“That doesn’t explain the Dr. Self connection.”
“Sending photographs to her indicates he’s created a psychological landscape and a ritual for his crimes. And it also becomes a game, serves a purpose. Removes him from the horror of what he’s doing, because to face the fact that he’s sadistically inflicting pain and death might be more than he can bear. So he has to give it a meaning. He has to make it cunning.” She retrieves a very unscientific but practical packet of Post-its from her crime scene case. “Rather much like religion. If you do something in the name of God, that makes it okay. Stoning people to death. Burning them at the stake. The Inquisition. The Crusades. Oppressing people who aren’t just like you. He’s given a meaning to what he does. My opinion, anyway.”
She probes the bed with a bright white light, and uses the sticky side of Post-its to collect any fibers, hairs, dirt, or sand she sees.
“Then you don’t think Dr. Self is personally significant to this guy? That she’s just a prop in his drama? That he just latched on to her because she’s there. On the air. A household name.”
Scarpetta places the Post-its in a plastic evidence bag and seals it with yellow crime scene tape that she labels and dates with a Sharpie. She and Lucy begin to fold the bedspread.
“I think it’s extremely personal,” Scarpetta replies. “You don’t place someone in the matrix of your game or psychological drama if it isn’t personal. I can’t answer the why part of it.”
A loud ripping noise as Lucy tears a large sheet of brown paper from its roll.
“For example, he may have never met her. Same thing stalkers do. Or he might have,” Scarpetta says. “For all we know, he’s been on her show or has spent time with her.”
They center the folded spread on the paper.
“You’re right. One way or other, it’s personal,” Lucy decides. “Maybe he kills the woman in Bari and does all but confess it to Dr. Maroni, perhaps thinking Dr. Self will find out. Well, she doesn’t. So now what?”
“He feels even more ignored.”
“Then what?”
“Escalation.”
“What happens when Mother doesn’t pay attention to her profoundly disturbed and damaged child?” Scarpetta asks as she wraps.
“Let me think,” Lucy says. “The child grows up to be me?”
Scarpetta cuts off a strip of yellow tape and says, “What a terrible thing. Torture and kill women who were guests on your show. Or do it to get your attention.”
The sixty-inch flat-screen television talks to Marino. It tells him something about Madelisa that he can use against her.
“That a plasma screen?” he asks. “Must be the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”
She’s overweight, with heavy-lidded eyes, and could use a good dentist. Her dentures remind him of a white picket fence, and her hairstylist ought to be shot. She sits on a floral-print couch, her hands fidgety.
She says, “My husband and his toys. I don’t know what it is, except big and expensive.”
“Must be something watching a game on that thing. Me? I’d probably sit in front of it, never get a damn thing done.”
Which is probably what she does. Sit in front of the TV like a zombie.
“What do you like to watch?” he asks.
“I like crime shows and mysteries, because I can usually figure them out. But after what just happened to me, I’m not sure I can watch anything violent ever again.”
“Then you probably know a lot about forensics,” Marino says. “Seeing as how you watch all these crime shows.”
“I was on jury duty about a year ago and knew more about forensics than the judge did. That doesn’t say much about the judge. But I know a few things.”
“How about image recovery?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“As in photographs, videotapes, digital recordings that have been erased.”
“Would you like some iced tea? I can make it.”
“Not right now.”
“I think Ashley’s going to pick up some Jimmy Dengate’s. You ever had fried chicken from there? He’ll be home any minute, and maybe you’d like some.”
“What I’d like is for you to quit changing the subject. See, with image recovery, it’s next to impossible to totally get rid of a digital image that’s on a disk or memory stick or whatever. You can delete stuff all day and we can get it back.” This isn’t entirely true, but Marino has no compunction about lying.
Madelisa looks like a cornered mouse.
“You know what I’m getting at, don’t you?” Marino says, and he’s got her where he wants her but he doesn’t feel good about it, and he himself isn’t quite sure what he’s getting at.
When Scarpetta called him a while ago and said Turkington is suspicious about what Mr. Dooley erased because he kept mentioning it during the interview, Marino said he’d get an answer. More than anything right now, he wants to please Scarpetta, make her think something’s still worthwhile about him. He was shocked she called him.
“Why are you asking me?” Madelisa says, and she begins to cry. “I said, I don’t know anything other than what I already told that investigator.”
She continues glancing past Marino toward the back of her small, yellow house. Yellow wallpaper, yellow carpet. Marino’s never seen so much yellow. It looks like an interior decorator peed on everything the Dooleys own.
“The reason I bring up image recovery is I understand your husband erased part of what he videotaped out there on the beach,” Marino says, unmoved by her tears.
“It was just me standing in front of the house before I had permission. That’s the only thing he erased. Of course, I never did get permission, because how could I? It’s not that I didn’t try. I have manners.”
“I really don’t give a shit about you and your manners. What I care about is what you’re hiding from me and everybody else.” He leans forward in the recliner chair. “I know damn well you’re not being totally honest with me. Why do I know that? Because of science.”
He doesn’t know anything of the sort. To recover deleted images from a digital recorder isn’t a given. If it can be done at all, the process is painstaking and would take a while.
“Please don’t,” she begs him. “I’m so sorry, but please don’t take him. I love him so much.”
Marino has no idea what she’s talking about. It occurs to him she means her husband, but he isn’t sure.
He says, “If I don’t take him, what then? How do I explain it when I leave here and I’m asked?”
“Pretend you don’t know about it.” She cries harder. “What difference does it make? He didn’t do anything. Oh, the poor baby. Who knows what he’s been through. He was shaking and had blood on him. He didn’t do anything except get scared and escape, and if you take him you know what will happen. They’ll put him to sleep. Oh, please, let me keep him. Please! Please! Please!”
“Why did he have blood on him?” Marino asks.
In the master bathroom, Scarpetta shines a flashlight obliquely over an onyx floor the color of tigereye.
“Bare footprints,” she says from the doorway. “Smallish. Maybe hers again. And more hair.”
“If what Madelisa Dooley says is to be believed, he had to have walked around in here. This is so weird,” Becky says as Lucy shows up with a small blue-and-yellow box and a bottle of sterile water.
Scarpetta steps inside the bathroom. She pulls open the tiger-striped shower curtain and shines the light inside the deep copper tub. Nothing, then something catches her attention, and she picks up what looks like a piece of broken white pottery that for some reason was between a bar of white soap and a dish hooked to the side of the tub. She examines it carefully. She gets out her jeweler’s lens.
“Part of a dental crown,” she says. “Not porcelain. A temporary that somehow got broken.”
“I wonder where the rest of it is,” Becky says, crouching in the doorway and peering at the floor, turning on her flashlight and shining it in all directions. “Unless it’s not recent.”
“Could have gone down the drain. We should check the trap. Could be anywhere.” Scarpetta thinks she sees
