“I’m sorry I have to ask you these questions. Do you understand why they’re important?”
He nodded, wiping his eyes and nose with the backs of his hands.
“It was cold last night,” Scarpetta said. “Why would you leave your coat in the car? Especially if all the lights were out and you were concerned.”
“I took my coat off to surprise her.”
“Surprise her?”
“She liked me in tight T-shirts. I already told you. I even thought about taking it off as she was opening the door. It was a sleeveless T-shirt. A white undershirt. I wanted her to open the door and see me in my undershirt.”
Too much explanation. His coat was in the car for another reason. He was lying, and doing it badly.
“I have a key to her building,” he said. “I went in and rang the bell to her apartment.”
Scarpetta asked, “Do you have a key to her apartment, or only to the building’s outer door?”
“Both. But I always ring the bell. I don’t just walk in on her. I rang the bell and suddenly the door flew open and this person was all over me, attacking me, dragging me inside, and slamming the door shut. That’s who killed her. It’s the same person who’s been following me, spying on me, tormenting me. Or he’s one of them.”
An interval of twenty-four hours was consistent with the age of Oscar’s injuries. But that didn’t mean he was telling the truth.
“Where’s your coat now?” Scarpetta asked.
He was staring at the wall.
“Oscar?”
He stared at the wall.
“Oscar?”
He answered as he stared at the wall, “It’s wherever they took it. The police. I said they could take my car, search it, do whatever they want. But they weren’t going to lay a finger on me. I told them they had to get you here. I would never hurt her.”
“Tell me more about your struggle with whoever was in her house.”
“We were near the door and it was pitch-dark. He was hitting me with the plastic flashlight. He ripped my T-shirt. It’s all ripped up and bloody.”
“You said it was pitch-dark. How do you know it was a flashlight?”
“When he opened the door, he shone it in my eyes, blinding me, then started the attack. We struggled.”
“Did he say anything?”
“All I heard was him breathing hard. Then he ran. He had on a big leather coat and leather gloves. He probably won’t have any injuries. He probably won’t have left his DNA or fibers. Things like that. He was smart.”
Oscar was the one who was smart, offering explanations to unasked questions. And lying.
“I shut the door and locked it and turned on all the lights. I screamed for Terri. The back of my neck feels like a cat clawed me. Hope I don’t get an infection. Maybe you should put me on an antibiotic. I’m glad you’re here. You had to be here. I told them. It all happened so fast, and it was so dark . . .” Tears, and he began to sob again. “I screamed for Terri.”
“The flashlight?” Scarpetta reminded him. “Was it on during your struggle?”
He hesitated, as if he’d never thought about that.
“He must have turned it off,” he decided. “Or maybe it broke when he was hitting me. Maybe he’s part of some kind of death squad. I don’t know. I don’t care how clever they are. There’s no perfect crime. You always quote Oscar Wilde. ‘Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.’ Except you. You could get away with it. Only someone like you could commit the perfect crime. You say it all the time.”
She couldn’t recall ever quoting Oscar Wilde, and she’d never said she could commit the perfect crime. It would be a stupid and outrageously offensive thing to say. She checked a cluster of slivered moon-shaped nail marks on his muscular left shoulder.
“He made a mistake. He had to have made at least one mistake. I know you can figure it out. You always say you can figure out anything.”
She never said that, either.
“Maybe it’s your voice and the way you express yourself. Your lack of pretense. You’re beautiful.”
He clenched his fists in his lap.
“Now that I see you in person, I can tell it isn’t from some makeup artist or perfect camera angle.”
His blue-green eyes fastened to her face.
“A little bit like Katharine Hepburn, only you’re blonde and not as tall.”
His clenched hands trembled, as if he was trying with all his might not to do something with them.
“You look very good in slacks, same as her. Actually, she wore trousers, didn’t she? Is there a difference? I don’t mean anything inappropriate. I’m not coming on to you. I wish you would hug me. I need you to hug me!”
“I can’t hug you. You understand why I can’t?” she said.
“You always say you’re very sweet with dead people. That you’re considerate and touch them as if they’re alive, talk to them as if they can feel and hear you. That people can still be attractive and desirable when they’re dead, and that’s why necrophilia’s not as hard to understand as the public thinks, especially if the body’s still warm. If you can touch dead people, why can’t you touch me? Why can’t you hug me?”
She’d never said she touched dead bodies as if they were alive, or talked to them as if they could feel and hear her. She’d never said dead bodies were desirable or that necrophilia was understandable. What the hell was he talking about?
“Did the person who attacked you try to choke you?” she asked.
The fingernail marks on the back of his neck were vertical. Perfectly vertical.
“At one point he had his hands around my neck, and he kept digging in his nails as I rolled around and managed to get myself free,” Oscar said. “Because I’m strong. I don’t know what would have happened if I weren’t so strong.”
“You said the spying started when you got involved with Terri. How did you meet her?”
“Online. She was one of my students, had been for a while. I know. You can’t talk about it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t bother. I’ll go along with it,” he said. “She was enrolled in my history of psychiatry course. Wanted to be a forensic psychologist. Curious so many women want to be forensic psychologists. This ward’s overrun with pretty young grad students from John Jay. Wouldn’t you expect women, especially pretty ones, to be afraid of the patients up here?”
Scarpetta began examining his broad, hairless chest, measuring more shallow abrasions. She touched his wounds and he rested his manacled wrists over his groin, and his blue-green eyes were like hands trying to explore what was under her lab coat.
“Wouldn’t you think women would be afraid to work in a place like this?” he said. “Are you afraid?”
When Shrew had gotten the cryptic phone call a year and a half ago, she’d had no idea how life-altering it would be.
The Italian-sounding man identified himself as an agent from a British trust company and said he had gotten her name indirectly because of the consulting group where she’d been a database marketing manager. In his bad English, he’d said he wanted to e-mail her a job description. Shrew had printed it out. It was still taped on her refrigerator to remind her of life’s synchronicities:
Webmaster: Must be able to take initiative, work unsupervised out of the home, have people skills and a flair for the dramatic. Limited technical experience required. Confidentiality utmost. Other requirements to be discussed. Great earning potential!
She had replied immediately, saying she was very interested but would like a little more information. In response to certain questions, the agent explained in his limited way that having people skills simply meant Shrew had to be interested in them, period. She wasn’t allowed to talk to them but needed to know what appealed to their “mostly basic instinct,” which she realized soon enough was voyeurism and taking immense pleasure in other people’s humiliation and extreme discomfort.
Shrew’s e-mailed acceptance, formatt
ed exactly like the offer had been, was also taped to her refrigerator:
I agree with all conditions and am honored. Can start this minute and have no problem with working whenever needed, including weekends and holidays.
In a way, Shrew had become an anonymous cyber version by proxy of the comedian she adored, Kathy Griffin, whose shows and stand-up routines Shrew watched obsessively, always picking up a new pointer or two about how to fillet the rich and famous and serve them up to an insatiable audience that grew exponentially as the world got worse. People were desperate to laugh. They were desperate to vent their frustrations, resentments, and fury at the golden scapegoats, as Shrew thought of the privileged untouchables who might be angered and annoyed but never really wounded by the slings and arrows of slights and ridicule.
After all, what damage could be done, really, to a Paris Hilton or a Martha Stewart? Gossip, savage insinuation, and exposés—even incarceration—only enhanced their careers and made people envy and love them all the more.
The cruelest of punishments was to be ignored, dismissed, made to feel invisible and nonexistent, exactly the way Shrew had felt when scores of computer technical assistance and marketing management jobs, including hers, were outsourced to India. She’d been pushed overboard with no notice and no parachute. She would never forget packing up her personal effects and carrying them out in a cardboard box, just like she saw in the movies. Miraculously, right about the time she feared she could no longer afford to live in Murray Hill and was asking around about more affordable housing that wasn’t in the slums, the Boss’s UK-BASED Italian agent called.
If Shrew had any chronic complaint now, it was a loneliness that unexpectedly had given her insight into serial killers and hit men, and caused her to feel slightly sorry for them. How burdensome and isolating it was to keep a secret when the stakes were so high, and she often imagined what people would do if they knew that the lady next to them in line at CVS or Whole Foods was largely responsible for the most popular Internet gossip column in history.
But she couldn’t tell a soul, not even the police investigator who had just been here. She couldn’t take credit. She couldn’t have friends and run the risk she might make a slip. It was just as well she didn’t confide in her daughters or have much contact with them. It was probably wise never to date or marry again. Even if she quit the website, she could never breathe a word of her former remarkable anonymous career. She’d signed enough nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements to send her to prison for life, land her in the poorhouse, or—and maybe she was getting silly—result in unnatural death if she committed even the smallest infraction. But what could she divulge?
She didn’t know who Gotham Gotcha was. The columnist could be a man, a woman, old, young, American, or not. Or the website phenomenon could be a collection of people, maybe a bunch of young smart alecks from MIT or spies in China or a small pool of genius kids at a mega Internet search technology company. Shrew was paid well enough, and took enormous pride in being an anonymous celebrity by proxy, but the arrangement had begun to seriously wear on her in a way she hadn’t seen coming. She was beginning to doubt her own raison d’être, which probably had something to do with why she had behaved like such a fool when Investigator Marino had stopped by.
Shrew was starved for interaction with flesh and blood, for conversation and attention and validation, and had lost the art of having a substantive dialogue with a human being who was present. It had been an extraordinary event for her to have a living soul sit in her family room and notice the puppy hairs stuck in her rug, or bear witness to her wearing her red velour warm-up lounging suit that was splotched light pink in places from a mishap with bleach. She’d been sorry when he’d left, and at the same time relieved, but mostly sorry, the more she’d been thinking about it. She’d had no idea what desolate straits she was in. Now she knew and she could see why. She most certainly could. Who wouldn’t be?
The invisible money wired to her bank account every two weeks, the impersonal and ungrateful e-mailed remarks and instructions she received now and then, may as well come from God, who Shrew also had never met and never seen a picture of, and whose real name was debatable. If Shrew needed encouragement, praise, gratitude, a holiday or birthday gift, maybe a raise, neither the Boss nor God was interested. Both remained silent and unseen.
She could forgive God, she supposed, who had a universe of employees and disciples to look after. But she was feeling less charitable about the Boss, who had only Shrew. Something about Investigator Marino’s visit today had resulted in clarity. While Shrew was the first to acknowledge that the Boss had created her, although she was grateful, she realized she was resentful. Shrew had signed her life away. She had no dog and no friends, didn’t dare travel or engage in candid conversations, and had no visitors, unless they were uninvited. The only person she could even have called an acquaintance had been murdered last night.
What awful terms Shrew had accepted for how to live her life. And life was short. It could end—and end horribly—in a blink. The Boss was a selfish user, uncaring, and completely unfair. Without Shrew, the Boss would not be able to populate the website with what Shrew chose from the thousands of gossipy e-mails and images and cranky, crude comments and mean mentions that were sent by fans. Shrew did all the work, and the Boss got all the credit, even if the fans didn’t know who the Boss was.
Shrew sat at her desk in front of her computer, the curtains drawn so she didn’t have to look at the building across the street and think of the horror that had happened. Shrew didn’t want to look at the police car still parked in front of Terri’s apartment, and have the policeman it belonged to report to Investigator Marino that the neighbor he had interviewed earlier was spying out her window. Although she would enjoy another visit, she couldn’t afford one. Investigator Marino was suspicious of her already. She was certain he believed she’d seen something last night, and having done a little research on the Internet after he left, she could understand why.
Terri’s death was quite a mystery, and a very ugly one. No one was saying how she died, only that the blond man with the yellow rose, whom Shrew had said hello to not long ago, was locked up at Bellevue just like the Son of Sam had been when he was caught, and the medical examiner who did Terri’s autopsy had released no details. But they must be gruesome. The case must be of huge importance because Dr. Scarpetta had, indeed, been called in to help. That was the belief, based on her being spotted at both Logan and La Guardia airports this afternoon, then being sighted again at Bellevue, pulling a suitcase with a wobbly wheel, apparently on her way to meet her forensic psychologist husband on the men’s prison ward, where the boyfriend was being held.
No doubt the Boss would get yet another column out of Dr. Scarpetta, and that was too bad. Blogs everywhere were responding to both of the columns posted today, and the opinions dramatically varied. While quite a number of people thought it a disgrace that any sexual violation of Scarpetta, whether by Investigator Marino or Sister Polly, was made public, there were plenty of other people who wanted more.
Details! Details!
Why would someone break a little kid’s pencils?
Women like her ask for it. That’s why they’re attracted to crime.
I’m surprised about the investigator but not about the nun.
Shrew had been unusually unmotivated since Investigator Marino had left, and she’d better get with it and start weeding through the most recent information and images sent by fans, on the off chance there was something important she should post or move to the Boss’s research folder.
She opened and deleted scores of banal, boring gossipy anecdotes, alleged sightings, and images taken with cell phone cameras until she came to an e-mail that had been sent several hours ago. Immediately, she was excited by the subject line but skeptical:
NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTO! MARILYN MONROE IN THE MORGUE
There was no message, only an attachment. Shrew downloaded the image, and as it appear
ed in high resolution on her screen, she felt a thrill that made her understand what people meant when they said their hair stood on end.
“My word,” she muttered. “Oh, my dear Lord,” she exclaimed.
Marilyn Monroe’s nude body was stitched up like a rag doll on top of a shiny steel autopsy table, her blond hair wetly clumped around her dead face, which was a bit swollen, but recognizable. Shrew began zooming in on every detail, the mouse clicking like mad as she did exactly what the fans were bound to do. She gawked and enlarged and gawked some more at the puckering and flattening of the movie goddess’s once gorgeous breasts caused by the dreadful railroad track of sutures that ran in a V from her collarbones to her cleavage, then all the way down her once gorgeous body, past old surgical scars, before disappearing in pubic hair. Her famous lips and blue eyes were shut, and at the highest magnification the software could muster, Shrew came upon the truth that the world had always wanted and certainly deserved.
Just like that, she knew, and could prove it.
It couldn’t be more obvious.
The details were there. Evidence: The recently dyed blond hair without a hint of dark roots showing. The perfectly plucked eyebrows. The manicured finger- and toenails, and smoothly shaven legs. She was slender, not an unseemly ounce to spare.
Marilyn had been fastidiously attending to her grooming and pampering herself, and keeping a keen eye on her weight right up to her tragic last breath. And severely depressed people didn’t do that. The photo was proof positive of what Shrew had always suspected.
She excitedly typed the copy. It had to be short. The Boss was the writer, not Shrew, and she was never allowed to craft more than fifteen words for a cutline or any sort of text on the site:
MARILYN MONROE MURDERED! (VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED)
AN ASTONISHING NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN AUTOPSY PIC PROVES WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT THAT FILM GODDESS MARILYN MONROE WASN’T DEPRESSED AT THE TIME OF HER DEATH, AND DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE.
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