Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  It was like listening to the same intoxicating piece of music again and again, as she’d just done in the rain shower, every touch, every look, every accidental intention that resulted in a grazing of bodies that was so erotic and at the same time so moving because it really meant something. It wasn’t cheap. It wasn’t guilt-ridden or headed into shame. It felt perfectly right, and she simply didn’t believe it could be happening to her.

  This was a dream she’d never known enough to have, because no part of her had ever feared or wanted it any more than she had nightmares about extraterrestrials or fantastic dreams about flying machines and race cars. Those didn’t exist or were real and within reach. Jaime Berger wasn’t an impossibility or a possibility that had ever crossed Lucy’s mind, although certainly during early encounters she’d felt a giddiness, a nervousness, on the rare occasions she’d been around her, as if she were being offered an opportunity to toy with a very large, undomesticated cat, like a cheetah or a tiger, that she would never be in the same room with, much less pet.

  Lucy stood up inside the steam-filled shower, unable to see through the clouded glass, contemplating how best to have an open conversation with her aunt, to explain, to just talk.

  She pushed open the door at the same time a shape moved in front of it, and steam dissolved around Mike Morales’s face. He smiled at her, a pistol pointed inches from her head.

  “Die, bitch,” he said.

  The door yielded to one blow of the battering ram and slammed against the wall.

  Bacardi and a uniformed officer whose name she thought was Ben walked into the soft music of Coldplay as they entered apartment 2D and were confronted by Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

  “What the hell?” Bacardi said.

  Scarpetta was all over the walls. Posters, some of them from ceiling to floor, not poses but newsy photos of her on the set of CNN or walking through Ground Zero or in the morgue, preoccupied and unaware that someone was taking what Bacardi called a “thinking action shot.” Didn’t mean the person was doing something powerful, but he or she was doing it mentally.

  “It’s like a freakin’ shrine,” said Ben, or whatever his name was.

  The apartment at the back of the building, one floor above Terri Bridges’s, was unfurnished except for a simple maple desk facing a wall and, tucked under it, a small office chair. On the desk was a laptop, one of those new PowerBooks or AirBooks or whatever they were called, expensive and weighing almost nothing. Bacardi had heard stories about people accidentally throwing them away with a stack of newspapers, and could see how that might happen. The laptop was plugged into a charger, and “Clocks” was playing on iTunes—the volume turned low, playing over and over again, God knows for how long, because someone had selected repeat on the menu.

  Also on the desk were four bud vases, cheap cut glass, and in each one a withered rose. She went to the desk and pulled down one of the rose petals.

  “Yellow,” she said.

  Officer Ben, as she now thought of him, was too busy looking around at the shrine to Scarpetta to care about a few dead roses, or to understand that from the female perspective, yellow mattered. Bacardi’s need of reassurance wanted red when it came to roses, but her instinct knew better. A man who gave you yellow roses was one you’d never have, and that’s the one you wanted and should move heaven and earth to get. She glanced at Officer Ben, for an instant fearing she just might have said that out loud.

  “Well, guess what?” she said, her voice bouncing off old plaster walls as she walked on bare hardwood floors, going from room to room. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, because it looks like the only thing in here’s a computer and toilet paper.”

  When she walked back in, Officer Ben was still looking around at photographs of Scarpetta that were as big as Times Square in proportion to their location. He shone his flashlight on them as if that might tell him something.

  “While you gawk,” Bacardi said, “I’m going to call Pete— Investigator Marino to you—and find out just what the hell we’re supposed to do with Gotham Gotcha. You got any idea how to arrest a website, Ben?”

  “Ban,” he corrected her. “For Bannerman,” he said.

  His light trailed over the huge posters like a comet on its last legs.

  “If I were Dr. Scarpetta,” he said, “I might hire a couple body-guards.”

  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 ou
t 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.