“I’m not your bro. Don’t waste your rapper-talk shit on me.”
Morales’s MO was to come across as half asleep and bored, and doped up on sedatives or painkillers, which Marino doubted, but then again, he didn’t know. Behind Morales’s haze was a snobby bastard who had gone to Dartmouth, then Johns Hopkins, where he’d completed medical school and decided he’d rather be one of New York’s finest, a cop, which Marino didn’t take at face value. Nobody who could be a doctor would end up a cop.
Besides, he was a bullshit artist who circulated all sorts of wild stories about himself and laughed his ass off when other cops believed him. Supposedly, his cousin was the president of Bolivia, and his father had moved the family to America because he believed in capitalism and was tired of herding llamas. Supposedly, Morales had grown up in the projects of Chicago and had been a pal of Barack Obama until politics interfered, which seemed reasonable to those who didn’t know better. No presidential candidate would want to be friends with someone who used words like bro and looked like a member of a street gang, right down to his half-mast baggy jeans, big gold chains and rings, and cornrow hair.
“Been running queries all day—not to be confused with homos, bro,” Morales said.
“Got no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Queer-ies? I forgot you got no sense of humor and barely finished high school. Looking for the usual patterns, trends, modus operandi, complaints, from here to Dollywood, and I think I hit on something.”
“What besides Berger?” Marino said.
“What is it about women like her and Kay Scarpetta? It might be worth dying to have her hands all over me. Goddamn. Can you imagine doing her and Berger at the same time? Well, who am I talking to? Of course you can imagine it.”
Marino’s dislike of Morales instantly turned to hate. He was always screwing with Marino, putting him down, and the only reason Marino didn’t screw him back, only harder, was Marino’s self-imposed probation. Benton had asked Berger for a favor. If she hadn’t granted it, God knows where Marino would be. Probably a dispatcher in some shitbox small-town police department somewhere. Or a drunk in a homeless shelter. Or dead.
“It’s possible our killer’s struck before,” Morales said. “I’ve found two other homicides that are somewhat similar. Not New York, but remember Oscar’s self-employed and doesn’t, quote, go to the office. He’s got a car. He’s got disposable income because he gets a tax-free check from his family every birthday, and right now the limit’s up to twelve grand—their way of not feeling guilty about their freako only son. He’s got no one to support but himself. So we got no idea how much he travels or what he does, now, do we? I might just get a couple of oldie goldies cleared while I’m at it.”
Marino opened the refrigerator, found another Sharp’s, twisted off the cap, and hurled it into the sink, where it clattered like shotgun pellets smacking a pop-up metal target.
“What two other homicides?” he asked.
“Got hits on two possibles in our database. Like I said, not New York cases, which is why they didn’t come to mind. Both in the summer of 2003, two months apart. A fourteen-year-old kid hooked on oxys. Found nude, hands and ankles bound, strangled with a ligature that was missing from the scene. From a good family in Greenwich, Connecticut. Body dumped near the Bugatti dealership. Unsolved, no suspects.”
Marino said, “Where was Oscar the summer of 2003?”
“Same place he is now. Same job, living his whacked life in his same apartment. Meaning he could have been anywhere.”
“I’m not seeing the connection. The kid’s what? Doing blows for drugs and got picked up by the wrong customer? That’s what it sounds like to me. And you got reason to think Oscar Bane’s into teenage boys?”
“You ever notice we don’t know what the hell people are into until after they start raping and murdering and it comes out in the wash? It could have been Oscar. Like I said, he drives. He can afford to get around and has plenty of time on his hands. He’s strong as hell. We should keep an open mind.”
“What about the other case? Another teenage boy?”
“A woman.”
“So tell me who and why Oscar might have done her,” Marino said.
“Oops.” Morales yawned loudly. “I’m reshuffling my paperwork. Out of order, me, oh, my. She was first, then the kid. Beautiful, twenty-one, just moved to Baltimore from a rural town in North Carolina, got a nothing job with a radio station, was hoping to get into television, and instead got involved in some extracurricular activities to keep herself in oxys. So she was vulnerable to being picked up. Nude, hands bound, strangled with a ligature that wasn’t found at the scene. Body found in a Dumpster near the harbor.”
Marino said, “DNA in either case?”
“Nothing useful, and there was no sign of sexual assault. Negative for seminal fluid.”
“I’m still waiting for the connection,” Marino said. “Homicides where people are probably doing tricks for drugs and end up bound and strangled and dumped are a dime a dozen.”
“You aware Terri Bridges had a thin gold chain around her left ankle? Nobody knows where it came from. Kind of weird she had no other jewelry on, and when I pushed Oscar about the ankle bracelet, he said he’d never seen it before.”
“And?”
“And these other two cases, same thing. No jewelry except a thin gold bracelet around the left ankle. Same side as the heart, right? Like a leg iron? Like, you’re my love slave? Could be the killer’s signature. Could be Oscar’s signature. I’m getting the case files together, still data-searching and digging for other info. Will put out alerts to the usual suspects—including the posse from your past.”
“What posse from my past?” Marino’s thoughts went from dark to black.
He couldn’t see through the storm clouds rolling in his head.
“Benton Wesley. And that hot young former agent-cop-whatever who’s unfortunately untouchable to yours truly here, if rumors are to be believed. Of course, your little discovery of the laptops when you dropped by the scene earlier today without my permission just threw her a bone.”
“I don’t need your permission. You’re not my den mother.”
“Nope. The den mother would be Berger. Maybe you should ask her who’s in charge.”
“If I need to, I will. Right now, I’m doing my job. Investigating this homicide, exactly like she expects me to do.”
He drained the last of the Sharp’s and glass clanked inside the refrigerator as he went for another one. By his calculations, if each bottle was point three percent alcohol, he could achieve the first hint of a buzz if he drank at least twelve in quick succession, which he had tried before, and had felt nothing but an urgency to pee.
Morales said, “She’s got this forensic computer company Berger’s eager to use. Lucy, as in Kay Scarpetta’s niece.”
“I know who she is.”
Marino also knew about Lucy’s company in the Village, and that Scarpetta and Benton were involved with John Jay. He knew a lot of things he chose not to discuss with Morales or anyone else. What he didn’t know was that Lucy, Benton, and Scarpetta were involved in the Terri Bridges case, or that Scarpetta and Benton were in the city right this minute.
Morales’s cocky voice: “It may relieve you to know that I don’t believe Kay will be around long enough for you to have any awkward encounters.”
There could be no doubt. Morales had read that fucking gossip column.
“She’s here to examine Oscar,” Morales said.
“What the hell for?”
“Looks like she’s the blue plate special on Oscar’s menu. He demanded her, and Berger’s giving the little guy whatever his little heart wants.”
Marino couldn’t stand the thought of Scarpetta being alone with Oscar Bane. It unnerved him that Oscar had requested her specifically, because that could mean only one thing: He was far more aware of her than he ought to be.
Marino said, “You’re suggesting h
e might be a serial killer, so what’s he doing with the Doc? I can’t believe Berger or anybody set her up for something like this. Especially since he could get out any minute. Jesus.”
He was pacing. In a dozen steps, he could cover his apartment’s entire square footage.
“Once she’s done, maybe she’ll buzz back to Massachusetts and you got nothing to worry about,” Morales said. “Which is good, right? Since you got plenty to worry about already.”
“That right? Why don’t you tell me.”
“I’m reminding you this is a sensitive case, and you didn’t handle it all too well when Oscar Bane poured his heart out to you last month.”
“I did it by the book.”
“Funny thing about that. Nobody gives a shit once there’s a problem. As far as your former boss Kay goes, I advise avoidance. Not that you have any reason to be in her company or show up unexpected at Bellevue. For example.”
It inflamed Marino to hear Morales call her Kay. Marino had never called her Kay, and he’d worked side by side with her, had probably spent ten thousand hours with her in the morgue, in her office, in the car, at crime scenes, in her home, including on holidays, and even having a drink or two in her hotel room when they worked cases out of town. So if he didn’t call her Kay, who the hell did Morales think he was?
“My advice to you is to make yourself scarce until Kay’s back in Massachusetts,” Morales said. “She doesn’t need any more stress, you hearing me, bro? And what I don’t want is next time we call her in for assistance, she says no because of you. We don’t need her quitting her position at John Jay, quitting as a consultant because of you. Then Benton would quit next, if he wants to keep the wife happy. So we lose both of them because of you. I plan on spending a lot of years working with both of them. Being the Three Musketeers.”
“You don’t know them.” Marino was so angry, his heart was pounding in his neck.
“They quit and it will hit the news,” Morales said. “And you know how things get passed down the line. A scandal because it will be the front page of the Post, a headline ten feet tall that Jaime Berger, the ace prosecutor of sex crimes, hired a sex offender and maybe she gets fired. Unbelievable how you can bring down the house of cards, man. Anyway, I gotta get off the phone. About what’s on the Internet, what happened between you and Kay. Not to pry—”
“Then fucking don’t,” Marino snapped.
4
Oscar Bane’s hairless, shackled legs dangled over the edge of the examination table inside one of the several infirmaries in the psychiatric prison ward. His eyes, one blue, the other green, gave Scarpetta the unsettling sensation that two people were staring at her.
A Department of Corrections officer had the solid, silent presence of the Rockies as he stood near the wall, allowing her space to work, but close enough to intervene should Oscar become violent, which seemed unlikely. He was frightened. He’d been crying. She sensed nothing aggressive about him as he sat on the table, self-conscious in a thin cotton gown that was long on him but periodically sneaked open below the tie at his waist. Chains quietly clanked whenever he shifted his shackled legs or cuffed hands to cover himself.
Oscar was a little person, a dwarf. While his extremities and fingers were disproportionately short, his flimsy gown revealed that he was well endowed elsewhere. One might go so far as to say that God had overcompensated him for what Scarpetta suspected was achondroplasia, caused by a spontaneous mutation of the gene responsible for the formation of bone, primarily targeting the long bones of the arms and legs. His torso and head were disproportionately large for his extremities, and his short, thick fingers diverged between the middle and ring fingers, giving his hands a somewhat trident appearance. Beyond that, he appeared normal anatomically except for what he had done to himself at considerable misery and expense.
His startling white teeth had been bonded or bleached, possibly crowned, and his short hair was dyed bright yellow-gold. His nails were buffed and perfectly squared, and although Scarpetta couldn’t swear to it, she credited his tranquil brow to injections of Botox. Most remarkable was his body, which looked as if it were sculpted of beige Carrara marble with bluish-gray veining. Perfectly balanced in its musculature, it was almost completely devoid of hair. The overall effect of his appearance, with his intensely different eyes and Apollo-like radiance, was rather surreal and bizarre, and she found Benton’s comment about Oscar’s phobias quite strange. He could not look the way he did without worshipping at the feet of pain and the practitioners who inflicted it.
She felt the probe of his blue-green gaze as she opened the crime scene case Benton kept in his office for her. Unlike those whose professions didn’t demand forceps, evidence envelopes and bags and containers, or camera equipment, forensic light sources, sharp blades, and all the rest, Scarpetta was forced to live a life of redundancy. If bottled water couldn’t make it through airport security, a crime scene case certainly wouldn’t, and flaunting her medical examiner’s shield only drew more unwanted attention.
She’d tried it once at Logan and had ended up in a room where she was interrogated, searched, and subjected to other invasions to make sure she wasn’t a terrorist who, the TSA officers had to admit, just happened to be the spitting image of that lady medical examiner on CNN. In the end, she wasn’t allowed to carry the crime scene case on the plane anyway, and refusing to check it in baggage, she ended up driving. Now she kept duplicates of all security threats in Manhattan.
She asked Oscar, “Do you understand the purpose of these samples and why you’re under no obligation to give them?”
He watched her arrange envelopes, forceps, a tape measure, and various other forensic items on the white paper-covered examination table. He turned away from her and stared at the wall.
The corrections officer said, “Look at the doctor when she talks to you, Oscar.”
Oscar continued to stare at the wall.
In a tense, tenor voice, he said, “Dr. Scarpetta, could you repeat what you said, please?”
“You signed a release, agreeing it was all right for me to take certain biological samples,” she replied. “I’m confirming you understand the scientific information these samples can provide, and that no one has asked for them.”
Oscar still hadn’t been charged with a crime. She wondered if Benton, Berger, and the police interpreted his malingering to mean he was going to confess any minute to a murder Scarpetta knew nothing about. This forced her into an untenable and unprecedented position. Since he wasn’t under arrest, she couldn’t divulge anything he revealed to her unless he waived the doctor-patient privilege, and the only waiver he had signed so far was one that allowed her to take biological samples.
Oscar looked at her and said, “I know what they’re for. DNA. I know why you need my hair.”
“The samples will be analyzed and the labs will have your DNA profile. Hair can tell us if you’re a chronic substance abuser. There are other things the police, the scientists look for. Trace evidence . . .”
“I know what it is.”
“I’m making sure you understand.”
“I don’t do drugs, and I’m certainly not a chronic substance abuser of any description,” he said in a shaky voice, facing the wall again. “And my DNA and fingerprints are all over her apartment. My blood’s in there. I cut my thumb.”
He showed her his right thumb, a Band-Aid around the second knuckle.
“I let them fingerprint me when they brought me in,” he said. “I’m not in any database. They’ll see I’ve never committed a crime. I don’t get parking tickets. I stay out of trouble.”
He stared at the forceps she picked up, and fear shadowed his mismatched eyes.
“I don’t need those,” he said. “I’ll do it myself.”
“Have you showered since you got here?” she asked, putting down the forceps.
“No. I said I wouldn’t until you looked at me.”
“Have you washed your hands?”
“No
. I’ve touched as little as possible, mainly the pencil your husband had me use during certain psychological tests. Projective figure drawings. I’ve refused to eat. I didn’t want to do anything to my body until you looked. I’m afraid of doctors. I don’t like pain.”
She tore open paper packets of swabs and applicators while he watched, as if at any moment he expected her to do something that might hurt.
“I’d like to scrape under your nails,” she said. “Only if it’s all right. We can recover trace evidence, DNA, from under fingernails, toenails.”
“I know what it’s for. You won’t find anything that shows I did anything to her. Finding her DNA means nothing. My DNA’s all over her apartment,” he repeated himself.
He sat very still while she used a plastic scraper to scrape under his nails, and she could feel his stare. She sensed his blue-green eyes like warm light as they touched her head and other parts of her, as if he was examining her while she was examining him. When she was done with the scraping and looked up at him, he was looking at the wall. He asked her not to watch while he plucked his own head hair, which she helped him place inside an envelope, and then his pubic hair, which went into another envelope. For someone so averse to pain, he didn’t flinch, but his face was tense and his forehead was beaded with sweat.
She peeled open a buccal brush, and he swabbed the inside of his cheek, and his hands trembled.
“Now please make him leave.” He meant the corrections officer. “You don’t need him here. I’m not talking with him here.”
“Doesn’t work that way,” the officer said. “It’s not your choice.”
Oscar was silent. He stared at the wall. The officer looked at Scarpetta, waiting to see what she was going to do.
“You know,” she decided, “I think we’ll be fine.”
“I’d rather not do that, Doc. He’s pretty keyed up.”
He didn’t seem keyed up, but she didn’t comment. What he seemed was dazed and upset, and on the verge of hysteria.
“What you mean is chained up like Houdini,” Oscar said. “It’s one thing to be in lockup. But I don’t need to be shackled like some serial killer. I’m surprised you didn’t roll me out in a Hannibal Lecter cage. The staff here obviously doesn’t know that mechanical restraints in psychiatric hospitals were abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. What have I done to deserve this?”
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