Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Maybe the same reason he never tells her where he’s been or what he’s doing,” Lucy said. “He doesn’t tell her his plans—if he’s going to run errands on a given day, for example. He says he walked x number of miles but doesn’t give specifics as to where or when he plans to do it next. He writes the way one would if he’s worried that someone else might be reading his e-mails or watching him.”

  “Jump back earlier to last fall, last summer or spring,” Berger said. “And let’s see if the pattern’s similar.”

  They skimmed for a while. Those e-mails between Terri and Oscar weren’t at all like the recent ones. Not only were they less personal, but the tone and content of his were much more relaxed. He mentioned libraries and bookstores that were his favorites. He described where he liked to walk in Central Park, and a gym he’d tried a few times, but a lot of the machines weren’t the right fit. He included a number of details that revealed information he wouldn’t have been open about were he worried that someone else was reading his e-mails or, in other words, spying on him.

  “He wasn’t scared back then,” Berger said. “What Benton’s concluded seems right. He says Oscar is afraid of something now—right now. A perceived threat—right now.”

  Lucy typed Berger’s name into a search field and said, “I’m curious to see if there’s any mention anywhere of his phone call to your office last month. His fears of being under electronic surveillance, followed, his identity stolen, and so on.”

  She got a hit on Jaime Berger’s name, but the e-mail in question had nothing to do with Oscar’s recent phone call to the DA’s office:

  Date: Mon, 2 July 2007 10:47:31

  From: “Terri Bridges”

  To: “Jaime Berger”

  CC: “Dr. Oscar Bane”

  Subject: “Interview with Dr. Kay Scarpetta”

  Dear Ms. Berger,

  I’m a graduate student writing a master’s thesis on the evolution of forensic science and medicine from earlier centuries to modern times. It’s tentatively titled “Forensic Follies.”

  In brief: We’ve come full circle, gone from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the quackery of phrenology, physiognomy, and the image of the murderer captured by the retina of the victim’s eye to the “magic tricks” of modern movies and TV dramas. I’ll happily explain further if you might be so gracious as to answer me. E-mail is preferable. But I’m including my phone number.

  I’d love your thoughts, of course, but my real reason for writing is I’m trying to contact Dr. Kay Scarpetta—who better for the topic, I’m sure you agree! Perhaps, if nothing else, you’ll give her my e-mail address? I’ve tried to contact her several times at her office in Charleston, but with no success. I know you’ve had professional connections in the past, and assume you’re still in touch with each other and friends.

  Sincerely,

  Terri Bridges

  212-555-2907

  “Obviously, you never got this,” Lucy said.

  “Sent to New York City Government-dot-org from someone who called herself Lunasee?” Berger replied. “I wouldn’t get that in a million years. A more important question to me is why Kay didn’t know Terri was trying to get hold of her. Charleston isn’t exactly New York City.”

  “It may as well have been,” Lucy said.

  Berger got out of her chair and collected her coat, her briefcase.

  “I have to go,” she said. “We’ll probably have a meeting tomorrow. I’ll call you when I know the time.”

  “Late last spring, early summer,” Lucy said. “I can see why my aunt never got Terri’s message, if that’s what happened. And likely, it is.”

  She got up, too, and they walked through the loft.

  “Rose was dying,” Lucy said. “Mid-June to early July, she lived in my aunt’s carriage house. Neither of them went to the office anymore. And Marino wasn’t there. Aunt Kay’s new practice was small. She was only about two years into it. There really was no other staff.”

  “No one to take a message, and no one to answer the phone,” Berger said as she put on her coat. “Before I forget, if you’d forward that e-mail to me so I have a copy. Since you don’t seem to print things around here. And if you find anything else I should know about?”

  “Marino had been gone since early May,” Lucy said. “Rose never knew what happened to him, which was really unfair. He vanished into thin air, and then she died. No matter what, she cared about him.”

  “And you? Where were you while the phones rang and no one picked up or noticed?”

  “It all seems like a different life, as if I wasn’t there,” Lucy said. “I almost can’t remember where I was or what I did toward the end, but it was awful. My aunt put Rose in the guest room and stayed with her around the clock. She spiraled down really quickly after Marino disappeared, and I stayed away from the office and the labs. I’d known Rose all my life. She was like the cool grandmother everyone wants, just so cool in her proper suits with her hair pinned up, but a piece of work and not afraid of anything whether it was dead bodies or guns or Marino’s motorcycles.”

  “What about dying? Was she afraid?”

  “No.”

  “But you were,” Berger said.

  “All of us were. Me most of all. So I did a really brilliant thing and suddenly got busy. For some reason it seemed urgent that I do a refresher in advanced executive protection training, attack recognition and analysis, tactical firearms, the usual. I got rid of one helicopter and found another, then went to the Bell Helicopter school in Texas for several weeks when I really didn’t need to do that, either. Next thing I knew, everybody had moved up north. And Rose was in a cemetery vault in Richmond, overlooking the James, because she loved the water so much, and my aunt made sure she’d have a water view forever.”

  “So somehow what we’re dealing with now, in a way, started back then,” Berger said. “When nobody was paying attention.”

  “I’m not sure what started,” Lucy said.

  They stood near the front door, neither one of them particularly keen to open it. Berger wondered when they would be alone again like this, or if they should be, and what Lucy must think of her. She knew what she thought of herself. She had been dishonest, and she couldn’t leave it like that. Lucy didn’t deserve it. Neither of them did.

  “I had a roommate at Columbia,” Berger said, fastening her coat. “We shared this slum of an apartment. I didn’t have money, wasn’t born with it, married into it, and you know all that. During law school we lived in this most God-awful place in Morningside Heights, it’s a wonder both of us weren’t murdered in our sleep.”

  She tucked her hands into her pockets while Lucy’s eyes held hers, both of them leaning their shoulders against the door.

  “We were extremely close,” Berger added.

  “You don’t owe me any explanations,” Lucy said. “I completely respect who you are and why you live the way you do.”

  “You don’t know enough to respect anything, actually. And I’m going to give you an explanation, not because I owe it but because I want to. She had something wrong with her, my roommate. I won’t say her name. A mood disorder, which I had no understanding of at the time, and when she got ugly and angry I thought she meant it. I fought with her when I shouldn’t have, because that made matters only worse, unbelievably worse. One Saturday night, a neighbor called the police. I’m surprised you didn’t dig that up somewhere. Nothing was done about it, but it was rather unpleasant, and both of us were drunk and looked like train wrecks. If I ever run for office, you can imagine, if there are stories like that.”

  “Why would there be?” Lucy asked. “Unless you plan on getting in fights when you’re drunk and looking like a train wreck.”

  “There was never a threat of that with Greg, you see. I don’t think we ever yelled at each other. Certainly never threw anything. We coexisted without rancor or much of anything. A relatively pleasant détente, much of the time.”

  “What happened to your roommate
?”

  “I suppose it depends on how you measure success,” Berger said. “But nothing good, in my opinion. It will only get worse for her because she lives a lie, meaning she doesn’t live at all, and life is very unforgiving if you don’t live it, especially as you get older. I’ve never lived a lie. You may think so, but I haven’t. I’ve simply had to figure things out as I’ve gone along, and I’ve respected decisions I’ve made, right or wrong, no matter how hard that’s been. Many things remain irrelevant as long as they remain theoretical.”

  “Meaning there wasn’t someone and hasn’t been when there shouldn’t have been,” Lucy said.

  “I’m no Sunday-school teacher. Far from it,” Berger said. “But my life is nobody’s business, and it’s mine to mess up, and I don’t intend to mess it up. I won’t let you mess it up, nor do I intend to mess up yours.”

  “Do you always start with disclaimers?”

  “I don’t start,” Berger said.

  “This time you’re going to have to,” Lucy said. “Because I’m not. Not with you.”

  Berger slid her hands out of her coat pockets and touched Lucy’s face, then reached for the door but didn’t open it. She touched Lucy’s face again and kissed her.

  22

  Nineteen floors below the prison ward, in the parking lot across East 27th, Marino was a lone figure obscured by hydraulic lifts, most of them empty at this hour, no valet in sight.

  He watched them in the bright green field of a long-range night-vision monocular, because he needed to see her. He needed to look at her in person, even if it was covertly and from a distance and for only a moment. He needed to somehow feel reassured that she hadn’t changed. If she was still the same, she wouldn’t be cruel to him when she saw him. She wouldn’t disgrace or humiliate or shun him. Not that she would have in the past, no matter how much he deserved it. But what did he know about her anymore, except what he read or saw on TV?

  Scarpetta and Benton had just left the morgue and were taking a shortcut through the park, back to Bellevue. It was dizzying to see her again, and unreal, as if she’d been dead, and Marino imagined what she’d think if she knew how close he’d come to dying. After what he’d done, he hadn’t wanted to be here anymore. While he lay in the guest bed of her carriage house the morning after he’d hurt her, he’d started going through a list of possibilities, intermittently fighting off nausea while the worst headache of his life hammered his brain to pulp.

  His first thought was to drive his truck or maybe his motorcycle off a bridge and drown himself. Then again, he might survive, and he was terrified of not being able to breathe. That meant smothering wasn’t a good choice, either, using a plastic bag, for example, and he couldn’t stomach the thought of hanging, of twisting and thrashing after kicking the chair out from under himself and then changing his mind. He’d briefly considered sitting in a bathtub and slashing his throat, but with the first spurt of blood from his carotid, he’d want to take it back and it would be too late.

  As for carbon monoxide poisoning? It gave him too much time to think. Poison? Same thing, and it was painful, and if he chickened out and called 911, he’d end up with his stomach pumped and a complete loss of respect from all who knew about it. Jumping off a building? Never. His luck, he’d survive and be maimed beyond recognition. Last on the list was his nine-millimeter pistol. And Scarpetta had hidden it.

  As he’d lain in her guest room bed trying to figure out where she might have tucked it out of sight, he decided he’d never find it, was too sick to find it, and he could always shoot himself later because he had a couple extra guns in his fishing shack, but it would have to be a precision shooting because the worst scenario of all was to end up in an iron lung.

  When he’d eventually contacted Benton at McLean and confessed all this, Benton matter-of-factly informed him that if an iron lung was the only thing stopping him, he had no worries unless he tried to kill himself with polio. That was exactly what he’d said, adding that most likely, if he did a bad job shooting himself, he’d end up with brain damage that profoundly compromised him but left him vaguely aware of why he’d wanted to off himself in the first place.

  What would be really shitty luck, Benton had said, was an irreversible coma that became a discussion among Supreme Court justices before someone got the go-ahead to pull the plug. While he’d said it wasn’t likely Marino would have any awareness that this was going on, no one knew for sure. You’d have to be the person who was brain-dead to know for sure, he’d said.

  You mean I could hear people saying they were going to take me off that . . . ? Marino had asked.

  Life support, Benton had said.

  So it wouldn’t breathe for me anymore, and I might be aware of it but nobody knows I am?

  You wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore. And it’s within the realm of possibility you might be aware that you were about to be taken off the respirator. Have the plug pulled, in other words.

  Then I could literally watch the person walk to the wall and pull it out of the socket.

  It’s possible.

  And I’d instantly start smothering to death.

  You wouldn’t be able to breathe. But hopefully loved ones would be there helping you through it, even though they wouldn’t know you were aware of them.

  Which brought Marino right back to his fear of smothering, and the grim reminder that the only loved ones he had were the very people he’d just fucked over, most of all, her, Scarpetta. It was at this point in a motel room near the Boston Bowl Family Fun Center where he and Benton had been having this discussion that Marino decided not to kill himself but to take the longest vacation he’d ever had in his life, at the treatment center on Massachusetts’s North Shore.

  If he showed improvement once the alcohol and the male-performance-enhancement drugs had been completely flushed out of his system, and if he stuck with therapy and was sincere about it, then the next step would be finding him a job. So here he was, about half a year later, in New York, working for Berger and hiding in a parking lot just to catch a glimpse of Scarpetta before she got into his car and they drove to a crime scene, business as usual.

  He watched her move silently, eerily in bright green, her gestures familiar as she talked, every detail vivid but so far removed from him, he felt as if he were a ghost. He could see her but she couldn’t see him, and her life had gone on without him, and knowing her as well as he did, he was sure that by now she had gotten over what he’d done to her. What she wouldn’t have gotten over was his disappearing the way he did. Or maybe he was giving himself too much importance, he decided. It could very well be that she never thought about him anymore, and when she saw him, it wouldn’t matter. She wouldn’t feel anything, would scarcely remember the past.

  So much had happened since. She’d gotten married. She’d left Charleston. She was the chief of a big office just outside Boston. She and Benton actually lived together like a couple, for the first time, in a beautiful old house in Belmont that Marino had driven past at night once or twice. Now they had a place in New York, too, and sometimes he walked along the Hudson several blocks west of Central Park and stared at their building, counting the floors until he was pretty sure he knew exactly which apartment was theirs, and he imagined what it must look like inside and the beautiful view they must have of the river, and of the city at night. She was on television all the time, was really famous, but whenever he tried to envision people asking her for her autograph, he drew a blank. That part he didn’t get. She wasn’t the type to like that sort of attention, or at least he hoped she wasn’t, because if she was, she had changed.

  He watched her through the powerful night-vision scope that Lucy had given to him for his birthday two years ago, and was lonely for the sound of Scarpetta’s voice. He recognized her mood by the way she moved, shifting her position, slightly gesturing her dark-gloved hands. She was understated. People said that about her all the time, that she said and did less, rather than more, and because of it made her
point more loudly, so to speak. She wasn’t histrionic. That was another word Marino had heard. In fact, he remembered, Berger had said it when describing how Scarpetta conducted herself on the witness stand. She didn’t need to raise her voice or flail away but could just sit there calmly and shoot straight with the jurors, and they trusted her, believed her.

  Through the scope, Marino noticed her long coat and the shape of her neatly styled blond hair, a little longer than she used to wear it, a little bit over her collar and brushed straight back from her forehead. He could make out her familiar strong features, so hard to compare to anyone he could think of, because she was pretty and she wasn’t, her face too sharply defined to be of beauty-pageant quality or to fit in with the sticklike women in designer clothes who cruised the runways of fashion shows.

  He thought he might throw up again, just like he had that morning in her carriage house. His heart began to pound as if it were trying to hurt itself.

  He longed for her but as he hid in his rust-smelling, filthy shadowy space, he realized he didn’t love her the way he once did. He had driven the stake of self-destruction into the part of him where hope had always hidden, and it was dead. He no longer hoped she would fall in love with him someday. She was married, and hope was dead. Even if Benton was out of the picture, hope was dead. Marino had killed hope and killed it savagely, and he had never done anything like that in his life, and he had done it to her.

  On his most disgusting, drunken dates, he had never forced himself on a woman.

  If he kissed her and she didn’t want his tongue in her mouth, he withdrew. If she pushed his hands away, he didn’t touch her again uninvited. If he had a hard-on and she wasn’t interested, he never pushed himself against her or shoved her hand between his legs. If she noticed his soldier wouldn’t settle down, he’d make his same old jokes. He’s just saluting you, baby. He always stands up when there’s a lady in the room. Hey, babe, just ’cause I got a stick shift don’t mean you gotta drive my car.