12
Shrew had resumed drinking Maker’s Mark, the same thing the Boss drank. She poured herself a tumbler full, on the rocks, the same way the Boss drank it.
She picked up the remote to the forty-inch flat-screen Samsung TV, just like the Boss used to have, according to the columns, but apparently not anymore. If what Shrew read was true, the Boss had gotten a new fifty-eight-inch plasma Panasonic. Unless that was nothing more than another paid endorsement. It was hard to know what was real and what was made up for money, because the business part of Gotham Gotcha was as hidden from Shrew as everything else.
Terrorists, she thought.
What if that’s where the money went? Maybe terrorists had killed her neighbor, gotten the buildings mixed up, and were really after Shrew because they sensed she was on to them? What if government agents who were after terrorists had tracked the website to Shrew and had gotten the apartments confused? It would be easy enough to do. Shrew’s and Terri’s apartments were directly across the street from each other, except Shrew’s was one floor higher. Governments took out people all the time, and Marilyn Monroe was probably one of them because she knew too much.
Maybe Shrew knew too much, or the wrong people thought she did. She was working herself into such a state of panic, she picked up the business card Investigator Pete Marino had left for her. She drank bourbon and held the card, and was within an inch of calling him. But what would she say? Besides, she wasn’t sure what she thought of him. If what the Boss had written about him was true, he was a sex maniac and had gotten away with it, and the last thing she needed inside her apartment right now was a sex maniac.
Shrew placed a dining room chair in front of her door, wedging the back of it under the knob, like she saw in the movies. She made sure all of her windows were locked and that no one was on the fire escape. She checked the TV guide to see if she could find a good comedy, and didn’t, so she played her favorite DVD of Kathy Griffin.
Shrew settled in front of her computer and drank her bourbon on the rocks and used her password to get into the website’s programming, or under the hood, as she thought of it.
She was astonished by what she discovered and not sure she believed it.
The Marilyn Monroe photo and Shrew’s accompanying sensational story had already gotten more than six hundred thousand hits. In less than an hour. She thought back to the video footage of Saddam Hussein being taunted and hanged, but no. That hadn’t gotten even a third as many hits the first hour it was up. Her amazement turned to pride, even if she was slightly terrified. What would the Boss do?
Shrew would justify her civil and literary disobedience by pointing out that if she hadn’t written the story about Marilyn’s murder, the world wouldn’t know the truth. It was the right and moral thing to do. Besides, the Boss never posted breaking news, so why should the Boss care if Shrew did? The Boss wasn’t particularly concerned about breaking anything except the hearts and spirits of whoever was on the radar.
Shrew logged out of the website and started surfing television channels, certain that somebody had picked up her startling revelation. She expected to see Dr. Scarpetta on CNN talking about it with Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer or Kitty Pilgrim. But no sign of the famous medical examiner whom the Boss seemed to hate, and no mention of Marilyn Monroe. It was early yet. She drank bourbon, and fifteen minutes later logged back in to the website programming to check the numbers again, and was dumbfounded to discover that almost a million people had clicked on the morgue photo of Marilyn Monroe. Shrew had never seen anything like this. She logged out of the programming and on to the actual site.
“Oh dear God,” she said out loud as her heart seemed to stop.
The home page looked demon-possessed. The letters spelling Gotham Gotcha! continuously rearranged themselves into OH C THA MAGGOT! and in the background, the New York skyline was blacked out, and behind it the sky flashed blood-red, then somehow the Christmas tree from Rockefeller Center was upside down in Central Park, and ice skaters were twirling inside the Boathouse restaurant while diners ate at tables on the ice of Wollman Rink, and then a heavy snow began to fall, and thunder clapped and lightning illuminated a horrendous rainstorm that ended up inside FAO Schwarz before turning into a sunny summer’s flight along the Hudson, where the Statue of Liberty suddenly filled the screen and deconstructed as if the helicopter had flown right into it.
On and on, over and over again, the banner was caught in a crazy loop that Shrew couldn’t stop. This is what millions of fans were seeing, and she couldn’t click her way out of it. All of the icons were unresponsive—dead. When she tried to access this morning’s column, or the more recently posted bonus column, or any column archived, she got the dreaded spinning color wheel. She couldn’t send an e-mail to the site or enter Gotham Gossip, where fans chatted and had spats and said terrible things about people they didn’t know.
She couldn’t visit the Bulletin Bored, or Sneak Peeks, or the Photo Swap Shop, or even the Dark Room, where one could see Sick Pics or Celebrity Overexposures or the wildly popular Gotham Gotcha A.D., where Shrew posted photographs taken after death, including the most recent one of Marilyn.
How could hundreds of thousands of fans be opening that photo and Shrew’s accompanying story when the website was locked up and haywire? A conspiracy, she thought. The Mafia, it occurred to her with horror as she thought about the mysterious Italian agent who had hired her over the phone. The government! Shrew had spilled the beans and the CIA or FBI or Homeland Security had sabotaged the site so the world wouldn’t know the truth. Or maybe it really was all about terrorists.
Shrew frantically clicked on every icon, and nothing happened, and the banner continued its infernal loop as Gotham Gotcha rearranged itself nonstop:
. . . GOTHAM GOTCHA! OH C THA MAGGOT!
GOTHAM GOTCHA!
Benton was waiting outside the infirmary, and in the space of the closing door, Oscar’s mismatched eyes stared at Scarpetta before disappearing behind beige steel. She heard the clanks and clicks of restraints being removed.
“Come on,” Benton said, touching her arm. “We’ll talk in my office.”
Tall and slender, he seemed to dominate any space he was in, but he looked tired, as if he was coming down with something. His handsome face was tense, his silver hair a mess, and he was dressed like an institutional employee in a bland gray suit, white shirt, and nondescript blue tie. He wore a cheap rubber sports watch and his simple platinum wedding band. Any sign of affluence was unwise on a prison ward, where the average stay was less than three weeks. It wasn’t uncommon for Benton to evaluate a patient at Bellevue and a month later see the same person on the street, rooting through garbage for something to eat.
He took the crime scene case from her, and she held on to envelopes of evidence and said she needed to receipt them to the police.
“I’ll get someone to stop by my office before we leave,” Benton said.
“It should go straight to the labs. They should analyze Oscar’s DNA and get it into the database as soon as possible.”
“I’ll call Berger.”
They walked away from the infirmary. Two linen carts rolling by sounded like a train, and a barrier door slammed shut as they passed cells that would have been spacious by prison standards were they not crammed with as many as six beds. Most of the men were in ill-fitting pajamas, sitting up and engaged in loud conversations. Some gazed through mesh-covered windows at the dark void of the East River, while others watched the ward through bars. One patient thought it a fine time to use the steel toilet, smiling at Scarpetta as he peed and telling her what a great story he’d be. His cell mates began bickering about who would look better on TV.
Benton and Scarpetta stopped at the first barrier door, which never opened fast enough, the guard in the control room on the other side busy with the rhythm of gatekeeping. Benton loudly announced that they were coming through, and they waited. He called out again as a man mopped a corridor that led to the recreation room, where there were tables and chairs, a few board games, and an old home gym with no detachable parts.
Beyond that were interview rooms, and areas for group therapy, and the law library with its two typewriters, which like the televisions and the wall clocks were covered with plastic to prevent patients from disassembling anything with components that could be fashioned into a weapon. Scarpetta had gotten the tour the first time she was summoned up here. She was confident nothing had changed.
The white-painted steel door finally slid open and slammed shut behind them, and a second opened to let them through. The guard inside the control room returned Scarpetta’s driver’s license, and she surrendered her visitor’s pass, the exchange made mutely through thick bars as officers escorted in the newest patient, who wore the blaze-orange jumpsuit of Rikers Island. Prisoners like him were temporary transfers, brought here only if they needed medical attention. Scarpetta never ceased to be dismayed by what malingerers would do to themselves to earn a brief stay at Bellevue.
“One of our frequent flyers,” Benton said as steel slammed. “A swallower. Last visit it was batteries. Triple A, double A. Can’t remember. About eight of them. Rocks and screws before that. Once it was toothpaste, still in the tube.”
Scarpetta felt as if her spirit were unzipped from her body like the lining of a coat. She couldn’t be who she was, couldn’t show emotion, couldn’t share her thoughts about Oscar or a single detail he had told her about himself or Terri. She was chilled by Benton’s professional distance, which was always the most extreme on the ward. It was here where he entertained fears he wouldn’t confess, and didn’t need to, because she knew him. Ever since Marino had gotten so drunk and out of control, Benton had been in a quiet, chronic panic he refused to admit. To him, every male was a potential beast who wanted to carry her off to his lair, and nothing she did or said reassured him.
“I’m going to quit CNN,” she said as they headed to his office.
“I understand the position Oscar’s just put you in,” Benton said. “None of this is your fault.”
“You mean, the position you’ve just put me in.”
“It’s Berger who wanted you here.”
“But you’re the one who asked.”
“If I had my way about it, you’d still be in Massachusetts,” he said. “But he wouldn’t talk unless you came here.”
“I just hope I’m not the reason he’s here.”
“Whatever the reason, you can’t hold yourself responsible.”
“I don’t like the way that sounds,” she said.
They passed shut office doors, no one around. It was just the two of them, and they didn’t disguise their tense tones.
“I hope you’re not hinting it’s possible some obsessed fan pulled a horrific stunt so he could have an audience with me,” she added. “I hope that’s not what you’re implying.”
“A woman’s dead. That’s no stunt,” Benton said.
She couldn’t talk to him about Oscar’s conviction that he was being spied on and that whoever was behind it was Terri Bridges’s killer. Maybe Benton already knew, but she couldn’t ask. She couldn’t reveal that Oscar’s injuries were self-inflicted, that he’d lied to the police and everyone else about how he’d gotten them. The most she could do was speak in generalities.
“I have no information that might justify my discussing him with you,” she said, implying Oscar had confessed to nothing, nor indicated he was a threat to himself or others.
Benton unlocked his office door.
“You spent a long time with him,” he said. “Remember what I always tell you, Kay. Your first cue is your gut. Listen to what your gut tells you about this guy. And I’m sorry if I seem strung out. I’ve had no sleep. Actually, things are rather much a fucking mess.”
The work space the hospital had allotted Benton was small, with books, journals, clutter piled everywhere as neatly as he could manage. They sat, and the desk between them seemed a solid manifestation of an emotional barrier she could not get past. He did not want sex, at least not with her. She didn’t believe he was having it with anybody else, but the benefits of marriage seemed to include shorter and more impersonal conversations, and less time in bed. She believed Benton had been happier before they’d gotten married, and that sad fact she wasn’t going to blame on Marino.
“What did your gut tell you?” Benton asked.
“That I shouldn’t be talking to him,” she replied. “That I shouldn’t be prevented from talking to you. My head tells me otherwise.”
“You’re an associate, a consultant here. We can have a professional discussion about him as a patient.”
“I don’t know anything about him as your patient. I can’t tell you anything about him as mine.”
“Before now you’d never heard of him? Or Terri Bridges?”
“That much I can say. Absolutely not. And I’m going to ask you not to cajole me. You know my limitations. You knew them when you called this morning.”
Benton opened a drawer and pulled out two envelopes. He reached across the desk to hand them to her.
“I didn’t know what might happen by the time you got here,” he said. “Maybe the cops would have found something, arrested him, and we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. But you’re right. At the moment, your priority has to be Oscar’s well-being. You’re his physician. But that doesn’t mean you have to see him again.”
Inside one envelope was a DNA report, and inside the other, a set of crime scene photographs.
“Berger wanted you to have a copy of the DNA analysis. The photographs and police report are from Mike Morales,” Benton said.
“Do I know him?”
“He’s relatively new to the detective division. You don’t know him, maybe won’t have to. Candidly speaking, I think he’s a jerk. Photos he took at the crime scene, his preliminary report. The DNA’s from swabs Dr. Lester took from Terri Bridges’s body. There’s a second set of photos I haven’t gotten yet. From a second search earlier this afternoon when luggage in her closet was checked, and it turned out Terri’s laptops were in it. Apparently, she was supposed to fly to Arizona this morning to spend a few days with her family. Why her luggage was packed and out of sight in her closet, no one knows.”
Scarpetta thought about what Oscar had told her. Terri didn’t leave luggage out. She was obsessively neat, and Oscar didn’t like good-byes.
Benton said, “One possible explanation is she was extremely neat. Perhaps obsessively so. You’ll see what I mean in the photos.”
“I’d say that’s a very plausible explanation,” she commented.
He held her gaze. He was trying to determine if she’d just given him information. She didn’t break their eye contact or the silence. He retrieved a number from his cell phone contact list and reached for the landline. He asked Berger if she could send someone by to pick up evidence Scarpetta had collected from Oscar Bane.
He listened for a moment, then looked up at Scarpetta and said to Berger, “I completely agree. Since he can leave whenever he wants, and you know how I feel about that. And no, I haven’t had a chance . . . Well, she’s right here. Why don’t you ask her?”
Benton moved the handset to the middle of the desk and held out the receiver to Scarpetta.
“Thanks for doing this,” Jaime Berger said, and Scarpetta tried to remember the last time they’d talked.
Five years ago.
“How was he?” Berger asked.
“Extremely cooperative.”
“Do you think he’ll stay put?”
“I think I’m in an awkward position.” Scarpetta’s way of saying she couldn’t talk about her patient.
“I understand.”
“All I can comfortably tell you,” Scarpetta said, “is if you can get his DNA analyzed quickly, that would be a good thing. There’s no downside to that.”
“Fortunately, there are plenty of people in the world right now who love overtime. One of them, however, isn’t Dr. Lester. While I’ve got you, I’ll ask you directly and let Benton off the hook, unless he’s already said something. Would you mind looking at Terri Bridges’s body tonight? Benton can fill you in. Dr. Lester should be on her way in from New Jersey. Sorry to subject you to something so unpleasant, and I don’t mean the morgue.”
“Whatever’s helpful,” Scarpetta replied.
“I’m sure we’ll talk later. And we should get together. Maybe dinner at Elaine’s,” Berger said.
It seemed to be the favorite line of professional women like them. They would get together, have lunch, maybe dinner. She and Berger had said it to each other the first time they met eight years ago, when Berger was brought to Virginia as a special prosecutor in a case that was one of the most stressful ones in Scarpetta’s life. And they’d said it to each other last time they met, in 2003, when both of them had been concerned about Lucy, who had just returned from a clandestine operation in Poland that Scarpetta still knew very little about, except that what Lucy had done wasn’t legal. It certainly wasn’t moral. In Berger’s penthouse apartment here in the city, the prosecutor had sat down with Scarpetta’s niece, and whatever had gone on between them had remained between them.
Oddly, Berger knew far more about Scarpetta than almost anybody she could think of, and yet they weren’t friends. It was unlikely they would get together and do anything except work, no matter how many times they suggested lunch or a drink and meant it. Their disconnection wasn’t simply due to the vicissitudes of very busy lives that collide and then resume their separate paths. Powerful women tended to be loners, because it was their instinct not to trust one another.
Scarpetta handed the receiver back to Benton.
She said, “If Terri were obsessive-compulsive, her body might offer a few hints. It seems I’ll have a chance to look for myself. Coincidentally.”
“I was about to tell you. Berger asked me earlier to see if you would.”
“Since Dr. Lester’s on her way back into the city, I guess I agreed to it before I knew about it.”
“You can leave afterwards, stay out of it,” Benton said. “Unless Oscar gets charged. Then I don’t know how it will involve you. That will be up to Berger.”
“Please don’t tell me this man killed someone to get my attention.”
“I don’t know what to tell you about anything. At this point, I don’t know what to think about anything. The DNA from Terri’s vaginal swabs, for example. Take a look.”
Scarpetta removed the lab report from an envelope and read it as he described what Berger had told him about a woman in Palm Beach.
“Well?” he said. “Can you think of any reason?”
“What’s not here is Dr. Lester’s report of what samples she took. You said vaginal.”
“That’s what Berger told me.”
“Exactly what they were and from where? Not here. So no. I’m not going to venture a guess about the unusual results and what they might mean.”
“Well, I will. Contamination,” he said. “Although I can’t figure out how an elderly woman in a wheelchair factors into that.”
“Any chance she has a connection with Oscar Bane?”
“I’m told no. Berger called her and asked.”
His phone rang. He answered, listening for a long silence, his closed face giving away nothing.
“Don’t think it was such a great idea,” he finally spoke to whoever was on the line. “Sorry that happened . . . Of course I regret it in light of . . . No, I didn’t want to tell you for this very reason . . . Because, no, hold on. Listen to me for a minute. The answer is, I have . . . Lucy, please. Let me finish. I don’t expect you to understand, and we can’t get into it now. Because . . . You don’t mean that. Because . . . When someone has nowhere else to turn . . . We’ll deal with it. Later, all right? Calm down and we’ll talk later,” and he got off the phone.
“What the hell was that about?” Scarpetta asked. “What was Lucy saying? What are you sorry about, and who has nowhere else to turn?”
Benton’s face was pale but impassive, and he said, “Sometimes she has no sense of time and place, and what I don’t need right now is one of her rages.”
“Rage? Over what?”
“You know how she gets.”
“Usually when she has good reason to get that way.”
“We can’t get into it now.” He said the same thing to her that he’d said to Lucy.
“How the hell am I supposed to concentrate after overhearing a conversation like that? Get into what?”
He was silent. She never liked it when he stopped to think after she’d asked him a question.
“Gotham Gotcha,” he said, to her surprise and annoyance.
“You’re not really going to make a big deal out of that.”
“You read it?”
“I started reading it in the cab. Bryce said I needed to.”
“Did you read all of it?”
“I was interrupted by being thrown out on the street.”
“Come look.”
He typed something as she moved next to him.
“That’s odd,” Benton said, frowning.
The Gotham Gotcha website had a massive programming error or had crashed. Buildings were dark, the sky flashing red, and Rockefeller Center’s huge Christmas tree was upside down in Central Park.
Benton impatiently scooted the mouse around on its pad and clicked it repeatedly.
“The site’s down for some reason and completely fucked up,” he said. “However, unfortunately, I can pull up the damn column anyway.”
Typing, he executed a search, hitting keys vigorously.
“It’s all the hell over the place,” he said.
The screen filled with references to Gotham Gotcha and Dr. Kay Scarpetta, and he clicked on a file and opened a copy of not one column but two that someone had cut and pasted on a forensic fan site. The unflattering photograph of Scarpetta filled the screen, and she and Benton looked at it for a moment.
“You think it was taken in Charleston?” he asked. “Or your new office? Do the scrubs tell you anything? The color? Don’t you wear cranberry scrubs in Watertown?”
“Depends on what we get from the medical linen service. They pick up and deliver, and one week it might be teal-green, the next week purple, different shades of blue, cranberry. That’s true at most morgues in recent years. The most I might specify is I don’t want something cute like SpongeBob, the Simpsons, Tom and Jerry. Literally true. I know pathologists who wear them, as if they’re pediatricians.”
“And you have no recollection of someone taking a picture of you during an autopsy? Maybe using their cell phone?”
She thought back, thought hard, and said, “No. Because if I saw it happen, I would have made the person delete it. I would never permit such a thing.”
“Most likely it happened since you moved and started with CNN. The celebrity factor. A cop. Someone from a funeral home, a removal service.”
“That would be bad,” she said, thinking about Bryce. “That would make me worry about someone on my staff. What’s this about Sister Polly? Who’s Sister Polly?”
“Don’t know. Read this. Then we’ll get to that.”
He moved the cursor to the first column that had been posted today, to the part he wanted her to see:
. . . yet beneath that impenetrable façade is a dirty secret she hides pretty well. Scarpetta may live in a world of stainless steel but she’s certainly no woman made of steel. She’s weak, a disgrace.
Guess what, she can be raped.
That’s right. Just like any other woman, only you can blame the victim this time. She brought it upon herself. Pushed away, mistreated, and belittled her investigative partner in crime until one drunken night in Charleston when he couldn’t take it anymore. You have to feel a little sorry for poor Pete Marino. . . .
Scarpetta returned to her chair. Gossip was one thing. This was another.
“I won’t ask why people are so hateful,” she said. “I learned a long time ago not to ask. Finally figured out the why part might give insight, but really doesn’t matter. Just the end result. That’s what matters. If I find out who this is, I’ll sue.”
“I won’t tell you not to let it get to you.”
“I believe you just told me by not telling me. What happened was never in the news. I never reported it. It’s not accurate. This is slander. I’ll sue.”
“Sue whom? An anonymous piece of shit in cyberspace?”
“Lucy could find out who.”
“Speaking of, I’m not sure it’s coincidental the site crashed,” he said. “That’s probably the best remedy. Maybe it will stay crashed forever.”
“Did you ask her to crash the site?”
“You just heard me on the phone with her. Of course not. But you know her, as do I. Sure as hell is something she’d do, and much more effective than a lawsuit. There’s no slander. You can’t prove that what this person’s written is a lie. You can’t prove what happened. And what didn’t.”
“You say that as if you don’t believe what I’ve told you.”
“Kay.” He met her eyes. “Let’s don’t turn this into a fight between us. What you need to brace yourself for, obviously, is the exposure. The public didn’t know, and now it does, and you’re going to be asked. Same thing with this. . . .” He read some more. “This other bullshit. Parochial school. Sister Polly. That’s a story I’m not familiar with.”
Scarpetta barely read it, didn’t need to, and she replied, “There’s no Sister Polly, and what was described didn’t happen, not like that. It was a different nun, and there certainly was no salacious whipping in the bathroom.”
“But some truth.”
“Yes. Miami, the scholarship to parochial school. And my father’s protracted, terminal illness.”
“And his grocery store. Did the other girls in school call you a Florida cracker?”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Benton.”
“I’m trying to determine what’s true and who would know it. What’s already out there? Any of this?”
“You know what’s out there. And no. None of this, true or false, is out there. I don’t know where the information came from.”
He said, “I’m not as concerned about what’s false. I want to know what’s out there that’s true, and if there’s a publicized source for what’s in these columns. Because if there isn’t, as you seem to be suggesting, then someone close to you is leaking information to whoever this hack writer is.”
“Marino,” she reluctantly said. “He knows things about me that other people don’t.”
“Well, obviously the Charleston information. Although I can’t imagine him using that word.”
“What word, Benton?”
He didn’t answer.
“You can’t bring yourself to say it, can you? The word rape. Even though that’s not what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened,” he said quietly. “That’s my problem. I only know as much as you’ve let me know.”
“Would you somehow feel better if you’d watched?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“You need to see every detail, as if that will give you closure,” Scarpetta said. “Who’s the one always saying there’s no such thing as closure? I believe that would be both of us. And now this columnist, and whoever is leaking information to him or her, wins. Why? Because we’re sitting here upset, not trusting each other, estranged. Truth is, you probably know far more about what happened than Marino does. I sincerely doubt he remembers much of what he did or said that night. For his sake, I hope I’m right.”
“I don’t want to be estranged, Kay. I don’t know why this bothers me more than it seems to bother you.”
“Of course you know why, Benton. You feel even more powerless than I did because you couldn’t stop it, and at least I stopped some of it. I stopped the worst of it.”
He pretended to read the two columns again. What he was really doing was composing himself.
“Would he know the Florida information?” he asked. “What did you tell him about your childhood? Or let me restate the question. The part that’s true”—he indicated what was on the computer—“is that from information you gave him?”
“Marino’s known me for almost twenty years. He’s met my sister, my mother. Of course he knows some details about my life. I don’t remember everything I’ve said to him, but it’s no great secret among those close to me that I grew up in a not-so-nice Miami neighborhood, and we had no money, and my father lingered with cancer for many years before dying. And that I did pretty well in school.”
“The girl who broke your pencils?”
“This is ridiculous.”
“I take that as a yes.”
“There was a girl who did that. A bully. I don’t remember her name.”
“Did a nun slap you across the face?”
“Because I confronted the girl, and she tattled on me, not the other way around, and one of the sisters punished me. That was it. No titillating bathroom scene. And it’s absurd we’re having this conversation.”
“I thought I knew all your stories. It doesn’t feel good that I don’t and had to find out from the Internet. Absurd or not, details like this will be bounced around all over the place, probably already are. You can’t escape it, not even on CNN, where you have friends. When you’re on the set, someone will be obliged to ask. I guess you’ll have to get used to it. I guess we both will.”
She wasn’t thinking about the exposure or getting used to it. She was thinking about Marino.
“That’s what Lucy was talking about when she called you a little while ago,” Scarpetta said. “She was saying something about him.”
Benton said nothing. That was his answer. Yes, Lucy had been talking about Marino.
“What did you mean about him having nowhere else to turn? Or were you talking about somebody else? Don’t keep anything from me. Not now.”
“What he did. Hit-and-run. That’s how Lucy thinks of it,” Benton said, and she had gotten better at knowing when he was being evasive. “Because he disappeared, and I’ve explained until I’m blue in the face that when someone feels he has no place to turn, he looks for an out. This isn’t new. You know the story. And you know Lucy.”
“What story? I’ve never known the story. He disappeared, and I never believed he killed himself. That’s not Marino. He wouldn’t have the nerve or the stupidity, and most of all he’s afraid of going to hell. He believes there really is a physical hell located somewhere in the molten core of the earth, and if he ends up there he’ll be on fire for all eternity. He confessed that to me on another drunken occasion. He’s wished hell on half the planet because he’s terrified of it for himself.”
The look in Benton’s eyes was unutterably sad.
“I don’t know what story you’re talking about, and I don’t believe you,” she said. “Something else has happened.”
They held each other’s eyes.
Benton said, “He’s here. He’s been here since last July. The first weekend in July, exactly.”
He went on to tell her that Marino worked for Berger, who found out from the gossip column the real reason Marino had left Charleston, a sordid detail she certainly didn’t know when she hired him. Now Lucy knew about Marino because Berger had just met with her and had told her.
“That’s why Lucy called,” he said. “And knowing you as well as I do, I suspect you would have wanted me to help Marino, despite it all. And you would have wanted me to honor his wish that he go into treatment and basically start his life again without your knowledge.”
“You should have told me a long time ago.”
“I couldn’t divulge details about him to anyone. Any more than you can tell me what Oscar told you. Doctor-patient confidentiality. Marino called me at McLean not long after he disappeared from Charleston and asked me to get him into a treatment center. He asked me to confer with his therapist up there, to oversee, to intervene.”
“And then get him a job with Jaime Berger? And that’s a secret, too? What’s that got to do with doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“He asked me not to tell you.”
Benton’s voice said he’d done the right thing, but the look in his eyes belied his certainty.
“This isn’t about doctor-patient confidentiality or your even being decent,” Scarpetta said. “You know what it’s about. Your reasoning is completely irrational because there’s no way he could work for Jaime Berger and I wouldn’t find out, eventually. Which is exactly what’s happened.”
She started flipping through the police report because she didn’t want to look at him. She felt someone behind her before the person spoke, and turned around, startled by the man in Benton’s doorway.
In his baggy gang clothing, thick gold chains, his hair in cornrows, he looked as if he’d just escaped from the prison ward.
“Kay, you and Detective Morales haven’t met, I don’t think,” Benton said, and he wasn’t particularly friendly about it.
“I bet you don’t remember, but we almost met once,” Morales said as he brazenly walked in and looked her over.
“I’m sorry.” Meaning she didn’t remember, and she didn’t offer to shake his hand.
“Last Labor Day weekend. In the morgue,” he said.
He had an unsettling energy that made her edgy and uncomfortable, and she imagined that whatever he did was thought out quickly and done in a hurry, and that it was his nature to dominate whatever he touched.
“A couple of tables away from where you were busy looking at that guy found in the East River, floating off the shore of Ward’s Island?” he said. “I can tell you don’t remember me. Question was whether he was tired of life and jumped off the footbridge, or someone hastened his journey to the Great Beyond, or maybe he’d had a heart attack and fell off the embankment. One of Pester Lester’s cases. Turns out, she failed to connect the dots—didn’t recognize the telltale fern-like pattern on his torso was—guess what? Arborization from being struck by lightning, which she had ruled out because she didn’t find any burns in his socks, the bottom of his shoes, shit like that. You used a compass to show his belt buckle was magnetized, which is typical in lightning strikes, right? Anyway, you wouldn’t remember me. Was in and out, grabbing a couple bullets that needed to go to the labs.”
He pulled an evidence form out of the back pocket of his half-mast voluminous jeans, unfolded it, and started filling it out, leaning over the desk, so close to her his elbow brushed against her shoulder as he wrote, obliging her to move her chair. He handed her the form and the pen, and she filled out the rest and signed it. Then he took the envelopes of Oscar Bane’s evidence and left.
“Needless to say,” Benton remarked, “Berger’s got her hands full with him.”
“He’s in her squad?”
“No, that might make it easier. Then maybe she could control him, at least a little,” Benton said. “He’s rather ubiquitous. Whenever a case is high-profile, he somehow manages to show up. Such as the lightning death he mentioned. And by the way, he probably won’t forgive you for not remembering him, which is why he had to point it out three times.”