A powerful, good-looking woman can have her pick. What about her trainer? You said you can’t stand the thought that he puts his hands on her.”
“I’m glad she’s taking care of herself, and a trainer’s a good thing. Prevents people from injuring themselves, especially if they’ve never worked with weights and aren’t twenty years old.”
“I believe his name is Kit.”
Benton didn’t like Kit. He always found excuses not to use the gym in their apartment building if Scarpetta was working out with Kit.
“Truth of the matter,” Dr. Thomas said. “Whether you trust Kay or not, it won’t change her behavior. That’s her power, not yours. I’m more interested in whether you trust yourself.”
“I don’t know why you continue to push me on this,” Benton said.
“Since you got married, your sexual patterns have changed. At least that’s what you told me the first time we talked. You find excuses not to have sex when the opportunity is there, and then want it when you, quote, shouldn’t. Again, what you told me. Still true?”
“Probably,” Benton said.
“That’s one way to pay her back.”
“I’m not paying her back for Marino. Jesus Christ. She didn’t do anything wrong.” Benton tried not to sound angry.
“No,” Dr. Thomas said. “I think it’s more likely you’re paying her back for being your wife. You don’t want a wife. You never have, and that’s not what you fell in love with. You fell in love with a powerful woman, not a wife. You’re sexually attracted to Kay Scarpetta, not to a wife.”
“She’s Kay Scarpetta and my wife. In fact, in many ways, she’s more powerful than she’s ever been in her life.”
“It’s not the rest of us who need convincing, Benton.”
Dr. Thomas always gave him special treatment, meaning she was more aggressive and confrontational than she was with her other patients. She and Benton shared a commonality that went beyond their therapeutic bond. Each understood how the other processed information, and Dr. Thomas could see right through linguistic camouflage. Denial, evasion, and passive communication simply weren’t options. Long sessions of silent staring as the shrink waited for an uptight patient to launch into what was bothering him weren’t going to happen. One minute into the void, and she was going to prompt Benton as she did last time: Did you come here for me to admire your Hermes tie? Or do you have something on your mind? Maybe we should pick up where we left off last time. How’s your libido?
Dr. Thomas said, “And Marino? Will you talk to him?”
“Probably not,” Benton said.
“Well, it seems you have a lot of people not to talk to, and I’ll leave you with my quirky little theory that at some level we intend everything we do. That’s why it’s extremely important to root out our intentions before they uproot us. Gerald’s waiting for me. Errands. We’re having a dinner party tonight, which we need like a hole in the head.”
It was her way of saying “Enough.” Benton needed to process.
He got up from his desk and stood before his office window, gazing out at the leaden winter afternoon. Nineteen floors below, the hospital’s small garden was barren, its concrete fountain dry.
GOTHAM GOTCHA!
Happy New Year, everyone!
My resolution is all about you—what will really grab you, and as I was mulling it over . . . ? Well, you know how they roll back the year? Remind us of every awful thing that happened so we can get depressed all over again? Guess who filled my to-die-for fifty-eight-inch HD Samsung plasma TV?
The to-die-for queen herself: Dr. Kay Scarpetta.
Walking up courthouse steps to testify in another sensational murder trial. Her sidekick investigator Pete Marino in tow—meaning the trial was at least six, seven months ago, right? I think we all know the poor fat maggot’s not her sidekick anymore. Has anybody seen him? Is he in a cosmic jail somewhere? (Imagine working for a forensic diva like Scarpetta. Were it me, I might just commit suicide and hope she’s not the one who does the autopsy.)
Anyway, back to her walking up the courthouse steps. Cameras, the media, wannabes, spectators everywhere. Because she’s the expert, right? Gets called in from here to Italy because who better? So I poured another glass of Maker’s Mark, cranked up Coldplay, and watched her for a while, testifying in that pathological language of hers so few of us understand beyond getting the drift that some little girl was raped from stem to stern, even found seminal fluid in her ear (thought you could get that only from phone sex), and her head was bashed against the tile floor and blunt force trauma was what killed her. It dawned on me:
Who the hell is Scarpetta, anyway?
If you took away the hype, would there be anything behind it?
I began doing a little research. Start with this. She’s a politico. Don’t fall for bullshit about her being a champion for justice, a voice for those who can no longer speak, the lady physician who believes in “First Do No Harm.” (Are we absolutely sure Hippocrates isn’t where the word hypocrite comes from?) Fact is, Scarpetta’s a megalomaniac who manipulates us on CNN into believing she’s serving an altruistic social service when the only thing she’s serving is herself. . . .
Scarpetta had seen enough and dropped her BlackBerry into her handbag, disgusted that Bryce had suggested she look at such rot. She was as annoyed with him as she would be if he had written it, and she could have done without his critique of the photograph that accompanied the column. Although the display on her BlackBerry was small, she saw enough to get a good impression of what he’d meant when he’d said the photograph was unflattering.
She looked like a she-devil in bloody scrubs, a face shield, a disposable hair cover reminiscent of a shower cap. Her mouth was open mid-sentence, her bloody gloved hand pointing a scalpel, as if she was threatening someone. The black rubber chronograph watch she was wearing was a birthday gift from Lucy in 2005, meaning the photograph had been taken at some point in the last three and a half years.
Taken where?
Scarpetta didn’t know. The background had been whited out.
“Thirty-four dollar, twenty cent,” her driver said loudly as the taxi abruptly halted.
She looked through her side window at the closed black iron front gates of Bellevue’s former psychiatric hospital, a foreboding red-rock building some two centuries old that hadn’t seen a patient in decades. No lights, no cars, nobody home, the guard booth behind the fence empty.
“Not here,” she said loudly through the opening in the Plexiglas partition. “Wrong Bellevue.”
She repeated the address she’d given him when he’d picked her up at La Guardia, but the more she explained, the more insistent he got, jabbing his finger at the entrance, where Psychiatric Hospital was carved in granite. She leaned closer to him, directing his attention several blocks ahead where tall buildings were etched in gray, but he was bullish in his bad English. He wasn’t taking her anywhere else, and she must get out of the cab right now. It entered her mind that he truly didn’t know that the Bellevue Hospital Center wasn’t this creepy old horror that looked like something out of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He probably thought his passenger was a psychiatric patient, a criminally insane one suffering a relapse. Why else would she have luggage?
Scarpetta decided she’d rather walk the rest of the way in arctic blasts of wind than deal with him. Paying the fare, she got out of the cab, shouldered two bags, and began rolling her suitcase full of home cooking along the sidewalk. She pressed a button on her wireless earpiece.
“I’m almost here—” she started to tell Benton. “Dammit!” Her suitcase flopped over as if someone shot it.
“Kay? Where are you?”
“I just got thrown out of a taxi—”
“What? Thrown out of what? You’re breaking up . . .” he said, right before the battery went dead.
She felt like a homeless person as she struggled with her luggage, the suitcase falling over every other
