To him, every male was a potential beast who wanted to carry her off to his lair, and nothing she did or said reassured him.
“I’m going to quit CNN,” she said as they headed to his office.
“I understand the position Oscar’s just put you in,” Benton said. “None of this is your fault.”
“You mean, the position you’ve just put me in.”
“It’s Berger who wanted you here.”
“But you’re the one who asked.”
“If I had my way about it, you’d still be in Massachusetts,” he said. “But he wouldn’t talk unless you came here.”
“I just hope I’m not the reason he’s here.”
“Whatever the reason, you can’t hold yourself responsible.”
“I don’t like the way that sounds,” she said.
They passed shut office doors, no one around. It was just the two of them, and they didn’t disguise their tense tones.
“I hope you’re not hinting it’s possible some obsessed fan pulled a horrific stunt so he could have an audience with me,” she added. “I hope that’s not what you’re implying.”
“A woman’s dead. That’s no stunt,” Benton said.
She couldn’t talk to him about Oscar’s conviction that he was being spied on and that whoever was behind it was Terri Bridges’s killer. Maybe Benton already knew, but she couldn’t ask. She couldn’t reveal that Oscar’s injuries were self-inflicted, that he’d lied to the police and everyone else about how he’d gotten them. The most she could do was speak in generalities.
“I have no information that might justify my discussing him with you,” she said, implying Oscar had confessed to nothing, nor indicated he was a threat to himself or others.
Benton unlocked his office door.
“You spent a long time with him,” he said. “Remember what I always tell you, Kay. Your first cue is your gut. Listen to what your gut tells you about this guy. And I’m sorry if I seem strung out. I’ve had no sleep. Actually, things are rather much a fucking mess.”
The work space the hospital had allotted Benton was small, with books, journals, clutter piled everywhere as neatly as he could manage. They sat, and the desk between them seemed a solid manifestation of an emotional barrier she could not get past. He did not want sex, at least not with her. She didn’t believe he was having it with anybody else, but the benefits of marriage seemed to include shorter and more impersonal conversations, and less time in bed. She believed Benton had been happier before they’d gotten married, and that sad fact she wasn’t going to blame on Marino.
“What did your gut tell you?” Benton asked.
“That I shouldn’t be talking to him,” she replied. “That I shouldn’t be prevented from talking to you. My head tells me otherwise.”
“You’re an associate, a consultant here. We can have a professional discussion about him as a patient.”
“I don’t know anything about him as your patient. I can’t tell you anything about him as mine.”
“Before now you’d never heard of him? Or Terri Bridges?”
“That much I can say. Absolutely not. And I’m going to ask you not to cajole me. You know my limitations. You knew them when you called this morning.”
Benton opened a drawer and pulled out two envelopes. He reached across the desk to hand them to her.
“I didn’t know what might happen by the time you got here,” he said. “Maybe the cops would have found something, arrested him, and we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. But you’re right. At the moment, your priority has to be Oscar’s well-being. You’re his physician. But that doesn’t mean you have to see him again.”
Inside one envelope was a DNA report, and inside the other, a set of crime scene photographs.
“Berger wanted you to have a copy of the DNA analysis. The photographs and police report are from Mike Morales,” Benton said.
“Do I know him?”
“He’s relatively new to the detective division. You don’t know him, maybe won’t have to. Candidly speaking, I think he’s a jerk. Photos he took at the crime scene, his preliminary report. The DNA’s from swabs Dr. Lester took from Terri Bridges’s body. There’s a second set of photos I haven’t gotten yet. From a second search earlier this afternoon when luggage in her closet was checked, and it turned out Terri’s laptops were in it. Apparently, she was supposed to fly to Arizona this morning to spend a few days with her family. Why her luggage was packed and out of sight in her closet, no one knows.”
Scarpetta thought about what Oscar had told her. Terri didn’t leave luggage out. She was obsessively neat, and Oscar didn’t like good-byes.
Benton said, “One possible explanation is she was extremely neat. Perhaps obsessively so. You’ll see what I mean in the photos.”
“I’d say that’s a very plausible explanation,” she commented.
He held her gaze. He was trying to determine if she’d just given him information. She didn’t break their eye contact or the silence. He retrieved a number from his cell phone contact list and reached for the landline. He asked Berger if she could send someone by to pick up evidence Scarpetta had collected from Oscar Bane.
He listened for a moment, then looked up at Scarpetta and said to Berger, “I completely agree. Since he can leave whenever he wants, and you know how I feel about that. And no, I haven’t had a chance . . . Well, she’s right here. Why don’t you ask her?”
Benton moved the handset to the middle of the desk and held out the receiver to Scarpetta.
“Thanks for doing this,” Jaime Berger said, and Scarpetta tried to remember the last time they’d talked.
Five years ago.
“How was he?” Berger asked.
“Extremely cooperative.”
“Do you think he’ll stay put?”
“I think I’m in an awkward position.” Scarpetta’s way of saying she couldn’t talk about her patient.
“I understand.”
“All I can comfortably tell you,” Scarpetta said, “is if you can get his DNA analyzed quickly, that would be a good thing. There’s no downside to that.”
“Fortunately, there are plenty of people in the world right now who love overtime. One of them, however, isn’t Dr. Lester. While I’ve got you, I’ll ask you directly and let Benton off the hook, unless he’s already said something. Would you mind looking at Terri Bridges’s body tonight? Benton can fill you in. Dr. Lester should be on her way in from New Jersey. Sorry to subject you to something so unpleasant, and I don’t mean the morgue.”
“Whatever’s helpful,” Scarpetta replied.
“I’m sure we’ll talk later. And we should get together. Maybe dinner at Elaine’s,” Berger said.
It seemed to be the favorite line of professional women like them. They would get together, have lunch, maybe dinner. She and Berger had said it to each other the first time they met eight years ago, when Berger was brought to Virginia as a special prosecutor in a case that was one of the most stressful ones in Scarpetta’s life. And they’d said it to each other last time they met, in 2003, when both of them had been concerned about Lucy, who had just returned from a clandestine operation in Poland that Scarpetta still knew very little about, except that what Lucy had done wasn’t legal. It certainly wasn’t moral. In Berger’s penthouse apartment here in the city, the prosecutor had sat down with Scarpetta’s niece, and whatever had gone on between them had remained between them.
Oddly, Berger knew far more about Scarpetta than almost anybody she could think of, and yet they weren’t friends. It was unlikely they would get together and do anything except work, no matter how many times they suggested lunch or a drink and meant it. Their disconnection wasn’t simply due to the vicissitudes of very busy lives that collide and then resume their separate paths. Powerful women tended to be loners, because it was their instinct not to trust one another.
