Scarpetta

by Patricia Cornwell

  “In the basement somewhere. That’s not my department.”

  “Maybe you could check and make sure it’s still there,” Benton said.

  “Sure, sure. But obviously he didn’t come in or out that way, or the ladder would be under the roof hatch, right? You’re starting to make me nervous now. Like maybe we should have some cops on the roof. Since they let him out of Bellevue, now you’re giving me the willies a little.”

  He led them down to the end of the hall, to Oscar’s dark wooden door, the number on it 10B.

  “How many apartments on this floor?” Scarpetta asked. “Four?”

  “That’s right. His neighbors work, aren’t around during the day. Out a lot at night because they’re single, got no kids. For two of them, this isn’t their only residence.”

  “I’ll need their information,” Morales said. “Not just them but a list of everybody who lives in the building.”

  “Sure, sure. There’s forty units, four per floor. Obviously, this is the top floor. I won’t call it a penthouse, because the apartments aren’t any nicer up here than on the other floors. But the view’s better. From the ones in the back you can see the Hudson pretty good. I gotta tell you how shocked I am. Mr. Bane sure doesn’t seem like the type to do something like that. But you know what they say. They never do, right? And then he did start getting weird. I’ll check on the ladder.”

  “A little reminder, pal,” Morales said to him. “Mr. Oscar Bane’s not been charged with a crime. Nobody’s saying he killed his girlfriend. So be careful what you spread around, got it?”

  They had reached Oscar’s door, and Morales had a key that Scarpetta recognized as belonging to a high-security Medeco lock. She noticed something else that she didn’t want to draw attention to while the doorman was standing there—a strand of black thread, maybe eight inches long, on the carpet directly below the bottom door hinge.

  “I’ll be downstairs,” the doorman said. “You need me? There’s a house phone in the kitchen. A white wall phone. Just dial zero. Who do I call about the ladder?”

  Morales gave him his card.

  The doorman looked like he didn’t want it, but he had no choice. He walked back toward the elevator, and Scarpetta set down her crime scene case, opened it, and handed out gloves. She picked up the piece of thread and examined it under a magnifying lens, noticing a thick knot on one end that had been coated with what appeared to be a flattened bit of colorless soft wax.

  She suspected she knew the purpose of the knotted thread, but the door was almost twice as tall as Oscar, and he couldn’t possibly have reached the top of it without assistance.

  “What you got?” Morales said.

  He took the thread from her, looked at it under the lens.

  “If I had to guess,” she said, “it’s something he draped over the top of the door so he could tell if it had been opened in his absence.”

  “What a clever little guy. Guess we better find out about that ladder, huh? How did he reach the top of the door?”

  “We know he’s paranoid,” Benton said.

  Scarpetta placed the thread in an evidence bag she labeled with a Sharpie as Morales unlocked the door and opened it. The alarm started beeping, and he stepped inside and entered a code he had written on a napkin. He turned on the lights.

  “Well, look here, we got another ghostbusting gizmo,” he said flippantly, bending down to pick up a straightened coat hanger on the floor just inside the door. “Either that or Oscar was roasting marshmallows. I’m looking for a line of flour across the floor like the crazies do to make sure aliens haven’t entered their houses.”

  Scarpetta examined both ends of the straightened coat hanger, then looked at the small flattened piece of wax inside the plastic bag.

  “It’s possible this is how he’d get the thread on the top of the door,” she said. “He’d stick the waxy knot on the tip of the coat hanger. There’s an indentation consistent with the diameter of the wire. Let’s see if I might be right.”

  She shut herself out of the apartment, and there was just enough space between the door and the floor for the coat hanger to fit. She slid it back inside the apartment, and Morales opened the door.

  “Looney Tuney,” he said. “I don’t mean you, of course.”

  The living room was immaculate and masculine, with walls painted a deep shade of blue and hung with a fine collection of original Victorian maps and prints. Oscar had a fondness for dark antiques and English leather, and an obsession with anti-mind-control devices. They were strategically placed everywhere, inexpensive spectrometers, radio frequency field strength and TriField meters, for the supposed detection of various surveillance frequencies such as infrared, magnetic, and radio waves.

  As they walked around the apartment, they discovered antennas and strips of vinyl-coated lead, and buckets of water, and odd contraptions like aluminum foil-lined metal plates wired to batteries and homemade copper pyramids, and hard hats lined with soundproofing foam and topped by small sections of pipe.

  An aluminum foil tent completely enclosed Oscar’s bed.

  “Wave-jamming devices,” Benton said. “Pyramids and hats to block out sound waves, beamed energies, including psychic energies. He was trying to create a bubble force field around himself.”

  Marino and a uniformed officer were carrying a box the size of a washing machine as Lucy got out of a cab in front of Terri Bridges’s brownstone.

  Lucy slung a nylon satchel over her shoulder, paid the fare, and watched them load the box into the back of a police van. She hadn’t seen Marino since she’d threatened to blow his head off last spring in his fishing shack, and decided the best approach was to walk right up to him.

  “This the officer who’s going to be on my jet?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Marino said.

  “You got the tail number and the pilots’ names, right?” she said to the officer. “It’s Signature at La Guardia, and when you go inside, Brent should be waiting for you. He’s the PIC, will be in a black suit, white shirt, blue striped tie, and has on pants.”

  “What’s a PIC?” The officer slammed the back of the van shut. “What do you mean he has on pants?”

  “Pilot in command, sits in the left seat, your trivia for the night. Make sure he knows you’ve got a gun, just in case he forgot his glasses. He’s blind as a bat without his glasses. Which is why he wears pants.”

  “That’s supposed to be a joke, right?”

  “There are two pilots. FAA regs—only one needs to see, but both must have on pants.”

  The officer looked at her.

  He looked at Marino and said, “Tell me she’s kidding.”

  “Don’t ask me,” Marino said. “I don’t like to fly. Not anymore.”

  Berger emerged from the building and came down the steps, in the cold, blustery wind, with no coat on. She pushed her hair out of her face and pulled her suit jacket together, folding her arms against the cold.

  “We’d better get our coats,” Berger said to Marino.

  She didn’t say anything to Lucy but touched her hand as the two of them walked with Marino to his dark blue Impala.

  Lucy said to Marino, “I’m going to check out the wireless network Terri was using. If you’d make sure whoever’s securing her apartment doesn’t have a problem with my being in there so I don’t end up cuffed and on the floor—or maybe he doesn’t. I may not need to go inside her apartment if the entire building’s on the same network, but I’ve got a couple of interesting things to pass along.”

  “Why don’t we get out of the cold and sit in the car,” Berger said.

  She and Lucy got into the back, and Marino climbed into the front. He started the engine and turned on the heat as the van with Terri Bridges’s vanity chair pulled away from the curb. Lucy unzipped her satchel and pulled out her MacBook. She opened it.

  “Two important things,” she said. “First is how Terri hooked up with whoever Scarpetta six-twelve is. The John Jay website. This past Octob
er ninth, about a month after Benton and Kay became visiting lecturers, Terri—or whoever was signed on as Lunasee—posted a notice on a John Jay website bulletin board asking if anybody knew how she might get in touch with Aunt Kay.”

  Berger was putting on her coat, and Lucy caught the subtle scent of spices and bamboo, and the oil of bitter orange blossoms—Berger’s fragrance, from a perfume house in London. Lucy had asked about it earlier, hoping it wasn’t one more lovely thing about Berger that was left over from Greg.

  “The posting is archived, obviously,” Lucy said.

  “How’d you find it?” Marino turned around, his face almost indistinguishable in the dark.

  “Looks like you’ve lost a lot of weight,” Lucy said to him.

  “I quit eating,” he said. “Don’t know why other people haven’t thought of it. I could write a book, make a lot of money.”

  “You should. A book with blank pages in it.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. No food and nothing in the book. It works.”

  Lucy could feel his scrutiny of her, of Berger, of the two of them sitting close. Marino had sensors that told him where people were in relation to each other, and where they were in relation to him. It was all connected, in his way of thinking.

  Lucy watched Berger read what was on the MacBook’s screen:

  Hi Everyone,

  My name’s Terri Bridges, and I’m a forensic psych grad student trying to get hold of Dr. Kay Scarpetta. If anybody has any connection with her, could you please pass on my e-mail address? I’ve been trying to track her down since last spring to interview her for my thesis. Thanks.

  —TB

  Lucy read it out loud to Marino.

  She opened another file, and the photograph of Scarpetta from this morning’s column in Gotham Gotcha filled the display.

  “This was on the same bulletin board?” Berger asked.

  Lucy held up the laptop so Marino could see the off-putting photograph of Scarpetta in a morgue, pointing a scalpel at someone.

  “The original image,” Lucy said. “So the background’s not been Photoshopped out. As you recall, in the photo on Gotham Gotcha, it’s just my aunt and you got no idea about the context, except you assume she’s in a morgue. But when we get the background back, we see a countertop with a monitor for security cameras, and beyond is a cinder-block wall with cabinets. But when I did some image enhancement of my own”—she touched the trackpad and opened another file—“I got this.”

  She showed them an enlargement of the transparent plastic shield covering Scarpetta’s face. Reflected in it was the vague image of another person.

  Lucy moved her finger over the trackpad and opened another file, and the image reflected in the face shield was more refined.

  “Dr. Lester,” Berger said.

  “That figures,” Marino said. “Someone like her would hate the Doc.”

  Lucy said, “We can establish a few things that may or may not be related. The photograph on the Internet this morning was taken in the New York ME’s office during a case or cases when Dr. Lester was present, and that’s who my aunt was talking to. Obviously, Dr. Lester didn’t take the photograph, but my guess is she knows who did, unless she just didn’t notice when it was being done. . . .”

  “She would know,” Berger said decisively. “She watches her fiefdom like a vulture.”

  “And no,” Lucy said. “I didn’t find the image on the John Jay website, although it’s possible this photograph is floating around out there on the Internet and a fan sent it in to Gotham Gotcha.”

  “How do you know Dr. Lester didn’t send it to Gotham Gotcha?” Marino asked.

  “I’d have to get into her e-mail to figure that out,” Lucy said.

  “And you won’t,” Berger said. “But it’s not Lenora’s style. Her MO at this stage in her unhappy life is to dismiss people, treat them as if they don’t matter. Not draw attention to them. The only person she’s desperate to draw attention to is herself.”

  “I saw the two of them being real cozy with each other earlier tonight,” Marino said. “Her and Morales in the park at Bellevue, next to the DNA building. They met on a bench for a few minutes after Benton and the Doc left the morgue. I happened to see it because I was waiting to pick them up. My read on it is Dr. Lester wanted to update Morales on what the Doc did in the morgue, what she found out. But for what it’s worth, Dr. Lester was text-messaging somebody when she walked off in the dark.”

  “I’m not sure that means anything,” Berger said. “Everybody text-messages these days.”

  “That’s bizarre,” Lucy said. “She meets with him in a dark park? Are they . . . ?”

  “I tried to imagine it,” Marino said. “I couldn’t.”

  “He has a way of sidling up close to people,” Berger said. “They might be friendly. But not the other. No. I’d say she’s not his type.”

  “Not unless he’s a necrophile,” Marino said, as if there were such a word.

  “I’m not going to make fun of anyone,” Berger said, and she meant it.

  “Point being,” Marino said, “I guess it sort of surprised me because I don’t think of her as having anything personal enough with anybody to merit her text-messaging them.”

  “It’s more likely she was text-messaging the chief medical examiner,” Berger said. “Just speculation. But that would be like her to pass on information to him, especially if she could take credit for what somebody else did.”

  “Covering her ass because she probably missed stuff,” Lucy said. “So she wanted to call the chief right away. I’d have to get into his e-mail to figure it out.”

  “And you’re not going to do that,” Berger said.

  Her shoulder was solidly against Lucy’s as she said it.

  Lucy was so aware of Berger’s every motion, sound, and scent, she could be on LSD, based on what she’d read about it: an increased heart rate and higher body temperature, and crossover sensations such as “hearing” colors and “seeing” sounds.

  “It might be something like that,” Marino was saying. “She’s a pilot fish. Has to swim after the sharks to get the leftovers they drop. I’m not making fun of her. It’s the truth.”

  “What’s the Terri connection in all this?” Berger asked.

  Lucy replied, “The photograph was sent to her, specifically, to the user account called Lunasee.”

  “Sent by?” Berger asked.

  “Scarpetta six-twelve sent it to her the first Monday of December, the third, and what’s not making much sense is for some reason Terri, I’m going to say it was Terri, deleted it, and whoever sent it also deleted it, which is why it wasn’t in the trash. I had to restore it with the neural networking programming.”

  Marino said, “You’re telling us the photo was sent December third, and both parties immediately deleted it that same day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there a message with it?” Berger asked.

  “Showing you that right now.”

  Lucy moved her finger on the trackpad.

  “This,” she said.

  Date: Mon, 3 December 2007 12:16:11

  From: “Scarpetta”

  To: “Terri”

  Terri,

  I know you like primary source material, so consider this an early Christmas present—for your book. But I do not want to be credited with having given this to you, and will deny it if asked. Nor will I tell you who took it—wasn’t with my permission (the idiot gave me a copy, assumed I’d be pleased). I’m asking that you move the photo to a Word file and delete it from your e-mail as I’ve just now deleted it from mine.—Scarpetta

  “Terri Bridges was writing a book?” Marino asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. “But based on what Jaime and I have seen of this master’s thesis? Could very well be that’s where it was headed.”

  Berger said, “Especially if she really believed all this material was coming from Kay, and I do think she believed that. I think Lunasee was Terri.
For the record. Although I know it’s speculative.”

  “I do, too,” Lucy said. “Obviously, the critical question is whether whoever’s been posing as my aunt in these e-mails to Terri has anything to do with her murder.”

  “What about the IP?” Marino asked.

  “When can you guys get the info from the ISP—the Internet service provider—to identify the customer? Because the address I get is a twenty-something block of the Upper East Side that includes the Guggenheim, the Met, and the Jewish Museum. That’s not real helpful.”

  Lucy knew the exact location but wasn’t going to be forthcoming about it. Berger didn’t like her to break the rules, and Lucy had her friends in the world of ISPs, some of them going back to her federal law-enforcement years, and others further back than that, who knew people who knew people. What she’d done was no different from cops getting a warrant after they’d already opened the trunk of a car and discovered a hundred kilos of cocaine inside.

  She said, “Also right around in that area, which is basically Museum Mile, is Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s dermatology practice.”

  Berger’s face was close to hers in the dark backseat, her fragrance a spell.

  Berger said, “Right around in that area? How right around are we talking about?”

  “The dermatologist to the stars has an apartment that’s the entire thirtieth floor in the building where her office is,” Lucy said. “She’s away for the holidays. Her office doesn’t reopen until Monday the seventh.”

  27

  Scarpetta waited to go inside the library until she could find an excuse to be alone, and Lucy’s call provided it.

  Leaving Morales and Benton in the bedroom, she walked back toward the living room and entered the library as Lucy told her over the phone about a posting on the John Jay website and asked if she was aware of it. Scanning shelves of old psychiatric volumes, Scarpetta told her that she wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Scarpetta added. “Everything I’m hearing makes me feel sorry, really sorry. I wish I’d known she was trying to get hold of me.”