physiognomy, and the image of the murderer captured by the retina of the victim’s eye to the “magic tricks” of modern movies and TV dramas. I’ll happily explain further if you might be so gracious as to answer me. E-mail is preferable. But I’m including my phone number.
I’d love your thoughts, of course, but my real reason for writing is I’m trying to contact Dr. Kay Scarpetta—who better for the topic, I’m sure you agree! Perhaps, if nothing else, you’ll give her my e-mail address? I’ve tried to contact her several times at her office in Charleston, but with no success. I know you’ve had professional connections in the past, and assume you’re still in touch with each other and friends.
Sincerely,
Terri Bridges
212-555-2907
“Obviously, you never got this,” Lucy said.
“Sent to New York City Government-dot-org from someone who called herself Lunasee?” Berger replied. “I wouldn’t get that in a million years. A more important question to me is why Kay didn’t know Terri was trying to get hold of her. Charleston isn’t exactly New York City.”
“It may as well have been,” Lucy said.
Berger got out of her chair and collected her coat, her briefcase.
“I have to go,” she said. “We’ll probably have a meeting tomorrow. I’ll call you when I know the time.”
“Late last spring, early summer,” Lucy said. “I can see why my aunt never got Terri’s message, if that’s what happened. And likely, it is.”
She got up, too, and they walked through the loft.
“Rose was dying,” Lucy said. “Mid-June to early July, she lived in my aunt’s carriage house. Neither of them went to the office anymore. And Marino wasn’t there. Aunt Kay’s new practice was small. She was only about two years into it. There really was no other staff.”
“No one to take a message, and no one to answer the phone,” Berger said as she put on her coat. “Before I forget, if you’d forward that e-mail to me so I have a copy. Since you don’t seem to print things around here. And if you find anything else I should know about?”
“Marino had been gone since early May,” Lucy said. “Rose never knew what happened to him, which was really unfair. He vanished into thin air, and then she died. No matter what, she cared about him.”
“And you? Where were you while the phones rang and no one picked up or noticed?”
“It all seems like a different life, as if I wasn’t there,” Lucy said. “I almost can’t remember where I was or what I did toward the end, but it was awful. My aunt put Rose in the guest room and stayed with her around the clock. She spiraled down really quickly after Marino disappeared, and I stayed away from the office and the labs. I’d known Rose all my life. She was like the cool grandmother everyone wants, just so cool in her proper suits with her hair pinned up, but a piece of work and not afraid of anything whether it was dead bodies or guns or Marino’s motorcycles.”
“What about dying? Was she afraid?”
“No.”
“But you were,” Berger said.
“All of us were. Me most of all. So I did a really brilliant thing and suddenly got busy. For some reason it seemed urgent that I do a refresher in advanced executive protection training, attack recognition and analysis, tactical firearms, the usual. I got rid of one helicopter and found another, then went to the Bell Helicopter school in Texas for several weeks when I really didn’t need to do that, either. Next thing I knew, everybody had moved up north. And Rose was in a cemetery vault in Richmond, overlooking the James, because she loved the water so much, and my aunt made sure she’d have a water view forever.”
“So somehow what we’re dealing with now, in a way, started back then,” Berger said. “When nobody was paying attention.”
“I’m not sure what started,” Lucy said.
They stood near the front door, neither one of them particularly keen to open it. Berger wondered when they would be alone again like this, or if they should be, and what Lucy must think of her. She knew what she thought of herself. She had been dishonest, and she couldn’t leave it like that. Lucy didn’t deserve it. Neither of them did.
“I had a roommate at Columbia,” Berger said, fastening her coat. “We shared this slum of an apartment. I didn’t have money, wasn’t born with it, married into it, and you know all that. During law school we lived in this most God-awful place in Morningside Heights, it’s a wonder both of us weren’t murdered in our sleep.”
She tucked her hands into her pockets while Lucy’s eyes held hers, both of them leaning their shoulders against the door.
“We were extremely close,” Berger added.
“You don’t owe me any explanations,” Lucy said. “I completely respect who you are and why you live the way you do.”
“You don’t know enough to respect anything, actually. And I’m going to give you an explanation, not because I owe it but because I want to. She had something wrong with her, my roommate. I won’t say her name. A mood disorder, which I had no understanding of at the time, and when she got ugly and angry I thought she meant it. I fought with her when I shouldn’t have, because that made matters only worse, unbelievably worse. One Saturday night, a neighbor called the police. I’m surprised you didn’t dig that up somewhere. Nothing was done about it, but it was rather unpleasant, and both of us were drunk and looked like train wrecks. If I ever run for office, you can imagine, if there are stories like that.”
“Why would there be?” Lucy asked. “Unless you plan on getting in fights when you’re drunk and looking like a train wreck.”
“There was never a threat of that with Greg, you see. I don’t think we ever yelled at each other. Certainly never threw anything. We coexisted without rancor or much of anything. A relatively pleasant detente, much of the time.”
“What happened to your roommate?”
“I suppose it depends on how you measure success,” Berger said. “But nothing good, in my opinion. It will only get worse for her because she lives a lie, meaning she doesn’t live at all, and life is very unforgiving if you don’t live it, especially as you get older. I’ve never lived a lie. You may think so, but I haven’t. I’ve simply had to figure things out as I’ve gone along, and I’ve respected decisions I’ve made, right or wrong, no matter how hard that’s been. Many things remain irrelevant as long as they remain theoretical.”
“Meaning there wasn’t someone and hasn’t been when there shouldn’t have been,” Lucy said.
“I’m no Sunday-school teacher. Far from it,” Berger said. “But my life is nobody’s business, and it’s mine to mess up, and I don’t intend to mess it up. I won’t let you mess it up, nor do I intend to mess up yours.”
“Do you always start with disclaimers?”
“I don’t start,” Berger said.
“This time you’re going to have to,” Lucy said. “Because I’m not. Not with you.”
Berger slid her hands out of her coat pockets and touched Lucy’s face, then reached for the door but didn’t open it. She touched Lucy’s face again and kissed her.
Nineteen floors below the prison ward, in the parking lot across East 27th, Marino was a lone figure obscured by hydraulic lifts, most of them empty at this hour, no valet in sight.
He watched them in the bright green field of a long-range night-vision monocular, because he needed to see her. He needed to look at her in person, even if it was covertly and from a distance and for only a moment. He needed to somehow feel reassured that she hadn’t changed. If she was still the same, she wouldn’t be cruel to him when she saw him. She wouldn’t disgrace or humiliate or shun him. Not that she would have in the past, no matter how much he deserved it. But what did he know about her anymore, except what he read or saw on TV?
Scarpetta and Benton had just left the morgue and were taking a shortcut through the park, back to Bellevue. It was dizzying to see her again, and unreal, as if she’d been dead, and Marino imagined what she’d think if she knew how close he’d come to dying. After what he’d done, he hadn’t wanted to be here anymore. While he
