Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  She couldn’t talk to him about Oscar’s conviction that he was being spied on and that whoever was behind it was Terri Bridges’s killer. Maybe Benton already knew, but she couldn’t ask. She couldn’t reveal that Oscar’s injuries were self-inflicted, that he’d lied to the police and everyone else about how he’d gotten them. The most she could do was speak in generalities.

  “I have no information that might justify my discussing him with you,” she said, implying Oscar had confessed to nothing, nor indicated he was a threat to himself or others.

  Benton unlocked his office door.

  “You spent a long time with him,” he said. “Remember what I always tell you, Kay. Your first cue is your gut. Listen to what your gut tells you about this guy. And I’m sorry if I seem strung out. I’ve had no sleep. Actually, things are rather much a fucking mess.”

  The work space the hospital had allotted Benton was small, with books, journals, clutter piled everywhere as neatly as he could manage. They sat, and the desk between them seemed a solid manifestation of an emotional barrier she could not get past. He did not want sex, at least not with her. She didn’t believe he was having it with anybody else, but the benefits of marriage seemed to include shorter and more impersonal conversations, and less time in bed. She believed Benton had been happier before they’d gotten married, and that sad fact she wasn’t going to blame on Marino.

  “What did your gut tell you?” Benton asked.

  “That I shouldn’t be talking to him,” she replied. “That I shouldn’t be prevented from talking to you. My head tells me otherwise.”

  “You’re an associate, a consultant here. We can have a professional discussion about him as a patient.”

  “I don’t know anything about him as your patient. I can’t tell you anything about him as mine.”

  “Before now you’d never heard of him? Or Terri Bridges?”

  “That much I can say. Absolutely not. And I’m going to ask you not to cajole me. You know my limitations. You knew them when you called this morning.”

  Benton opened a drawer and pulled out two envelopes. He reached across the desk to hand them to her.

  “I didn’t know what might happen by the time you got here,” he said. “Maybe the cops would have found something, arrested him, and we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. But you’re right. At the moment, your priority has to be Oscar’s well-being. You’re his physician. But that doesn’t mean you have to see him again.”

  Inside one envelope was a DNA report, and inside the other, a set of crime scene photographs.

  “Berger wanted you to have a copy of the DNA analysis. The photographs and police report are from Mike Morales,” Benton said.

  “Do I know him?”

  “He’s relatively new to the detective division. You don’t know him, maybe won’t have to. Candidly speaking, I think he’s a jerk. Photos he took at the crime scene, his preliminary report. The DNA’s from swabs Dr. Lester took from Terri Bridges’s body. There’s a second set of photos I haven’t gotten yet. From a second search earlier this afternoon when luggage in her closet was checked, and it turned out Terri’s laptops were in it. Apparently, she was supposed to fly to Arizona this morning to spend a few days with her family. Why her luggage was packed and out of sight in her closet, no one knows.”

  Scarpetta thought about what Oscar had told her. Terri didn’t leave luggage out. She was obsessively neat, and Oscar didn’t like good-byes.

  Benton said, “One possible explanation is she was extremely neat. Perhaps obsessively so. You’ll see what I mean in the photos.”

  “I’d say that’s a very plausible explanation,” she commented.

  He held her gaze. He was trying to determine if she’d just given him information. She didn’t break their eye contact or the silence. He retrieved a number from his cell phone contact list and reached for the landline. He asked Berger if she could send someone by to pick up evidence Scarpetta had collected from Oscar Bane.

  He listened for a moment, then looked up at Scarpetta and said to Berger, “I completely agree. Since he can leave whenever he wants, and you know how I feel about that. And no, I haven’t had a chance . . . Well, she’s right here. Why don’t you ask her?”

  Benton moved the handset to the middle of the desk and held out the receiver to Scarpetta.

  “Thanks for doing this,” Jaime Berger said, and Scarpetta tried to remember the last time they’d talked.

  Five years ago.

  “How was he?” Berger asked.

  “Extremely cooperative.”

  “Do you think he’ll stay put?”

  “I think I’m in an awkward position.” Scarpetta’s way of saying she couldn’t talk about her patient.

  “I understand.”

  “All I can comfortably tell you,” Scarpetta said, “is if you can get his DNA analyzed quickly, that would be a good thing. There’s no downside to that.”

  “Fortunately, there are plenty of people in the world right now who love overtime. One of them, however, isn’t Dr. Lester. While I’ve got you, I’ll ask you directly and let Benton off the hook, unless he’s already said something. Would you mind looking at Terri Bridges’s body tonight? Benton can fill you in. Dr. Lester should be on her way in from New Jersey. Sorry to subject you to something so unpleasant, and I don’t mean the morgue.”

  “Whatever’s helpful,” Scarpetta replied.

  “I’m sure we’ll talk later. And we should get together. Maybe dinner at Elaine’s,” Berger said.

  It seemed to be the favorite line of professional women like them. They would get together, have lunch, maybe dinner. She and Berger had said it to each other the first time they met eight years ago, when Berger was brought to Virginia as a special prosecutor in a case that was one of the most stressful ones in Scarpetta’s life. And they’d said it to each other last time they met, in 2003, when both of them had been concerned about Lucy, who had just returned from a clandestine operation in Poland that Scarpetta still knew very little about, except that what Lucy had done wasn’t legal. It certainly wasn’t moral. In Berger’s penthouse apartment here in the city, the prosecutor had sat down with Scarpetta’s niece, and whatever had gone on between them had remained between them.

  Oddly, Berger knew far more about Scarpetta than almost anybody she could think of, and yet they weren’t friends. It was unlikely they would get together and do anything except work, no matter how many times they suggested lunch or a drink and meant it. Their disconnection wasn’t simply due to the vicissitudes of very busy lives that collide and then resume their separate paths. Powerful women tended to be loners, because it was their instinct not to trust one another.

  Scarpetta handed the receiver back to Benton.

  She said, “If Terri were obsessive-compulsive, her body might offer a few hints. It seems I’ll have a chance to look for myself. Coincidentally.”

  “I was about to tell you. Berger asked me earlier to see if you would.”

  “Since Dr. Lester’s on her way back into the city, I guess I agreed to it before I knew about it.”

  “You can leave afterwards, stay out of it,” Benton said. “Unless Oscar gets charged. Then I don’t know how it will involve you. That will be up to Berger.”

  “Please don’t tell me this man killed someone to get my attention.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you about anything. At this point, I don’t know what to think about anything. The DNA from Terri’s vaginal swabs, for example. Take a look.”

  Scarpetta removed the lab report from an envelope and read it as he described what Berger had told him about a woman in Palm Beach.

  “Well?” he said. “Can you think of any reason?”

  “What’s not here is Dr. Lester’s report of what samples she took. You said vaginal.”

  “That’s what Berger told me.”

  “Exactly what they were and from where? Not here. So no. I’m not going to venture a guess about the unusual results a
nd what they might mean.”

  “Well, I will. Contamination,” he said. “Although I can’t figure out how an elderly woman in a wheelchair factors into that.”

  “Any chance she has a connection with Oscar Bane?”

  “I’m told no. Berger called her and asked.”

  His phone rang. He answered, listening for a long silence, his closed face giving away nothing.

  “Don’t think it was such a great idea,” he finally spoke to whoever was on the line. “Sorry that happened . . . Of course I regret it in light of . . . No, I didn’t want to tell you for this very reason . . . Because, no, hold on. Listen to me for a minute. The answer is, I have . . . Lucy, please. Let me finish. I don’t expect you to understand, and we can’t get into it now. Because . . . You don’t mean that. Because . . . When someone has nowhere else to turn . . . We’ll deal with it. Later, all right? Calm down and we’ll talk later,” and he got off the phone.

  “What the hell was that about?” Scarpetta asked. “What was Lucy saying? What are you sorry about, and who has nowhere else to turn?”

  Benton’s face was pale but impassive, and he said, “Sometimes she has no sense of time and place, and what I don’t need right now is one of her rages.”

  “Rage? Over what?”

  “You know how she gets.”

  “Usually when she has good reason to get that way.”

  “We can’t get into it now.” He said the same thing to her that he’d said to Lucy.

  “How the hell am I supposed to concentrate after overhearing a conversation like that? Get into what?”

  He was silent. She never liked it when he stopped to think after she’d asked him a question.

  “Gotham Gotcha,” he said, to her surprise and annoyance.

  “You’re not really going to make a big deal out of that.”

  “You read it?”

  “I started reading it in the cab. Bryce said I needed to.”

  “Did you read all of it?”

  “I was interrupted by being thrown out on the street.”

  “Come look.”

  He typed something as she moved next to him.

  “That’s odd,” Benton said, frowning.

  The Gotham Gotcha website had a massive programming error or had crashed. Buildings were dark, the sky flashing red, and Rockefeller Center’s huge Christmas tree was upside down in Central Park.

  Benton impatiently scooted the mouse around on its pad and clicked it repeatedly.

  “The site’s down for some reason and completely fucked up,” he said. “However, unfortunately, I can pull up the damn column anyway.”

  Typing, he executed a search, hitting keys vigorously.

  “It’s all the hell over the place,” he said.

  The screen filled with references to Gotham Gotcha and Dr. Kay Scarpetta, and he clicked on a file and opened a copy of not one column but two that someone had cut and pasted on a forensic fan site. The unflattering photograph of Scarpetta filled the screen, and she and Benton looked at it for a moment.

  “You think it was taken in Charleston?” he asked. “Or your new office? Do the scrubs tell you anything? The color? Don’t you wear cranberry scrubs in Watertown?”

  “Depends on what we get from the medical linen service. They pick up and deliver, and one week it might be teal-green, the next week purple, different shades of blue, cranberry. That’s true at most morgues in recent years. The most I might specify is I don’t want something cute like SpongeBob, the Simpsons, Tom and Jerry. Literally true. I know pathologists who wear them, as if they’re pediatricians.”

  “And you have no recollection of someone taking a picture of you during an autopsy? Maybe using their cell phone?”

  She thought back, thought hard, and said, “No. Because if I saw it happen, I would have made the person delete it. I would never permit such a thing.”

  “Most likely it happened since you moved and started with CNN. The celebrity factor. A cop. Someone from a funeral home, a removal service.”

  “That would be bad,” she said, thinking about Bryce. “That would make me worry about someone on my staff. What’s this about Sister Polly? Who’s Sister Polly?”

  “Don’t know. Read this. Then we’ll get to that.”

  He moved the cursor to the first column that had been posted today, to the part he wanted her to see:

  . . . yet beneath that impenetrable façade is a dirty secret she hides pretty well. Scarpetta may live in a world of stainless steel but she’s certainly no woman made of steel. She’s weak, a disgrace.

  Guess what, she can be raped.

  That’s right. Just like any other woman, only you can blame the victim this time. She brought it upon herself. Pushed away, mistreated, and belittled her investigative partner in crime until one drunken night in Charleston when he couldn’t take it anymore. You have to feel a little sorry for poor Pete Marino. . . .

  Scarpetta returned to her chair. Gossip was one thing. This was another.

  “I won’t ask why people are so hateful,” she said. “I learned a long time ago not to ask. Finally figured out the why part might give insight, but really doesn’t matter. Just the end result. That’s what matters. If I find out who this is, I’ll sue.”

  “I won’t tell you not to let it get to you.”

  “I believe you just told me by not telling me. What happened was never in the news. I never reported it. It’s not accurate. This is slander. I’ll sue.”

  “Sue whom? An anonymous piece of shit in cyberspace?”

  “Lucy could find out who.”

  “Speaking of, I’m not sure it’s coincidental the site crashed,” he said. “That’s probably the best remedy. Maybe it will stay crashed forever.”

  “Did you ask her to crash the site?”

  “You just heard me on the phone with her. Of course not. But you know her, as do I. Sure as hell is something she’d do, and much more effective than a lawsuit. There’s no slander. You can’t prove that what this person’s written is a lie. You can’t prove what happened. And what didn’t.”

  “You say that as if you don’t believe what I’ve told you.”

  “Kay.” He met her eyes. “Let’s don’t turn this into a fight between us. What you need to brace yourself for, obviously, is the exposure. The public didn’t know, and now it does, and you’re going to be asked. Same thing with this. . . .” He read some more. “This other bullshit. Parochial school. Sister Polly. That’s a story I’m not familiar with.”

  Scarpetta barely read it, didn’t need to, and she replied, “There’s no Sister Polly, and what was described didn’t happen, not like that. It was a different nun, and there certainly was no salacious whipping in the bathroom.”

  “But some truth.”

  “Yes. Miami, the scholarship to parochial school. And my father’s protracted, terminal illness.”

  “And his grocery store. Did the other girls in school call you a Florida cracker?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this, Benton.”

  “I’m trying to determine what’s true and who would know it. What’s already out there? Any of this?”

  “You know what’s out there. And no. None of this, true or false, is out there. I don’t know where the information came from.”

  He said, “I’m not as concerned about what’s false. I want to know what’s out there that’s true, and if there’s a publicized source for what’s in these columns. Because if there isn’t, as you seem to be suggesting, then someone close to you is leaking information to whoever this hack writer is.”

  “Marino,” she reluctantly said. “He knows things about me that other people don’t.”

  “Well, obviously the Charleston information. Although I can’t imagine him using that word.”

  “What word, Benton?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You can’t bring yourself to say it, can you? The word rape. Even though that’s not what happened.”

  “I don’t know w
hat happened,” he said quietly. “That’s my problem. I only know as much as you’ve let me know.”

  “Would you somehow feel better if you’d watched?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “You need to see every detail, as if that will give you closure,” Scarpetta said. “Who’s the one always saying there’s no such thing as closure? I believe that would be both of us. And now this columnist, and whoever is leaking information to him or her, wins. Why? Because we’re sitting here upset, not trusting each other, estranged. Truth is, you probably know far more about what happened than Marino does. I sincerely doubt he remembers much of what he did or said that night. For his sake, I hope I’m right.”

  “I don’t want to be estranged, Kay. I don’t know why this bothers me more than it seems to bother you.”

  “Of course you know why, Benton. You feel even more powerless than I did because you couldn’t stop it, and at least I stopped some of it. I stopped the worst of it.”

  He pretended to read the two columns again. What he was really doing was composing himself.

  “Would he know the Florida information?” he asked. “What did you tell him about your childhood? Or let me restate the question. The part that’s true”—he indicated what was on the computer—“is that from information you gave him?”

  “Marino’s known me for almost twenty years. He’s met my sister, my mother. Of course he knows some details about my life. I don’t remember everything I’ve said to him, but it’s no great secret among those close to me that I grew up in a not-so-nice Miami neighborhood, and we had no money, and my father lingered with cancer for many years before dying. And that I did pretty well in school.”

  “The girl who broke your pencils?”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “I take that as a yes.”

  “There was a girl who did that. A bully. I don’t remember her name.”

  “Did a nun slap you across the face?”

  “Because I confronted the girl, and she tattled on me, not the other way around, and one of the sisters punished me. That was it. No titillating bathroom scene. And it’s absurd we’re having this conversation.”