Scarpetta

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I don’t mean to be a smart-ass about it,” Marino said. “But first off, when you said Isle of Man, where the hell is that? I assume it’s one of these Caribbean tax havens or maybe one of those islands near Fiji. . . . Now, that’s something. Never heard of it, and I’ve been there before. I mean to England. . . . I realize it isn’t exactly in England. I know Isle of Man’s a fucking island, but in case you flunked geography, England’s a fucking island.”

  Scarpetta leaned close to Benton’s ear and wished him good luck. She felt like telling him she loved him, which was unusual with people around. But for some reason she wanted to say it, but she didn’t. She got up and hesitated, because Marino seemed about to get off the phone.

  “No offense, but we knew that. We got that address,” Marino said.

  He looked at Bacardi and shook his head as if the IRS agent he was talking to was dumber than a bag of hammers—one of Marino’s favorite expressions.

  He said, “That’s right . . . Nope, you must mean One-A. So it’s Terri Bridges. I know it’s an LLC and you don’t got a name yet, but that’s her apartment . . . No. Not Two-D. She’s in One-A.” He frowned. “You sure, I mean damn sure? . . . Wait a minute. That guy’s a Brit, right? Well, he’s Italian but lives in the UK, is a UK citizen . . . Okay. So it fits with the Isle of Man shit, I guess. But you’d better be right, because in maybe half an hour, that fucking door’s getting kicked in.”

  Marino touched his earpiece and disconnected the IRS without a thanks or a good-bye.

  He said, “ Gotham Gotcha? We don’t have the name of whoever it is, but we know where the person has an apartment. Upstairs from Terri Bridges. Two-D. Unless something’s changed and nobody told us, still nobody home in that building. Tenant’s an Italian financial guy named Cesare Ingicco, domicile is Isle of Man, where his company is actually located, and Isle of Man’s not the Caribbean, just so you know. The LLC renting his apartment is this offshore one that Lucy dug up info about. Guarantee the guy doesn’t actually live there, that it’s someone else working out of that apartment or maybe no one working out of it. So sounds like we need a warrant and should go in there. Or maybe we go in and then get a warrant. Whatever. We don’t waste time, since Eva Peebles indirectly worked for this Cesare Ingicco guy across the street but probably not the one who actually lives across the street, probably on his island and we’re going to find—you watch—that he dealt with Eva over the phone, long distance. Eva didn’t know shit, whatever the case. How fucked up is that?”

  “Why don’t I hook up with some of your guys over there,” Bacardi said. “I think you should hang around this area. When Benton goes live on the air, all hell might break loose.”

  “I agree,” Benton said. “Morales is going to know, if he had any doubt at all, that we think he might be after Oscar, and the rest of the world is after him, after Morales.”

  “You think there’s any chance at all Oscar and Morales are partners in all this?” Bacardi asked. “Maybe I’m crazy, but how do we know they don’t work as a team, sort of like Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. And to this day there are plenty of people who think the Son of Sam didn’t act alone, either. You just never know.”

  “Extremely unlikely,” Benton said as Scarpetta put on her coat by the door. “Morales is far too narcissistic to work with anyone. He can’t work with anyone else no matter what he’s doing.”

  “You got that right,” Marino said.

  “But what about Oscar’s shoe prints and fingerprints we found in Eva Peebles’s apartment?” Bacardi made a good point. “I don’t know if we should just ignore them and assume they were doctored or there’s a mistake.”

  “Guess who collected the shoeprints and fingerprints?” Marino said. “Fucking Morales. Plus, he has a pair of Oscar’s sneakers, from when he took his clothes the other night.”

  “Anybody witness him lifting the prints off the light fixture?” Bacardi went on. “It’s not easy to cheat. I mean, it’s one thing if it’s a pair of sneakers you took from the suspect. But it’s another to take his fingers and leave prints, so to speak. My point is you got to have a pretty clever conspiracy to process prints at a crime scene and have them get a hit in the computer system. In IAFIS.”

  “Yeah, well, Morales is a clever guy,” Marino said.

  Bacardi got up and said, “I’m going to go on over to Murray Hill. Who’s meeting me?”

  “Sit back down.” Marino tugged softly on the back of her belt. “You ain’t taking a damn cab. You’re a homicide detective. I’ll drop you off and head right back here. I got a battering ram in the trunk you can have. I pinched it last night when they brought me one at the Peebles scene, special order. Oops. I forgot to give it back.”

  “I’m going,” Scarpetta said. “Everybody be careful, please. Mike Morales is an evil man.”

  “Actually?” Berger said to Lucy. “And I’ve never told anybody this before.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” Lucy said.

  “I think Morales may have broken in the barrister for Greg, and in typical fashion, Morales goes from being the philanderer to the confidant you can tell your troubles to. The more I think about it, he’s very bizarre that way, among other ways. To say the least.”

  “You think Greg knew?”

  “No, I sure don’t. Should I get us more coffee?”

  “How do you know Morales was screwing around with the barrister?”

  “It’s not hard to tell these things when you’re in an office with other people. I don’t pay much attention, or maybe it appears I don’t, but it registers. In retrospect, it becomes clear. Morales has probably done this sort of thing countless times, practically under my nose, or I’ve heard stories. He seduces someone into cheating on the boyfriend, the husband, and next thing, Morales has a bedside manner if not caretaking relationship with his victim. Helps her patch things up. Or he gets to know the man he fucked over, who doesn’t know he’s been fucked over, because Morales loves being pals with someone who has no idea he’s the devil. Sadistic games and more sadistic games. He and Greg used to sit downstairs and drink his expensive liquor and talk. Probably about me, at least some of the time. Not in a good way.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Morales got transferred into investigations about a year ago. It was right about that time. Toward the end. Not long before Greg moved to London. I’m sure Morales encouraged it. Might even have been his idea—for Greg to just end it with me.”

  “Maybe so Morales could start something with you?”

  “Finish me and start me. He’d get off on that,” Berger said.

  “Then Greg is how Morales would have gotten the idea for the Irish whiskey and Scotch he wrote about in that phony interview he sent to Terri, when he was pretending to be my aunt,” Lucy said. “And Greg shouldn’t have let himself be talked into anything. Fuck that. He made his choice. And Morales won’t be finishing or starting anything, except he’s going to finish himself. You watch.”

  “If you check the bottles downstairs,” Berger said, “my guess, he and Greg put a hefty dent in both of them. Morales would want the most expensive thing in the bar. That’s him, all right. And it was a nasty dig to imply Kay routinely drinks whiskey that costs five, six, seven hundred dollars a bottle and say it was more than Terri’s schoolbooks. He was painting quite the portrait of her, and if she’d finished her thesis, her so-called book? That would have been extremely unfortunate. I’m sure it’s occurred to you he might be Gotham Gotcha. Seems that sort of thing would be right up his alley.”

  “The IP of whoever writes those columns is anonymized, and the Internet service provider has an account that traces to an LLC with an address in the Isle of Man,” Lucy said. “Which has one of the strongest offshore trust jurisdictions in the world. The machine access code doesn’t match anything I’ve seen so far, so those columns aren’t written on any laptop or any other device we’re familiar with, nor is it one used to send any e-mails we’ve been looking at. Probl
em is, jurisdictions like the Isle of Man, Nevis, Belize offer such stringent privacy protection, it’s very difficult to penetrate the shield and find out who’s behind an LLC. I’ve got a contact at the IRS pulling some strings for me. Interesting it’s the UK. I would have expected the Caymans. As in about seventy-five percent of all hedge funds registered. But I don’t think Morales is Gotham Gotcha.”

  “The implication, of course, is whoever it is, this person has a lot of money parked offshore,” Berger said.

  “Of course she would,” Lucy said. “Her endorsements alone, her product promotions. She’s probably getting staggering kick-backs wired into accounts that are sheltered. My hope is she’s a little too clever about bypassing certain tax laws, and that’s what will lead us to a physical address. I mean, she rents, she owns, she’s paying bills, or someone is on her behalf, and she’s likely got a place in this city and was paying an employee in this city, and we know that for a fact. Someone was wiring Eva Peebles money from the UK on behalf of Gotham Gotcha. This agent who used to be ATF and now is IRS, I gave him Marino’s name, too, and he’s tying down more info from Eva Peebles’s bank. I want to know who Gotham Gotcha is and where the hell she is. And if she’s screwing the IRS? Oh, well. Have fun in prison.”

  “She? Her?”

  “After that first column came out, I ran language analysis on maybe fifty archived ones. No, I really don’t think it’s Morales who writes those columns and has a site like that. Would require too much maintenance, too much work. He’s a hit-and-run guy, just like everybody says. He’s got a careless streak in him, and that’s going to be what nails him in the end.”

  “You ran this analysis on the website about the same time you crashed it?” Berger said.

  “I didn’t crash it. Marilyn Monroe crashed it.”

  “A subject for another day. For the record, I don’t approve of infecting sites with worms,” Berger said.

  “Same words and phrases constantly pop up, and allusions, metaphors, similes.” Lucy was talking about the language analysis she ran.

  “How can a computer possibly recognize a simile?” Berger asked.

  “An example. Search for the words like and as, then the computer searches for those followed by adjectives, nouns. Like the long hard leg of a chair—as if he had three of them. And here are a few more good ones from Gotham Gotcha’s purple prose. Gently curved like a firm banana inside Calvin Kleins that seemed melted on him. Then let me see if I remember. Her tiny tits as flat as cookies, her nipples as small as raisins.

  Berger said, “And your computer recognizes a metaphor how, exactly?”

  “Discrete bodies of information with nouns and verbs that are inconsistent with each other. My skull hibernated in the wet nest of my hair. Skull and hibernate in the same sentence would be flagged as an inconsistency. As would nest and hair, if you look at them literally. But what you have metaphorically is a line from the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. I’m sure you knew that wasn’t purple prose.”

  “So your neural networking software reads poetry when it’s not busy tracking assholes on the Internet.”

  “What it’s telling me is the author of Gotham Gotcha is likely female,” Lucy said. “One who’s snide, petty, resentful, and angry. A woman competitive with other women. A woman who so intensely loathes other women, she’ll mock one who was sexually assaulted. She’ll humiliate and degrade the victim all over again. Or try.”

  Berger picked up the remote and pressed play.

  Terri’s panicky face in the mirror talking as latex-gloved hands kneaded her breasts. Her eyes were watering. She was in pain.

  Her voice shook badly as she said, “No. I can’t. I’m sorry. Don’t be angry with me. I don’t want us to do this.”

  Her lips and tongue made sticky sounds, her mouth was so dry.

  The killer’s voice. “Sure you do, baby. You love being tied up and fucked, don’t you? So this time we’re going for the jackpot, you know?”

  Gloved hands set a jar of Aqualine on the counter, screwing off the lid, and his fingers dug into it. He smeared it into her vagina while she stood with her back to him, and he took his time, his condom-sheathed erect penis pushing hard into her upper back. He sexually assaulted her with the lubricant and his fingers. He raped her with fear. Unless he’d penetrated her with his penis off camera, that wasn’t what he did. It wasn’t what he wanted.

  The chair scraped across tile as he made her sit.

  “Look how pretty you are in the mirror,” he said. “Sitting all pretty. Almost the same height as when you’re standing. Who else can I say that about, right, little girl?”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t. Oscar’s going to be here any minute. Please stop. My hands are numb. Please take it off. Please.”

  She was crying but trying to act as if this was just that—an act. She was trying to act as if he really wasn’t doing anything harmful. It was a sex game, and based on references and demeanor, it seemed a certainty they’d had sex before, and domination might have been part of the drama. But nothing like this. Nothing even close. A part of her knew she was about to die, and die horribly, but she was doing her best to will it not to be so.

  “He gets here at five, poor little punctual Oscar. It’s your fault, you know,” Morales’s voice said to her face in the mirror. “From now on, baby, it’s what you created. . . .”

  Berger turned it off again. She wrote down a few more of her thoughts.

  It all added up. But they couldn’t prove one damn bit of it. They had yet to see Mike Morales’s face, not once. Not in this video recording or the one he’d made when he’d murdered Bethany in his crappy Baltimore apartment the summer he’d finished medical school at Johns Hopkins in 2003, and not in the recording he made months later when he murdered Rodrick and dumped his graceful young boy’s body near the Bugatti dealership in Greenwich, where Rodrick probably found his way onto Morales’s radar because of the vet’s office where Morales had worked part-time. It was probably where he’d met Bethany, only a different vet’s office, that one in Baltimore.

  In both those cases he’d done the same thing he’d done to Terri. He bound the victims’ wrists. He was wearing surgical gloves when he penetrated them digitally, using the same type of lubricant. Back then, five years ago, he was about to start the NYPD police academy, and his part-time work was with veterinarians, not dermatologists. But veterinarians use cauterizing applicators and lubricants like Aqualine. Morales’s pilfering a partially used jar of lubricant from his workplace was part of his MO, perhaps going back to his first murder.

  Berger had no idea how many people he’d killed, but she wondered if the reason he used the lubricant was to confound police with a mixture of different DNA profiles.

  “He would think that was funny,” she said to Lucy. “He must have been thrilled when one of the profiles actually got a hit in CODIS and turned out to be the paraplegic from Palm Beach. What a big ha-ha that must have been.”

  “He won’t get away with it,” Lucy said.

  “I don’t know.”

  The police not only hadn’t found Morales yet, but at the moment there was no warrant for his arrest. The overwhelming problem, which would continue to be a problem, was proof. The scientific evidence did not prove Morales had killed anyone, and recovering his DNA at Terri’s crime scene and even from her body meant nothing, since he was inside the apartment and had actually touched her when he’d checked her vitals. He was the lead investigator in her case and had touched everything and everyone connected to it.

  And his face wasn’t on the video recordings. And he wasn’t on video coming into or leaving Terri’s apartment building because he probably had used the roof access night before last, pulling the ladder up after him. Then returning it to its closet later. Prior to that, when he’d been with her, probably it was somewhere else. Not Terri’s apartment. That was too risky. Someone might have remembered seeing him in the area. Morales was too smart to take a chance like that.


  It was possible, Berger considered, he used the roof then, too. She wouldn’t rule it out, and she might never know.

  Morales was smart as hell. He’d finished Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins. He was a sadistic sexual psychopath, perhaps the most outrageous and dangerous one Berger had ever come across. She thought of the times she’d been alone with him. In his car. In Tavern on the Green. And in the Ramble, when she’d paid a retrospective visit to that crime scene where the marathon runner had been raped and manually strangled, and now Berger had to wonder about her. Did Morales kill that woman, too?

  She suspected it. Couldn’t prove it. A jury wasn’t likely to trust any identification based on the sound of his voice, which, like O.J. and the bloody glove, could be altered on demand so he didn’t sound exactly like the murderer in the recordings. That man spoke with a heavy Spanish accent. Morales, when speaking normally, had no discernible accent. A case wasn’t going to be won solely based on forensic voice analysis, either. Didn’t matter how sophisticated the software.

  It wasn’t likely anyone—certainly not a prosecutor as seasoned as Berger—was going to suggest anything as ridiculous as making a comparison of Morales’s penis with the penis in the video recordings, a normal penis, uncircumcised, nothing unusual about it, nothing remarkable one way or another, and wearing a condom over it was reminiscent of someone having a stocking over his face. Were there any identifying features, so much as a freckle, they were masked .

  The most the cops could do—or Lucy could do—was prove these violent, seemingly damning videos were in his e-mail account, but where did he get them? Having them didn’t prove he’d killed anyone or even done the filming with a camcorder he must have set up on a tripod. Lucy was the first to say that getting jurors to understand IP addresses, machine access codes, anonymizers, cookies, packet sniffing, and about a hundred other terms that were part of her easygoing vernacular was like a throw-back to the early days, the late eighties and early nineties, when people like Berger were first trying to explain DNA to judges and jurors.