“Since when is it about what the inmate wants?”
“PR, political reasons, and he’s not an inmate, not that anybody on the ward’s considered an inmate once they’ve been admitted. They’re patients.” His nervous ramblings didn’t sound like him as he heard himself talk. “As I’ve said, he’s not been charged with any crime. There’s no warrant. There’s nothing. He’s basically a civil admission. We can’t make him stay the minimum seventy-two hours because he didn’t sign a consent form, and as I said, he’s not been charged with a crime, at least not yet. Maybe that will change after you’ve seen him. But at this moment, he can leave whenever he wants.”
“You’re expecting me to find something that will give the police probable cause to charge him with murder? And what do you mean he didn’t sign . . . ? Back up. This patient signed himself into a prison ward with the proviso he can walk out the door whenever he pleases?”
“I’ll explain more when I see you. I’m not expecting you to find anything. No expectations, Kay. I’m just asking you to come because it’s a very complicated situation. And Berger really wants you here.”
“Even though he might be gone by the time I get there.”
He detected the question she wasn’t going to ask. He wasn’t acting like the cool, unflappable forensic psychologist she had known for twenty years, but she wasn’t going to point that out. She was in the morgue and she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t going to ask him what the hell was wrong with him.
Benton said, “He definitely won’t leave before you get here.”
“I don’t understand why he’s there.” She wasn’t going to let that go.
“We’re not entirely sure. But in a nutshell? When the cops arrived at the scene, he insisted on being transported to Bellevue. . . .”
“His name?”
“Oscar Bane. He said the only person he’d allow to conduct the psychological evaluation was me. So I was called, and as you know, I left immediately for New York. He’s afraid of doctors. Gets panic attacks.”
“How did he know who you are?”
“Because he knows who you are.”
“He knows who I am?”
“The cops have his clothes, but he says if they want any evidence collected from him physically—and there’s no warrant, as I keep emphasizing—it will have to be you who does it. We hoped he’d calm down, agree to let a local ME take care of him. Never going to happen. He’s more adamant than ever. Says he’s terrified of doctors. Has odynephobia, dishabiliophobia.”
“He’s afraid of pain and taking his clothes off?”
“And caligynephobia. Fear of beautiful women.”
“I see. So that’s why he’d feel safe with me.”
“That part was supposed to be funny. He thinks you’re beautiful, and he’s definitely not afraid of you. I’m the one who should be afraid.”
That was the truth of the matter. Benton didn’t want her here. He didn’t even want her in New York right now.
“Let me make sure I understand. Jaime Berger wants me to fly there in a snowstorm, examine a patient on a prison ward who hasn’t been charged with a crime—”
“If you can get out of Boston, the weather’s fine here. Just cold.” Benton looked out his window and saw nothing but gray.
“Let me finish up with my Army Reservist sergeant who was a casualty in Iraq but didn’t know it until he got home. And I’ll see you mid-afternoon,” she said.
“Fly safe. I love you.”
Benton hung up, started tapping the down arrow again, then the up arrow, reading and re-reading, as though if he read the anonymous gossip column often enough, it wouldn’t seem so offensive, so ugly, so hateful. “Sticks and stones,” Scarpetta always said. Maybe that was true in grammar school, but not in their adult lives. Words could hurt. They could hurt badly. What kind of monster would write something like this? How did the monster find out?
He reached for the phone.
Scarpetta paid scant attention to Bryce as he drove her to Logan International Airport. He’d been talking nonstop about one thing or another ever since picking her up at her house.
Mainly, he’d been complaining about Dr. Jack Fielding, reminding her yet again that returning to the past was like a dog returning to its own vomit. Or Lot’s wife looking back and turning into a pillar of salt. Bryce’s biblical analogies were endless and irritating and had nothing to do with his religious beliefs, assuming he had any, but were leftover pearls from a college term paper he’d done on the Bible as literature.
Her administrative assistant’s point was you don’t hire people from your past. Fielding was from Scarpetta’s past. He’d had his problems, but then who hadn’t? When she had accepted the position up here and had started looking for a deputy chief, she wondered what Fielding was doing, tracked him down, and found out he wasn’t doing much.
Benton’s input had been unusually toothless, maybe even patronizing, which made more sense to her now. He’d said she was looking for stability, and often people move backward instead of forward when they are overwhelmed by change. Feeling the desire to hire someone she’d known since the early days of her career was understandable, Benton had said. But the danger in looking back was that we saw only what we wanted to see, he’d added. We saw what made us feel safe.
What Benton had chosen to avoid is why she didn’t feel safe to begin with. He hadn’t wanted to get within range of how she really felt about her domestic life with him, which was as chaotic and dissonant as it had ever been. Since their relationship began with an adulterous affair more than fifteen years ago, they’d never lived in the same place, didn’t know the meaning of day-to-day togetherness, until last summer. Theirs had been a very simple ceremony in the garden behind her carriage house in Charleston, South Carolina, where she’d just set up a private practice that she then was forced to close.
Afterward, they’d moved to Belmont, Massachusetts, to be near his psychiatric hospital, McLean, and her new headquarters in Watertown, where she’d accepted the position of chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth’s Northeastern District. Because of their proximity to New York, she thought it a fine idea for them to accept John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s invitation to serve as visiting lecturers there, which included offering pro bono consultation for the NYPD, the New York Medical Examiner’s office, and forensic psychiatric units such as the one at Bellevue.
“. . . I know it’s not the sort of thing you’d look at or maybe even be a big deal to you, but at the risk of pissing you off, I’m going to point it out.” Bryce’s voice penetrated her preoccupations.
She said, “What big deal?”
“Well, hello? Don’t mind me. I was just talking to myself.”
“I’m sorry. Rewind the tape.”
“I didn’t say anything after staff meeting because I didn’t want to distract you from all the shit going on this morning. Thought I’d wait until you were done and we could have a little heart-to-heart behind your closed door. And since nobody’s said anything to me, I don’t think they saw it. Which is good, right? As if Jack isn’t pissy enough this morning. Of course, he’s always pissy, which is why he has eczema and alopecia. And by the way, did you see the crusty lesion behind his right ear? Home for the holidays. Does wonders for the nerves.”
“How much coffee have you had today?”
“Why is it always me? Kill the messenger. You zone out until what I’m trying to convey reaches critical mass, and then kaboom, and I’m the bad guy, and bye-bye messenger. If you’re going to be in New York more than a night, please let me know a-sap so I can get coverage. Should I set up some sessions with that trainer you like so much? What’s his name?”
Bryce thought, touching a finger to his lips.
“Kit,” he answered himself. “Maybe one of these days when you need me as your boy Friday in New York, he can have a go at me. Love handles.”
He pinched his waist.
“Although I hear liposuction’s the only thing that works once you turn thirty,” he said. “Truth serum time?”
He glanced over at her, his hands gesturing as if they were something alive and not part of him.
