Scarpetta

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I would hope so. That’s not an insignificant medication.”

  “I’ll pass all this on to Lucy. Thank you.”

  “I know you will,” Scarpetta said. “I know you’ll tell her whatever she needs to hear.”

  Benton was out of the shower and wrapped in a thick robe, stretched out on the bed. He was scrolling through something on his laptop, and Scarpetta moved it out of the way and sat next to him. She noticed the red thumb drive plugged into a port.

  “I’m not clean yet,” she said. “I probably smell like death. Would you still respect me if I told a lie?”

  “Depends on who it’s to.”

  “To another doctor.”

  “Well, then, that’s fine. For future reference, lawyers are preferable if you’re going to lie to someone.”

  “I went to law school and don’t appreciate lawyer jokes,” she said, smiling.

  She combed her fingers through his hair. It was still damp.

  She added, “I’ll tell my lie in front of you, and it won’t seem as much a sin. I can’t wait to get in the shower and brush my teeth. And these . . .”

  Realizing she still had her dirty shoes in one hand while she touched his hair with the other.

  “I thought you were going to wait and take a shower with me,” she said. “And we’d wash our shoes.”

  “I planned to take a second one,” he said. “I haven’t washed my shoes yet.”

  Scarpetta got up from the bed and used the landline.

  This time she didn’t call Dr. Stuart’s presidential suite directly or her cell phone, she tried the St. Regis front desk. She said she was from CNN and trying to reach Dr. Stuart, who she realized stayed there under the name of Dr. Oxford.

  “Hold on, please.”

  And then Dr. Stuart was on the line.

  Scarpetta told her who she was, and Dr. Stuart said brusquely, “I don’t discuss my patients.”

  “And I generally don’t discuss other doctors on television,” Scarpetta said. “But I might make an exception.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means what it means, Dr. Stuart. At least one of your patients has been murdered in the past twenty-four hours, and another one is being accused of that murder and another murder, and more charges could follow, and he’s vanished. As for Eva Peebles, who also was murdered last night? I don’t know if she’s one of your patients. But what I do know is that forensic evidence indicates you’d be wise to be helpful. For example? I’m wondering if a certain woman from Palm Beach who has a home in New York might also be your patient.”

  Scarpetta gave her the name of the paraplegic whose DNA was found in Terri Bridges’s vagina.

  “You absolutely know I can’t release information about my patients.”

  Dr. Stuart said it in a way that confirmed the woman was her patient.

  “I absolutely know how it works,” Scarpetta said, and to be sure, she added, “Just tell me no if she’s not your patient.”

  “I’m not going to say no to anything.”

  Scarpetta went through the same routine with Bethany and Rodrick, without telling Dr. Stuart why she wanted to know. If the dermatologist had been acquainted with them, she wouldn’t need Scarpetta to tell her the two had been murdered five years ago. She would know that.

  “As you might imagine, I have plenty of patients from the Greenwich area, because I have an office in White Plains,” Dr. Stuart said as Scarpetta leaned against Benton and looked at what he was scrolling through.

  It looked like sections of maps someone had been e-mailing to Oscar—allegedly.

  “I’m not saying whether those two people have ever been seen by anyone in my practice,” Dr. Stuart said. “I will tell you that I remember the young man’s death. Everyone was shocked. Just as we are by what’s just happened in New York. I saw it on the news last night. But the reason I remember Greenwich is because the Aston Martin dealership—”

  “Bugatti,” Scarpetta said.

  “I use the Aston Martin dealership. It’s very close to Bugatti,” Dr. Stuart said. “That’s why the boy’s murder hit home. I’ve probably driven within a block of the spot where he was found or killed. When I’ve taken my Aston Martin in for service. That’s the reason I remember, if you understand what I’m saying. Actually, I don’t have that car anymore.”

  She was hinting that neither Rodrick nor Bethany had been her patient and that she would have been aware of a sadistic sexual homicide because it had reminded her of a car that cost more than some people’s homes.

  “Do you have anybody working for you or somehow connected with your practice who the police should be aware of?” Scarpetta asked. “Or let me ask it in a way easier to answer. What might you be thinking if you were me?”

  “I’d be thinking about the staff,” she said. “In particular, part-timers.”

  “Which part-timers?”

  “Part-time techs, residents, particularly those who do menial things in the offices and come and go. For example, work at one of my offices during their summer breaks or after hours. It could be anything from cleaning up to answering the phones and paging the physician on call. I have one who’s also a vet tech. But has never been a problem. It’s just he’s more of an unknown, and I don’t work with him personally. He’s rather much a cleaner-upper and assists other doctors. I have a huge practice. More than sixty employees at four different locations.”

  “Vet tech?” Scarpetta said.

  “I believe that’s what he does for his full-time job. I know he has something to do with pet stores, because he’s gotten a few of my staff puppies. A vet tech who helps with the pets in these places. Probably not in a way I want to know about, truth be told,” Dr. Stuart said. “He’s an odd duck, tried to give me a puppy once, on my birthday last summer. One of those Chinese crested dogs that has no fur except on its head, tail, and feet. This was maybe an eight-week-old puppy that looked deformed, as if it had alopecia, and all it did was shiver and cough. He wrote in a card that I could tell everyone I was doing hair removal on dogs now, that I was adding pet dermatology to my practice, or something like that. It was peculiar and I wasn’t amused and made him take the puppy back. Frankly, it was an extremely upsetting experience.”

  “Did you ever ask him what happened to the puppy?”

  “I have a good idea.”

  She said it ominously.

  “He likes to give injections, put it like that,” Dr. Stuart said. “He’s very good with needles, has some phlebotomy training. Look, this is making me very upset. His name is Juan Amate.”

  “That’s his full name? Often Hispanic names include the mother’s maiden name, not just the surname.”

  “That I don’t know. He’s worked out of my Upper East Side office for the last several years. Maybe three or four years, not sure. I don’t know him personally, and he’s not allowed in the room when I’m with a patient.”

  “Why?”

  “Frankly? Most of the patients I see personally are VIPs, and I don’t allow part-time techs to assist me. I have my regular assistants, who are accustomed to dealing appropriately with very well-known people. You don’t have a part-time tech drawing blood from an A-list movie star.”

  “Did you personally see Terri Bridges or Oscar Bane, or would that have been one of your other doctors?”

  “I wouldn’t have reason to know them personally. But I do have a few other little people who are patients, since obesity is one of the most common problems, and an unfortunate side effect of dieting can be skin problems. Acne, premature lines and creases on the face and neck, and if one doesn’t have the proper fat intake, the skin doesn’t hold moisture as well, so now we add dry flakiness to the list.”

  She didn’t see Terri or Oscar personally. They weren’t important enough.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about Juan Amate?” Scarpetta said. “I’m not saying he’s done anything wrong. But I don’t want anyone else hurt or dead, Dr. Stuart. Do you k
now where he lives, anything like that?”

  “Have no idea. I doubt he has much money. Olive complexion, dark hair. Hispanic. Speaks Spanish, which is helpful. Speaks English fluently, which is a requirement in my practice.”

  “Is he a U.S. citizen?”

  “He should be. But that’s not for me to check on. I suppose the answer is I don’t know.”

  “Anything else you can tell me? For example, do you have any idea where the police might find him right now, to ask questions?”

  “No idea whatsoever. I know nothing else. I just didn’t like it when he gave me that Chinese puppy,” she said. “I felt there was something mean about the gesture. As if he were jerking me around somehow—of all people? To give me an extremely ugly dog with hair and skin problems? I just remember it being very upsetting, and then I looked bad to my staff because I made him take the pathetic little thing out of there immediately, and he said he didn’t know what he’d do with it, as if I was sentencing the pitiful creature to . . . Well, it’s as if he wanted to make me look heartless, and I think I actually started almost thinking about firing him after that. Obviously, I should have.”

  Benton had placed his hand on Scarpetta’s bare thigh, and when she ended the call, he put his arm around her and directed her attention to what he had been looking at while she was on the phone.

  He scrolled through maps, scores of them.

  “Track logs,” Benton said. “These thick colored lines, the dark pink ones?” He traced one that ran from Amsterdam to an Upper East Side location on Third Avenue. “An actual track mapped by a GPS.”

  “Simulated or real?” Scarpetta asked.

  “I think these are real tracks. It appears they’re recordings of routes Oscar took, hundreds of them. Some kind of recording process was on while he was going to various locations. As you can see.”

  He scrolled through about a dozen maps.

  “Most of them either begin or terminate at the address of his apartment building on Amsterdam. Based on what I’m seeing, these track logs began this past October tenth and ended December third.”

  “December third,” Scarpetta said. “The same day the morgue photograph of me appears to have been simultaneously deleted in Scarpetta six-twelve’s and also Terri’s e-mail.”

  “And the same day Oscar called Berger’s office and ended up on the phone with Marino,” Benton said.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Scarpetta said. “Was he walking around with some kind of bracelet or something that has a GPS chip, and maybe using a PDA that has a GPS, and downloading all of his movements and perhaps e-mailing it to himself? To make it appear he’s being followed, spied on, all those things he’s said?”

  “You saw his apartment, Kay. Oscar believes this stuff. But if someone else has been sending these track logs to him, can you imagine?”

  “No.”

  Benton scrolled through more of them. Locations for grocery stores, several gyms, office-supply stores, or as Benton put it, just locations where he might have walked but didn’t actually go inside the restaurant, bar, or other business.

  “And as you can see,” Benton said, rubbing her back, “as time goes on, his destinations become more erratic and variable. He’s changing his locations daily. None of the tracks are the same. You can actually see his fear, the way he’s zigzagging, literally all over the map. Or his simulated fear. If, once again, he’s staged all this. But his fear seems real. His paranoia isn’t faked, I really don’t think so.”

  “You can imagine how this will look to a jury,” Scarpetta said, getting up. “It will look like the mad cyber professor manufactured this elaborate plan to make it appear he’s the target of some clandestine organization or hate group or God knows what. It will look as if he followed himself, so to speak, with a GPS, and planted all sorts of bizarre devices all over his apartment, and carried them on his person and in his car.”

  She finished undressing, because she had to get into the shower. There was so much to do. And Benton’s eyes were intense on her as he got off the bed.

  “No one on earth will believe him,” she said as Benton put his hands on her and kissed her.

  “I’ll help you take your shower,” he said, guiding her in that direction.

  31

  The wind buffeted Lucy as she sat on concrete as cold as ice on the brownstone’s roof and took photographs of the camera attached to the footing of the satellite dish.

  It was an inexpensive Internet camera that included audio, and was connected to the building’s wireless network and served any tenant who wished to join it.

  It also served somebody else. It served Mike Morales, and not in the way everybody thought, which was why it hadn’t occurred to Lucy to check. And she was furious with herself.

  Since it was known that another device was connected to the network—the camera that Morales said he had installed himself—it hadn’t entered Lucy’s mind to access the log to the wireless router. It hadn’t occurred to her she ought to check the router’s admin page.

  Had she done that last night, she would have discovered what she now knew, and she tried Marino again. For the past half-hour, she’d tried him and Berger, and had gotten voicemail.

  She didn’t leave a message. She wasn’t about to leave a message the likes of the one she had.

  This time Marino answered, thank God.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “You in a wind tunnel, or what?” he said.

  “The camera you saw Morales install up here on this roof, where I’m right now sitting? He wasn’t installing it when you surprised him up here. He was probably removing it.”

  “What are you talking about? I saw him . . . Well. Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t actually see him do anything. I just got off the phone with your aunt, let me tell you real quick, because she’s trying to get hold of you. Something about our person of interest being tracked by a GPS or something? And he might work as a vet tech at Dr. Stuart’s office? Long and short of it, Terri might have known the killer through the dermatologist’s office, some Hispanic guy . . .”

  “Listen to me, Marino! This fucking camera’s been up here for fucking three weeks! And it’s motion-sensitive, so every time it records something it’s e-mailing it to someone who’s about to get hacked into. I’ve got Morales’s damn IP. I’ve got his fucking machine access code, and it’s the same fucking one as Scarpetta six-twelve. Do you understand what that means?”

  “I’m not fucking retarded.”

  Just like the old days. How many times had he said that to her over the years?

  “It means whoever set up this camera and is getting images e-mailed from it is the same person sending e-mails to Terri, pretending to be my aunt. Probably some type of PDA, and the asshole stands out in front of John Jay, hijacks their wireless network, so that’s what the IP comes back to. The machine access code is also the same one for the device used to e-mail the photograph to Terri—the photograph e-mailed from the Internet café near Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s office. Morales is the one who instructed Terri to delete that photograph on December third. . . .”

  “Why?”

  “He plays fucking games, that’s why. He was probably in the morgue when the damn photo was taken, probably is behind it. Just like the photo of Jaime at Tavern on the Green. He probably orchestrated that and sent it to Gotham Gotcha.”

  “Then he’s probably connected to Gotham Gotcha.”

  “Got no idea, but I do know Eva Peebles worked for whoever Gotham Gotcha is. And I doubt she could tell you who Gotham Gotcha is, if she were still alive to tell us anything, poor lady. Nothing in her computer identifies who it is. I’m setting up sniff packets even as we speak, looking at info at junction points. Fuckhead Morales. He’s probably your fucking Hispanic vet tech, too. Fucking piece of shit. I’m about to pay him a home visit.”

  She was typing on her MacBook as she talked, doing a port scan. Marino had gotten deadly quiet.

  “You still there?”


  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “You want to tell me why the fuck a cop would put up a surveillance camera three weeks before a murder?” she said.

  “Jesus Christ. Why would he be sending shit pretending to be her?”

  Lucy heard a woman’s voice in the background. Bacardi.

  “Why don’t you ask him,” Lucy said. “He’s probably the one who gave Terri the brilliant idea to post something on the John Jay site about her needing to get in contact with my aunt. And Terri does, and then, miracle of miracles, guess who writes her? He obviously knew Terri or he wouldn’t have been e-mailing her. He’s probably the fucking vet tech, like I said, and she knew him because of the dermatologist.”

  “He probably gave her the sick puppy. Thought it was funny.” Marino’s voice, muttering. “Then Eva Peebles gets it. The puppy dies. She dies. What’d she do to deserve any of this? Wonder if he’s the one who fixed things in Terri’s apartment. What the landlord was talking about. That would be like him to be a pal, a confidant, to someone who could use a big strong pissant like him. Be like him to get someone like Terri, a forensic psych grad student, to post something on a website, to fuck with everyone. But why the Doc?”

  “Because he’s a failed doctor, and my aunt isn’t. I don’t know why. Why does anybody do anything?”

  “You’re not going to remove the camera, right? We don’t want him knowing it’s down.”

  “Of course not,” Lucy said as the wind ripped at her, as if trying to rip her off the roof. “He’d probably come up here to remove the damn thing, and last thing he expected was you climbing up the fire-escape ladder. Now he has to cover his ass. So he puts on the big act that he’s installing a surveillance camera in case the perp returns to the scene of the crime. Well, bullshit. I’ve got the log open right here on my laptop. This camera’s e-mailed over ten thousand images in the past three weeks and is still grinding away even as we speak. According to the tab status, the asshole’s accessing the network right now. You’ll be happy to know I’ve disabled the audio function. Not that you’d hear a damn thing up here but wind.”