Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  He meant Splenda. He must have remembered that Scarpetta didn’t touch saccharin or aspartame.

  “But no cream because it’s in those pitchers, so I couldn’t get it. I don’t think either of you drink it with cream, unless that’s changed. They’re in the console in back. Jaime Berger’s up front. You might not be able to see her, it’s so dark, so don’t start talking about her.”

  Trying to be funny.

  “Thank you,” Scarpetta said as she and Benton got into the car. “How are you?”

  “I’m doing good.”

  He slid behind the wheel, his seat back so far it was touching Scarpetta’s knees. Berger turned around and said hello, and she didn’t act as if the situation was unusual. That was better. It was easier.

  Marino pulled away from the hospital, and Scarpetta looked at the back of his head, at the collar of the black leather bomber-style jacket. It was classic Hogan’s Heroes, as Lucy used to tease him, with its half-belt, sleeve zippers, and plenty of antique brass hardware. On and off over the twenty years Scarpetta had known him, he’d get too big to wear it, especially around the gut, or more recently, too bulked up from the gym and, in retrospect, probably steroids.

  During the interim without Marino in her life, she’d had a lot of space to think about what had happened and what had led up to it. Insight came to her one day not that long ago, after she’d reconnected with her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, and hired him. Fielding had practically ruined his life with steroids, and Marino had been witness to much of it, but as he had gotten more disgruntled and frightened about a growing sense of powerlessness that Scarpetta couldn’t seem to do anything about, he’d become obsessed with his own physical strength.

  He’d always admired Fielding and his bodybuilding physique, all the while critical of the illicit and destructive means he used to obtain it. She was convinced Marino began taking steroids several years before the more recent sexual-performance drugs, which would help explain why he turned aggressive and, frankly, mean, long before his violent eruption in her carriage house last spring.

  The sight of him pained her in ways she hadn’t anticipated and probably couldn’t explain, bringing back memories of the long span of their lives spent together when he’d let his graying hair grow long and would comb it over his baldness, Donald Trump-style, only Marino wasn’t the sort to believe in gels or hairspray. The slightest stir and long strands would drift below his ears. He’d started shaving his head and wearing a sinister-looking do-rag. Now he had fuzz shaped like a crescent moon, and he wasn’t wearing an earring and didn’t look like a hard-riding Outlaw or Hells Angel.

  He looked like Marino, only in better shape but older, and on forced good behavior, as if he was taking the parole board on a drive.

  He turned onto Third Avenue, toward Terri Bridges’s apartment, which was only a few minutes from the hospital.

  Berger asked Scarpetta if she remembered Terri contacting her Charleston office last spring or early summer—or ever.

  Scarpetta said no.

  Berger fooled around with her BlackBerry and muttered something about Lucy’s opposition to paper, and then read an e-mail Terri had written to Berger last year, asking for assistance in contacting Scarpetta.

  “July second,” Berger said. “That’s when she sent this e-mail to the Bermuda Triangle of New York City government’s general e-mail address, hoping it would get to me because she hadn’t been able to get to you. It appears she never got to either of us.”

  “I’m not surprised, with a username like Lunasee,” Benton replied from the dark backseat while he looked out his window at the quiet neighborhood of Murray Hill, where so far Scarpetta had seen only one person out, a man walking a boxer.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if the username was the Pope’s,” Berger replied. “But I didn’t get it. Question is, Kay, are you absolutely sure you don’t recall her calling your office in Charleston?”

  “I’m absolutely sure I was never aware of it,” Scarpetta said. “But last spring and early summer my office was rather much of a Bermuda Triangle, too.”

  She didn’t want to elaborate, not with Marino sitting directly in front of her. How was she supposed to talk about what it had been like for her after he disappeared without a word or a trace, and then Rose had gone into such a rapid decline that she no longer had the proud stubbornness to resist Scarpetta’s moving her and taking care of her, eventually spoon-feeding her, changing her gowns and sheets when she soiled the bed, and then the morphine and oxygen at the very end when Rose decided she’d suffered enough, and death was in her eyes?

  How would Marino feel if he knew how angry Rose was with him for abandoning everyone in his life, especially her, when he knew she wasn’t long for this world? Rose had said it was wrong of him, and would Scarpetta please tell him that someday.

  Rose had said, You tell him for me I’ll box his ears.

  As if she’d been talking about a two-year-old.

  You tell him for me I’m mad at Lucy, too, just mad as hell at both of them. I blame him for what she’s doing right now. Up there at Black-water or some training camp like that, shooting guns and kneeing huge men in the kidneys as if she’s Sylvester Stallone, because she’s too scared to be home.

  Those last weeks Rose got disinhibited, her talk wild and loose, but nothing she said was utter nonsense.

  You tell him when I’m on the Other Side it will only be easier for me to find him and take care of business. And I’m going to take care of it. You watch.

  Scarpetta had set up a portable hospital bed, and had the French doors open so they could look at the garden and the birds, and hear the stirring of live oaks that had been there since before the Civil War. She and Rose would talk in that lovely old living room with its view, while the bracket clock on the mantel tick-tocked like a metronome measuring the final rhythm of their days together. Scarpetta never did go into detail about what Marino had done, but she did tell Rose something important about it, something she’d not told anyone.

  She’d said, You know how people say if they could live something again?

  You don’t hear me saying it, Rose had replied, propped up in bed, the morning light turning the sheets very white. Doesn’t do a damn bit of good to say something silly like that.

  Well, I wouldn’t say it because I wouldn’t mean it, you’re exactly right. I wouldn’t live that night again if offered the chance, because it wouldn’t change anything. I can try to rewrite it all I want. Marino would still do what he did. The only way I could stop him would be to start the process years earlier, maybe a decade or two earlier. My culpability in his crime is I didn’t pay attention.

  She’d done to him what he and Lucy had done to Rose in the end. Scarpetta hadn’t looked, had pretended not to notice, had absented herself by suddenly being busy and preoccupied or even in the midst of some crisis, instead of confronting him. She should have been more like Jaime Berger, who wouldn’t hesitate to tell some big cop with the appetites and insecurities that Marino had to stop looking down her blouse or up her skirt—to get over it because she wasn’t going to have sex with him. She wasn’t going to be his whore, his madonna, his wife, or his mother, or all of the above, and all of the above was what he’d really always wanted, what most men have always wanted because they don’t know any better.

  She could have told Marino something to that effect when she’d first been appointed chief in Virginia and he’d gone out of his way to give her such a hard time, acting like a nasty little boy with a crush. She’d been so afraid of hurting him, because ultimately her biggest flaw was her overriding fear of hurting anyone, and so she’d hurt the hell out of him and herself and all of them.

  What she’d finally admitted was she was selfish.

  Scarpetta had said to Rose, I’m the most selfish person there is. It goes back to feeling shamed. I was different, not like other people. I know what it is to feel ostracized and shunned and shamed, and I’ve never wanted to do it to anyone el
se. Or have it done to me again. And the last thing I just said is what’s most important. It’s about my not wanting discomfort more than it’s really about anyone else. What a dreadful thing to know about yourself.

  You’re the most different person I’ve ever met, Rose had said, and I can see why those girls didn’t like you, and why most people didn’t like you and maybe still don’t. It’s about people being small and your reminding them of it without trying to, and so they go out of their way to make you small as if that will somehow make them bigger. You know exactly how all that works, but who has the wisdom to figure it out while it’s going on? I would have liked you. If I’d been one of those nuns or one of the other girls, you would have been my favorite.

  I probably wouldn’t have been.

  You certainly would have. I’ve been following you around for twenty damn years, almost. And not because of the plush work conditions and all the jewelry and furs you give me and exotic vacations you take me on. I’m crazy about you. Was the first time you walked in that office. Do you remember? I’d never met a woman medical examiner and assumed the obvious. What a strange and difficult and unpleasant person you must be. Why else would a woman do this for a living? I hadn’t seen a picture of you and was sure you’d look like some creature that had just climbed out of a black lagoon or a plague pit. I’d already been planning on where I might go, maybe the medical college. Somebody over there would hire me. Because I didn’t think for a minute I’d stay with you, until I met you. Then I wouldn’t have left you for the world. I’m sorry I’m doing it now.

  “I’m sure we could go back and check phone records, the office e-mail,” Scarpetta said in the car, to Benton, to Marino, to Berger.

  “Not a priority this moment,” Berger said, turning around. “But Lucy’s been forwarding information to you that you’re going to want to look at when you get the chance. You need to see what Terri Bridges was writing, or we might assume it was her. Hard to say, since Oscar Bane could just as easily have a hand in it, or even be Lunasee, for all we know.”

  “I got a list of evidence collected that corresponds to markers inside,” Marino said as he drove. “And scene diagrams. A set for each of you so you know what was where.”

  Berger handed back two copies.

  Marino turned onto a dark neighborhood street with lots of trees and old brownstones.

  Benton observed, “Not well lit, and a lot of people appear to still be out of town for the holidays. Not a high-crime area.”

  “Nope,” Marino said. “Nothing around here. Last complaint before the murder was someone playing music too loud.”

  He parked behind an NYPD cruiser.

  “One new wrinkle in this,” Berger said. “Based on some of the e-mails Lucy and I have been looking at, one has to wonder if Terri might have been seeing someone else.”

  “Looks like nobody’s bothering to hide their damn police car,” Marino said, turning off the engine.

  “Hide it?” Berger asked.

  “Morales said he didn’t want them in plain view. In case the bogeyman came back. Guess he forgot to tell anyone who matters.”

  “You mean cheating on Oscar,” Benton said, opening his door. “That maybe Terri was cheating on Oscar? I think we should leave our coats in the car.”

  Blasts of cold air grabbed at Scarpetta’s suit and hair as she took off her coat, and then Marino climbed out, talking on his cell phone, obviously alerting the officer who was stationed inside the apartment that they had arrived. It was still an active crime scene and should be in the exact condition it was in when the police left shortly after one a.m., according to the reports Scarpetta had read.

  The building’s front door opened, and Marino, Benton, Berger, and Scarpetta climbed up five steps and entered the foyer, where a uniformed officer was very serious about his assignment.

  Marino said to him, “I see your car’s parked in front. I thought the latest order from headquarters was not to have your unit in plain view.”

  “The other officer wasn’t feeling good. I think the smell, which isn’t much until you sit there for a while,” said the officer. “When I relieved him, I didn’t get instructions about not parking in front. You want me to move it?”

  Marino said to Berger, “You got an opinion? Morales didn’t want it to look like there’s a police presence. Like I said. In case the killer returns to the crime scene.”

  “He installed a camera on the roof,” the officer said.

  “Glad it’s such a big friggin’ secret,” Marino said.

  “The only person who could return to this apartment,” Benton said, “would be Oscar Bane, unless there are other people running around who have keys. And I have a hard time believing, as paranoid as he is, that he would show up here and try to get in.”

  “Someone in his state of mind is more likely to show up at the morgue, in hopes of getting a last look at their person,” Scarpetta said.

  She’d decided she’d had enough of being completely close-mouthed. There were ways to communicate necessary information without breaking patient-physician confidentiality.

  Marino said to the officer, “Maybe it would be a good idea to step up patrol around the area of the ME’s office. In case Oscar Bane shows up, but do me a favor and don’t transmit nothing about him over the air so some reporter hears it, okay? We don’t need every dwarf on the East Side being stopped and questioned.”

  As if the area around the Medical Examiner’s office was a popular hangout for little people.

  “You need to get something to eat or do whatever, this is a good time,” Marino said.

  “As much as I’d like to take you up on that, no, thank you,” the officer said, glancing at Berger. “My orders are to stay here. And I’ll need you to sign the log.”

  “Don’t be so damn professional. Nobody bites, even Ms. Berger doesn’t,” Marino said. “And we need a little elbow room. You can hang out in the foyer, suit yourself. Or you can make a pit stop. I’ll give you a fifteen-minute heads-up before we’re ready to leave. Just don’t go to Florida or nothing.”

  The officer opened the apartment door, and Scarpetta smelled cooked chicken that was well on its way to turning ripe. He collected his jacket from the back of a folding chair, and a copy of Philipp Meyer’s American Rust from the oak floor under it. Beyond that point the officer wasn’t allowed to venture for any reason, and should he be tempted, the small blaze-orange cones marking locations where evidence had been collected were a bright reminder. Didn’t matter if he needed water or food, or was desperate to use the bathroom, he had to call for a backup to cover for him while he took care of himself. He couldn’t even sit unless he brought his own chair.

  Scarpetta opened her crime scene case just inside the door and retrieved a digital camera and a notepad and pen, and gave each person a pair of gloves. She took her usual survey without moving closer or speaking, noticing that except for the evidence markers, there was nothing out of place, and not the slightest indication that anything remotely violent had happened. The apartment was impeccable, and everywhere she looked, she saw traces of the rigid, obsessive woman who had lived and died here.

  The floral upholstered couch and side chair in the living room straight ahead were perfectly arranged around a maple coffee table, and on top of it were magazines impeccably fanned, and in a corner a standard-size Pioneer flat screen that looked new and was precisely positioned to face the exact center of the sofa. Inside the fireplace was an arrangement of silk flowers. The ivory Berber rug was straight and clean.

  Other than the cones, there was barely a hint that the police had been all over this place. In this new age of crime scene management, they would have been suited up in disposable clothing, including shoe covers. Electrostatic dust lifters would have been used to recover any impressions from the polished wood floors, and forensic lights and photography would have taken precedence over messy black powders. In sophisticated departments such as the NYPD, crime scene scientists neither created nor d
estroyed.

  The living room flowed into the dining area and kitchen, the apartment small enough that Scarpetta could see the table set for dinner, and the makings of it on a countertop near the stove. No doubt the chicken was still in the oven, and God knows how long it would stay there, didn’t matter how rancid anything got by the time the landlord or Terri’s family were allowed free access to the place. It wasn’t the responsibility or the right of law enforcement to clean up the gore left in the wake of a violent death, whether it was blood or an uneaten holiday dinner.

  “Let me ask the obvious question,” Scarpetta said to no one in particular. “Is there any possibility she wasn’t the intended victim? Even remotely possible? Since there’s another apartment across from this one, and what? Two more upstairs?”

  “I always say everything’s possible,” Berger replied. “But she opened the doors. Or if someone else did, he or she had keys. There would seem to be a connection between her and the person who killed her.” To Marino she said, “You mentioned the roof access? Anything new about that?”

  “A text message from Morales,” he replied. “He said when he got to the scene last night, the ladder was exactly where he found it after installing the roof camera. In the utility closet.”

  Marino had a look on his face as he said that, as if he knew a joke he wasn’t about to share.

  “I’m assuming nothing new. Nobody of interest in terms of a possible suspect or witness among the other tenants?” Berger asked Marino, continuing the conversation just inside the apartment door.

  “According to the landlord, who lives on Long Island, she was a real quiet lady except when she had a complaint. One of those who had to have everything just right,” Marino said. “But what’s a little interesting is, it was something she couldn’t take care of herself, she’d never let the landlord in to fix it. She’d say she’d get someone to take care of it. He said it was like she was making notes of all the problems in case he got any ideas about raising the rent.”