“I don’t get to pick them! He was shouting, ordering me to look at him when he spoke to me, and I tried to explain I couldn’t hear him if I looked at him. Asking me things in the living room, demanding answers. Look at me, look at me! I was trying to help at first. I said someone must have come to the outer door and rung the bell and she thought it was me. Maybe she thought I was early and forgot my keys. There had to be a reason she felt it was safe to let the person in.”
“You keep telling me how anxious Terri was. Was she unusually cautious?”
“It’s New York, and people don’t just open their doors, and she’s always been incredibly cautious. People our size are cautious. That’s one of the reasons her parents are so protective, practically kept her locked up in the house when she was growing up. She wouldn’t open her door unless she felt safe.”
“What do you think that means, then? How did the intruder get in, and do you have any idea why someone would want to harm Terri?”
“They have their motives,” he said.
“When you were in her apartment, did you notice any signs of robbery? Might that have been a motive?”
“I didn’t notice anything missing. But I didn’t look.”
“What about jewelry? Did she wear a ring, a necklace, anything that was missing?”
“I didn’t want to leave her. They had no right to make me leave her, to make me sit in that detective’s car as if I were a murderer. He looks more like a murderer than I do, with his gang clothes and braided hair. I refused to talk.”
“You just said you did. Inside the house.”
“They had their minds made up. I hate the police. I’ve always hated them. Driving by in their patrol cars, talking, laughing, staring. Someone keyed my car and smashed all the windows. I was sixteen. And this cop says, ‘So, are we having a little problem? ’ And he sat in my car and put his feet on the extended pedals, and his knees were on either side of the steering wheel, while the other cop laughed. Fuck them.”
“What about other people? Have they mistreated you, made fun of you?”
“I grew up in a small town, and everybody knew me. I had friends. I was on the wrestling team and made good grades. I was the class president my senior year. I’m realistic. I don’t take stupid chances. I like people. Most people are all right.”
“Yet you’ve chosen a career where you can avoid them.”
“It’s predicted most students will go to college online eventually. The police think everybody’s guilty of something. If you look different or have some sort of disability. There was a boy with Down syndrome across the street from me. The cops always suspected him of something, always assumed he was going to rape every girl in the neighborhood.”
Scarpetta began packing her crime scene case. She was done with him. Comparing the silicone impressions of his fingernails and the scratches and nail marks, and relying on measurements and photographs were only going to corroborate what she already knew. He would realize that already, he must, and she wanted him to realize it.
She said, “You understand what we can tell from all that I’ve done today, don’t you, Oscar? The silicone impressions of your fingertips and wounds. The photographs and precise measurements.”
He stared at the wall.
She continued to bluff, slightly. “We can study these impressions under the microscope.”
“I know what you can do,” he said. “I know why you made the silicone casts. Yes, I know that now you’ll look at them under a microscope.”
“I’ll let the police labs do that. I don’t need to. I think I already have the information I need,” she said. “Did you do this to yourself, Oscar? The scratches, the bruises? They’re all within your reach. All angled the way they would be if they were self-inflicted.”
He didn’t say anything.
“If you really have this mythical notion that I can solve the perfect crime, would there have been a doubt in your mind that I would figure out you injured yourself?”
Nothing. Staring at the wall.
“Why?” she asked him. “Was it your intention for me to come here and determine you’d done this to yourself?”
“You can’t tell anyone. You can’t tell your husband. You can’t tell Detective Morales. You can’t tell Berger or that asshole in her office who didn’t believe me last month.”
“Under the current circumstances, what’s gone on between us is confidential. But that could change,” she reminded him.
“It’s the only way I could get you here. I had to be injured.”
“The attacker at her door?” she said.
“There was no one. I got there and the lights were out. Her door was unlocked. I ran inside calling out her name. And found her in the bathroom. The light was on in there, as if he wanted me to be shocked. You can’t see that light from where I parked because the bathroom’s in the back. I removed the flex-cuffs with scissors from the kitchen. That’s when I cut my thumb. Just a small cut, not sure how it happened, but I was grabbing for the scissors, and the block of knives fell over, and one of them must have nicked me, so I wrapped a paper towel around my thumb and ran out to my car and threw my coat inside. I sat with her on the bathroom floor and ripped my shirt and hurt myself. There’s blood on my shirt. I called the police.”
“The flashlight? You hit yourself with it?”
“I found it in the kitchen drawer. I wiped it off and left it on the living room floor. Near the door.”
“Why did you bother to wipe it off if your fingerprints and DNA are all over her house and all over her body?”
“So I could tell the police the intruder was wearing gloves. That would corroborate my story. The gloves wiped off any prints on the flashlight. Leather gloves, I told them.”
“And the scissors from the kitchen? What did you do with those after you cut off the flex-cuff?”
His face twitched, and she could almost see him re-creating that scene, and he began to breathe hard, rocking back and forth.
His voice wavered when he said, “Her hands were this awful deep bluish red. Her fingernails were blue. I rubbed her wrists and her hands to get the circulation going. I tried to rub the grooves away, these deep grooves.”
“Do you remember what you did with the scissors?”
“That flex-cuff was so tight. It had to hurt. I left the scissors on the bathroom floor.”
“When did you decide to injure yourself because, as you just told me, it was the only way to get me here?”
“I was on the bathroom floor with her. I knew I’d be blamed. I knew if I got to your husband, I could get to you. I had to get to you. I trust you, and you’re the only one who cared about her.”
“I didn’t know her.”
“Don’t lie to me!” he screamed.
Shrew had resumed drinking Maker’s Mark, the same thing the Boss drank. She poured herself a tumbler full, on the rocks, the same way the Boss drank it.
She picked up the remote to the forty-inch flat-screen Samsung TV, just like the Boss used to have, according to the columns, but apparently not anymore. If what Shrew read was true, the Boss had gotten a new fifty-eight-inch plasma Panasonic. Unless that was nothing more than another paid endorsement. It was hard to know what was real and what was made up for money, because the business part of Gotham Gotcha was as hidden from Shrew as everything else.
Terrorists,she thought.
What if that’s where the money went? Maybe terrorists had killed her neighbor, gotten the buildings mixed up, and were really after Shrew because they sensed she was on to them? What if government agents who were after terrorists had tracked the website to Shrew and had gotten the apartments confused? It would be easy
