meant. She looked up “fixed lividity,” and “a slight ecchymotic area,” and “no refractile crystals found in the stomach or the duodenum.” She looked up a lot of things and got increasingly indignant.
How dare a bunch of powermongering, womanizing, selfish men do this to Marilyn! Well, the world could stop speculating about what really happened. Shrew’s fingers flew over the keyboard.
HIGHLY CLASSIFIED INFORMATION FROM THE ACTUAL AUTOPSY REPORT IS COMPLETELY CONSISTENT WITH WHAT’S PLAINLY VISIBLE IN THIS REMARKABLE PHOTO. MARILYN MONROE, NUDE AND HELPLESS, WAS FORCIBLY HELD DOWN ON HER BED (EXPLAINING BRUISES ON HER LEFT HIP AND LOWER BACK) WHILE HER KILLERS ADMINISTERED AN ENEMA HEAVILY LACED WITH BARBITURATES.
SHE CERTAINLY DIDN’T DIE FROM A SUICIDAL OVERDOSE OF NEMBUTAL, OR THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN AT LEAST A TRACE OF PILL CAPSULES AND A YELLOWISH RESIDUE IN HER STOMACH AND DUODENUM— AND THERE WASN’T. ADDED TO THAT IS THE DISCOVERY THAT HER COLON WAS DISCOLORED AND DISTENDED—JUST AS ONE WOULD EXPECT IT TO BE AFTER A POISONOUS ENEMA!
AND BY THE WAY, IF SHE GAVE HERSELF THE ENEMA AS OPPOSED TO OTHERS DOING IT, WHERE WERE ALL THOSE EMPTY PILL CAPSULES? WHERE WAS THE EMPTY ENEMA BOTTLE?
ONCE THE DRUGS WERE IN HER SYSTEM, COMMON SENSE WOULD TELL YOU SHE COULDN’T POSSIBLY HAVE RUN OUT OF HER HOUSE TO DISPOSE OF THE EVIDENCE, THEN RETURNED, TAKEN OFF HER CLOTHES, CLIMBED BACK IN BED, AND TUCKED THE COVERS NEATLY UNDER HER CHIN. AFTER THAT ENEMA, SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN INCAPACITATED, UNCONSCIOUS, AND DEAD, FAST. IN FACT, SHE NEVER EVEN MADE IT TO THE BATHROOM! AT DEATH, HER BLADDER WAS FULL! IT SAYS SO ON THE AUTOPSY REPORT!
MARILYN WAS MURDERED BECAUSE SHE WOULDN’T KEEP HER MOUTH SHUT—NO MATTER WHO GAVE THE ORDER!
The view from Jaime Berger’s office was of rampant lions carved in bas-relief on the granite building across from her eighth-floor office window.
She happened to have been gazing out that same window when American Airlines Flight 11 roared abnormally loud and low in a clear blue sky and slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Eighteen minutes later, the second plane hit the south tower. In disbelief, she watched the symbols of power she had known much of her life burn and collapse, and rain ash and debris over lower Manhattan, and she was sure the world had come to an end.
Since then, she wondered what would be different had she not been in New York that Tuesday morning, sitting in this same office, talking on the phone with Greg, who was in Buenos Aires without her because she had yet another big trial—one she could scarcely recall now.
There were always extremely important, and later hard to recall, big trials requiring her to stay in the city while Greg squired his two children from a previous marriage to wondrous spots around the world. He decided he liked London best and took a flat there, and then it turned out what he’d really taken there was a mistress, a young English barrister he’d met several years earlier while she was spending a few weeks at Berger’s office during an excessively stressful trial.
Berger had never thought twice about it when the young barrister and Greg had dinner together while Berger worked until the hands fell off the clock. As he used to put it.
She remained in a state of conjugal unconsciousness until Greg dropped by her office unannounced one day last winter to take her to lunch. They walked to Forlini’s, a favorite hangout of criminal-justice potentates and politicians, and husband and wife sat across from each other, surrounded by dark paneling and heavy oil paintings of the Old Country. He didn’t tell her he was having an affair and had been for years, just that he wanted out, and at that time and of all things, Berger’s thoughts shifted to Kay Scarpetta. There was a logical reason.
Forlini’s named booths after influential patrons, and the booth where Berger and Greg sat, coincidentally, was named for Nicholas Scoppetta, now the fire commissioner. Seeing the name Scoppetta on the wall made Berger think of Scarpetta, who Berger felt sure would have gotten up from that damn dusky rose leather booth and stalked out of the restaurant, instead of subjecting herself to, if not encouraging, blatant lies and humiliation.
But Berger didn’t move or lodge a protest. She was her usual poised, controlled self listening to Greg make the insane bullshit point that he didn’t love her anymore. He had stopped loving her after Nine-Eleven, probably because he was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, even though he was well aware he wasn’t in the country when the terrorist attack happened, but the constant replays on the news made it almost as bad as being there.
He said what had happened to America, and was continuing to happen—especially to his real-estate investments and the plummeting value of the dollar—was unbearably traumatizing, and therefore he was moving to London. He wanted a discreet divorce, and the more discreet and uncontested it was, the better off everyone would be. Berger asked if another woman might discreetly have something to do with it, just to see if he might have it in him to be honest. He’d said the question was irrelevant when a couple wasn’t in love anymore, and then made a not-so-subtle accusation that Berger had other interests, and he didn’t mean professional ones. She didn’t object, redirect, or even offer proof that she’d never violated the terms of their marital contract, even if she’d thought about it.
Berger was now discreetly divorced, discreetly rich, and discreetly isolated. Her office floor was vacant this late afternoon. It was, after all, a holiday, or a sick day, depending on how enthusiastically one had brought in the New Year. But Berger had no incentive to stay home. There was always work to be done. So with her former husband across the Pond, his children grown, and none of her own, she was alone in this cold stone Art Deco building not far from Ground Zero, nobody here to even answer the phone.
When it rang at exactly five p.m., exactly twenty-four hours after Oscar Bane said he had arrived at Terri Bridges’s brownstone, Berger picked up the receiver herself, already knowing who it was.
“No. Not the conference room,” she said to Lucy. “It’s just the two of us. We’ll do it in my office.”
Oscar stared at the clock built into a plastic case on the wall, and then covered his face with his cuffed hands.
At this time yesterday afternoon, Terri should have been opening her door to him, and maybe she did. Or maybe what he claimed was true, and by this time yesterday she was already dead. The minute hand on the wall clock twitched ahead to one past five.
Scarpetta asked, “Did Terri have any friends?”
“Online,” Oscar said. “That’s how she connected with people. That’s where she learned to trust them. Or realize she couldn’t. You know that. Why are you doing this? Why can’t you admit it? Who’s stopping you?”
“I don’t know what it is you want me to admit.”
“You’ve been instructed.”
“What makes you think I’ve been instructed? And instructed to do what?”
“Okay, fine,” Oscar said testily. “I’m getting very tired of this game. But I’ll tell you anyway. I have to believe you’re protecting me. I have to believe that’s why you’re so evasive. I’ll accept it and answer your question. Terri met people online. If you’re a little person and a woman, you’re much more vulnerable.”
“At what point did the two of you get together, start seeing each other?”
“After a year of exchanging e-mails. We discovered both of us were going to a meeting in the same location at the same time. Orlando. The LPA. That’s when we realized we both have achondroplasia. After Orlando, we began seeing each other. I told you. Three months ago.”
“Why her apartment from the very start?”
“She liked to be in her own place. She’s very neat, obsessively neat and clean.”
“She worried your apartment might be dirty?”
“She worried most places were dirty.”
“Was she obsessive-compulsive? Phobic of germs?”
“When we’d go out somewhere, she’d want both of us to shower when we got back to her place. At first I thought it was about sex, which was fine. Showering with her. Then I realized it was about being clean. I had to be very clean. I used to have long hair, but she made me cut it short because it’s easier to keep clean if it’s short. She said hair collects dirt and bacteria. I was a good sport but said there was one place I was keeping my body hair. Nobody was coming near me down there.”
