Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  He wiped his eyes with his cuffed hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “They have their motives,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He stared at the wall.

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

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

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

  He didn’t say anything.

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

  Nothing. Staring at the wall.

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

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

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

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

  “The attacker at her door?” she said.

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

  “The flashlight? You hit yourself with it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I didn’t know her.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” he screamed.

  12

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

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

  Terrorists, she thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  . . . GOTHAM GOTCHA! OH C THA MAGGOT!

  GOTHAM GOTCHA!

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’ll call Berger.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It’s Berger who wanted you here.”

  “But you’re the one who asked.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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