Scarpetta

by Patricia Cornwell

  She said, “I’ll also stick with my theory that she was influenced by consumer reviews. Possibly even for her provocative tastes.”

  “I’d give this maybe three stars,” Marino said, holding up a thong he’d just pulled out of a drawer. “But you ask me, the thing about rating underwear? It all depends on who’s wearing it.”

  “Victoria’s Secret. Frederick’s of Hollywood,” Scarpetta observed. “Open mesh and fishnet. Lace teddies, crotchless panties. A corset. She was wearing a red lace shelf bra under her robe, and it’s very difficult for me to imagine she wasn’t wearing panties to match.”

  “I don’t think I know what a shelf bra is.”

  “It rather much does what the name implies,” she said. “The object of the game, to enhance and accentuate.”

  “Oh. The one he cut off her. Doesn’t look like it would cover anything important.”

  “It wouldn’t, and wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “That’s why she would have been wearing it to begin with, assuming it wasn’t the killer’s idea.”

  Scarpetta returned the lingerie to its drawer and for a moment couldn’t look at Marino as she remembered the sounds and smells of him, and his shocking strength. It wasn’t until later that she’d felt him, when pain mapped out where he’d been in damaged flesh that burned and throbbed all the way to the bone.

  “That and all the condoms,” Marino said.

  He had his back to her, opening drawers in a nightstand. The condoms had been collected by the police.

  “You see from the pictures, she must have had a hundred condoms in this top drawer,” he said. “Maybe this is a Benton question, but if she was a neat freak—”

  “Not if.”

  “In other words, she was uptight. Everything had to be exactly right. So does it make sense for someone like that to have this wild side?”

  “You mean for someone obsessive-compulsive to like sex?”

  “Yeah.”

  Marino was sweating, and his face was red.

  “Makes perfect sense,” Scarpetta said. “Sex was a way to relieve her anxiety. Perhaps the only acceptable way for her to be uninhibited, to give up control. Or better put, to delude herself into thinking she was giving up control.”

  “Yeah. She gave it up as long as it was according to her plan.”

  “Meaning she never really gave it up. She couldn’t possibly. That’s not how she was programmed. Even when she appeared to be giving up control—during sex, for example—she wasn’t. Because it wasn’t Oscar or someone else who decided what she would buy. I doubt it was he or any of her partners who decided what she would wear or whether she would have body hair. Or even whether Oscar would have body hair. My guess is she decided what they would and wouldn’t do. And where and when and how.”

  She remembered what Oscar had said about Terri’s liking his body perfectly sculpted and perfectly clean and smooth. She liked sex in the shower. She liked to be dominated, to be tied up.

  “She called the shots,” Scarpetta said. “Until the end. That was the fun part for the person who killed her—controlling her absolutely.”

  “It makes you wonder if Oscar finally couldn’t take it anymore,” Marino said, stopping short of whatever else he was about to say.

  Scarpetta stood in the bathroom doorway and looked in at the white marble and French gold fixtures, and the corner soaking tub with its showerhead and curtain pulled back. She looked at the polished, veined grayish stone floor and imagined the contusions Terri would have had if her assailant had sexually assaulted her on it, and was fairly certain that didn’t happen. The weight of the assailant, even if the person were a hundred and nine pounds, like Oscar, would have caused contusions in areas that contacted the floor, especially if her wrists were tightly bound behind her.

  Scarpetta outlined her thoughts to Marino as she studied the gilt-framed oval mirror above the vanity, and the chair with the gold metal back shaped like a heart. Her reflection looked back at her. Then Marino’s chest was in the mirror as he looked at everything she was looking at.

  “If he wanted to watch her die,” Marino said, “maybe he also wanted to watch her being raped. But as I’m standing here looking at the mirror, I don’t see how that could have happened if he was a normal-size person. If he’d been standing behind her, I’m saying. Well, I don’t see how he could have.”

  “I’m also not so sure she could have been raped without exhibiting at least some injury,” Scarpetta said. “If her wrists had been strapped together behind her back and he had gotten on top of her, even if it was on the bed, she likely would have had abrasions or contusions or both, posteriorly. Not to mention the bed didn’t look touched, based on the photographs. And the clothing on them didn’t look disturbed.”

  “She had no injuries to her back.”

  “None.”

  “You’re pretty sure her wrists was already bound.”

  “I can’t prove it. But his cutting her robe and bra off suggests she was bound at the time.”

  “What makes you so sure she was bound behind her back instead of in front? I know that’s what Oscar told the police. Is that what you’re basing it on?”

  Scarpetta held out her wrists, the left one on top of the right, as if they were bound by a single strap.

  “I’m basing it on the pattern of the furrow on her wrists, where the groove was the deepest, where there was sparing, et cetera,” she said. “If she’d been bound in front, it’s likely the strap would have been inserted under this wrist”—she indicated her right one—“with the locking block a little to the right of her right wrist bone. If they’d been bound behind her back, the position would have been reversed.”

  “The killer right-handed or left-handed, in your opinion?”

  “Based on the direction he pulled the strap during tightening? Consistent with someone left-handed, assuming he was facing her when he bound her. For what it’s worth, Oscar’s dominant hand is his right one. And I probably shouldn’t tell you that.”

  She and Marino put on fresh gloves, and she stepped inside the bathroom and lifted the vanity chair and set it in the middle of the floor. She measured the height of it from its turned-up metal foot to the black fabric seat, which had darker areas, stained areas, that added to her theory.

  “Possibly residues of the lubricant,” she said. “Nobody noticed because it was never considered that she might have been sitting in this chair when she was garroted, in front of the mirror. Maybe some tissue and blood on the legs from her thrashing. Let me see.”

  She looked with a magnification lens.

  “I can’t tell. But maybe not. Not really surprised. Since her injuries are to the tops of her legs, not the backs of them. You still carry those little tactical lights that can blind people?”

  Marino dug into his pocket and pulled out his flashlight and gave it to her. She got down on her knees and shone the light under the vanity, illuminating smears of dark dried blood under the counter’s edge, not visible unless one was on the floor, looking. She found more blood on the underside of the vanity drawer, which was unpainted plywood. Marino squatted, and she showed him.

  She took photographs.

  “I’m going to swab all this, but not the chair,” she said. “What we’re going to do is wrap it up, and it goes to La Guardia. Can you step out for a minute and tell Jaime we need an officer who can escort this chair to Lucy’s jet and be on that jet and receipt it to Dr. Kiselstein at the airport in Knoxville? Lucy can set it up. In fact, knowing her, she already has.”

  She studied the chair.

  She decided, “The lubricant is moist, so we don’t want anything plastic like poly tubing or basically shrinkwrap. I think paper so it continues to air-dry, maybe a Mammoth Bag, and then place the entire thing in a large evidence storage box. Be as creative as you can. I don’t want any chance of bacteria, and I don’t want anything rubbing against any surface of it.”

  Marino left, and Scarpetta retrieved a roll of string, a roll of blue e
vidence tape, and a pair of small scissors from her crime scene case. She set the chair against the tile wall and began measuring and cutting string to correlate with Oscar’s and Terri’s heights, and the lengths of their legs and also their torsos. She taped the strings to the wall directly above the chair as Marino reappeared in the doorway. Berger was with him.

  “If you can give Jaime my notepad and pen so she can take notes and you can free up your hands. What I’m about to show you,” Scarpetta said, “is why I don’t believe Oscar could have committed this murder. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I’m going to show you why it’s unlikely. A little simple math.”

  She directed their attention to the different lengths of string taped to the tile wall above the chair.

  “This is all based on the theory that Terri was seated in this chair. What’s relevant is the length of her torso, which is eighty-four and a quarter centimeters. . . .”

  “The metric system ain’t my thing,” Marino said.

  “About thirty-four and an eighth inches,” she said. “I measured her in the morgue, and as you know, people with achondroplasia have abnormally short limbs, but their torsos and heads are relatively the same size as a normal adult’s, which is why they seem disproportionately larger. That’s why little people can drive cars without sitting on cushions but need extended pedals so their feet can reach the accelerator, the brake, the clutch. In Terri’s case, her torso is about the same length as Jaime’s and mine. So I’ve taped a segment of string to the wall”—Scarpetta showed them—“that’s exactly the length of Terri’s torso, and positioned it so it begins at the seat of the chair and ends here.”

  She pointed to the piece of blue tape fastening the top end of the string to the wall.

  “The distance between the chair cushion and the floor is twenty-one inches,” she continued to explain. “So if you add thirty-four and an eighth and twenty-one, you get fifty-five and one-eighth inches. Oscar Bane is four feet tall. In other words, forty-eight inches tall.”

  She pointed to the string that represented his height.

  Berger commented as she wrote, “Not even as tall as Terri was when she was sitting.”

  “That’s right,” Scarpetta said.

  She lifted the “Oscar string,” as she called it, from the wall and held it out parallel to the floor, and did the same with the “seated Terri string.” She asked Marino to hold both, level and parallel to the floor.

  She took more photographs.

  Then Benton was behind Berger, and a uniformed officer was with him.

  The officer said, “Someone need a chair escorted to a private jet headed to the bomb factory in Oak Ridge? The chair’s not going to explode or nothing, right?”

  “You bring the evidence packaging I asked for?” Marino asked him.

  “Just like UPS,” the officer said.

  Scarpetta asked Marino to continue holding the Oscar and Terri strings while she explained to Benton what they were doing.

  “And his arms are very short, about sixteen inches from his shoulder joint to the tips of his fingers, which would have given him less leverage,” she added, looking at Benton. “Your reach is a good eight inches more than that, and if you’d been standing behind Terri while she was seated, you would have towered over her by almost twenty inches, giving you tremendous leverage. As opposed to Oscar. Imagine someone his size trying to pull up and back with force while the victim is thrashing about in the chair.”

  “And he’s not even level with her when he’s doing it? I don’t really see how he could,” Marino agreed. “Especially if he kept doing it to her over and over again, allowing her to regain consciousness, then strangling her into unconsciousness again, like you said. I don’t care how much he can bench-press.”

  “Actually, I don’t think there’s any way he could have done it,” Berger said.

  “I’m worried about him,” Scarpetta said. “Has anybody tried to call him?”

  “When I talked to Morales,” Benton said, “I asked him if anybody knew where Oscar was or had heard from him. He says the police have Oscar’s cell phone.”

  “He voluntarily gave that up?” Scarpetta asked.

  “Along with a lot of other things, yes,” Benton said. “Which is too bad, at least about the phone. I wish he had it, because he’s not answering his apartment phone, which doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know how we’re going to reach him.”

  “I think what we ought to do is split up, as I suggested earlier,” Berger said. “Benton? You and Kay meet Morales at Oscar’s apartment and take a look. Marino and I will make sure this chair gets packaged properly. We’ll make sure the swabs you just took and any other evidence goes directly to the labs. Then we’ll head across the street and see what the neighbor has to say about Jake Loudin.”

  Scarpetta carried the chair out of the bathroom and set it down for the officer who was to package and escort it.

  Berger said to her, “If you’re still at Oscar’s apartment when we’re done, we’ll meet you there. Lucy said she’ll call me if she finds out anything else important on her end.”

  26

  Oscar Bane lived on Amsterdam Avenue in a ten-story building of insipid yellow brick that reminded Scarpetta of Mussolini’s fascist constructions in Rome. Inside the lobby, the doorman wouldn’t let them near the elevator until Morales showed his badge. He looked Irish, was portly and elderly, wearing a uniform the same green as the awning outside.

  “I haven’t seen him since New Year’s Eve,” the doorman said, his attention fixed to Scarpetta’s big crime scene case. “I guess I know why you’re here.”

  Morales said, “That so? Tell me why we’re here.”

  “I read about it. I never saw her.”

  “You mean Terri Bridges?” Benton said.

  “Everybody’s talking about it, as you might imagine. I hear they let him out of Bellevue. It’s not nice the names they’re calling him. You gotta feel sorry for anyone made fun of like that.”

  No one had heard from Oscar, as far as Scarpetta knew. No one seemed to have a clue where he was, and she was extremely worried someone might harm him.

  “There’s five of us who work the door, and we all say the same thing. She’d never been to this building or one of us, at least, would know. And he’d gotten strange,” the doorman said.

  He directed his attention to Scarpetta and Benton because he obviously didn’t like Morales and wasn’t trying very hard to hide it.

  “Now, that wasn’t always the case,” the doorman continued, “and I know that for a fact because I’ve worked here for eleven years, and he’s been in the building about half that time. He used to be friendly, a real nice guy. Then all of a sudden he changed. Cut his hair and dyed it the color of a marigold, got quieter and quieter, stayed in his apartment a lot. When he’d come out to walk or whatever, it was at odd times and he was as nervous as a cat.”

  “Where does he keep his car?” Morales asked.

  “An underground parking garage around the block. A lot of the tenants park there.”

  “When was this?” Benton asked. “When you noticed something different about him.”

  “I’d say it was the fall. October or so when it started becoming obvious that something was going on. Knowing what I do now, I have to wonder what he got tangled up with, you know, with the girl. Put it this way, when two people get together and one of them changes for the worse? You figure it out.”

  “Is someone on the door around the clock?” Benton asked him.

  “Twenty-four-seven. Come on. I’ll take you up. You got a key, right?”

  “I assume you have one?” Benton said.

  “Funny you would mention that.” His green gloved finger pressed the elevator button. “Mr. Bane took it upon himself to change his lock some months back, around the time he started acting odd.”

  They boarded, and he tapped the button for the tenth floor.

  “He’s supposed to give us a key. We got to have a key in case of an
emergency, and we’ve kept asking him, and we still don’t have one.”

  “Sounds to me like ol’ Oscar doesn’t want anybody in his place,” Morales said. “I’m surprised you didn’t kick him out.”

  “It was getting to where there was going to be a confrontation with the building manager. Nobody wanted that. We kept hoping he’d get around to it. Sorry it’s so slow—slowest elevator in the city. You’d think we got someone on the roof pulling us up with a rope. Anyway, Mr. Bane keeps to himself. Never has visitors. Has never caused any problems around here, but like I said, he started acting a little unusual, and about the same time he changed his locks. I guess you just never know about people.”

  “Is this the only elevator?” Scarpetta asked.

  “There’s a freight elevator. We ask the residents to use it when they take out their dogs. Not everybody wants to be on an elevator with a dog. Poodles are the worst. The big standard ones? They scare me. I’m not getting on an elevator with one of those. Rather ride with a pit bull.”

  “If someone took the freight elevator, would you be aware of it?” Morales asked. “Like if somebody tried to slip by you?”

  “Don’t see how they could. They’d still have to come in and out of the front of the building.”

  “No other access at all? I mean, we’re sure Oscar hasn’t come in tonight, and nobody saw him?” Morales asked.

  “Not unless he climbed up the fire escape and came through the roof,” the doorman said, as if Oscar would have to be Spider-Man.

  Scarpetta recalled noticing a zigzag of horizontal platforms connected by stairs on the west side of the building.

  The elevator stopped, and the doorman stepped out into a hallway of old green carpet and pale yellow walls. Scarpetta looked up at a steel-framed plastic dome in the ceiling that wasn’t an ordinary skylight.

  “That’s the roof access you mean?” she said to the doorman.

  “Yes, ma’am. You’d have to have the ladder. Either that or use the fire escape and come through somebody’s window.”

  “And the ladder’s kept where?”