it’s part of a plan. And you can’t tell anyone anything I don’t want them to know. Right now, legally, you can’t reveal anything that goes on between us. Not even to your husband. I allowed him to do my psychological eval, and he’ll tell you from my mental-health assessment that I’m not crazy. I trust his expertise. More important, I knew he could get to you.”
“Did you tell him what you’re telling me?”
“I let him do the eval, and that’s all. I said he could check my mind and you could check the rest of me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t cooperate. You can’t tell him what I say. Not even him. If that changes and I get falsely accused and you get subpoenaed? By then you’ll believe in me and fight for me anyway. You should believe in me. It’s not like you’ve never heard of me.”
“Why would you think I’ve heard of you?”
“I see.” His stare was fierce. “You’ve been instructed not to talk. Fine. I don’t like this game. But okay. Fine. All I ask is you listen to me and not betray me or violate your sworn oath.”
Scarpetta should stop now. But she was thinking about Berger. Oscar hadn’t threatened Berger. Not yet. Unless he did, Scarpetta couldn’t reveal a word he said, but that didn’t stop her from worrying about Berger, about anybody close to Berger. She wished he would come right out with it and say in no uncertain terms that he was a danger to Berger or to someone. Then no more confidentiality, and at the very least, he would be arrested for communicating a threat.
“I’m going to take notes, which I’ll keep in a file as a consultation,” Scarpetta said.
“Yes, notes. I want a record of the truth in your hands. In case something happens.”
She slipped a pad of paper and pen out of a pocket of her lab coat.
“In case I die,” he said. “There’s probably no way out. They’ll probably get me. This will probably be my last New Year’s Day. Probably I don’t care.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Whatever I do, wherever I go, they know.”
“What about right now?”
“Maybe. But you know?” He looked at the door. “There’s a lot of steel to get through. I’m not sure they can get through it, but I’m going to be careful what I say and what I think. You need to listen carefully. You need to read my mind while you can. Eventually, they’ll completely control what’s left of my free will, my thoughts. Maybe what they’re doing is practice. They have to practice on someone. We know the CIA’s had covert behavior- modification neuro-electromagnetic programs for half a century, and who do you think they practice on? And what do you think happens if you go to the police? Mysteriously, no report is filed. Same thing that happened when I reported it to Ms. Berger. I was ignored. And now Terri’s dead. I’m not paranoid. I’m not suffering some schizoid, psychotic episode. I don’t have a personality disorder. I’m not delusional. I don’t believe the Air Loom Gang is after me with their infernal machine, although one has to wonder about the politicians and if that’s why we’re at war in the Middle East. Of course, I’m being facetious, although not much would surprise me anymore.”
“You seem very well versed in psychology and psychiatric history.”
“I have a Ph.D. I teach the history of psychiatry at Gotham College.”
She’d never heard of it and asked him where it was.
“It’s nowhere,” he said.
Her username was Shrew because her husband used to call her that. He didn’t always mean it as an insult. Sometimes it was a term of endearment.
“Don’t be such a goddamn shrew,” he would say, verbatim, after her complaints about his cigars or not picking up after himself. “Let’s have a drink, my darling little shrew” usually meant it was five p.m. and he was in a decent mood and wanted to watch the news.
She’d carry in their drinks and a bowl of cashews, and he’d pat the cushion next to him on the tawny corduroy couch. After a half-hour of the news, which, needless to say, was never good, he would get quiet and not call her a shrew or talk to her, and dinner would be the sounds of eating, after which he would retreat to the bedroom and read. One day he went out on an errand and never came back.
She had no illusions about what he’d have to say were he still here. He wouldn’t approve of her being the anonymous system administrator for the Gotham Gotcha website. He would call what she did disgusting detritus that was intended to ruthlessly exploit and inflict disease upon people, and would say it was insane for her to work a job where she’d never met any of those involved or for that matter didn’t know their names. He would say it was outrageously suspicious that Shrew did not know who the anonymous columnist was.
Most of all, he would be aghast that she had been hired over the phone by an “agent” who wasn’t an American. He said he lived in the UK, but he sounded about as English as Tony Soprano, and had forced Shrew to sign numerous legal documents without her own counsel reviewing them first. When she’d done everything asked of her, she was given a trial run of one month. Without pay. At the end of that period, no one had called to tell her what a marvelous job she’d done or how thrilled the Boss (as Shrew thought of the anonymous columnist) was to have her onboard. She’d never heard a word.
And so she continued, and every two weeks, money was wired into her bank account. No taxes were withheld, and she received no benefits, nor was she reimbursed for any expenses she might incur, such as when she’d needed a new computer some months back and a range extender for the wireless network. She wasn’t given sick leave or vacation days or paid overtime, but as the agent had explained, it was part of the job description to be “on the call twenty-forty-seven.”
In an earlier life, Shrew had held real jobs with real companies, her last one a database marketing manager for a consulting firm. She was no tabula rasa, was all too aware that her current employment demands were unreasonable and she had grounds to sue the company if she knew whom she worked for. But she wouldn’t think of complaining. She was paid reasonably well, and it was an honor to work for an anonymous celebrity whose column was the most talked-about one in New York, if not the entire country.
The holidays were an especially busy time for Shrew. Not for personal reasons, because she really wasn’t allowed to have personal reasons for anything. But website traffic inevitably surged, and the banner on the home page was a tremendous challenge. Shrew was clever, but admittedly had never been an especially gifted graphic artist.
This time of year the publishing schedule was escalated as well. Instead of three columns per week, the Boss picked up the pace to please the fans and sponsors, and rewarded them for a year of being a faithful, enthusiastic, lucrative audience. Beginning Christmas Eve, Shrew was to post a column daily. On occasion, she was fortunate and got several at once and made adjustments, and they waited in a queue for auto release, and she was allowed a respite, could run a frivolous errand or two, or get her hair done, or go for a walk, instead of waiting for the Boss to get on with things. The Boss never thought twice about Shrew’s inconveniences, and the truth was, it might be more dismal than that.
Shrew suspected the Boss deliberately orchestrated it, no doubt through programming, so that columns were shipped one at a time although several days of them had been done in advance and were already in the can. What this implied was two important bits of intelligence.
First, unlike Shrew, the Boss had a life and stockpiled work so he or she could do other things, maybe take a trip or be with friends or family, or simply rest. Second, the Boss did think about Shrew, was invested enough in their relationship to remind her regularly that she was small and unimportant, and was owned and controlled by whoever the anonymous celebrity might be. Shrew’s was a nonexistence, and it was not her right to be granted a day or two when the work was done and she didn’t need to think about it. She was to wait on the Boss and serve at the Boss’s pleasure. The Boss answered Shrew’s prayers or didn’t, rather much with a finger on the mouse, the cursor on send.
It was fortunate, really, that Shrew would dread the holidays were she given the opportunity to enjoy them, because they were nothing more than an empty ship that took her from one year into the next, reminding her of what she didn’t have and what wasn’t ahead, and that biology was unkind and played mischievous tricks on the mind. She didn’t recall the process being a gradual one, as logic had always told her it would be—a little gray hair here, a wrinkle or stiff joint there.
It seemed that one day she looked in the mirror and didn’t find the thirty-year-old she was inside or
