Scarpetta

by Patricia Cornwell

  “We don’t know what it is not to feel haunted,” she said.

  He squeezed his finger, staining the tissue brilliant red. He looked at her on the other side of his desk, at the squareness of her shoulders, at her strong, capable hands, and the lovely contour of her body beneath her suit, and he wanted her. He felt aroused just doors away from a prison, and yet when they were alone at home, he scarcely touched her. What had happened to him? It was as if he’d been in an accident and had been pieced back together wrong.

  He said, “You should go back to Massachusetts, Kay. If he gets indicted and you’re subpoenaed, then you’ll come back and we’ll deal with it.”

  “I’m not going to run from Marino,” she said. “I’m not going to avoid him.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” But it was exactly what he was saying. “It’s Oscar Bane I’m worried about. He could walk out of Bellevue right now. I’d like you as far away from him as possible.”

  “What you want is for me to be as far away from Marino as possible.”

  “I don’t know why you’d want to be around him.” His feelings went flat, his voice hard.

  “I didn’t say I wanted it. I said I wasn’t going to run from it. I’m not the one who ran like a coward. He did.”

  “Hopefully my part in this will be over in a few days,” Benton said. “Then it’s NYPD’s responsibility. God knows I’m way behind at McLean. Only halfway through my research study, although I’m not sure about the journal article anymore. You don’t have to do the consultation at the damn morgue. Why should you pull Dr. Lester’s feet out of the fire again?”

  “That’s not what you really want. For me to be a no-show? For me to walk off the job after Berger’s asked me to help? The last shuttle’s at nine o’clock. I’d never make it. You know that. Why are you talking like this?”

  “Lucy could take you in her helicopter.”

  “It’s snowing at home. The visibility’s probably two feet.”

  She watched his face, and it was hard for him to keep his feelings out of his eyes, because he wanted her. He wanted her now, in his office, and if she knew what he was feeling, she would be repulsed by him. She would decide he’d spent too many years wallowing through every form of perversion imaginable, and had finally been infected.

  “I keep forgetting the weather’s different there,” he said.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Then that’s the way it will be. You certainly packed as if you aren’t going anywhere.”

  Her luggage was by the door.

  “Food,” she said. “As much as you’d love to take me out for a romantic dinner tonight, we’re eating in. If we ever get home.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes. She had just asked him the question she’d been wanting to ask but hadn’t.

  He answered her, “My feelings about you haven’t changed. If you knew how I felt sometimes. I just don’t tell you.”

  “Maybe you’d better start telling me.”

  “I am telling you.”

  He wanted her right then, and she sensed it, and she didn’t recoil. Maybe she felt the same way. It was so easy for him to forget there was a reason she was so polished and precise, that science was just the lead she looped around the neck of the wild animal so she could walk with it, so she could understand it and handle it. What she’d chosen to expose herself to in life couldn’t be more naked or primitive or powerful, and nothing shocked her.

  “I believe a very important element in this case is why Terri Bridges was murdered in the bathroom,” she said. “And what makes us so sure she was?”

  “The police found no evidence she was killed in any other area of the house. Nothing to suggest her body was moved into the bathroom after the fact. What food?”

  “What we were going to have last night. When you say nothing suggests her body was moved, what does that mean? What might have suggested it?”

  “I only know that Morales says nothing suggested it.”

  “And likely nothing would in this case,” Scarpetta said. “If she’d been dead less than two hours, her body wasn’t going to tell anybody much of anything. Livor, rigor usually take at least six hours to be fully developed. Was she warm?”

  “He said when he got there, he felt for a pulse. She was warm.”

  “Then if Oscar didn’t kill her, whoever did must have left her apartment shortly before he got there and found her dead. Coincidence, amazing good luck for the killer that he wasn’t interrupted. He was just minutes away from Oscar walking in on him. Assuming the killer and Oscar aren’t one and the same.”

  “If they aren’t,” Benton said, “you have to wonder why someone else would assume Terri would be home alone on New Year’s Eve. Unless it was random. Her lights were on in an otherwise dark building, and this time of year, most people who are home have their lights on all day, or at least by four, when the sun is going down. Question is whether she was a victim of opportunity.”

  “What about an alibi? Oscar have one that you know of?”

  “He have one that you know of?”

  She watched him squeeze as much blood from his finger as he could.

  “I’m trying to remember the last time you had a tetanus shot,” she said.

  14

  It hadn’t been difficult searching the NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center and finding the two cases Morales had mentioned. What took a little longer was getting a response from the investigators who had worked them.

  Marino was unbuttoning his coat inside his apartment when his cell phone rang at six-twenty. The woman identified herself as Bacardi, like the rum he used to drink mixed with Dr Pepper. He called her back on his landline and gave her a synopsis of the Terri Bridges case, asking if she’d ever heard of Oscar Bane, or if someone fitting his description had been spotted in the area when the homicide in Baltimore had occurred in the summer of 2003.

  “Before we go galloping off together on some great big man-hunt,” Bacardi said, “what makes you think the cases are connected?”

  “First, let’s start with it wasn’t my idea. This other detective’s name is Mike Morales, and he got hits on our computer system. You know him?”

  “Not off the top of my head. So you’re not taking credit. Must be shit, what you got.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Marino said. “There are similarities in the MOs between yours and mine. Same thing in the Greenwich case, which I assume you’re aware of.”

  “Went over it until my eyes fell out. Broke up my marriage. He died of cancer last year. Not my ex-husband, the Greenwich investigator. Where are you from? You sound like a Jersey boy.”

  “Yeah, from the bad part. I’m sorry about the Greenwich detective. What kind?”

  “Liver.”

  “If I still had one, that would be what gets me.”

  “Here one day, gone the next. Just like my ex and last two boyfriends.”

  Marino wondered how old she was and if she was making sure he knew she was single.

  “The case here, Terri Bridges?” he said. “She had a gold bracelet on her left ankle. A thin gold chain. I saw it in the pictures. I haven’t actually seen the body. I didn’t go to the scene or the morgue.”

  “Real gold?”

  “Like I said, I’ve only seen photographs, but on the report it says ten-karat. Must be stamped on the clasp. Don’t know how else you’d know.”

  “Hon, I can tell just by looking at it. I can tell you anything you want to know about jewelry. Real, fake, good, bad, expensive, cheap. I used to work property crimes. Plus, I like stuff I can’t afford and would rather have nothing than crap. You know what I mean?”

  Marino was aware of his cheap knockoff Italian designer suit, made in China. He felt sure if he got rained on, he’d leave a trail of black dye-stained water, like a squid. He struggled out of the jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair. He yanked off his tie and couldn’t wait to put on jeans, a sweater, and that old fleece-lined leather Harley jacket he
’d had forever and had refused to hand over at the bazaar.

  “Can you e-mail me a picture of the ankle bracelet Terri Bridges had on?” Bacardi asked him.

  Her voice was melodic and happy, and she seemed interested in what she did and interested in him. Talking to her was waking him up in a way he hadn’t felt in a very long while. Maybe it was because he’d forgotten how nice it was to be treated like an equal, or, more important, with the respect he deserved. What had changed in the last few years to make him feel so bad about himself?

  Charleston had been an accident waiting to happen, and that was the fact of the matter. It wasn’t about a so-called disease one poured out of a bottle. When he’d come to that realization, he and his therapist Nancy got into their biggest disagreement, an ugly argument. This was right before he’d finished his treatment program. She’d started it by saying that everything dysfunctional in his life was rooted in his alcoholism, and as drunks and junkies got older, they became exaggerated versions of themselves.

  She’d even drawn a chart for him when they were alone in the chapel that sunny June afternoon, and all the windows were open, and he could smell the sea air and hear the gulls screaming as they swooped over the rocky coastline on the North Shore, where he ought to have been fishing or riding a motorcycle, or better yet, sitting with his feet propped up, drinking booze instead of blaming his life on it. Nancy had shown him in black and white how after he and beer had become “best friends” when he was twelve, his life had begun a slow deterioration peppered with traumas that she inked heavily and labeled:

  Fighting

  Poor Perf. in School

  Isolation

  Sexually Promix.

  FX relationships

  Risk/boxing/guns/police/motorcy.

  Nancy had charted his fuckups for the better part of an hour, using abbreviations that required deciphering. What she basically demonstrated to him was that ever since his first beer, he’d been on an angry, dangerous path of aggression, sexual promiscuity, fractured friendships, divorce, and violence, and the older he got, the closer together his traumas were spaced, because that was the nature of the Disease. The Disease took you over, and as you got older, you physically couldn’t resist its having its way with you, or something like that.

  Then she had signed and dated his chart, and even drew a smiley face under her name, and handed the damn thing to him, all five pages, and he said, What do you want me to do? Tape it on my fucking refrigerator?

  He’d gotten up from the pew and walked over to the window, and looked out at the ocean crashing against black granite, and spray shooting up and gulls screaming as if whales and birds were gathering and rioting right in front of him, trying to break him out of the joint.

  Do you see what you just did? Nancy said to his back, from her pew, while he looked out at the most beautiful day he’d ever seen, wondering why he wasn’t outside in the middle of it. You just pushed me away, Pete. That’s the alcohol talking.

  The hell it is, he replied. I haven’t had a fucking drink in a fucking month. That was me talking.

  Now as he talked to a woman he’d never met who had a name that made him happy, he realized he hadn’t been doing all that badly, really, until he’d stopped being a real cop. When he’d finally left Richmond PD, and had gone to work as a private investigator for Lucy, and then as a death investigator for Scarpetta, he’d lost enforcement powers and all self-respect. He couldn’t arrest anybody. He couldn’t even have some asshole’s car ticketed or towed. All he could do was muscle his way into situations and issue empty threats. He might as well have had his dick cut off. So what did he do last May? He had to show Scarpetta he still had a dick, because what he was really doing was proving it to himself and trying to take his life back. He wasn’t saying what he’d done was right or should be excused. He’d never said that, and he sure as hell didn’t think it.

  “I’ll get you whatever you need,” he said to Bacardi.

  “That’d be great.”

  He took perverse pleasure in imagining Morales’s reaction. Marino was talking to the Baltimore homicide investigator, doing whatever he wanted.

  Fuck Morales.

  Marino was a sworn NYPD cop. More than that, he worked for the elite DA squad, and Morales didn’t. What made that poor man’s Puff Daddy in charge? Just because he was on duty last night and responded to the scene?

  Marino said to Bacardi, “You sitting in front of your computer?”

  “Home alone, Happy New Year. Fire away. You watch the ball drop in the Big Apple? Me? I ate popcorn and watched The Little Rascals. Don’t laugh. I got the complete set of originals.”

  “When I was a kid, you could name something Buckwheat and not have Al Sharpton up your ass. I had a cat named Buckwheat. Guess what. She was white.”

  He opened a big envelope and pulled out his copies of the police and autopsy reports, and then opened the envelope of photographs, which he pushed around on the Formica countertop, covering a couple of cigarette burns and pot rings, until he found what he wanted. Cordless phone tucked under his chin, he inserted a photograph into the scanner attached to his laptop.

  “You should know there’s some political bullshit here,” he said.

  “You only got some?”

  “Point being, just you and me need to be talking about this right now, and nobody else involved. So if anybody besides me gets in touch—I don’t care if it’s the NYPD police commissioner—I’d appreciate it if you’d not mention me, but let me know. And I’ll handle it. Not everybody in the mix is—”

  “You’re telling me the grass is green and the sky is blue. No worries, Pete.”

  It felt good to hear her call him Pete. He went into his e-mail to attach the scanned photograph as an image.

  “I get any calls,” she said, “I’ll let you know first and foremost. I’d appreciate the reciprocation. There are a lot of people running around who’d love the credit for solving my lady here in Baltimore and the kid in Greenwich. Did I mention how weird people are about getting credit? See, my theory? That’s what led up to the mortgage crisis. Everybody wants credit. I’m not being a comedian.”

  “Especially if Morales calls,” Marino added. “I’m surprised he hasn’t. But then, he doesn’t seem to be a follow-up kind of guy.”

  “Yup. What I call fuck and run. Shows up for the big moment, then disappears, lets everybody else clean up after him or finish what he started. Sort of like a deadbeat dad.”

  “You got kids?”

  “Not in the house anymore, happy to report. They turned out pretty good, considering. I’m looking at the picture now. And nobody seems to know why the victim there, Terri Bridges, was wearing the bracelet?”

  “That’s the story. Her boyfriend, Oscar, said he’d never seen it before.”

  “A bracelet’s not rocket science, but I’m not one of those who ignores circumstantial evidence,” she said. “I guess you can tell I’m over forty and superstitious about putting my entire case in a lab coat pocket. All the young ones? Shit. It’s Forensic Let’s Make a Deal. Behind door number one is a videotape of someone raping and murdering a woman he’s kidnapped. Behind door number two is DNA from a cigarette butt found at the driveway. Which do they choose?”

  “Don’t get me started.”

  “Yeah, you and me together. I tell them, you know what CSI stands for? It stands for Can’t Stand It. Because when I hear that term or acronym or whatever the hell it is, I think to myself, I can’t stand it. I really can’t stand it. You tell me, Pete. When you was getting started, was there such a thing as a CSI?”

  “TV invented it. They was crime scene techs in the real world. Or most times, people like you and me got out our fingerprint kit, camera, measuring tape, and all the rest, and did it our damn self. I didn’t need a friggin’ laser to map a crime scene and get all the dimensions right. Luminol works just as good as all these new chemicals and fancy crime scene lights. Been mixing up luminol in a spray bottle and using it all my lif
e. I don’t need the Jetsons to work a homicide.”

  “I won’t go that far. A lot of the new stuff? So much better, there’s no comparison. I can work a scene without totally trashing the place, if nothing else. You know, some old lady gets burglarized, and no more ruining everything she owns with black dusting powder. Technology at least lets me be considerate. But I don’t have a magic box. You got one?”

  “I keep forgetting to recharge it,” he said.

  “You ever come to Baltimore, Pete?”

  “Hadn’t heard that expression in a while,” Marino said. “The case-in-a-lab-coat-pocket thing you said. So guess what? I’m over forty. You have some files landing. You checking your e-mail as we complain? You ever come to New York?”

  He was scanning pages of the police report, and Dr. Lester’s preliminary autopsy findings.

  “It’s not the way I started,” Bacardi said. “I still believe in talking to people and looking at motive, the old-fashioned way. Sure, I come to New York. Or I can. No big deal. We should exchange yearbook pictures first. But I promise I look better since I had my face transplant.”

  Marino grabbed a Sharp’s out of the refrigerator. He had to meet this one. She was something.

  “I’m looking at the photograph of the bracelet right now. Jesus—money,” Bacardi said. “It’s the same as the others. All three of them ten-karat. A herringbone design, really thin. Based on the scale in this photo, it looks like your bracelet—just like the other two—is ten inches long. Sort of thing you’d buy in a mall kiosk or on the Internet for forty, fifty bucks. One interesting difference that strikes me right off the bat is in my case and Greenwich, the bodies weren’t indoors. It appears the victims were out looking to score drugs for sex, and got picked up by someone cruising for an opportunity. Your victim—Terri Bridges—have a history of drug abuse or a secret life that might have left her open for that kind of thing happening to her?”