.” Shaking his head. “I shouldn’t say it—to you of all people. Gambino, Bonanno? It was better back then. You know? They did what they did, but they had their reasons, know what I mean? They didn’t go around whacking people for the hell of it. Especially doing some poor lady like that. A dwarf. And that elderly widow. Then the other woman and the kid. What chance did they have?”

“They didn’t,” Benton said.

“Me? I believe in cement shoes. There’s special situations. You don’t mind me asking, how’s the little . . . you know, the other dwarf doing? I feel like I shouldn’t use that word because a lot of people say it in the pejorative.”

Oscar had contacted the FBI and was fine. A GPS microchip had been removed from his left buttock, and he was taking a rest, as Benton put it, at the private and posh psychiatric unit at McLean called the Pavilion. He was getting therapy and, most of all, was being given the gift of feeling safe until he could sort himself out. Scarpetta and Benton would head back to Belmont in the morning.

“He’s doing okay,” Benton said. “I’ll tell him you asked.”

Louie said, “What can I bring you? Drinks? Calamari?”

“Kay?” Benton said.

“Scotch. Your best single-malt.”

“Make that two.”

Louie said with a wink, “For you? My special stash. A couple new ones for you to try. Anybody driving?”

“Strong,” Scarpetta said, and Louie headed to the bar.

Behind her, at a table by a window overlooking Second Avenue, a big man wearing a white Stetson sat alone, working on what looked like straight vodka or gin with a twist. Now and then he craned his neck to check the score of a basketball game playing silently on the TV above his head, and Scarpetta got a glimpse of his big jaw and thick lips, and long white sideburns. Then he stared at nothing, slowly turning his glass in small circles on the white tablecloth. Something about him was familiar, and she envisioned footage she’d seen on TV and was seized by the shock that she was looking at Jake Loudin.

But it wasn’t possible. He was in custody. This man was small, rather thin. She realized he was an actor, one who wasn’t busy anymore.

Benton studied the menu, his face obscured by a plastic laminated menu with Elaine on the cover.

Scarpetta said to him, “You look like the Pink Panther on a stakeout.”

He closed the menu and placed it on the table, and said, “Anything in particular you want to say to everyone? Since you’ve orchestrated this little gathering for reasons beyond being sociable. I just thought I’d mention it before they show up.”

“Nothing in particular,” Scarpetta said. “Just wanted to air out. I feel everyone should air out before we go home. I wish we weren’t going. It doesn’t seem like we should be there and everyone else is here.”

“Lucy will be absolutely fine.”

Tears touched Scarpetta’s eyes. She couldn’t get over it. A sense of dread held her heart like unwelcome hands, and she was conscious of her near loss, even in her sleep.

“She’s not meant to go anywhere.” Benton pulled his chair closer and took her hand. “If she were, she would have checked out a hell of a long time ago.”

Scarpetta held her napkin to her eyes, then stared up at the silent TV, as if she cared about whoever was playing basketball.

She cleared her throat and said, “But it’s almost impossible.”

“It’s not. Those revolvers? The ones I’m always telling you are such a terrible idea because they’re so lightweight? Well, you see why, only in this case the luck was in our favor. The recoil is unbelievable. Like having your hand kicked by a horse. I think he jerked when he pulled the trigger, and probably Lucy moved, and small-caliber, low-velocity. Plus, she’s meant to be with us. She’s not meant to go anywhere. All of us are fine. We’re more than fine,” Benton said, pressing his lips against her hand, then kissing her on the mouth tenderly.

He didn’t used to be so openly affectionate in public. He didn’t seem to care anymore. If Gotham Gotcha still existed, they would probably be an item in it tomorrow—Scarpetta’s entire dinner party would be.

She had never visited the apartment where the anonymous author wrote her cruel and vindictive columns, and now that she was sure who it was, she felt pity for her. She completely understood why Terri Bridges turned on her. Terri was receiving heartless and belittling e-mails from her hero, or thought she was, and when she’d had enough, she gave her alter ego the assignment to eviscerate Scarpetta publicly. Terri had pulled her own trigger, firing several rounds at a woman whose perceived mistreatments were the last straw in a lifetime of mistreatment.

Lucy had determined that Terri had written the two New Year’s Day columns on December 30, and they had been in a queue and had been automatically sent to Eva Peebles after Terri was already dead. Lucy also discovered that on the afternoon of December 31, just hours before Terri was murdered, she deleted all her e-mails from Scarpetta612, not because she sensed she was about to die, for sure, in Benton’s opinion, but because she had just committed her own crime, anonymously, against a medical examiner whom she would finally meet, in the morgue.

Benton believed Terri had a conscience, a sizable one, and that’s why she’d deleted the hundred-some e-mails she’d thought were between Scarpetta and her. Terri’s anxiety had dictated she should eradicate any evidence that there might be a connection between Gotham Gotcha and Terri Bridges. By deleting the correspondence, she’d also expunged her fallen hero from her life.

That was Benton’s theory. Scarpetta didn’t have a theory except that there would always be theories.

“I wrote Oscar a letter,” she said as she opened her handbag and pulled out an envelope. “I’m thinking everyone should read it, that I’ll show it to them. But I want to read it to you first. Not an e-mail but a real letter on real paper, my personal stationery, which I haven’t used since God knows when. I didn’t write it in longhand, though. My penmanship gets only worse with time. Since there will never be a court case, Jaime said it’s perfectly fine to tell Oscar whatever I want, and I have. I’ve done my best to explain to him that Terri was dealt hardships by her family, and it was this early programming that compelled her to control everything within her reach. She was angry because she’d been hurt, and hurt people often hurt back, but beneath it all she was a good person. I’m giving you a bit of a summary, because it’s long.”

She slipped four folded pages of heavy, creamy paper out of the envelope and carefully smoothed them open. She skimmed until she found the part she wanted Benton to hear.

She quietly read to him:

. . . In the secret room upstairs where she wrote her columns were the yellow roses you gave her. She saved every one of them, and I’m betting she never told you. No one would do something like that if the feelings weren’t profoundly important, Oscar. I want you to remember that, and if you forget, re-read this letter. That’s why I wrote it. Something for you to keep.

I also took the liberty to write her family and express my condolences and tell them what I could, because they have many, many questions. Dr. Lester, I fear, hasn’t been as helpful as they’d like, so I’ve filled in the blanks, most of those conversations over the phone, with a few exchanges by e-mail.

I’ve talked about you, and maybe by now you’ve heard from them. If you haven’t, I feel sure you will. They said they wanted me to tell you what Terri did in her will, and they intend to write you about it. Maybe they have.

I won’t divulge the fine points of her wishes, because it isn’t my place to do that. But in keeping with her family’s request to me, I’ll pass along this much. She left a considerable sum to the Little People of America, to start a foundation that offers assistance in medical care for those who want and need procedures (such as corrective surgeries) that medical insurance won’t cover. As you know, much of what can and should be done is unfairly deemed elective: orthodontic care, for example, and in some instances, bone lengthening.

Suffice it to say, Terri had a very kind heart. . . .

Scarpetta had read as much as she could, because the wave of sadness was rolling over her again. She folded the pages and tucked them back into their envelope.

Louie appeared with their drinks and just as unobtrusively was gone, and she took a sip and it warmed her on its way down and its vapors lifted her brain as if it had retreated into a cloistered place and needed courage.

“If you think it won’t interfere with your patient’s treatment”—she handed Benton the envelope—“would you see that he gets this?”

“It will mean more to him than you imagine,” Benton said, sliding it into the inside pocket of his jacket, a buttery black leather jacket.

It was new, as was the belt with its Winston eagle-head buckle, and the handmade boots he had on. Lucy’s way of celebrating when she, quote, dodged another bullet, was to buy people gifts. Not inexpensive ones. She’d gotten Scarpetta another watch she really didn’t need—a titanium Breguet with a carbon-fiber face—to go with the black Ferrari F43O Spider that she said she’d also gotten Scarpetta. It was a joke, thank God. Scarpetta would rather ride a bicycle than drive one of those things. Marino had a new motorcycle, a racing red Ducati 1098 that Lucy was keeping for him in her hangar in White Plains, because she said he wasn’t allowed to ride anything with fewer than four wheels in the city. She’d rather rudely added that he had to maintain his weight or he wouldn’t fit on a Superbike no matter how super it was.

Scarpetta had no idea what Lucy might have given Berger. She didn’t ask questions unless Lucy wanted her to ask them. Scarpetta was being patient as Lucy continued to wait for judgment that Scarpetta had no intention of rendering because it wasn’t what she felt. Not remotely. After getting over the initial shock of it, although there was no justification for shock, not really, Scarpetta couldn’t be more pleased.

She and Berger had actually gone out to lunch last week, the two of them alone at Forlini’s near One Hogan Place, and had sat in a booth that Berger said was almost named after Scarpetta. She’d said it was a lucky booth because it was the break-up booth. Scarpetta had said she didn’t see how that could be construed as lucky, and Berger, who, it turned out, was a Yankees fan and used to go to games and thought she might do so again, had replied that it depended on who was up to bat in the bottom of the ninth.

Scarpetta didn’t need to watch baseball to get the gist of things. She’d simply been glad that a booth named after New York’s fire commissioner wasn’t the hot seat it might have been in the not-so-distant past. Few people knew as much about Scarpetta as Jaime Berger did.

“I didn’t answer your question,” Benton said, watching the door. “I’m sorry.”

“I forgot the question.”

“Your letter. Thank you for reading it to me, but don’t read it to them.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“They don’t need proof that you’re a decent human being.” Benton’s eyes on hers.

“It’s that obvious.”

“Everyone knows that shit on the Internet, the e-mails Morales sent pretending to be you, and all the rest of it? We know who you are and who you aren’t. Nothing that’s happened is your fault, and you and I will continue to talk about this, say the same thing again and again. It takes a long time for your emotions to catch up with your intellect. Besides. I should feel guilty. Morales got all that shit from Nancy what’s-her-name, and Marino never would have had that flake for a therapist had I not sent him to that damn treatment center and even wasted my time conferring with her.”

“She should never have talked to Morales, I agree. But I can see why she would.”

“Nope,” Benton said. “Never should have happened. He probably seduced her over the phone. I don’t know what he said, but she should never have told him one word of what Marino had confided in her. It’s such a HIPAA violation, she’s history. I’m seeing to that.”

“Let’s don’t punish anybody. There’s been enough punishment, enough of people not getting along and fighting each other’s battles and making each other’s decisions and paying people back. Indirectly, that’s why Terri’s dead. That’s why Eva’s dead. If Terri hadn’t been paying everybody back . . . Well, if Marino wants to go after his former lamebrain therapist, let him do it himself.”

“You’re probably right,” Benton said. “And they’re here.”

He got up so Marino would see him in the crowded dark, and the party of four, which included Marino’s new girlfriend, Bacardi, who did have a first name—it was Georgia—and also Berger and Lucy, squeezed their way through the crowded dining room and paid their respects to Elaine and bantered about things Scarpetta couldn’t hear. Then everyone was pulling out chairs and sitting down, and seemed in fine spirits. Lucy had on a Red Sox baseball cap, probably to tease Berger, who naturally hated the Red Sox, but mainly to cover a small shaved spot.

That was it. An insult to Lucy’s vanity, the bullet wound on the back of her head healed, the minor contusion to her brain gone. Marino had rather much summarized as only he could that Lucy was a-okay because there was nothing up there to hit but bone.

Louie was back with plates of Elaine’s famous calamari, and he took orders without writing anything down, and Berger and Lucy wanted to try his special stash of Scotch, and Bacardi didn’t live up to her name and asked for an apple martini, and Marino hesitated, then shook his head and looked uncomfortable. Nobody paid any attention, and Scarpetta knew what had happened. She reached behind Lucy and touched Marino’s arm.

He leaned back and his wooden chair creaked, and he said, “How ya doin’?”

“Have you ever been here?” she asked him.

“Not me. Not my kind of joint. I don’t like having private conversations with Barbara Walters two tables away.”

“That’s not Barbara Walters. They have Red Stripe, Buckler, Sharp’s. I don’t know what you’re drinking these days,” Scarpetta said.

She wasn’t encouraging him to drink or not drink. She was saying she didn’t care what he was drinking, and that only he should care about it, and what she cared about was him.

Marino said to Louie, “You still got Red Stripe?”

“You bet.”

“Maybe a little later,” Marino said.

“Maybe a little later,” Louie repeated along with the rest of the orders, and was gone.

Berger was looking at Scarpetta, and she cut her eyes toward the man in the white Stetson sitting by the window.

“You know what I’m thinking,” Berger said to her.

“It’s not him,” Scarpetta said.

“I almost had a heart attack when I walked in the door,” Berger said. “You have no idea. I thought, How can that be possible?”

“He still where he ought to be?”

“You mean hell?” Lucy cut in, seeming to know exactly what they were talking about. “That’s where he ought to be.”

“Don’t go getting any ideas, Rocky,” Marino said to her.

That used to be his nickname for Lucy, because she never knew when to quit swinging and was always challenging him to boxing and wrestling matches, until she turned twelve and got her period. His middle name was Rocco, so his calling her Rocky had always struck Scarpetta as a bit of projection going on. What he loved in Lucy was what he loved in himself and just didn’t know it.

“I don’t care what anybody says, I’m crazy about those damn movies,” Bacardi said as Louie was with them again already. “Even the last one, Rocky Balboa. I always cry at the end. I don’t know why. Real blood and guts? Not a tear. But the movies? I’m a mess.”

“Anybody driving?” Louie said again, and then answered himself, his usual routine, “Of course not. Nobody’s driving. I don’t know what happened. Gravity,” he added, letting them know their drinks were strong. “I start pouring, and gravity takes over. I can’t lift up the bottle, and I keep pouring.”

“My parents used to bring me here when I was a kid,” Berger said to Lucy. “This is old New York. You should absorb every detail, because one day there won’t be anything left of an era when everything was better, even if it didn’t seem so at the time. People would come in here and actually talk about art and ideas. Hunter Thompson. Joe DiMaggio.”

“I’ve never really thought of Joe DiMaggio talking about art and ideas. Mainly baseball—but not Marilyn Monroe. We all know he didn’t talk about her,” Lucy said.

“You better hope there’s no such things as ghosts,” Benton said to his almost niece. “After what you did.”

“I’ve been wanting to ask you about that,” Bacardi said to Lucy. “Wow. Now, this has got a hell of a lot of apples in it.”

She tucked her arm under Marino’s and leaned against him, and a butterfly tattoo lifted out of her tight knit top on a swell of bosom.

Bacardi said, “Since the damn thing crashed, and what a mystery that is, I never got to see the damn photograph. It’s fake, right?”

“What do you mean?” Lucy asked innocently.

“Don’t play your dumb-as-a-fox role with me.” Bacardi smiled and sipped her apple martini, not daintily.

Scarpetta said to Berger, “You must have seen some interesting people here when you were a kid.”

“Many of the people in the pictures on the walls,” Berger said. “Half of them Lucy has never heard of.”

“Here we go again. It’s a damn wonder anybody serves me a drink,” Lucy said. “I’m still ten. I’ll be ten my entire life.”

“You weren’t around when JFK was shot, not when Bobby was, not when Martin Luther King was. Not even for Water-gate,” Berger said.

“Was there anything I missed that might have been good?”

“When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. That was good,” Berger said.

“I was around for that, and when Marilyn Monroe died.” Bacardi worked her way back into the discussion. “So let’s hear it. Tell me about the photograph. The worm, or whatever the media’s calling it.”

“There are dead pictures of her on the Internet,” Marino said. “A couple of ’em. That’s what happens. Some asshole who works in a morgue sells a picture. We could stop letting people bring in their phones,” he said to Scarpetta. “Make them leave them in the morgue office like I have to leave my gun when I go into lockup. Have a safe or something.”

“It’s not a real photograph,” Lucy said. “Not exactly. Just from the neck up. The rest of it I cut and pasted and enhanced.”

“You think it’s true she was murdered?” Bacardi asked very seriously.

Scarpetta had seen the altered photograph and what Eva had written about it, and was quite familiar with all of the records pertaining to the case. If she hadn’t been more than halfway through her single-malt Scotch, straight and neat, she might not have been so candid.

“Probably,” she said.

“Probably not smart to say that on CNN,” Benton said to Scarpetta.

She took another sip. The Scotch was smooth with a peaty finish that drifted up her nose and evaporated somewhere in her brain, deeper than before.

“People would be surprised if they knew what I don’t say,” she said. “Eva Peebles had it mostly right.”

Lucy curled her fingers around her glass, raising it to her aunt, then to her lips, exploring it with her nose and tongue the way a Tastevin treats a fine wine. She looked at Scarpetta from the shadow of her baseball cap and smiled.