“I’ve been meaning to ask.” Berger’s shrewd, pretty face studied Benton. “If Kay’s Lucy’s aunt, does that make you Lucy’s uncle? Or are you a de facto uncle, an almost uncle? Does she call you Uncle Benton?”
“Lucy doesn’t listen to her almost uncle or her aunt. I hope she’ll listen to you.” Benton knew damn well what Berger was doing.
She was sticking him, goading him. She wanted him to bring up that damn gossip column, to confess and surrender himself to the mercy of her court. But he had his mind made up. He wasn’t going to volunteer anything because he’d done nothing wrong. When the timing was right, he could defend himself easily. He could explain his silence and justify it by reminding her that, legally, Marino had been neither charged nor accused of anything, and Scarpetta’s privacy wasn’t Benton’s to violate.
“Does Lucy have the laptops?” he asked.
“Not yet. But she will. And as soon as she determines the details of the e-mail accounts, we’ll go to the providers and get the passwords. Including Oscar’s.”
“When you met with her to discuss what she’s going to—”
“I haven’t met with her yet,” Berger interrupted him. “Only talked to her briefly over the phone. I’m surprised you never told me she’d moved to the city. On second thought, I shouldn’t be surprised.” She reached for her coffee. “I had to find out from several sources she’d recently moved here and started her own company. She’s built a reputation rather quickly, which is why I decided to ask for her help in this particular case.”
She drank coffee and set the mug back down, her every move thoughtful and deliberate.
“You have to understand that he and I don’t routinely have contact with each other,” she said.
She meant Marino. The cross-examination had begun.
“Knowing what I do, assuming there’s any truth to it,” she said, “I can’t imagine Lucy told him she was here or has had any contact with him at all—or even knows that he’s here. I’m wondering why you didn’t tell her. Or am I making an unfair assumption? Have you told her?”
“No.”
“That’s quite something. She relocates to New York, and you’ve never told her he’s here. Alive and well in my DA squad. And maybe his secret would have been safe a little longer if it wasn’t his bad luck that he’s the one who took Oscar’s call last month.”
“Lucy’s still setting up shop, hasn’t been involved in many cases yet,” Benton said. “A couple in the Bronx and Queens. This will be the first in Manhattan, in other words, involving your office. Of course, at some point, she and Marino were going to find out about each other. I expected that to happen naturally and professionally.”
“You didn’t expect anything of the sort, Benton. You’ve been in complete denial. You’ve made flawed and desperate decisions and not logically thought through the inevitable consequences. And now your two degrees of separation have begun to converge. Must be an indescribable feeling, moving people around like pawns only to wake up one day and realize that because of a banal gossip column, your pawns are now destined to confront each other and possibly knock each other off your game board. Let me try to recap what’s happened.”
With a slight movement of her fingers, she said no to the waitress and her coffeepot.
“Your original plan didn’t include a residence in New York,” Berger said.
“I didn’t know John Jay was going to—”
“Ask both of you to be visiting lecturers, consultants? I bet you tried to talk Kay out of it.”
“I thought it was unwise.”
“Of course you did.”
“She’d just been hired as chief, relocated her entire existence. I advised against her taking on more work, more stress. I told her she shouldn’t do it.”
“Of course you did.”
“She was insistent. Said it would be good to help if we could. And she didn’t want to be limited.”
“That would be Kay,” Berger said. “Always one to help anywhere she can and position herself accordingly. The world is her stage. You couldn’t possibly coop her up in a corner of Massachusetts, and you couldn’t push too hard because then you’d have to tell her why you didn’t want her in New York. You found yourself with a problem on your hands. You’d already moved Marino to New York, and let’s be honest, talked me into hiring him. And now Kay’s going to be in and out of New York, and possibly end up helping in cases that will involve my office. Since both of you are going to be in and out of New York, why not? Lucy moves to the great city of opportunity, as well. What better place on the planet for her than the Village? How could you possibly have anticipated all this when you came up with your master design? And since you didn’t anticipate it, you also didn’t anticipate I’d find out the real reason you parked Marino in my office.”
“I’m not going to say I never worried about it,” Benton replied. “I simply hoped it wouldn’t happen anytime soon. And it wasn’t my place to discuss—”
She cut him off. “You’ve never told Marino, have you? About John Jay, about your apartment here?”
“I haven’t told him Kay’s in and out of New York. I haven’t told him about Lucy’s moving here.”
“No, in other words.”
“I can’t remember the last time I talked to him, and have no idea what he might have found out on his own. But you’re right. I never expected anything like this to happen when I recommended you hire him. However, it wasn’t my place to divulge—”
She cut him off again. “Divulge? You divulged plenty, just not the whole truth.”
“It would be hearsay. . . .”
“His was such a sad story. And savvy prosecutor that I am, I fell for it without question. Marino and his problem with alcohol. Quits his job because he can’t deal with your engagement to Kay, and he’s depressed and self-destructive. A month in a treatment center, good as new, and I should hire him. After all, he started out his career with NYPD, and he wasn’t a stranger to me. I believe the phrase you used was mutually beneficial. ”
“He’s a damn good investigator. At least give me credit for that.”
“Did you really think—for even five minutes—that he’d never find out? That Kay and Lucy would never find out, for God’s sake? At any given moment, Kay could be summoned to my office to go over an autopsy report that Marino has something to do with—which will probably happen, by the way. She’s in and out of the morgue as a consultant. She’s on CNN every other week.”
“For all he knows, she does CNN by satellite from Boston.”
“Oh, please. Marino hasn’t had a lobotomy since you saw him last. But I’m starting to wonder if you have.”
“Look,” Benton said, “I hoped if enough time passed . . . Well, we’d deal with it. And I don’t pass on tawdry stories that are, if we’re honest, nothing more than rumors.”
“Nonsense. What you wanted was to avoid dealing with reality, and that’s how this entire mess has happened.”
“I was putting off dealing with it. Yes.”
“Putting it off until when? The next life?”
“Until I figured out what to do about it. I lost control of it.”
“Now we’re getting close to the facts of the case. This isn’t about hearsay, and you know it. It’s about your head in the sand,” she said.
“All I wanted, Jaime, was to restore some civility. Restore something. To move on and do so without malice, without irrevocable damage.”
“To magically make everybody friends again. Restore the past, the good ol’ days. Happily ever after. Delusions. Fairy tales. I imagine Lucy hates him. Probably Kay doesn’t. She’s not the sort to hate.”
“I don’t know what the hell Lucy will do when she sees him. And she will. Then what? It’s a big concern. It’s not funny.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“You’ve seen her in action. This is serious.”
“I was hoping she’d outgrown killing people in the line of what she considers duty.”
“She’s going to see him eventually, or know about it, at least,” Benton said. “Since you’ve decided to avail yourself of her forensic computer skills.”
“Which, by the way, I found out from the DA in Queens County and a couple of cops. Not from you. Because you didn’t want me to know she was here, either, because you hoped I’d never use her—nice de facto uncle that you are. Because if I decided to use her, one day she’d show up at my office, and guess who she might
