desk and handed him several tissues.
“I hate it,” he said. “Always hate it when you’re in my world, not yours. A dead body doesn’t get attached to you, have feelings for you. You don’t have a relationship with someone dead. We’re not robots. A guy tortures someone to death, and I sit across a table from him. He’s a person, a human being. He’s my patient. He thinks I’m his best friend until he hears me testify in court that he knew the difference between right and wrong. He ends up in prison for the rest of his life or, depending on the jurisdiction, on death row. Doesn’t matter what I think or believe in. I’m doing my job. I’ve done what’s right in the eyes of the law. Knowing that doesn’t make me feel any less haunted.”
“We don’t know what it is not to feel haunted,” she said.
He squeezed his finger, staining the tissue brilliant red. He looked at her on the other side of his desk, at the squareness of her shoulders, at her strong, capable hands, and the lovely contour of her body beneath her suit, and he wanted her. He felt aroused just doors away from a prison, and yet when they were alone at home, he scarcely touched her. What had happened to him? It was as if he’d been in an accident and had been pieced back together wrong.
He said, “You should go back to Massachusetts, Kay. If he gets indicted and you’re subpoenaed, then you’ll come back and we’ll deal with it.”
“I’m not going to run from Marino,” she said. “I’m not going to avoid him.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” But it was exactly what he was saying. “It’s Oscar Bane I’m worried about. He could walk out of Bellevue right now. I’d like you as far away from him as possible.”
“What you want is for me to be as far away from Marino as possible.”
“I don’t know why you’d want to be around him.” His feelings went flat, his voice hard.
“I didn’t say I wanted it. I said I wasn’t going to run from it. I’m not the one who ran like a coward. He did.”
“Hopefully my part in this will be over in a few days,” Benton said. “Then it’s NYPD’s responsibility. God knows I’m way behind at McLean. Only halfway through my research study, although I’m not sure about the journal article anymore. You don’t have to do the consultation at the damn morgue. Why should you pull Dr. Lester’s feet out of the fire again?”
“That’s not what you really want. For me to be a no-show? For me to walk off the job after Berger’s asked me to help? The last shuttle’s at nine o’clock. I’d never make it. You know that. Why are you talking like this?”
“Lucy could take you in her helicopter.”
“It’s snowing at home. The visibility’s probably two feet.”
She watched his face, and it was hard for him to keep his feelings out of his eyes, because he wanted her. He wanted her now, in his office, and if she knew what he was feeling, she would be repulsed by him. She would decide he’d spent too many years wallowing through every form of perversion imaginable, and had finally been infected.
“I keep forgetting the weather’s different there,” he said.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Then that’s the way it will be. You certainly packed as if you aren’t going anywhere.”
Her luggage was by the door.
“Food,” she said. “As much as you’d love to take me out for a romantic dinner tonight, we’re eating in. If we ever get home.”
They looked into each other’s eyes. She had just asked him the question she’d been wanting to ask but hadn’t.
He answered her, “My feelings about you haven’t changed. If you knew how I felt sometimes. I just don’t tell you.”
“Maybe you’d better start telling me.”
“I am telling you.”
He wanted her right then, and she sensed it, and she didn’t recoil. Maybe she felt the same way. It was so easy for him to forget there was a reason she was so polished and precise, that science was just the lead she looped around the neck of the wild animal so she could walk with it, so she could understand it and handle it. What she’d chosen to expose herself to in life couldn’t be more naked or primitive or powerful, and nothing shocked her.
“I believe a very important element in this case is why Terri Bridges was murdered in the bathroom,” she said. “And what makes us so sure she was?”
“The police found no evidence she was killed in any other area of the house. Nothing to suggest her body was moved into the bathroom after the fact. What food?”
“What we were going to have last night. When you say nothing suggests her body was moved, what does that mean? What might have suggested it?”
“I only know that Morales says nothing suggested it.”
“And likely nothing would in this case,” Scarpetta said. “If she’d been dead less than two hours, her body wasn’t going to tell anybody much of anything. Livor, rigor usually take at least six hours to be fully developed. Was she warm?”
“He said when he got there, he felt for a pulse. She was warm.”
“Then if Oscar didn’t kill her, whoever did must have left her apartment shortly before he got there and found her dead. Coincidence, amazing good luck for the killer that he wasn’t interrupted. He was just minutes away from Oscar walking in on him. Assuming the killer and Oscar aren’t one and the same.”
“If they aren’t,” Benton said, “you have to wonder why someone else would assume Terri would be home alone on New Year’s Eve. Unless it was random. Her lights were on in an otherwise dark building, and this time of year, most people who are home have their lights on all day, or at least by four, when the sun is going down. Question is whether she was a victim of opportunity.”
“What about an alibi? Oscar have one that you know of?”
“He have one that you know of?”
She watched him squeeze as much blood from his finger as he could.
“I’m trying to remember the last time you had a tetanus shot,” she said.
It hadn’t been difficult searching the NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center and finding the two cases Morales had mentioned. What took a little longer was getting a response from the investigators who had worked them.
Marino was unbuttoning his coat inside his apartment when his cell phone rang at six-twenty. The woman identified herself as Bacardi, like the rum he used to drink mixed with Dr Pepper. He called her back on his landline and gave her a synopsis of the Terri Bridges case, asking if she’d ever heard of Oscar Bane, or if someone fitting his description had been spotted in the area when the homicide in Baltimore had occurred in the summer of 2003.
“Before we go galloping off together on some great big man-hunt,” Bacardi said, “what makes you think the cases are connected?”
“First, let’s start with it wasn’t my idea. This other detective’s name is Mike Morales, and he got hits on our computer system. You know him?”
“Not off the top of my head. So you’re not taking credit. Must be shit, what you got.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Marino said. “There are similarities in the MOs between yours and mine. Same thing in the Greenwich case, which I assume you’re aware of.”
“Went over it until my eyes fell out. Broke up my marriage. He died of cancer last year. Not my ex- husband, the Greenwich investigator. Where are you from? You sound like a Jersey boy.”
“Yeah, from the bad part. I’m sorry about the Greenwich detective. What kind?”
“Liver.”
“If I still had one, that would be what gets me.”
“Here one day, gone the next. Just like my ex and last two boyfriends.”
Marino wondered how old she was and if she was making sure he knew she was single.
“The case here, Terri Bridges?” he said. “She had a gold bracelet on her left ankle. A thin gold chain. I saw it in the pictures. I haven’t actually seen the body. I didn’t go to the scene or the morgue.”
