anonymizer that gives you a temporary address every time you send an e-mail, so people can’t find your real IP.”
“That’s my big battle.” Berger made her favorite complaint about the Internet.
It was one Lucy liked to hear. The devil Berger fought was one Lucy knew.
“White-collar crime, stalking, identity theft,” Berger added. “I can’t tell you my aggravation.”
“What about the account information for Scarpetta six-twelve?” Marino was asking Lucy, as if nothing dysfunctional had ever gone on between them.
He was just more guarded, which made him somewhat polite, for once.
“Anything more than the generic they gave me?” he asked.
“Name’s listed as Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Address and phone number are her office in Watertown. All public information,” Lucy said. “No profile, no options that would have required the person who set up the account to use a credit card.”
“Same thing as Terri’s accounts.” Berger’s voice.
“Same thing with a million accounts,” Lucy said. “I’m in Scarpetta six-twelve right now, and the only e- mails sent or received were to and from Terri Bridges.”
“Don’t you think that might hint it was Terri who opened that account to make it look as if Kay were writing to her?” Berger suggested.
“What about the MAC, the machine access code?” Benton asked.
Lucy said, as she scrolled through e-mails, “Doesn’t match either of these laptops, but all that means is Terri or someone didn’t carry one of these laptops to John Jay and send the e-mails from that network. But you’re right. The sole purpose of Scarpetta six-twelve seems to be for an imposter to correspond with Terri Bridges, which would have added credence to the theory that the imposter and Terri were the same person, were it not for one thing.”
The one thing she was talking about was on her screen.
“I’m talking as I’m going through the Scarpetta six-twelve account,” she said. “And this is something that’s really important. Really, really important.”
So important, Lucy almost couldn’t believe it.
She said, “At eight-eighteen last night, Scarpetta six-twelve wrote an e-mail that was saved as a draft and never sent. I’m forwarding it to all of you, and I’m going to read it out loud to you in a sec. This rules out Terri or Oscar writing it. Do you hear what I’m saying? This e-mail I’m talking about rules out either one of them being Scarpetta six-twelve.”
“Shit.” Marino’s voice. “Someone wrote an e-mail while this place was crawling with cops? Fact is, her body was probably already at the morgue by then.”
“Her body arrived at the morgue at around eight, as I recall,” Scarpetta said.
“So someone writes an e-mail to Terri and decides not to send it for some reason.” Lucy tried to work it out. “As in maybe the person somehow found out Terri was dead right while in the middle of writing to her? And then just saved the e-mail as a draft?”
“Or wanted us to find it and make that assumption, draw some sort of conclusion from it,” Scarpetta said. “Remember, we don’t know how much of this is intended to deliberately lead us or, better put, mislead us.”
“That’s my hunch.” Berger’s voice. “This is deliberate. Whoever’s behind it is smart enough to know we’d see these e-mails eventually. The person wants us to see what we’re seeing.”
“To jerk us around,” Marino said. “And it’s working. I’m feeling jerked around as hell.”
“Two things are indisputable,” Benton said. “Terri had been dead for hours by the time that e-mail was written and saved as a draft. And Oscar was already at Bellevue, so he definitely wasn’t sending e-mails to anyone. So he couldn’t have written the one you’re talking about. Lucy? Can you read it, please?”
She read out loud what was on her screen:
Date: Mon, 31 December 2007 20:18:31
From: “Scarpetta”
To: “Terri”
Terri,
After three glasses of champagne and some of that whiskey that costs more than your books, I can be candid. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and be brutally candid with you. It’s my New Year’s resolution—to be brutal.
While I think you’re bright enough to have an excellent grasp of forensic psychology, I don’t think you could ever do anything but teach, if you insist on staying in the field. The sad fact? Suspects, inmates, victims would never accept a dwarf, and I don’t know how jurors would respond, either.
Would you ever consider being a morgue assistant where your appearance is immaterial? Who knows? Maybe one day you could work for me!
—Scarpetta
Lucy said, “The IP’s not John Jay. Not an address we’ve seen so far.”
“I’m glad she never got that.” Scarpetta sounded solemn. “That’s terrible. If she wasn’t sending them to herself, after all, she probably really did think they were from me. And Oscar probably thought so, too. I’m glad neither she nor Oscar ever read that, glad it was never sent. How incredibly cruel.”
“That’s what I’m getting at,” Marino said. “The person’s a piece of shit. Is playing games, having fun with us. This is for our benefit, to fuck with us, rub our noses in it. Who else was going to see this unsent e-mail except those of us investigating Terri’s murder? Mainly it’s for the Doc’s benefit. You ask me, somebody’s really got it in for the Doc.”
“Any idea where that IP traces? What the address is, if not John Jay?” Benton asked Lucy.
She said, “All I’ve got is a range of numbers from the Internet service provider. They aren’t going to tell me anything unless I hack into the mainframe.”
“I didn’t hear that,” Berger said to her. “You didn’t just say that.”
For the first time since Marino had attacked her last spring, Scarpetta found herself alone with him.
She set down her crime scene case outside the bathroom doorway in the master bedroom, and she and Marino both looked at the stripped mattress beneath a window that had draperies drawn across it. They examined photographs of what the bed had looked like when the police had arrived last night, and the soft, sexy clothing that had been laid out on top of it. There was an uneasiness between the two of them now that they were inches from each other, with no one else around and no one to overhear them.
His big index finger began tapping an eight-by-ten of the clothing on the perfectly made bed.
He said, “You think it’s possible the killer did this, like maybe he was going through some fantasy shit after the fact? Like maybe he was playing out a fantasy of her dressing up for him in red or something?”
“I doubt it,” Scarpetta said. “If that was his intention, why didn’t he do it? He could have forced her to dress any way he’d wanted.”
She pointed at the clothing on the bed in the photograph, and her index finger was smaller than his pinkie.
“The clothes are laid out the way they would be if someone extremely organized was planning what to wear last night,” she explained. “Just as she had set up everything else for the evening, with methodical deliberation. I think that’s how she went about her normal routines. She’d timed her dinner preparation, perhaps had taken the wine out a few hours earlier so it would be the temperature she wanted. She’d set the table and had arranged flowers that she’d bought at a market earlier in the day. She was in her robe, perhaps had just showered.”
“Did it look to you like she’d just shaved her legs?” he asked.
“There wasn’t anything to shave,” Scarpetta said. “That’s not how she removed her hair. She went to the dermatologist for that.”
Photographs made sliding sounds as he shuffled them around, looking for ones that showed the interior of Terri’s closets and drawers, which the police had not left in their original ordered state. He and Scarpetta started looking through socks and hose, under garments and gym clothes, everything jumbled up and in disarray from
