Scarpetta

by Patricia Cornwell

  “You absolutely sure about this?” Marino said.

  “And I’m in. This is completely illegal,” Lucy said.

  “Oh, God,” she said, shocked, as she scrolled through video files.

  Video files in Mike Morales’s personal e-mail account. His username was Forenxxx.

  She landed on a video file that had been recorded by an entirely different device than the rooftop camera. She opened it and clicked play.

  “Oh, Christ,” she said. “A recording made New Year’s Eve. Only this one isn’t from the roof, it’s from inside Terri’s apartment. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”

  Berger’s penthouse was two levels, the master area on the upper one, where she and Lucy watched the murder of Terri Bridges on a huge plasma flat screen in a sitting area off the bedroom.

  It was almost more than either one of them could stomach, and there was virtually nothing either of them hadn’t seen. They sat rigidly on a sofa, watching Terri’s face in her vanity mirror as a pair of latex-gloved hands garroted her from behind with a rubbery blue tourniquet, the type used in doctor’s offices when blood is being drawn. Victim and assailant were nude, her hands bound behind her back as she kicked savagely from the chair with the heart-shaped back, while he almost lifted her off it as he strangled her into unconsciousness.

  Then he would release the pressure and, when she was revived, start again.

  She said nothing the entire time, just made the expected awful guttural gagging sounds as her eyes bulged and her tongue protruded from her mouth and spittle ran down her chin. It took exactly twenty-four and a half minutes for her to finally die, because that’s how long it took for him to ejaculate and finish her off, because he had no further interest.

  He flushed the condom down the toilet, and he turned off the camera.

  “Let’s start it again,” Berger said. “I want to listen a little more carefully to what’s said when he takes her into the bathroom. I’m getting the impression they’d had sex before. And the other things said suggest maybe why he did this. The premeditation factor. He may have had motive that went beyond his sexually sadistic compulsions. Did she call him Juan? Or was that just a sound she made?”

  “I suspect she’d been having sex with him long before she had it with Oscar,” Lucy said. “Based on the familiarity, the comments he’s making. She would have known him from Dr. Stuart’s office—for a couple of years. I don’t care if we don’t yet know for a fact that he’s Juan Amate. I’m telling you they’re the same person. They have to be. I think she might have said Juan. I agree, hard to tell.”

  She pressed the play button on the remote. The film began mid-sentence with a shot of the vanity and Terri’s terrified face in the oval mirror. Behind her was a man’s naked body. He moved, adjusting himself and the camera angle, exposing his erect condom-sheathed penis, poking it between her shoulder blades as if it were the barrel of a gun. He was visible only from the waist down.

  “Just our usual, baby, with a little extra hot sauce thrown in,” the killer’s voice said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice quavering as his gloved hand held up a scalpel in the mirror and twirled it, and its steel blade caught the light.

  The sound of fabric slitting as he cut open her robe, her lacy red bra. It was a shelf bra, and her breasts protruded from it, her nipples exposed. He slit off her matching red lacy panties. He turned the camera on the pink robe and pink slippers and the bra as he dropped them into the tub. His gloved hands waved the cut lacy red panties in front of the camera lens.

  “Capturing the flag.” His Hispanic voice. “In my pocket so I can enjoy later, right, little girl?”

  “Let’s don’t,” she said. “I don’t think I can.”

  “Should have thought about that when you told the little man all our secrets.”

  “I didn’t tell him. You sent the e-mails. That’s how.”

  “Now, that was a really big mess you made. How’s that going to work? He complained to the fucking DA. How’s that going to work, baby? I trusted you. I did you a favor. And you told him.”

  “I never told him. He told me. You were sending him the e-mails, and finally he told me. He got freaked out. Why? Why are you doing this?” And it sounded as if she said Juan.

  “You gonna ask me why anything?” The scalpel stroking the air, almost touching her cheek, then withdrawing and vanishing.

  “No.”

  “So, who’s your man? The little one. Or me?”

  “You are,” her terrified face said to the mirror, his gloved hands pinching her nipples.

  “Now you know that’s not right, or you wouldn’t have told him.” The killer’s voice chiding her.

  “I promise I didn’t. He found out because of the e-mails, those maps you sent him. He told me. You scared him.”

  “Now, baby.” Pinching her nipples harder. “I don’t want to hear no more of your lies. And now I gotta figure out how to get that fucking thing out of his ass before somebody else does.”

  Lucy hit pause, and the recording froze on a blurry image of Terri’s wide-eyed face talking while his hands squeezed her breasts in the mirror.

  “Right there,” Lucy said. “The way he says it. Possible he’s hinting he’s going to murder Oscar? He’s going to be the one to retrieve the thing out of his ass?”

  “I’m wondering the same thing,” Berger said.

  She triple-underlined a key phrase in notes on her legal pad: Terri’s idea—GPS?

  She said to Lucy, “I don’t think there’s any doubt about how this started—that Terri asked Morales to follow Oscar, because she was a jealous, controlling person. It wasn’t her nature to trust anyone, and before she’d even considered making any sort of a commitment to him or perhaps telling her family about him, she wanted proof he was honorable.”

  “If one can make psychopathology logical.”

  “We have to. Jurors expect reasons for things. You can’t just say someone’s evil or felt like it.”

  “She may have said something about wanting to know what Oscar was up to, but I doubt an implanted GPS was her idea,” Lucy said. “I don’t think she ever imagined Morales would do her the favor, and then take it a little further by anonymously e-mailing GPS track logs to Oscar to drive him crazy, to torment the living hell out of him. The e-mailing of the tracking logs stopped when Oscar finally said something about it to Terri, and she obviously must have flown all over Morales about it.”

  “Right. That’s what Morales is referring to.” Berger indicated the frozen image on the TV screen. “She did the wrong thing and complained to Morales, berated him, perhaps. A guy like this? You insult his narcissism? And then he’s the typical psychopath and blames it on her because she’s the one who wanted Oscar spied on. Suddenly, it’s her fault that Oscar called my office and reported everything.”

  “To Marino, on December third,” Lucy said. “And at that point, Oscar destroyed his computer’s hard drive and hid the thumb drive in his library, where my aunt and Benton found it. And Morales stopped e-mailing the logs to him, because Terri knew, and the gig was up.”

  “Kay mentioned the thread on the carpet outside Oscar’s apartment door. The roof access and fire escape. I’m wondering if Morales went in there trying to find this log, and while he was at it, planted a jar of Aqualine. I’m wondering if he came in through the window, set off the alarm, then left through the roof access so the doorman didn’t see him. He had a key and the alarm code, the password. After killing Terri, he got some unexpected surprises. Oscar demanded to go to Bellevue. He demanded to see Benton and Kay. Now the stakes have been raised considerably. Morales has some worthy adversaries to deal with. Including you. He wants that damn tracking log so it’s not traced back to him by someone like you. And he wanted Oscar to take the fall for at least four homicides.”

  “A classic case of someone who’s decompensating,” Lucy said. “Morales didn’t need to kill Eva Peebles, not really. For that matter, he didn’t need to kill Terri. He
used to be smart and stick with strangers. What I still can’t figure out is why would Oscar let anybody do that?”

  “You mean the implant.”

  “We just listened to him say it. He stuck something in Oscar’s ass and has to get it back. What else could that mean? I’m thinking there’s only one thing. But you don’t just walk up to someone and say, hey, can I implant a GPS microchip under your skin?”

  Berger placed her hand on Lucy’s bare knee and leaned against her to pick up the cordless phone. She called Scarpetta for the second time in the past hour.

  “Us again,” Berger said. “Maybe you and Benton should just come over here.”

  “I can. He can’t,” Scarpetta said.

  Berger put her on speakerphone and set the handset upright on the coffee table inside her handsome sitting area of leather and glass, and Agam polymorphic paintings and serigraphs that seemed to change and shimmer as Berger moved.

  Greg’s room.

  Where he used to plant himself in front of the TV while Berger was alone in bed, in the adjoining room, sleeping or working. It took her a while to figure out that one of the reasons he started keeping such strange hours, as if he were on UK time, was because he was on UK time. He’d sit in this room, and at some point after midnight New York time, he’d call his friend the barrister, who would just be waking up in London.

  “Benton’s with Marino and Bacardi,” Scarpetta said. “They went out. He was rather cryptic about it. I’ve not heard anything from Dr. Lester. Still. I’m assuming you haven’t.”

  Morales had dropped off Dr. Lester at the ME’s office earlier, because he didn’t know then what Lucy was about to find out. Now he was aware people were looking for him, because Berger had contacted him. All she’d had to say was, “I think you need to explain some things.”

  She’d gotten as far as mentioning silver nitrate and Dr. Stuart, when he hung up on her.

  “I suppose someone will tell me if I need to go down there,” Scarpetta said. “Although I seriously doubt it’s an issue, she really should x-ray Eva Peebles carefully. I’m repeating myself, because you don’t want her body leaving the morgue until every inch of it has been x-rayed. Same thing with Terri’s body. X-rayed again, every inch of it.”

  “That’s what I’m getting around to,” Berger said. “This idea of the microchip implant. When you talked to Oscar, did you get any idea that might lead you to believe he’d ever, for any reason, allow something like that? Lucy and I are watching this God-awful video again, and that’s what the killer is implying. Morales, I mean. We know it’s him.”

  “Oscar would never allow that,” Scarpetta said. “What’s far more likely is he complained about painful treatments, specifically, laser hair removal. And he has had hair removed from his back, possibly from his buttocks. He has no hair at all except on his face, his head. And he has pubic hair. He mentioned Demerol to me. If someone came in with scrubs and a mask on, and Oscar was on his belly, he would never have seen the tech or necessarily recognize him later. At Terri’s apartment, for example, when Morales encountered Oscar at the crime scene? Oscar wouldn’t necessarily connect him with some backroom tech at Dr. Stuart’s office.”

  “In the video, we think Terri calls him Juan. We’re not sure. You need to listen,” Berger said.

  Scarpetta said, “They’re doing R-and-D with wireless GPS glass-encapsulated chips that have miniature antennas and a power supply that can last up to three months. About the size of a grain of rice, maybe smaller. One of them could have been implanted into his buttocks and he’d never know, especially if it’s migrated, buried itself in deeper, which happens. We could find it with an x-ray, if we can find him. And by the way, he’s not the only one paranoid about this sort of thing. The U.S. government has a number of pilot programs, and a lot of people fear that mandatory chipping is on the horizon.”

  “Not me,” Berger said. “I’ll move.”

  “You’ll have plenty of company. That’s why some call it Mark of the Beast Six-Six-Six technology.”

  “But you didn’t see anything like that in Terri’s x-rays?”

  “I’ve been looking,” Scarpetta said. “I have the electronic files of that and everything else, and I’ve been doing nothing but work on all of this since we last spoke. The answer’s no. It’s very important that Dr. Lester get more films, and I want to see them. Especially focusing on the back, the buttocks, the arms. People who have been implanted with microchips usually get them in their arms. Morales would know a lot about microchip technology for the simple reason it’s used to tag animals. He would have seen microchips implanted in pets at the vet’s office. He may have done the implanting himself, a simple procedure that requires nothing more than the chip and an implant gun fitted with a fifteen-gauge needle. I can be there in maybe half an hour.”

  “That would be fine.”

  Berger reached across Lucy again and ended the call. She returned the handset to its charger. She scribbled more notes and underlined words and phrases. She looked at Lucy for a long moment, and Lucy looked back, and Berger wanted to kiss her again, to resume what had begun when Lucy first appeared at her door and Berger had pulled her by the hand straight up here. Lucy didn’t even have time to take off her coat. Berger didn’t know how she could think about something like that right now, with that hideous image frozen on the big flat screen. Or maybe that was why she was thinking about it. Berger didn’t want to be alone.

  “That’s what makes the most sense,” Lucy finally said. “Morales implanting the GPS chip in Oscar while he’s in the dermatologist’s office. Probably thought he was getting a shot of Demerol in his butt. Terri probably had said something to Morales about Oscar, about not knowing if she could trust him, probably when she and Oscar first started dating. And Morales did his thing and acted like her best friend, her confidant.”

  “Big question. Who did Terri think Morales was? Juan Amate or Mike Morales?”

  “I’m betting Juan Amate. Way too risky if she knew he was an NYPD cop. I think she did call him Juan. I do think that’s what I heard.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “If she was screwing around with him, does that compute?” Lucy said. “Morales wouldn’t care if she was seeing someone else?”

  “No. As I just said, he acts like your best friend. Women confide in him. Even I have, to an extent.”

  “To what extent?”

  They had never returned to the subject of the whiskeys in her bar.

  “I shouldn’t have to say it,” Berger said. “But Morales and I didn’t have that, and I don’t think you believed we did or you wouldn’t be sitting here. You wouldn’t have come back. The Tavern on the Green rumors. That’s all they are—rumors. And yes, no doubt he started them. He and Greg liked each other.”

  “No way.”

  “No, no. Not that way,” Berger said. “One thing Greg doesn’t have any ambivalence about is what he likes to fuck, and it definitely isn’t men.”

  32

  Scarpetta refilled coffees and carried them out on a tray with a few things to eat. She believed that sleep deprivation was healed by good food.

  She set down a platter of fresh buffalo mozzarella, sliced plum tomatoes, and basil dribbled with cold-pressed unfiltered olive oil. In a sweetgrass basket lined with a linen napkin was crusty homemade Italian bread that she urged everyone to pass around, to break it with their hands, to tear off pieces. She told Marino he could start, and he took the basket, and she placed small plates and blue-checked napkins in front of him, then one in front of Bacardi.

  Scarpetta set her own place on the coffee table next to Benton’s, and she sat next to him on the couch, leaning forward, because she could stay only a minute.

  “Just remember,” Benton said to her, “when she hears about it, and you know she will, you don’t talk about what I’m about to do. Either before or after I’ve done it.”

  “Damn right,” Marino cut in. “Her damn phone will start ringing off the hook.
I gotta tell you I don’t feel so hot about this. I wish I could think about it some more.”I

  “Well, we can’t,” Benton said. “We don’t have the luxury of time to think about much of anything. Oscar’s out there somewhere, and if Morales hasn’t gotten to him already, he will. All he has to do is track him down like a hunted animal.”

  “Like he’s been doing,” Bacardi said. “Now a guy like that makes you believe in the death penalty.”

  “Much better if we get a chance to study them,” Benton said matter-of-factly. “Killing them serves no useful purpose.”

  He was impeccably dressed in one of his hand-tailored suits that he never wore on the ward, a deep blue with a lighter blue pinstripe, a light blue shirt, and silvery blue silk tie. The makeup artist at CNN wouldn’t need more than fifteen minutes with him. There was little Benton needed to improve his appearance, maybe a little powder and a breath of spray on his platinum hair, which needed a trim. To Scarpetta, he looked the same way he always had, and she hoped he was doing the right thing. That both of them were.

  “I won’t say anything to Jaime. I’ll stay out of it,” she said, and she realized she had started calling her Jaime about the same time Jaime had started spending so much time with Lucy.

  All these years, and she usually referred to her as Berger, which was rather distant and perhaps not particularly respectful.

  Scarpetta said to Benton, “I’ll tell her she can take that up with you. It’s not my network and, contrary to popular opinion, I don’t run your life.”

  Marino’s cell phone rang. He lifted his PDA and squinted at the display.

  “IRS. Must be about all my charitable trusts,” he said, pressing his flashing blue earpiece to answer. “Marino . . . Yup . . . Just hanging out. You? . . . Hold on. I’m going to start writing.”

  Everyone got quiet so he could talk. He set down the PDA on the coffee table and placed his notepad on his wide knee. He started scribbling. Upside down or right side up, Marino’s writing looked about the same. Scarpetta had never been able to read it, at least not without tremendous annoyance, because he had his own version of shorthand. No matter the cracks he made, in truth, his writing was far worse than hers.