Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  8

  Cyberspace, the perfect place to hide from ridicule.

  Gotham was an online college, where students saw Dr. Oscar Bane’s talents and intelligence and not the dwarfed vessel that contained them.

  “It couldn’t be a student or group of students,” he said to Scarpetta. “They don’t know me. My address and phone number aren’t listed. There’s no physical college where people go. The faculty meets several times a year in Arizona. And that’s as much as most of us see each other.”

  “What about your e-mail address?”

  “It’s on the college website. It has to be. That’s probably how it started. The Internet. Easiest way to steal your identity. I told the DA’s office. I said that’s probably how they got access to me. My speculations didn’t matter. They didn’t believe me, and I realized they might be part of the mind stealing. That’s what’s happening. They’re trying to steal my mind.”

  Scarpetta got up from her chair. She tucked her notepad and the pen into her lab coat pocket.

  She said, “I’m moving around to the other side of the table so I can look at your back. You must go out at least some.”

  “The grocery store, ATM, gas stations, doctors’ offices, the dentist, the theater, restaurants. When it began, I started changing my patterns. Different places, different times, different days.”

  “What about the gym?”

  She untied his gown and gently pulled it down to his hips.

  “I work out in my apartment. I still power-walk outside. Four to five miles, six days a week.”

  There was a distinctive pattern to his injuries that didn’t make her feel any better about him.

  “Not the same walk or at the same time of day. I mix things up,” he added.

  “Groups, clubs, organizations you belong to or are involved with?”

  “Little People of America. What’s happening has nothing to do with the LPA, no way. Like I said, the electronic harassment just started maybe three months ago. As far as I know.”

  “Anything unusual happen three months ago? Anything change in your life?”

  “Terri. I started dating Terri. And they started following me. I’ve got proof. On a CD hidden in my apartment. If they break in, they won’t find it. I need you to get it when you’re in there.”

  She measured abrasions on his lower back.

  “When you’re inside my apartment,” he said. “I gave my written consent to that detective. I don’t like him. But he asked me, and I gave him my consent, my key, the information for the burglar alarm, because I’ve got nothing to hide, and I want you to go in. I told him I want you to go in with him. Do it right away before they go in there. Maybe they already have.”

  “The police?”

  “No. The others.”

  His body relaxed as her gloved fingers touched him.

  “I wouldn’t put anything past them and their capabilities,” he said. “But even if they’ve already gone in, they didn’t find it. They won’t find it. It’s not possible. The CD’s hidden in a book. The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor by Littleton Winslow. Published in 1874 in London. Fourth shelf of the second bookcase, left of the door in the guest bedroom. You’re the only person who knows.”

  “Did you tell Terri you were being followed, spied on? Did she know about the CD?”

  “Not for a long time. I didn’t want her to worry. She has problems with anxiety. Then I had no choice. I had to tell her several weeks ago when she started mentioning she wanted to see my apartment, and I wouldn’t let her. She started accusing me of hiding something from her, so I had to tell her. I had to make sure she understood it wasn’t safe for me to bring her to my apartment because I was being electronically harassed.”

  “The CD?”

  “I didn’t tell her where it is. Just what’s on it.”

  “Did she worry that knowing you might place her at risk, too? No matter where you saw her?”

  “It’s obvious they never followed me to her apartment.”

  “How is that obvious?”

  “They tell me where they follow me. You’ll see. I explained to Terri I was sure they didn’t know about her and she was safe.”

  “Did she believe you?”

  “She was upset, but she wasn’t frightened.”

  “Seems a little unusual for someone who has a lot of anxiety,” Scarpetta said. “I’m surprised she wasn’t frightened.”

  “The communications from them stopped. It’s been weeks, and they’ve stopped. I began to hope they weren’t interested in me anymore. Of course, they were just setting me up for the cruelest thing of all.”

  “What are these communications?”

  “E-mails.”

  “If they stopped after you told Terri about them, might that suggest the possibility they were from her? That she was sending you whatever these e-mails are that make you feel you’re being harassed, spied on? And when you said something about it, she stopped sending them?”

  “Absolutely not. She would never do something so heinous. Especially not to me. It’s impossible.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “She couldn’t possibly do it. How would she know I took a detour when I was walking and ended up at Columbus Circle, for example, if I’d never told her? How could she know I went to the store for coffee creamer if I never mentioned it?”

  “Is there any reason she might have to hire someone to follow you?”

  “She wouldn’t do that. And after what’s happened, it makes no sense at all to think she had anything to do with it. She’s dead! They killed her!”

  The steel door moved slightly, and the guard’s eyes appeared in the crack. “We okay in here?”

  “We’re fine,” Scarpetta said.

  The eyes vanished.

  “But the e-mails stopped,” she said to Oscar.

  “Eavesdropping.”

  “You were raising your voice, Oscar. You need to stay calm or he’ll come back in here.”

  “I made one backup copy of what I’d already gotten, and cleaned everything off my computer so they couldn’t get in there and delete them or alter them to make it look as if I’m lying. The only record of the original e-mails is on the CD that’s in the book. The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor. Littleton Winslow. I collect old books and documents.”

  Scarpetta took photographs of abrasions and clusters of fingernail marks, all in the same area of his right lower back.

  “Psychiatry, topics related to it, mainly,” he said. “A lot of them, including ones about Bellevue. I know more about this place than the people who work here. You and your husband would find my Bellevue collection of great interest. Maybe I’ll get to show it to you someday. You’re welcome to borrow it. Terri’s always been interested in the history of psychiatry, fascinated by people. She really cares about people and why they do what they do. She says she could sit in an airport, a park, all day and watch people. Why are you wearing gloves? Achondroplasia isn’t contagious.”

  “For your protection.”

  It was and it wasn’t. She wanted a latex barrier between his skin and hers. He had crossed the line with her already. Before she’d even met him, he’d crossed it.

  “They know where I go, places I’ve been, where I live,” he said. “But not her apartment. Not Terri’s brownstone. Not Murray Hill. I never had any reason to believe they knew anything about her. They’ve never shown that location when they let me know where I’ve been on any given day. So why wouldn’t they show it? I go there every Saturday.”

  “Always the same time?”

  “Five o’clock.”

  “Where in Murray Hill?”

  “Not far from here. You could walk from here. Near Loews theater. We go to the movies sometimes and eat hot dogs and cheese fries when we’re splurging.”

  His back trembled as she touched it. Grief welling up inside of him.

  “Both of us are careful about our weight,” he said. “I never had any reason to believe they’d follow
ed me to Murray Hill, to any place we’d been together. I had no idea or I would have done something to protect her. I wouldn’t have let her live alone. Maybe I could have convinced her to leave the city. I didn’t do it. I would never hurt her. She’s the love of my life.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask.” Berger’s shrewd, pretty face studied Benton. “If Kay’s Lucy’s aunt, does that make you Lucy’s uncle? Or are you a de facto uncle, an almost uncle? Does she call you Uncle Benton?”

  “Lucy doesn’t listen to her almost uncle or her aunt. I hope she’ll listen to you.” Benton knew damn well what Berger was doing.

  She was sticking him, goading him. She wanted him to bring up that damn gossip column, to confess and surrender himself to the mercy of her court. But he had his mind made up. He wasn’t going to volunteer anything because he’d done nothing wrong. When the timing was right, he could defend himself easily. He could explain his silence and justify it by reminding her that, legally, Marino had been neither charged nor accused of anything, and Scarpetta’s privacy wasn’t Benton’s to violate.

  “Does Lucy have the laptops?” he asked.

  “Not yet. But she will. And as soon as she determines the details of the e-mail accounts, we’ll go to the providers and get the passwords. Including Oscar’s.”

  “When you met with her to discuss what she’s going to—”

  “I haven’t met with her yet,” Berger interrupted him. “Only talked to her briefly over the phone. I’m surprised you never told me she’d moved to the city. On second thought, I shouldn’t be surprised.” She reached for her coffee. “I had to find out from several sources she’d recently moved here and started her own company. She’s built a reputation rather quickly, which is why I decided to ask for her help in this particular case.”

  She drank coffee and set the mug back down, her every move thoughtful and deliberate.

  “You have to understand that he and I don’t routinely have contact with each other,” she said.

  She meant Marino. The cross-examination had begun.

  “Knowing what I do, assuming there’s any truth to it,” she said, “I can’t imagine Lucy told him she was here or has had any contact with him at all—or even knows that he’s here. I’m wondering why you didn’t tell her. Or am I making an unfair assumption? Have you told her?”

  “No.”

  “That’s quite something. She relocates to New York, and you’ve never told her he’s here. Alive and well in my DA squad. And maybe his secret would have been safe a little longer if it wasn’t his bad luck that he’s the one who took Oscar’s call last month.”

  “Lucy’s still setting up shop, hasn’t been involved in many cases yet,” Benton said. “A couple in the Bronx and Queens. This will be the first in Manhattan, in other words, involving your office. Of course, at some point, she and Marino were going to find out about each other. I expected that to happen naturally and professionally.”

  “You didn’t expect anything of the sort, Benton. You’ve been in complete denial. You’ve made flawed and desperate decisions and not logically thought through the inevitable consequences. And now your two degrees of separation have begun to converge. Must be an indescribable feeling, moving people around like pawns only to wake up one day and realize that because of a banal gossip column, your pawns are now destined to confront each other and possibly knock each other off your game board. Let me try to recap what’s happened.”

  With a slight movement of her fingers, she said no to the waitress and her coffeepot.

  “Your original plan didn’t include a residence in New York,” Berger said.

  “I didn’t know John Jay was going to—”

  “Ask both of you to be visiting lecturers, consultants? I bet you tried to talk Kay out of it.”

  “I thought it was unwise.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “She’d just been hired as chief, relocated her entire existence. I advised against her taking on more work, more stress. I told her she shouldn’t do it.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “She was insistent. Said it would be good to help if we could. And she didn’t want to be limited.”

  “That would be Kay,” Berger said. “Always one to help anywhere she can and position herself accordingly. The world is her stage. You couldn’t possibly coop her up in a corner of Massachusetts, and you couldn’t push too hard because then you’d have to tell her why you didn’t want her in New York. You found yourself with a problem on your hands. You’d already moved Marino to New York, and let’s be honest, talked me into hiring him. And now Kay’s going to be in and out of New York, and possibly end up helping in cases that will involve my office. Since both of you are going to be in and out of New York, why not? Lucy moves to the great city of opportunity, as well. What better place on the planet for her than the Village? How could you possibly have anticipated all this when you came up with your master design? And since you didn’t anticipate it, you also didn’t anticipate I’d find out the real reason you parked Marino in my office.”

  “I’m not going to say I never worried about it,” Benton replied. “I simply hoped it wouldn’t happen anytime soon. And it wasn’t my place to discuss—”

  She cut him off. “You’ve never told Marino, have you? About John Jay, about your apartment here?”

  “I haven’t told him Kay’s in and out of New York. I haven’t told him about Lucy’s moving here.”

  “No, in other words.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I talked to him, and have no idea what he might have found out on his own. But you’re right. I never expected anything like this to happen when I recommended you hire him. However, it wasn’t my place to divulge—”

  She cut him off again. “Divulge? You divulged plenty, just not the whole truth.”

  “It would be hearsay. . . .”

  “His was such a sad story. And savvy prosecutor that I am, I fell for it without question. Marino and his problem with alcohol. Quits his job because he can’t deal with your engagement to Kay, and he’s depressed and self-destructive. A month in a treatment center, good as new, and I should hire him. After all, he started out his career with NYPD, and he wasn’t a stranger to me. I believe the phrase you used was mutually beneficial.”

  “He’s a damn good investigator. At least give me credit for that.”

  “Did you really think—for even five minutes—that he’d never find out? That Kay and Lucy would never find out, for God’s sake? At any given moment, Kay could be summoned to my office to go over an autopsy report that Marino has something to do with—which will probably happen, by the way. She’s in and out of the morgue as a consultant. She’s on CNN every other week.”

  “For all he knows, she does CNN by satellite from Boston.”

  “Oh, please. Marino hasn’t had a lobotomy since you saw him last. But I’m starting to wonder if you have.”

  “Look,” Benton said, “I hoped if enough time passed . . . Well, we’d deal with it. And I don’t pass on tawdry stories that are, if we’re honest, nothing more than rumors.”

  “Nonsense. What you wanted was to avoid dealing with reality, and that’s how this entire mess has happened.”

  “I was putting off dealing with it. Yes.”

  “Putting it off until when? The next life?”

  “Until I figured out what to do about it. I lost control of it.”

  “Now we’re getting close to the facts of the case. This isn’t about hearsay, and you know it. It’s about your head in the sand,” she said.

  “All I wanted, Jaime, was to restore some civility. Restore something. To move on and do so without malice, without irrevocable damage.”

  “To magically make everybody friends again. Restore the past, the good ol’ days. Happily ever after. Delusions. Fairy tales. I imagine Lucy hates him. Probably Kay doesn’t. She’s not the sort to hate.”

  “I don’t know what the hell Lucy will do when she sees him. And she will. T
hen what? It’s a big concern. It’s not funny.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “You’ve seen her in action. This is serious.”

  “I was hoping she’d outgrown killing people in the line of what she considers duty.”

  “She’s going to see him eventually, or know about it, at least,” Benton said. “Since you’ve decided to avail yourself of her forensic computer skills.”

  “Which, by the way, I found out from the DA in Queens County and a couple of cops. Not from you. Because you didn’t want me to know she was here, either, because you hoped I’d never use her—nice de facto uncle that you are. Because if I decided to use her, one day she’d show up at my office, and guess who she might run into?”

  “When you talked to her on the phone, is that what happened?” Benton asked. “You said something about Marino?”

  “To my knowledge, she doesn’t know about him. Yet. Because no. I didn’t mention him. I was too busy worrying about this woman who was murdered last night and what might be on her laptops and what Lucy could do to help. I was too busy thinking about the last time I saw Lucy in my own apartment after she’d come back from Poland, and you and I both know what she did over there. Brilliant, brash. A vigilante with no respect for boundaries. Now she’s started this forensic computer investigation company. Connextions. Interesting name, I thought, as in connections and What’s next? And we all know, whatever’s next, Lucy will be there first. And what a relief. It didn’t sound like the Lucy I once knew. Showed less of a need to overpower and impress, more thoughtful, more reflective. She used to be into all these acronyms, remember? When she was the wunderkind doing a summer internship at Quantico. CAIN. Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network. She designs a system like that when she’s, what, still in high school? No bloody wonder she was so obnoxious, such a renegade, so out of bounds. And friendless. But maybe she’s changed. When I talked to her—granted, over the phone, not in person—she sounded mature, not so grandiose and self-absorbed, and she appreciated my reaching out to her first. Certainly not the old Lucy.”

  Benton was rather stunned that she remembered so much about the old Lucy or seemed so fascinated by the new one.