“I did look him up on the Internet,” he confessed. “I’m surprised Benton lets him anywhere near you. Reminds me of, of what’s-his-name on Queer as Folk ? The football star? Drove a Hummer and quite the homophobe until he hooked up with Emmett, who everyone says looks just like me, or the other way around, since he’s the one who’s famous. Well, you probably don’t watch it.”
Scarpetta said, “Kill the messenger because of what? And please keep at least one hand on the wheel since we’re driving in a blizzard. How many shots did you get in your Starbucks this morning? I saw two Venti cups on your desk. Hopefully not both of them from this morning. Remember our talk about caffeine? That it’s a drug, and therefore addictive?”
“You’re the whole damn thing,” Bryce went on. “Which I’ve never seen before. It’s really weird. Usually it’s not just one famous person, you know? Because whoever the columnist is, he roams around the city like some undercover asshole, and shits on a lot of celebs at once. The other week, it was Bloomberg, and, oh, what’s her name? That model always getting arrested for throwing things at people? Well, this time she was what got thrown —out of Elaine’s for saying something lewd to Charlie Rose. No, wait a minute. Barbara Walters? No. I’m crossing over into something I saw on The View . Maybe what’s-her-name the model went after that singer from American Idol. No, he was on Ellen, not in Elaine’s. And not Clay Aiken or Kelly Clarkson. Who’s the other one? TiVo’s simply killing me. It’s like the remote surfs through channels when you’re not touching anything. You ever have that happen?”
Snow was like a swarm of white gnats hitting the windshield, the wipers hypnotically useless. Traffic was slow but steady, Logan just a few minutes out.
“Bryce?” Scarpetta said in the tone she used when she was warning him to shut up and answer her question. “What big deal?”
“That disgusting online gossip column. Gotham Gotcha. ”
She’d seen ads for it on New York City buses and taxicab tops, the anonymous columnist notoriously vicious. The guessing game of who was behind it ranged from a nobody to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was having great fun making mean-spirited mischief and money.
“Nas-ty,” Bryce said. “Now, I know it’s supposed to be nasty, but this is nasty below the belt. Not that I read such tripe. But for obvious reasons, I have you as a Google alert. There’s a photograph, which is the worst part. It’s not flattering.”
Benton leaned back in his desk chair, looking out at his view of ugly red brick in the flat wintry light.
“Sounds like you got a cold,” he said into the phone.
“I’m slightly under the weather today. Which is why I didn’t get back to you sooner. Don’t ask me what we did last night to deserve it. Gerald won’t get out of bed. And I don’t mean it in a good way,” Dr. Thomas said.
She was a colleague at McLean. She was also Benton’s psychiatrist. There was nothing unusual about it. As Dr. Thomas, who was born in the coal-mining hinterlands of western Virginia, liked to say, “Hospitals are more incestuous than hillbillies.” Practitioners treated one another and their families and friends. They prescribed drugs for one another and their families and friends. They fucked one another, but hopefully not their families and friends. Occasionally, they got married. Dr. Thomas had married a McLean radiologist who scanned Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy, in the neuroimaging lab where Benton had his office. Dr. Thomas knew Benton’s business, pretty much all of it. She was the first person he’d thought of some months back when he’d realized he had to talk to someone.
“Did you open the link I e-mailed to you?” Benton asked her.
“Yes, and the real question is who are you more worried about? I think the answer might be you. What do you think?”
“I think that would make me incredibly selfish,” Benton said.
“It would be normal to feel cuckolded, humiliated,” she said.
“I forgot you were a Shakespearean actor in an earlier life,” he said. “Can’t remember the last time I heard someone refer to anyone as cuckolded, and it doesn’t apply. Kay didn’t wander out of the nest and into the arms of another man. She was grabbed. Were I to feel cuckolded, it should have been when it happened. But I didn’t. I was too worried about her. Don’t say ‘the lady doth protest too much.’ ”
“What I’ll say is when it happened, there wasn’t an audience,” Dr. Thomas said. “Perhaps it makes it more real when everybody knows? Did you tell her what’s on the Internet? Or had she already seen it?”
“I didn’t tell her, and I’m sure she hasn’t seen it. She would have called to warn me. Funny how she’s like that.”
“Yes. Kay and her fragile heroes with their feet of clay. Why didn’t you tell her?”
“Timing,” Benton said.
“Yours or hers?”
“She was in the morgue,” he said. “I wanted to wait and do it in person.”
“Let’s retrace our steps, Benton. You talked to her at the crack of dawn, let me guess. Isn’t that what you always do when you’re away from each other?”
“We talked early this morning.”
“So when you talked to her early this morning, you already knew what was on the Internet, because Lucy called you when?” Dr. Thomas said. “At one a.m. to tell you, since your hypomanic niece by marriage has audible alarms programmed into her computer to wake her up like a fireman if one of her search engines finds something important in cyberspace?”
Dr. Thomas wasn’t joking. Lucy did have alarms that signaled her when one of her search engines found something she needed to know about.
He said, “Actually, she called me at midnight. When the damn thing was posted.”
“But she didn’t call Kay.”
“To her credit, she didn’t, and she let it go when I said I would handle it.”
“Which you didn’t do,” Dr. Thomas said. “So we’re back to that. You talked to Kay early this morning, by which time you’d known for many hours what’s on the Internet? Yet you said nothing. You’ve still said nothing. I don’t believe it’s about telling her in person. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance she might find out from someone other than you—if she hasn’t already.”
Benton took a deep, quiet breath. He pressed his lips together and wondered when it was, exactly, that he’d begun to lose faith in himself and his ability to read his environment and react accordingly. For as far back as he could remember, he had possessed the uncanny ability to size up people at a glance or a quick listen. Scarpetta called it his party trick. He’d meet someone or overhear a snippet of a conversation, and that was it. Rarely was he wrong.
But he’d completely missed the danger at the door this time, and still didn’t fully comprehend how he could have been so devastatingly obtuse. He’d watched Pete Marino’s anger and frustration build over the years. He knew damn well it was a matter of time before Marino’s self-loathing and rage reached flashover. But Benton didn’t fear it. He didn’t give Marino enough credit to be feared like that. He wasn’t sure he’d ever imagined Marino having a dick prior to its becoming a weapon.
It made no sense, in retrospect. For virtually everybody else, it was impossible to get past Marino’s rough-hewn machismo and volatility, and that particular recipe was Benton’s bread and butter. Sexual violence, no matter its catalyst, was what kept forensic psychologists in business.
“I’m having homicidal thoughts about him,” Benton said to Dr. Thomas. “Of course, I wouldn’t do it. Just thoughts. I’m having a lot of thoughts. I believed I’d forgiven him and felt proud of myself, really proud of myself, because of the way I handled it. Where would he be without me? All I’ve done for him, and now I want to kill him. Lucy wants to kill him. The reminder this morning didn’t help, and now everyone knows. It’s made it happen all over again.”
“Or maybe happen for the first time. It feels real to you now.”
“Oh, it feels real. It always felt real,” Benton said.
“But it’s different when you read it on the Internet and know a million other people are, too. That’s a different level of real. You’re finally having an emotional response. Before, it was intellectual. Out of self-defense, you processed it in your head. I think this is a breakthrough, Benton. A very unpleasant one. I’m sorry for
