her, she already has.”
She studied the chair.
She decided, “The lubricant is moist, so we don’t want anything plastic like poly tubing or basically shrinkwrap. I think paper so it continues to air-dry, maybe a Mammoth Bag, and then place the entire thing in a large evidence storage box. Be as creative as you can. I don’t want any chance of bacteria, and I don’t want anything rubbing against any surface of it.”
Marino left, and Scarpetta retrieved a roll of string, a roll of blue evidence tape, and a pair of small scissors from her crime scene case. She set the chair against the tile wall and began measuring and cutting string to correlate with Oscar’s and Terri’s heights, and the lengths of their legs and also their torsos. She taped the strings to the wall directly above the chair as Marino reappeared in the doorway. Berger was with him.
“If you can give Jaime my notepad and pen so she can take notes and you can free up your hands. What I’m about to show you,” Scarpetta said, “is why I don’t believe Oscar could have committed this murder. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I’m going to show you why it’s unlikely. A little simple math.”
She directed their attention to the different lengths of string taped to the tile wall above the chair.
“This is all based on the theory that Terri was seated in this chair. What’s relevant is the length of her torso, which is eighty-four and a quarter centimeters. . . .”
“The metric system ain’t my thing,” Marino said.
“About thirty-four and an eighth inches,” she said. “I measured her in the morgue, and as you know, people with achondroplasia have abnormally short limbs, but their torsos and heads are relatively the same size as a normal adult’s, which is why they seem disproportionately larger. That’s why little people can drive cars without sitting on cushions but need extended pedals so their feet can reach the accelerator, the brake, the clutch. In Terri’s case, her torso is about the same length as Jaime’s and mine. So I’ve taped a segment of string to the wall”—Scarpetta showed them—“that’s exactly the length of Terri’s torso, and positioned it so it begins at the seat of the chair and ends here.”
She pointed to the piece of blue tape fastening the top end of the string to the wall.
“The distance between the chair cushion and the floor is twenty-one inches,” she continued to explain. “So if you add thirty-four and an eighth and twenty-one, you get fifty-five and one-eighth inches. Oscar Bane is four feet tall. In other words, forty-eight inches tall.”
She pointed to the string that represented his height.
Berger commented as she wrote, “Not even as tall as Terri was when she was sitting.”
“That’s right,” Scarpetta said.
She lifted the “Oscar string,” as she called it, from the wall and held it out parallel to the floor, and did the same with the “seated Terri string.” She asked Marino to hold both, level and parallel to the floor.
She took more photographs.
Then Benton was behind Berger, and a uniformed officer was with him.
The officer said, “Someone need a chair escorted to a private jet headed to the bomb factory in Oak Ridge? The chair’s not going to explode or nothing, right?”
“You bring the evidence packaging I asked for?” Marino asked him.
“Just like UPS,” the officer said.
Scarpetta asked Marino to continue holding the Oscar and Terri strings while she explained to Benton what they were doing.
“And his arms are very short, about sixteen inches from his shoulder joint to the tips of his fingers, which would have given him less leverage,” she added, looking at Benton. “Your reach is a good eight inches more than that, and if you’d been standing behind Terri while she was seated, you would have towered over her by almost twenty inches, giving you tremendous leverage. As opposed to Oscar. Imagine someone his size trying to pull up and back with force while the victim is thrashing about in the chair.”
“And he’s not even level with her when he’s doing it? I don’t really see how he could,” Marino agreed. “Especially if he kept doing it to her over and over again, allowing her to regain consciousness, then strangling her into unconsciousness again, like you said. I don’t care how much he can bench-press.”
“Actually, I don’t think there’s any way he could have done it,” Berger said.
“I’m worried about him,” Scarpetta said. “Has anybody tried to call him?”
“When I talked to Morales,” Benton said, “I asked him if anybody knew where Oscar was or had heard from him. He says the police have Oscar’s cell phone.”
“He voluntarily gave that up?” Scarpetta asked.
“Along with a lot of other things, yes,” Benton said. “Which is too bad, at least about the phone. I wish he had it, because he’s not answering his apartment phone, which doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know how we’re going to reach him.”
“I think what we ought to do is split up, as I suggested earlier,” Berger said. “Benton? You and Kay meet Morales at Oscar’s apartment and take a look. Marino and I will make sure this chair gets packaged properly. We’ll make sure the swabs you just took and any other evidence goes directly to the labs. Then we’ll head across the street and see what the neighbor has to say about Jake Loudin.”
Scarpetta carried the chair out of the bathroom and set it down for the officer who was to package and escort it.
Berger said to her, “If you’re still at Oscar’s apartment when we’re done, we’ll meet you there. Lucy said she’ll call me if she finds out anything else important on her end.”
Oscar Bane lived on Amsterdam Avenue in a ten-story building of insipid yellow brick that reminded Scarpetta of Mussolini’s fascist constructions in Rome. Inside the lobby, the doorman wouldn’t let them near the elevator until Morales showed his badge. He looked Irish, was portly and elderly, wearing a uniform the same green as the awning outside.
“I haven’t seen him since New Year’s Eve,” the doorman said, his attention fixed to Scarpetta’s big crime scene case. “I guess I know why you’re here.”
Morales said, “That so? Tell me why we’re here.”
“I read about it. I never saw her.”
“You mean Terri Bridges?” Benton said.
“Everybody’s talking about it, as you might imagine. I hear they let him out of Bellevue. It’s not nice the names they’re calling him. You gotta feel sorry for anyone made fun of like that.”
No one had heard from Oscar, as far as Scarpetta knew. No one seemed to have a clue where he was, and she was extremely worried someone might harm him.
“There’s five of us who work the door, and we all say the same thing. She’d never been to this building or one of us, at least, would know. And he’d gotten strange,” the doorman said.
He directed his attention to Scarpetta and Benton because he obviously didn’t like Morales and wasn’t trying very hard to hide it.
“Now, that wasn’t always the case,” the doorman continued, “and I know that for a fact because I’ve worked here for eleven years, and he’s been in the building about half that time. He used to be friendly, a real nice guy. Then all of a sudden he changed. Cut his hair and dyed it the color of a marigold, got quieter and quieter, stayed in his apartment a lot. When he’d come out to walk or whatever, it was at odd times and he was as nervous as a cat.”
“Where does he keep his car?” Morales asked.
“An underground parking garage around the block. A lot of the tenants park there.”
“When was this?” Benton asked. “When you noticed something different about him.”
“I’d say it was the fall. October or so when it started becoming obvious that something was going on. Knowing what I do now, I have to wonder what he got tangled up with, you know, with the girl. Put it this way, when two people get together and one of them changes for the worse? You figure it out.”
“Is someone on the door around the clock?” Benton asked him.
“Twenty-four-seven. Come on. I’ll take you up. You got a key, right?”
“I assume you have one?” Benton said.
