determine that areas of them had been roughly crushed at bondline surfaces where veneers had been glued together with a very strong adhesive.
The splinters had come from abrasively planed plyboard. She and Benton looked again at the eight-by-ten photograph of Terri’s nude body on the bathroom floor. In the background was the white marble countertop that included the built-in vanity and a small gold metal chair with heart-shaped back and black satin-upholstered bottom. On top of the vanity was a mirrored tray of perfumes, a brush, and a comb. Everything was perfectly neat and straight except for the oval mirror, and as Scarpetta looked closely at the photo and studied it under a lens, she confirmed that the edge of the countertop was squared off where the vanity was built in. It was sharp.
She looked through more photographs of the bathroom, taken from different angles.
“It’s all one unit.” She showed a photograph to Benton. “The counter built around the sink, cabinets, and the vanity with its drawer are one unit. And if you look here, this picture taken at floor level, you can see the counter has a white-painted plyboard back that’s against the tile wall. Very similar to desks built into kitchen counters. However, often with plyboard built-ins, the underside that’s not visible isn’t painted. It’s possible the underside of the vanity drawer isn’t, in other words. Microscopically, we can tell the splinters recovered from her knees and the tops of her feet are from unpainted plyboard. We need to go to the scene.”
Dr. Lester was behind them, looking on silently.
Scarpetta explained, “I think it’s possible he forced her to sit in the chair and watch herself in the mirror while he garroted her, and when she struggled—kicking violently—her legs struck the edge of the counter, causing the linear abrasions, the deep contusions on her thighs. Her knees struck the underside of the vanity so violently her patellae were shattered. If the underside of the vanity is unpainted plyboard, that would explain the splinters in the knees, and also the tops of her feet. As short as her legs are, her feet wouldn’t have reached the wall. They would have struck the underside of the drawer.”
“If you’re right,” Dr. Lester conceded, “it will have a bearing. If she was kicking and struggling that hard, and someone was making her sit and look in the mirror, that’s a different story.”
“An important question is what the bathroom was like when Oscar first got there and found the body,” Benton said. “Assuming his story is true.”
“I think we can get some measurements and figure out if his story is true,” Scarpetta said. “Depending on the chair. If Terri was sitting in it and Oscar was standing behind her, I don’t believe he could have pulled up high enough with the ligature to achieve the angle of the mark on her neck. But we need to go to the scene. We need to go there quickly.”
“First thing I’m going to do is outright ask him,” Benton said. “Maybe he’ll talk to me if he thinks new evidence has turned up and it’s in his best interest to cooperate. I’ll call the ward, see if he’ll be reasonable.”
Lucy was going through e-mail as Scarpetta explained over speakerphone why she wanted swabs from Terri Bridges’s orifices, and an entire chair, to be flown to the National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
“I have friends at Y-Twelve,” Scarpetta said to Berger, whose approval she wanted. “I think we could get a very rapid turnaround on this. Once they have the evidence, it’s just a matter of hours. The longest part will be vacuuming down the chamber, because that’s going to be slower than usual. The petroleum-based lubricant has a lot of moisture.”
“I thought they made nuclear weapons,” Berger said. “Didn’t they process the uranium for the first atomic bomb? You’re not suggesting Terri Bridges had connections that might have to do with terrorism or something like that?”
Scarpetta said that while it was true that Y-12 produced components for every weapon in the United States’ nuclear arsenal and also had the largest stockpile of enriched uranium, her interest in the place was because of its engineers, chemists, physicists, and especially its materials scientists.
“Are you familiar with their Visitec Large Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope?” she asked.
“I assume what you’re getting at is we don’t have one here,” Berger said.
“I’m afraid at present there’s no forensic lab on the planet that has a ten-ton microscope with a magnification of two hundred thousand X, and detectors for EDX and FTIR, energy dispersive X-ray detection, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy,” Scarpetta said. “One-stop shopping to get the morphology, and elemental and chemical compositions, of a sample as small as a macromolecule or as large as an engine block. It’s possible I might want to put an entire chair in the chamber. But we need to see. I’m not going to ask Lucy if she’ll let us borrow her jet and have police fly evidence down to Tennessee and receipt it to one of my scientist friends in the middle of the night unless I’m sure there’s a reason.”
“Tell me more about the chair,” Berger said. “Why you think it’s so important?”
“From her bathroom,” Scarpetta said. “I believe she was sitting in it when she was murdered—a theory at this point that I can’t begin to verify without a hands-on examination. I have reason to believe she was nude when she was sitting on it, and since we know the lubricant is contaminated with an admixture of DNA, it may be contaminated with traces of other organic and inorganic substances as well. We don’t know what the lubricant originally was used for, where it came from, or what’s in it. But the LC-SEM might help tell us, and tell us quickly. I’d like to go to the scene, to Terri’s apartment, as soon as possible.”
“There’s an officer in her apartment around the clock,” Berger said. “So it’s not a problem getting you inside. But I’d like an investigator with you. I also need to ask you again if you had any prior connection to Terri or Oscar.”
“None.”
“We’re finding things on a computer from her apartment that make it appear you did. At least with her.”
“I didn’t. We’ll be finished up here in fifteen, twenty minutes,” Scarpetta said. “Then all we have to do is drop by Benton’s office to pick up a few things. If someone could meet us in front of the hospital.”
“How would you feel if that someone is Pete Marino?” Berger was deliberately bland.
“If what I’m considering might have happened to Terri Bridges is right,” Scarpetta said, and she was bland, too, as if she had been expecting Berger to suggest what she did, “we’re dealing with a sexual sadist who may have killed before. Possibly two other people in 2003. Benton’s gotten e-mails, the same ones you’ve seen, from Marino.”
“I haven’t looked at my e-mail in the past few hours,” Berger said. “We’re actually just getting started on Terri Bridges’s e-mail right now. Hers and Oscar Bane’s.”
“If my suspicion’s correct, I don’t see how he could have done what I’m thinking the killer did. Of course, his DNA hasn’t been run through CODIS yet. But what I can say is if he was standing behind Terri while she was sitting, they would have been almost the same height. Unless he was standing on top of something like a step stool, and for him to maintain his balance while doing all the rest of it would have been difficult, if not impossible.”
“What did you just say?”
“Because of their achondroplasia,” Scarpetta said. “Their torsos are a normal length but their arms and legs aren’t. I’ll have to show you with measurements, but if someone suffering achondroplasia is four-foot-one, let’s say, and is sitting in front of someone standing who’s about the same height, their heads and shoulders will be almost level with each other.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. It sounds like a riddle.”
“Does anybody know where he is? Someone should check on him, to make sure he’s safe. He may have good reason to be paranoid if he’s not the killer, and I’m having my doubts. Serious doubts.”
“Jesus,” Berger said. “What do you mean ‘where he is’? Don’t tell me he’s left Bellevue.”
Scarpetta said, “Benton just called the prison ward. I assumed you knew.”
Tell-Tail Hearts’s flagship pet store was on Lexington Avenue, a few blocks west of Grace’s Marketplace, and as Shrew walked through the blustery dark, she kept thinking of the column she’d posted several weeks ago.
She recalled descriptions of cleanliness, and a staff in lab coats who offered the highest level of care, whether it was a nutritious diet, medical attention, or affection. All of the chain’s pet shops were open seven days a
