in history.
But she couldn’t tell a soul, not even the police investigator who had just been here. She couldn’t take credit. She couldn’t have friends and run the risk she might make a slip. It was just as well she didn’t confide in her daughters or have much contact with them. It was probably wise never to date or marry again. Even if she quit the website, she could never breathe a word of her former remarkable anonymous career. She’d signed enough nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements to send her to prison for life, land her in the poorhouse, or—and maybe she was getting silly—result in unnatural death if she committed even the smallest infraction. But what could she divulge?
She didn’t know who Gotham Gotcha was. The columnist could be a man, a woman, old, young, American, or not. Or the website phenomenon could be a collection of people, maybe a bunch of young smart alecks from MIT or spies in China or a small pool of genius kids at a mega Internet search technology company. Shrew was paid well enough, and took enormous pride in being an anonymous celebrity by proxy, but the arrangement had begun to seriously wear on her in a way she hadn’t seen coming. She was beginning to doubt her own raison d’etre, which probably had something to do with why she had behaved like such a fool when Investigator Marino had stopped by.
Shrew was starved for interaction with flesh and blood, for conversation and attention and validation, and had lost the art of having a substantive dialogue with a human being who was present. It had been an extraordinary event for her to have a living soul sit in her family room and notice the puppy hairs stuck in her rug, or bear witness to her wearing her red velour warm-up lounging suit that was splotched light pink in places from a mishap with bleach. She’d been sorry when he’d left, and at the same time relieved, but mostly sorry, the more she’d been thinking about it. She’d had no idea what desolate straits she was in. Now she knew and she could see why. She most certainly could. Who wouldn’t be?
The invisible money wired to her bank account every two weeks, the impersonal and ungrateful e-mailed remarks and instructions she received now and then, may as well come from God, who Shrew also had never met and never seen a picture of, and whose real name was debatable. If Shrew needed encouragement, praise, gratitude, a holiday or birthday gift, maybe a raise, neither the Boss nor God was interested. Both remained silent and unseen.
She could forgive God, she supposed, who had a universe of employees and disciples to look after. But she was feeling less charitable about the Boss, who had only Shrew. Something about Investigator Marino’s visit today had resulted in clarity. While Shrew was the first to acknowledge that the Boss had created her, although she was grateful, she realized she was resentful. Shrew had signed her life away. She had no dog and no friends, didn’t dare travel or engage in candid conversations, and had no visitors, unless they were uninvited. The only person she could even have called an acquaintance had been murdered last night.
What awful terms Shrew had accepted for how to live her life. And life was short. It could end—and end horribly—in a blink. The Boss was a selfish user, uncaring, and completely unfair. Without Shrew, the Boss would not be able to populate the website with what Shrew chose from the thousands of gossipy e-mails and images and cranky, crude comments and mean mentions that were sent by fans. Shrew did all the work, and the Boss got all the credit, even if the fans didn’t know who the Boss was.
Shrew sat at her desk in front of her computer, the curtains drawn so she didn’t have to look at the building across the street and think of the horror that had happened. Shrew didn’t want to look at the police car still parked in front of Terri’s apartment, and have the policeman it belonged to report to Investigator Marino that the neighbor he had interviewed earlier was spying out her window. Although she would enjoy another visit, she couldn’t afford one. Investigator Marino was suspicious of her already. She was certain he believed she’d seen something last night, and having done a little research on the Internet after he left, she could understand why.
Terri’s death was quite a mystery, and a very ugly one. No one was saying how she died, only that the blond man with the yellow rose, whom Shrew had said hello to not long ago, was locked up at Bellevue just like the Son of Sam had been when he was caught, and the medical examiner who did Terri’s autopsy had released no details. But they must be gruesome. The case must be of huge importance because Dr. Scarpetta had, indeed, been called in to help. That was the belief, based on her being spotted at both Logan and La Guardia airports this afternoon, then being sighted again at Bellevue, pulling a suitcase with a wobbly wheel, apparently on her way to meet her forensic psychologist husband on the men’s prison ward, where the boyfriend was being held.
No doubt the Boss would get yet another column out of Dr. Scarpetta, and that was too bad. Blogs everywhere were responding to both of the columns posted today, and the opinions dramatically varied. While quite a number of people thought it a disgrace that any sexual violation of Scarpetta, whether by Investigator Marino or Sister Polly, was made public, there were plenty of other people who wanted more.
Details! Details!
Why would someone break a little kid’s pencils?
Women like her ask for it. That’s why they’re attracted to crime.
I’m surprised about the investigator but not about the nun.
Shrew had been unusually unmotivated since Investigator Marino had left, and she’d better get with it and start weeding through the most recent information and images sent by fans, on the off chance there was something important she should post or move to the Boss’s research folder.
She opened and deleted scores of banal, boring gossipy anecdotes, alleged sightings, and images taken with cell phone cameras until she came to an e-mail that had been sent several hours ago. Immediately, she was excited by the subject line but skeptical:
NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTO! MARILYN MONROE IN THE MORGUE
There was no message, only an attachment. Shrew downloaded the image, and as it appeared in high resolution on her screen, she felt a thrill that made her understand what people meant when they said their hair stood on end.
“My word,” she muttered. “Oh, my dear Lord,” she exclaimed.
Marilyn Monroe’s nude body was stitched up like a rag doll on top of a shiny steel autopsy table, her blond hair wetly clumped around her dead face, which was a bit swollen, but recognizable. Shrew began zooming in on every detail, the mouse clicking like mad as she did exactly what the fans were bound to do. She gawked and enlarged and gawked some more at the puckering and flattening of the movie goddess’s once gorgeous breasts caused by the dreadful railroad track of sutures that ran in a V from her collarbones to her cleavage, then all the way down her once gorgeous body, past old surgical scars, before disappearing in pubic hair. Her famous lips and blue eyes were shut, and at the highest magnification the software could muster, Shrew came upon the truth that the world had always wanted and certainly deserved.
Just like that, she knew, and could prove it.
It couldn’t be more obvious.
The details were there. Evidence: The recently dyed blond hair without a hint of dark roots showing. The perfectly plucked eyebrows. The manicured finger- and toenails, and smoothly shaven legs. She was slender, not an unseemly ounce to spare.
Marilyn had been fastidiously attending to her grooming and pampering herself, and keeping a keen eye on her weight right up to her tragic last breath. And severely depressed people didn’t do that. The photo was proof positive of what Shrew had always suspected.
She excitedly typed the copy. It had to be short. The Boss was the writer, not Shrew, and she was never allowed to craft more than fifteen words for a cutline or any sort of text on the site:
MARILYN MONROE MURDERED! (VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED)
AN ASTONISHING NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN AUTOPSY PIC PROVES WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT THAT FILM GODDESS MARILYN MONROE WASN’T DEPRESSED AT THE TIME OF HER DEATH, AND DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE.
DETAILS CLEARLY VISIBLE DURING THE AUTOPSY PERFORMED ON AUGUST 5, 1962, IN LOS ANGELES, REVEAL INDISPUTABLE EVIDENCE THAT EVIL—NOT AN ACCIDENT OR SUICIDE—ENDED MARILYN’S LIFE.
Shrew should stop at that, for heaven’s sake. A word count of sixty-two, not including numbers and punctuation, almost five times the legal limit. But certainly the Boss would make an exception in this case and in fact would give Shrew a bonus and praise for once.
She jumped into the search window and easily found what purported to be the famous Dr. Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report and lab results. She read them carefully, not sure what many of the words and phrases
