34

The house phone rang, and Berger told Morales it was the intercom.

“It’s probably security,” she said from the couch, and she was pale and in pain.

Her hands were cherry-red behind her back. Scarpetta couldn’t feel her own hands at all now. They could be rocks.

“They probably heard the gunshot.” If a voice could be gray, Berger’s was gray.

When Morales had bounded up the stairs after the cell phone sounded up there, the ring tone a familiar one, Scarpetta had asked the question that would change eternity for her.

She’d said to Berger, “Is Lucy up there?”

Berger’s answer was her wide eyes, and then they heard the gunshot.

It had sounded like a metal door slamming shut, almost like the steel barrier doors at Bellevue.

And silence.

And now Morales was back, and at this point, Scarpetta no longer cared about anything in this world except Lucy.

“Please get an ambulance,” she said to him.

“Let me tell you what’s up, Doc.” He waved the pistol and was becoming more bizarre. “What’s up is your little superhero niece has a fucking bullet in her fucking head. You imagine the IQ I’m killing off this morning, whew.”

He picked up the unzipped gym bag and walked around the couch, to the front of it. Displayed on the PDA clipped to his low-riding jeans was a GPS track log, a heavy pink line snaking through a map of someplace.

He dropped the gym bag on the coffee table and squatted next to it. His latex-gloved hands reached inside the bag, and he pulled out a small pair of Brooks running shoes and a plastic Baggie containing the polyvinyl impressions Scarpetta had made of Oscar’s fingertips. The Baggie was greasy, as if Morales had oiled or lubricated the polyvinyl impressions. He balanced the revolver on his thigh.

He removed the impressions from the Baggie and slipped them over the fingers of his left hand, and that was the first time Scarpetta realized he was left-handed.

He held the gun with his other hand, and stood up and splayed his left hand with its freakish irregular white rubbery fingertips, and he grinned, his pupils so dilated it was as if he had black holes for eyes.

“I won’t be around to reverse the reverse of them,” he said. “These are reversed.”

Slowly moving his rubbery fingertips and enjoying himself.

“Right, Dr. Sher-lock? You know what I’m talking about. How many people would think of it?”

He meant that since the prints were from an impression, they would be reversed when they were transferred to a surface. Morales must have remedied that when he’d photographed the prints he’d planted on the light fixture in the tub at Eva Peebles’s apartment. Whoever photographed and lifted the prints in Berger’s apartment would discover a reverse-sequence arrangement, a mirror image of what was expected, and wonder how that could have happened. A fingerprints examiner would have to make adjustments, display different perspectives to make an accurate geometric analysis for a comparison of these planted prints with Oscar’s prints in IAFIS.

“You answer when I talk to you, bitch.” Morales got up and loomed so close Scarpetta smelled his sweat.

He sat down next to Berger and stuck his tongue between her lips and slowly rubbed the gun between her legs.

“Nobody would think of it,” he said to Scarpetta as he fondled Berger with the barrel of the revolver and she didn’t move.

“Nobody would,” Scarpetta said.

He got up and started pressing various silicone fingertips on the glass coffee table. He went to the bar, flicked open a glass door, and plucked out the Irish whiskey. He picked out a colorful tumbler that looked like hand-blown Venetian glass, and he poured whiskey into it. He left Oscar’s prints all over the bottle and the tumbler as he drank in gulps.

The apartment phone rang again.

Again, Morales ignored it.

“They have a key,” Berger said. “They hear something in this building and you don’t answer, they’ll finally come in. Let me answer it and tell them we’re fine. Nobody else needs to be hurt.”

Morales drank some more. He swished whiskey in his mouth and waved his gun at Berger.

“Tell ’em to go away,” he said. “You try anything, everybody’s dead right now.”

“I can’t pick it up.”

Morales exhaled an exasperated breath as he came close and picked up the cordless phone and held it against her mouth and ear.

Scarpetta noticed tiny specks of red on his light-skinned face, like his freckles but not his freckles, and something moved inside her like plates of the earth sliding before a huge quake.

The pink line on the map on the PDA snaked, moving. Someone or something moving fast. Oscar.

“Please call an ambulance,” she said.

Morales mouthed Sor-ry, and shrugged.

“Hello?” Berger said into the phone he held. “Really? You know what? Probably the TV. A Rambo movie or something he’s got on. Thanks for your concern.”

Morales removed the phone from her drained face.

“Hit zero,” she said with no inflection. “To disconnect the intercom.”

He hit zero and dropped the cordless phone into its charger.

 

 

Marino touched the door with his index finger and pushed it open an inch as he slid his Glock out of a pocket in his leather jacket and the alarm-system chime sounded its warning tone that a door or window had been breached.

Marino swung himself around inside Berger’s penthouse, the pistol in both hands. He crept forward, and through an archway he saw the sunken living room that reminded him of a spaceship.

Berger and Scarpetta were on the couch, their arms behind their backs, and he knew by the looks on their faces that it was too late. An arm snaked up from behind the wraparound couch and poked a gun in the back of Scarpetta’s head.

“Drop it, asshole,” Morales said as he stood up.

Marino was pointing his Glock at Morales, who had a gun buried in the back of Scarpetta’s blond hair, his finger on the trigger.

“You hear me, Gorilla Man? Drop the fucking gun or you’re going to see genius brains all over this penthouse apartment.”

“Don’t do it, Morales. Everybody knows it’s you. You can quit,” Marino’s mouth said while his thoughts streaked through possibilities that kept pinning him against the same wall, a wall he couldn’t get away from no matter what.

He was trapped.

He could pull the trigger, and Morales would pull the trigger. Maybe Morales would be dead, leaving Berger and Marino. But Scarpetta would be dead.

“You got a little problem with proof, Gorilla Man. Anybody ever call you that?” Morales said. “I like that. Gorilla Man.”

Marino couldn’t tell if he was drunk or high. But he was on something.

“Because . . . because”—he sniggered—“you’re the proverbial knuckle dragger, now, aren’t you. Va-nil-la Go-ril-la. How you like that?”

“Marino, don’t drop your gun,” Scarpetta said with amazing steadiness, but her face looked dead. “He can’t shoot everyone at once. Don’t drop your gun.”

“You know, she’s such a hero, ain’t she?” Morales jammed the barrel hard against her skull, and she winced silently. “One brave lady, having all these stiffs for patients who can’t thank her or complain.”

He bent over and touched her ear with his tongue.

“Poor thing. Couldn’t work with living people? That’s what they say about doctors like you. That and you gotta have the air-conditioning on fifty or you can’t sleep. Put the fucking gun down!” he yelled at Marino.

Their eyes locked.

“Okay.” Morales shrugged. He said to Scarpetta, “Sleepy time, and you get to see your precious little Lucy again. Did you tell Marino I blew her brains out upstairs? Say hello to everyone in heaven for me.”

Marino knew he meant it. He knew people meant it when they really didn’t care, and Morales didn’t care. Scarpetta was nothing to him. Nobody was anything to him. He was going to do it.

Marino said, “Don’t shoot. I’m going to put my gun down. Don’t shoot.”

“No!” Scarpetta raised her voice. “No!”

Berger said nothing, because there was nothing she could say that would make a difference. It was better for her to say nothing, and she knew it.

Marino didn’t want to put his gun down. Morales had killed Lucy. He would kill every one of them. Lucy was dead. She must be upstairs. If Marino kept his gun, Morales couldn’t kill all of them. But he’d kill Scarpetta. Marino couldn’t let him do that. Lucy was dead. All of them would be dead.

A tiny red laser dot landed on Morales’s right temple. The little dot flickered and was shaking badly, then slowed and moved just a little, like a ruby-red firefly.

“I’m putting my gun down on the floor,” Marino said, squatting.

He didn’t look up or back. He didn’t let on he saw anything as he set his Glock on the Oriental rug, his eyes never leaving Morales’s.

“Now stand up real slow,” Morales said.

He raised the pistol away from Scarpetta’s head and pointed it at Marino as the red firefly crawled around his ear.

“And say Mommy,” Morales said as the laser dot went perfectly still on his right temple.

The gunshot was a loud spit from the gallery, and Morales dropped. Marino had never actually seen that for real, someone dropping like a puppet with its strings cut, and he bolted around the couch and grabbed the gun off the floor as blood poured out of the side of Morales’s head, spreading across the black marble floor. Marino grabbed the phone and called 911 as he ran into the kitchen for a knife, and changed his mind and grabbed a pair of poultry shears out of the cutlery block, and snapped through the ties around Scarpetta’s and Berger’s wrists.

 

 

Scarpetta ran upstairs and couldn’t feel her own hand on the railing.

Lucy was just inside a doorway that led from the gallery into the master bedroom, blood everywhere, great smears of it from where she’d crawled across the bathroom floor, then across hardwood, to where she’d shot Morales with the Glock forty-caliber pistol next to her. She was sitting up, leaning against the wall, and shivering, a towel in her lap. She was so bloody, Scarpetta couldn’t tell exactly where’d she been hit, but it was her head, possibly the back of her head. Her hair was soaked with blood, and blood was running down her neck and her naked back, pooling behind and around her.

Scarpetta struggled out of her winter coat, then her blazer, and got on the floor next to her, and her hands felt dead as she touched the back of Lucy’s head. She pressed her blazer against Lucy’s scalp and Lucy complained loudly.

“It’s going to be all right, Lucy,” Scarpetta said. “What happened? Can you show me where you’ve been shot?”

“Right there. Ow! Jesus Christ! Right there. Fuck! I’m okay. I’m so cold.”

Scarpetta ran her hand down Lucy’s slippery neck and back, couldn’t feel anything, and her hands were beginning to burn and tingle, but her fingers didn’t seem to belong to her.

Berger appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Get towels,” Scarpetta said to her. “Lots of them.”

Berger could see Lucy was alert, she was all right. Berger hurried toward the bathroom.

Scarpetta said to Lucy, “Is any spot tender back here? Tell me where you feel pain.”

“Nothing back there.”

“You sure?” Scarpetta did the best she could, gently palpating with a hand that wasn’t working right. “Making sure you’ve got nothing going on with your spine.”

“It’s not back there. It feels as if my left ear’s gone. I can hardly hear anything.”

She scooted behind Lucy so that she was sitting behind her, her legs stretched out on either side of her, her back against the wall, and she carefully felt the back of Lucy’s heavily bleeding scalp.

“My hand’s pretty numb,” Scarpetta said. “Guide my fingers, Lucy. Show me where it hurts.”

Lucy reached back and took her hand and guided it to a spot.

“Right there. Goddamn that hurts. I think it might be under the skin. Shit that hurts. God, don’t press on it, that hurts!”

Scarpetta didn’t have her reading glasses on and couldn’t see anything but a blur of bloody hair. She pressed her bare hand against the back of Lucy’s head and Lucy yelled.

“We have to stop the bleeding,” Scarpetta said very calmly, kindly, almost as if she was talking to a child. “The bullet must be right under the scalp, and that’s why it’s hurting when we apply pressure. You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be just fine. The ambulance will be here any minute.”

There were furrows around Berger’s wrists, and her hands were bright red and were very stiff and awkward as she opened several large white bath sheets and tucked them around Lucy’s neck and under her legs. Lucy was naked and wet and must have just stepped out of the shower when Morales shot her. Berger got down on the floor next to them, and blood got all over her hands and her blouse as she touched Lucy and told her repeatedly that she would be fine. Everything was going to be fine.

“He’s dead,” Berger told Lucy. “He was about to shoot Marino, to shoot all of us.”

The nerves in Scarpetta’s hands were waking up and angry, a million pins sticking, and she vaguely perceived a small, hard lump at the back of Lucy’s skull, several inches to the left of the midline of it.

“Right here,” she said to Lucy. “Help me, if you can.”

Lucy lifted her hand and helped her find the perforation, and Scarpetta worked the bullet out, and Lucy complained loudly. It was medium- to large-caliber, semi-jacketed, and deformed, and she handed it to Berger and pressed a towel firmly against the wound to stop the bleeding.

Scarpetta’s sweater was soaked with blood, the floor around her slippery with it. She didn’t think the bullet had penetrated the skull. She suspected it had struck at an angle and expended most of its kinetic energy within a relatively small space within milliseconds. There are so many blood vessels close to the surface of the scalp, it bleeds alarmingly, always looks worse than it is. Scarpetta pressed the towel very firmly against the wound, her right hand on Lucy’s forehead, holding her.

Lucy leaned heavily against her and shut her eyes. Scarpetta felt the side of her neck and checked her pulse, and it was rapid but not alarmingly so, and she was breathing fine. She wasn’t restless and didn’t seem confused. There were no signs she was going into shock. Scarpetta held her forehead again, pressing hard against the wound to stop the bleeding.

“Lucy, I need you to open your eyes and stay awake. You listening? Can you tell us what happened?” Scarpetta said. “He ran upstairs and we heard a gunshot. Do you remember what happened?”

“You saved everybody’s life,” Berger said. “You’re going to be fine. All of us are fine.”

She was stroking Lucy’s arm.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I remember being in the shower. Then I was on the floor and my head felt as if someone hit me with an anvil. Like I got hit with a car in the back of my head. For a minute I was blind. I thought I was permanently blind, and suddenly I saw light, and images. I heard him downstairs, and I couldn’t walk. I was dizzy, so I crawled over to the chair, kind of slid myself over the wood to where my coat was and got the gun out of it. And I started to see again.”

The bloody Glock was on the bloody floor near the railing of the gallery, and Scarpetta remembered it was one Marino had given to Lucy for Christmas. It was Lucy’s favorite gun. She’d said it was the nicest thing he’d ever given to her, a pocket-size forty-caliber pistol with a laser sight and boxes of high-velocity hollowpoints to go with it. He knew what she liked. He was the one who’d taught her to shoot when she was a child, when the two of them would disappear in his pickup truck, and later Lucy’s mother—Scarpetta’s sister, Dorothy—would call and curse, usually after several drinks, and scream at Scarpetta for ruining Lucy, threatening to never let Lucy see her again.

Dorothy probably never would have allowed Lucy to visit were it not for the minor problem that she didn’t want a child, because Dorothy was a child who would always want a daddy to take care of her, to dote on her, to adore her the way their father had doted and depended on Scarpetta.

She pushed Lucy’s forehead with one hand and held the cloth against the back of her head with the other, and her hands felt hot and swollen now, her pulse pounding in them. The bleeding had slowed considerably, but she resisted looking. She continued the pressure.

“Looks like a thirty-eight,” Lucy said, shutting her eyes again.

She must have noticed the bullet when Scarpetta had handed it to Berger.

“I want you to keep your eyes open and stay awake,” Scarpetta said. “You’re fine, but let’s just stay awake. I think I hear something. I think the rescue squad’s here. We’re going to the ER and we’ll do all those fun tests you like so much. X-rays. MRI. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I hurt like shit. I’m okay. Did you see his gun? I’m wondering what it was. I don’t remember seeing it. I don’t remember him.”

Scarpetta heard the door open downstairs, and the clatter and confusion of tense voices as the squad came in, and Marino hurried them up the stairs, all of them talking loudly. He stepped out of the way, looking at Lucy in her bloody bath sheets, then at the Glock on the floor, and he leaned over and picked it up. He did the one thing you never do at a crime scene. He held it in his bare hands and walked off with it, disappeared into the bathroom with it.

Two paramedics were talking to Lucy and asking her questions, and she was answering as they buckled her into the stretcher, and Scarpetta was so busy with that, she didn’t notice Marino had somehow ended up back downstairs, and was there with three uniformed officers. Other EMTs were lifting Morales’s body onto yet another stretcher, nobody bothering with CPR because he had been dead for a while.

Marino was dropping the magazine out of the Glock—Lucy’s Glock—it seemed, and clearing the chamber while an officer held a paper bag open. Marino was telling them about Berger remotely unlocking the apartment door and letting him in without Morales knowing. Marino was making up a story about him creeping as close as he could, then deliberately making a sound so Morales would look up.

“Giving me just enough chance to get off a round before he shot someone,” Marino lied to the cops. “He was behind the Doc with his revolver pointed at her.”

Berger was with them, and she said, “We were right here on the couch.”

“A hammerless thirty-eight,” Marino said.

He was pointing all this out, taking the blame, not the credit, for killing someone, and Berger was going along with it flawlessly. It seemed her new role in life was keeping Lucy out of trouble.

Legally, Lucy absolutely couldn’t have a handgun in New York City, not even inside a residence, not even for self-defense. Legally, the handgun still belonged to Marino because he’d never gotten around to the paperwork, to transferring his gift over to Lucy’s ownership, because so much had gone on after that Christmas a year ago in Charleston. Nobody had been happy with one another, and then Rose wasn’t herself and no one knew why for a while, and Scarpetta wasn’t capable of fixing their world as it seemed to fly apart, like an old golf ball that’s lost its skin. It had been the beginning of what she’d decided, not all that long ago, was the end of them.

Her bloody hand held Lucy’s bloody hand as the paramedics clattered the stretcher toward the elevator, one of them talking on the radio to the ambulance in front of the building. The doors opened and Benton was stepping out in his pinstripe suit, looking just like he did on CNN when she’d watched him on her BlackBerry as she’d walked to Berger’s apartment.

He took Lucy’s other hand and looked into Scarpetta’s eyes, and the sadness and relief on his face was as deep as anything could possibly be.