Scarpetta

My resolution is all about you—what will really grab you, and as I was mulling it over . . . ? Well, you know how they roll back the year? Remind us of every awful thing that happened so we can get depressed all over again? Guess who filled my to-die-for fifty-eight-inch HD Samsung plasma TV?

The to-die-for queen herself: Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

Walking up courthouse steps to testify in another sensational murder trial. Her sidekick investigator Pete Marino in tow—meaning the trial was at least six, seven months ago, right? I think we all know the poor fat maggot’s not her sidekick anymore. Has anybody seen him? Is he in a cosmic jail somewhere? (Imagine working for a forensic diva like Scarpetta. Were it me, I might just commit suicide and hope she’s not the one who does the autopsy.)

Anyway, back to her walking up the courthouse steps. Cameras, the media, wannabes, spectators everywhere. Because she’s the expert, right? Gets called in from here to Italy because who better? So I poured another glass of Maker’s Mark, cranked up Coldplay, and watched her for a while, testifying in that pathological language of hers so few of us understand beyond getting the drift that some little girl was raped from stem to stern, even found seminal fluid in her ear (thought you could get that only from phone sex), and her head was bashed against the tile floor and blunt force trauma was what killed her. It dawned on me:

Who the hell is Scarpetta, anyway?

If you took away the hype, would there be anything behind it?

I began doing a little research. Start with this. She’s a politico. Don’t fall for bullshit about her being a champion for justice, a voice for those who can no longer speak, the lady physician who believes in “First Do No Harm.” (Are we absolutely sure Hippocrates isn’t where the word hypocrite comes from?) Fact is, Scarpetta’s a megalomaniac who manipulates us on CNN into believing she’s serving an altruistic social service when the only thing she’s serving is herself. . . .

Scarpetta had seen enough and dropped her BlackBerry into her handbag, disgusted that Bryce had suggested she look at such rot. She was as annoyed with him as she would be if he had written it, and she could have done without his critique of the photograph that accompanied the column. Although the display on her BlackBerry was small, she saw enough to get a good impression of what he’d meant when he’d said the photograph was unflattering.

She looked like a she-devil in bloody scrubs, a face shield, a disposable hair cover reminiscent of a shower cap. Her mouth was open mid-sentence, her bloody gloved hand pointing a scalpel, as if she was threatening someone. The black rubber chronograph watch she was wearing was a birthday gift from Lucy in 2005, meaning the photograph had been taken at some point in the last three and a half years.

Taken where?

Scarpetta didn’t know. The background had been whited out.

“Thirty-four dollar, twenty cent,” her driver said loudly as the taxi abruptly halted.

She looked through her side window at the closed black iron front gates of Bellevue’s former psychiatric hospital, a foreboding red-rock building some two centuries old that hadn’t seen a patient in decades. No lights, no cars, nobody home, the guard booth behind the fence empty.

“Not here,” she said loudly through the opening in the Plexiglas partition. “Wrong Bellevue.”

She repeated the address she’d given him when he’d picked her up at La Guardia, but the more she explained, the more insistent he got, jabbing his finger at the entrance, where Psychiatric Hospital was carved in granite. She leaned closer to him, directing his attention several blocks ahead where tall buildings were etched in gray, but he was bullish in his bad English. He wasn’t taking her anywhere else, and she must get out of the cab right now. It entered her mind that he truly didn’t know that the Bellevue Hospital Center wasn’t this creepy old horror that looked like something out of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He probably thought his passenger was a psychiatric patient, a criminally insane one suffering a relapse. Why else would she have luggage?

Scarpetta decided she’d rather walk the rest of the way in arctic blasts of wind than deal with him. Paying the fare, she got out of the cab, shouldered two bags, and began rolling her suitcase full of home cooking along the sidewalk. She pressed a button on her wireless earpiece.

“I’m almost here—” she started to tell Benton. “Dammit!” Her suitcase flopped over as if someone shot it.

“Kay? Where are you?”

“I just got thrown out of a taxi—”

“What? Thrown out of what? You’re breaking up . . .” he said, right before the battery went dead.

She felt like a homeless person as she struggled with her luggage, the suitcase falling over every other minute, and when she’d bend down to set it upright, her other bags would slide off her shoulders. Cold and irritable, she made her way to the modern Bellevue at First Avenue and East 27th, a full-service hospital center with a glass atrium entrance, a garden, a renowned trauma unit and ICU, and a forensic psychiatric floor for male patients whose alleged crimes ranged from jumping a turnstile to murdering John Lennon.

The phone on Benton’s desk rang just minutes after he and Scarpetta were disconnected. He was sure it was her, trying him back.

“What happened?” he said.

“I was about to ask you that.” Jaime Berger’s voice.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were Kay. She’s having some problem—”

“I’d say. Nice of you to mention it when we spoke earlier. Let’s see. That would have been six, seven hours ago? Why didn’t you say something?”

Berger must have read Gotham Gotcha.

“It’s complicated,” Benton said.

“I’m sure it is. We have a number of complications to deal with. I’m two minutes from the hospital. Meet me in the cafeteria.”

Pete Marino’s one-bedroom walk-up in Harlem was close enough to Manna’s Soul Food that he lived and breathed fried chicken and short ribs. It was unfair to a man whose deprivation of food and drink had created an insatiable appetite for everything he couldn’t have.

His makeshift dining area was a TV tray and straight-back chair overlooking the constant traffic on Fifth Avenue. He stacked deli turkey on a slice of whole-wheat bread, which he folded in half and dipped into a puddle of Nathan’s Coney Island mustard on a paper plate. He drank a Sharp’s nonalcoholic beer, about a third of the bottle in two swallows. Since he’d fled from Charleston, he’d lost fifty pounds and certain parts of his personality. Boxes of biker clothes, including an impressive collection of Harley-Davidson leather, went to a bazaar on 116th Sreet, where in exchange he got three suits, one blazer, two pairs of dress shoes, and a variety of shirts and ties, all knockoffs made in China.

He no longer wore his diamond stud, leaving a tiny hole badly located in his right earlobe, which somehow seemed a symbol of his have-not, off-center life. He’d quit shaving his scalp as smooth as a bowling ball, and what gray hair hadn’t abandoned him circled his large head like part of a tarnished silver halo held up by his ears. He’d made a pact to give up women until he was ready, and his motorcycle and pickup truck were pointless when there was no place to park, so he’d given them up, too. His therapist at the treatment center, Nancy, had helped him comprehend the importance of self-control in his day-to-day interactions with other people, no matter what was wrong with them or what they had coming to them.

She said in her descriptive way that alcohol was the lighted match that ignited the bonfire of his anger, and had gone on to explain that his drinking was a fatal disease he’d acquired honestly from his blue-collar, uneducated, and inadequate father who got drunk and violent every payday. In short, Marino had inherited this fatal disease, and based on the brisk business at every bar and liquor store he quickly walked past, it was an epidemic. He decided it had been around since the Garden of Eden, where it wasn’t an apple but a bottle of bourbon that the snake had given to Eve, which she in turn had shared with Adam, and that had led to sex and being thrown out of paradise with nothing but the fig leaves on their backs.

Nancy warned Marino if he didn’t religiously attend AA meetings, he would become a dry drunk, which was an individual who got angry, nasty, compulsive, and out of control without the benefit of a six-pack or two. The nearest gathering place of the AAs, as Marino called them, was a church not far from the Professional African Hair Braiding Center, and therefore quite convenient for him. But he hadn’t become a regular or even an irregular. When he’d first moved here, he’d attended three times in three days, uncomfortable as hell when the participants, suspiciously kind and friendly, had gone around the room, introducing themselves, giving him no choice but to solemnly swear himself in, as if he were on trial.

My name’s Pete and I’m an alcoholic.

Hi, Pete.

He sent Nancy e-mails explaining that it went against the nature and training of a cop to confess to anything, especially in a room packed with strangers, any one of whom might turn out to be a potential dry-drunk shitcan Marino might have to lock up someday. Besides, it had taken only three meetings for him to complete all twelve steps, although he’d decided against making a list of persons he’d harmed and making amends. His reason was step nine, which clearly stated that one shouldn’t make amends if it would only further injure whoever had been harmed, and he decided that was everyone.

Step ten was easier, and he had filled an entire notebook with the names of those who had wronged him throughout his life.

He hadn’t included Scarpetta on either list until a strange coincidence occurred. He found the apartment where he now lived, made a deal with the landlord to lease it at an affordable price in exchange for services, such as handling evictions, only to discover the location was so close to former President Bill Clinton’s office that Marino often walked past the fourteen-story building on his way to the subway station at 125th and Lenox. Thinking of Bill Clinton caused Marino to think of Hillary Clinton, and that caused him to think about women who were powerful enough to be the president or some other world leader. That led to thoughts of Scarpetta.

It had gotten to where he almost confused the two in his fantasies. He would see Hillary on CNN, then see Scarpetta on CNN, and by the time he changed channels in a desperate attempt to divert his attention with ESPN or maybe a pay-per-view movie, he was depressed. His heart would ache like an abscessed tooth. He would obsess about Scarpetta and the lists she wasn’t on. He would jot her name on one list, then scratch through it and jot it on the other. He fantasized about what it would be like if she were president. He would suddenly find himself on the Secret Service’s security threat list and have to escape to Canada.

Maybe Mexico. He’d spent several years in South Florida and could handle Spanish-speaking people better than he could those who spoke French. He’d never understood the French, and didn’t like their food. What did it say about a country that didn’t have a national beer, like Budweiser, Corona, Dos Equis, Heineken, or Red Stripe?

He finished a second turkey roll-up, took another slug of Sharp’s, and watched people whose only ambitions were West Indian take-out, boutiques, juice bars, tailor shops, or maybe the nearby Apollo theater, the noise of cars, trucks, and pedestrians a jarring orchestra that Marino didn’t mind in the least. In warm weather he kept his windows open until he couldn’t stand the dust. What he avoided was silence. He’d had plenty enough of that in rehab, where he wasn’t allowed to listen to music or watch TV, couldn’t fill his head with anything but the confessions of drunks and drug addicts, and his own haunted thoughts and memories of embarrassingly naked talks with Nancy.

He got up from his chair and collected his soggy paper plate, his napkin, his empty Sharp’s bottle. The kitchen was no more than six steps away, with a small window above the sink that afforded him a view of artificial turf-covered concrete and aluminum tables and chairs surrounded by a chain-link fence—what was advertised as the apartment building’s backyard.

On the counter was his computer, and he read the gossip column from this morning that he’d saved on the desktop, determined to discover who was behind it, then find the scumbag and do something that would rearrange his or her body parts permanently.

No investigative tool he knew of worked. He could Google Gotham Gotcha until the cows came home, and nothing that popped up told him a damn thing he didn’t already know. It was useless trying to trace the columnist through the advertising companies that paid to push foods, liquor, books, electronics, movies, and TV shows. There was no pattern, only the validation that millions of fans were addicted to a fucking gossip column that this morning had made the worst episode of Marino’s life its centerpiece.

His phone rang.

It was Detective Mike Morales.

“What’s up,” Marino said.

“Data mining, bro,” Morales said in his slow, lazy way.

“I’m not your bro. Don’t waste your rapper-talk shit on me.”

Morales’s MO was to come across as half asleep and bored, and doped up on sedatives or painkillers, which Marino doubted, but then again, he didn’t know. Behind Morales’s haze was a snobby bastard who had gone to Dartmouth, then Johns Hopkins, where he’d completed medical school and decided he’d rather be one of New York’s finest, a cop, which Marino didn’t take at face value. Nobody who could be a doctor would end up a cop.

Besides, he was a bullshit artist who circulated all sorts of wild stories about himself and laughed his ass off when other cops believed him. Supposedly, his cousin was the president of Bolivia, and his father had moved the family to America because he believed in capitalism and was tired of herding llamas. Supposedly, Morales had grown up in the projects of Chicago and had been a pal of Barack Obama until politics interfered, which seemed reasonable to those who didn’t know better. No presidential candidate would want to be friends with someone who used words like bro and looked like a member of a street gang, right down to his half-mast baggy jeans, big gold chains and rings, and cornrow hair.

“Been running queries all day—not to be confused with homos, bro,” Morales said.

“Got no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Queer-ies? I forgot you got no sense of humor and barely finished high school. Looking for the usual patterns, trends, modus operandi, complaints, from here to Dollywood, and I think I hit on something.”

“What besides Berger?” Marino said.

“What is it about women like her and Kay Scarpetta? It might be worth dying to have her hands all over me. Goddamn. Can you imagine doing her and Berger at the same time? Well, who am I talking to? Of course you can imagine it.”

Marino’s dislike of Morales instantly turned to hate. He was always screwing with Marino, putting him down, and the only reason Marino didn’t screw him back, only harder, was Marino’s self-imposed probation. Benton had asked Berger for a favor. If she hadn’t granted it, God knows where Marino would be. Probably a dispatcher in some shitbox small-town police department somewhere. Or a drunk in a homeless shelter. Or dead.

“It’s possible our killer’s struck before,” Morales said. “I’ve found two other homicides that are somewhat similar. Not New York, but remember Oscar’s self-employed and doesn’t, quote, go to the office. He’s got a car. He’s got disposable income because he gets a tax-free check from his family every birthday, and right now the limit’s up to twelve grand—their way of not feeling guilty about their freako only son. He’s got no one to support but himself. So we got no idea how much he travels or what he does, now, do we? I might just get a couple of oldie goldies cleared while I’m at it.”

Marino opened the refrigerator, found another Sharp’s, twisted off the cap, and hurled it into the sink, where it clattered like shotgun pellets smacking a pop-up metal target.

“What two other homicides?” he asked.

“Got hits on two possibles in our database. Like I said, not New York cases, which is why they didn’t come to mind. Both in the summer of 2003, two months apart. A fourteen-year-old kid hooked on oxys. Found nude, hands and ankles bound, strangled with a ligature that was missing from the scene. From a good family in Greenwich, Connecticut. Body dumped near the Bugatti dealership. Unsolved, no suspects.”

Marino said, “Where was Oscar the summer of 2003?”

“Same place he is now. Same job, living his whacked life in his same apartment. Meaning he could have been anywhere.”

“I’m not seeing the connection. The kid’s what? Doing blows for drugs and got picked up by the wrong customer? That’s what it sounds like to me. And you got reason to think Oscar Bane’s into teenage boys?”

“You ever notice we don’t know what the hell people are into until after they start raping and murdering and it comes out in the wash? It could have been Oscar. Like I said, he drives. He can afford to get around and has plenty of time on his hands. He’s strong as hell. We should keep an open mind.”

“What about the other case? Another teenage boy?”

“A woman.”

“So tell me who and why Oscar might have done her,” Marino said.

“Oops.” Morales yawned loudly. “I’m reshuffling my paperwork. Out of order, me, oh, my. She was first, then the kid. Beautiful, twenty-one, just moved to Baltimore from a rural town in North Carolina, got a nothing job with a radio station, was hoping to get into television, and instead got involved in some extracurricular activities to keep herself in oxys. So she was vulnerable to being picked up. Nude, hands bound, strangled with a ligature that wasn’t found at the scene. Body found in a Dumpster near the harbor.”

Marino said, “DNA in either case?”

“Nothing useful, and there was no sign of sexual assault. Negative for seminal fluid.”

“I’m still waiting for the connection,” Marino said. “Homicides where people are probably doing tricks for drugs and end up bound and strangled and dumped are a dime a dozen.”

“You aware Terri Bridges had a thin gold chain around her left ankle? Nobody knows where it came from. Kind of weird she had no other jewelry on, and when I pushed Oscar about the ankle bracelet, he said he’d never seen it before.”

“And?”

“And these other two cases, same thing. No jewelry except a thin gold bracelet around the left ankle. Same side as the heart, right? Like a leg iron? Like, you’re my love slave? Could be the killer’s signature. Could be Oscar’s signature. I’m getting the case files together, still data-searching and digging for other info. Will put out alerts to the usual suspects—including the posse from your past.”

“What posse from my past?” Marino’s thoughts went from dark to black.

He couldn’t see through the storm clouds rolling in his head.

“Benton Wesley. And that hot young former agent-cop-whatever who’s unfortunately untouchable to yours truly here, if rumors are to be believed. Of course, your little discovery of the laptops when you dropped by the scene earlier today without my permission just threw her a bone.”

“I don’t need your permission. You’re not my den mother.”

“Nope. The den mother would be Berger. Maybe you should ask her who’s in charge.”

“If I need to, I will. Right now, I’m doing my job. Investigating this homicide, exactly like she expects me to do.”

He drained the last of the Sharp’s and glass clanked inside the refrigerator as he went for another one. By his calculations, if each bottle was point three percent alcohol, he could achieve the first hint of a buzz if he drank at least twelve in quick succession, which he had tried before, and had felt nothing but an urgency to pee.

Morales said, “She’s got this forensic computer company Berger’s eager to use. Lucy, as in Kay Scarpetta’s niece.”

“I know who she is.”

Marino also knew about Lucy’s company in the Village, and that Scarpetta and Benton were involved with John Jay. He knew a lot of things he chose not to discuss with Morales or anyone else. What he didn’t know was that Lucy, Benton, and Scarpetta were involved in the Terri Bridges case, or that Scarpetta and Benton were in the city right this minute.

Morales’s cocky voice: “It may relieve you to know that I don’t believe Kay will be around long enough for you to have any awkward encounters.”

There could be no doubt. Morales had read that fucking gossip column.

“She’s here to examine Oscar,” Morales said.

“What the hell for?”

“Looks like she’s the blue plate special on Oscar’s menu. He demanded her, and Berger’s giving the little guy whatever his little heart wants.”

Marino couldn’t stand the thought of Scarpetta being alone with Oscar Bane. It unnerved him that Oscar had requested her specifically, because that could mean only one thing: He was far more aware of her than he ought to be.

Marino said, “You’re suggesting he might be a serial killer, so what’s he doing with the Doc? I can’t believe Berger or anybody set her up for something like this. Especially since he could get out any minute. Jesus.”

He was pacing. In a dozen steps, he could cover his apartment’s entire square footage.

“Once she’s done, maybe she’ll buzz back to Massachusetts and you got nothing to worry about,” Morales said. “Which is good, right? Since you got plenty to worry about already.”

“That right? Why don’t you tell me.”

“I’m reminding you this is a sensitive case, and you didn’t handle it all too well when Oscar Bane poured his heart out to you last month.”

“I did it by the book.”

“Funny thing about that. Nobody gives a shit once there’s a problem. As far as your former boss Kay goes, I advise avoidance. Not that you have any reason to be in her company or show up unexpected at Bellevue. For example.”

It inflamed Marino to hear Morales call her Kay. Marino had never called her Kay, and he’d worked side by side with her, had probably spent ten thousand hours with her in the morgue, in her office, in the car, at crime scenes, in her home, including on holidays, and even having a drink or two in her hotel room when they worked cases out of town. So if he didn’t call her Kay, who the hell did Morales think he was?

“My advice to you is to make yourself scarce until Kay’s back in Massachusetts,” Morales said. “She doesn’t need any more stress, you hearing me, bro? And what I don’t want is next time we call her in for assistance, she says no because of you. We don’t need her quitting her position at John Jay, quitting as a consultant because of you. Then Benton would quit next, if he wants to keep the wife happy. So we lose both of them because of you. I plan on spending a lot of years working with both of them. Being the Three Musketeers.”

“You don’t know them.” Marino was so angry, his heart was pounding in his neck.

“They quit and it will hit the news,” Morales said. “And you know how things get passed down the line. A scandal because it will be the front page of the Post, a headline ten feet tall that Jaime Berger, the ace prosecutor of sex crimes, hired a sex offender and maybe she gets fired. Unbelievable how you can bring down the house of cards, man. Anyway, I gotta get off the phone. About what’s on the Internet, what happened between you and Kay. Not to pry—”

“Then fucking don’t,” Marino snapped.