head. You’re wondering if I was ever inside her apartment, and I never was. I’ve never even been inside her building, and wouldn’t have the foggiest notion as to what she owned that a burglar might have been after. Like jewelry, for example. I don’t recall her wearing expensive-looking jewelry. Indeed, I don’t recall her wearing any jewelry. I asked her why in the world I would want another puppy, warranty or not, from that same shop where her boyfriend got Ivy. She said there was no warranty and she had no intention of getting anything from that shop, but I shouldn’t be judgmental. Not every place is as bad as that horrid Puppingham Palace. For example, she said the Tell-Tail Hearts chain of shops is wonderful, and she’d happily give me money if I wanted to get a puppy from there, from one of the shops here in New York or in New Jersey. I have read nice things about Tell-Tail Hearts, and I have been thinking seriously about trying again. Honestly, I just might in light of what’s happened. Anything that barks or growls. Burglars don’t break in if there’s a dog.”
“Except you have to take it out,” Investigator Marino said. “Including in the middle of the night. Which leaves you wide open for getting mugged or having someone force his way inside your building and right into your apartment.”
“I’m not naive about security,” Shrew said. “You don’t have to take a dog out if it’s small enough. Wee Wee Pads work fine. I had a Yorkie quite a long time ago and taught it to use the litter box. I could fit him in the palm of one hand, but talk about a bark. He would go for the ankles. I had to pick him up whenever we were on an elevator or when people would come over. Until he got used to them. Obviously, I didn’t take Ivy out. Not something that young and sickly on these filthy sidewalks. I’ve no doubt she already had the parvovirus when the boyfriend bought her at that dreadful Puppingham Palace.”
“What makes you so certain her boyfriend bought the puppy?”
“Goodness,” Shrew said.
She held her drink in both hands and contemplated what he was implying.
The recliner creaked as he waited.
“I’m jumping to conclusions,” she said. “You’re absolutely right.”
“Here’s what you do. What I tell every witness I talk to.”
“Witness?”
“You knew her. You live across the street.”
What was she a witness to? she asked herself as she shredded bits of tissue and stared up at the ceiling, hoping there was no access door beyond it.
“Pretend you’re writing a movie,” he said. “You got a pen and paper? Terri gives you little Ivy. Write me the scene. I’m going to sit right here while you write it up, then you’re going to read it to me.”
After Nine-Eleven, the city decided to build the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office a fifteen-story DNA building that looked like a blue-glass office high-rise.
Technology, including STRs and SNPs and low-copy-number profiling, was so advanced, scientists could analyze a sample as small as seventeen human cells. There was no backlog. If Berger wanted DNA testing in a high-priority case, theoretically she could get results in a matter of hours.
“No smoking gun,” Berger said.
She handed Benton a copy of the report as the waitress refilled their coffees.
“Just a hell of a lot of smoke,” she said. “In fact, Terri Bridges’s vaginal swabs are as confusing as I’ve seen in any case that comes to mind. No seminal fluid, and DNA from multiple donors. I spoke to Dr. Lester about it, which wasn’t helpful. I can’t wait to hear what Kay has to say about this.”
“Have all the profiles been run through CODIS?” Benton asked.
“One hit. It gets weirder. A woman.”
“In the database for what reason?” Benton scanned the report.
It didn’t tell him much—just that Dr. Lester had submitted swabs, and then the results that Berger was discussing.
“Vehicular manslaughter in 2002,” Berger said. “Fell asleep at the wheel and hit a kid on a bicycle, convicted, sentence suspended. Not here, where we wouldn’t be so nice, even if she is elderly and was stone-cold sober at the time of the accident. This was in Palm Beach, Florida, although she does have a Park Avenue apartment and is here, actually, even as we speak. But she was attending a New Year’s Eve party last night at the time Terri Bridges was murdered, not that I have any reason to suspect for a nanosecond she had anything to do with it. Another reason the judge in Palm Beach was so forgiving? She broke her back when she hit the kid on the bike. So you got any brilliant ideas why a seventy-eight-year-old female paraplegic’s DNA was in Terri Bridges’s vagina along with a host of other people’s?”
“Not unless there’s some bizarre error in the sample or the analysis?”
“I’m told there’s not a chance. In fact, to be on the safe side, since all of us have such deep respect for Dr. Lester’s competence, God, why did she have to be the one who did the damn autopsy? You are aware of that.”
“Morales gave me a few things. I’ve seen her preliminary report. You know how I feel about her.”
“And you know how she feels about me. Is it possible for a woman to be a misogynist? Because I believe she truly hates women.”
“Envy or a feeling that other women might lower the person’s status. In other words, sure. Women can be women-haters. We’ve seen plenty of that this political season.”
“The labs went ahead and began running the DNA on every case autopsied in the morgue this morning, on the off chance Terri’s swabs got contaminated or mislabeled somehow,” Berger said. “Even gone so far as to make comparisons with everybody who works at the ME’s office, including the chief, and, of course, all the cops who were at the scene last night—all of whom are already in the database for exclusionary reasons, obviously. Negative for the people in the morgue except for the ME who responded, which wasn’t Dr. Lester. And for Morales, and both guys who transported the body to the morgue. DNA testing is so sensitive these days, you breathe at a scene and good chance your DNA turns up. Which is as bad as it’s good.”
“Has someone asked this Palm Beach lady if she knows Oscar Bane or has any connection with him?” Benton asked.
“I did the unpleasant deed and called her myself,” Berger said. “Never heard of him before reading the Post. To put it diplomatically, she was indignant and unhappy at the implication she might somehow be connected to him. She said, and I’m only loosely paraphrasing, that even if she’s sitting in the same waiting room with a dwarf, she doesn’t speak or look at him for fear she might make him self-conscious.”
“Does she know why it would enter our minds to link her to Oscar? Did you mention her DNA?”
“Absolutely not. I said her name had come up. And she leapt to the conclusion that the parents of the sixteen-year-old Eagle Scout honor student she accidentally ran over in her Bentley are always trying to cause her problems. You know, shocking acts of aggression like lawsuits to pay medical bills that aren’t covered by insurance, but how is that her fault? And she complained about the sob stories to the media. She supposed that the parents no doubt heard about the, and I quote, Midget Murder, and decided to somehow drag her through more public embarrassment.”
“What a fucking bitch.”
“I’m still thinking contamination,” Berger said. “I can’t see any other explanation for the DNA. Maybe Kay will have an insight that eludes me at the moment. And tomorrow, hopefully, we’ll have Oscar’s DNA. But we expect his DNA to be on everything. A positive result isn’t likely to be helpful.”
“What about his e-mail? His consent or not, you can access it, right? I’m assuming he e-mailed Terri,” Benton said.
“We can access it, and we will. And no one’s telling him that. In summary, and I think we’ve established this clearly? He’s really not as cooperative as he might seem. Unless we find probable cause for his arrest, that won’t change. A very difficult position for me. I have to be extra-careful, yet I want to know what Kay knows. He’s telling her something up there in the infirmary. Something he’s not telling us and she’s not allowed to divulge under the current circumstances. I’m sure I don’t need to ask, but she has no history with Oscar Bane?”
“If she does, she didn’t know about it, didn’t remember it, or she would have said something the minute I mentioned his name when I called her earlier,” Benton said. “But we’re not going to find out unless Oscar is
