Her shoulder was solidly against Lucy’s as she said it.
Lucy was so aware of Berger’s every motion, sound, and scent, she could be on LSD, based on what she’d read about it: an increased heart rate and higher body temperature, and crossover sensations such as “hearing” colors and “seeing” sounds.
“It might be something like that,” Marino was saying. “She’s a pilot fish. Has to swim after the sharks to get the leftovers they drop. I’m not making fun of her. It’s the truth.”
“What’s the Terri connection in all this?” Berger asked.
Lucy replied, “The photograph was sent to her, specifically, to the user account called Lunasee.”
“Sent by?” Berger asked.
“Scarpetta six-twelve sent it to her the first Monday of December, the third, and what’s not making much sense is for some reason Terri, I’m going to say it was Terri, deleted it, and whoever sent it also deleted it, which is why it wasn’t in the trash. I had to restore it with the neural networking programming.”
Marino said, “You’re telling us the photo was sent December third, and both parties immediately deleted it that same day?”
“Yes.”
“Was there a message with it?” Berger asked.
“Showing you that right now.”
Lucy moved her finger on the trackpad.
“This,” she said.
Date: Mon, 3 December 2007 12:16:11
From: “Scarpetta”
To: “Terri”
Terri,
I know you like primary source material, so consider this an early Christmas present—for your book. But I do not want to be credited with having given this to you, and will deny it if asked. Nor will I tell you who took it— wasn’t with my permission (the idiot gave me a copy, assumed I’d be pleased). I’m asking that you move the photo to a Word file and delete it from your e-mail as I’ve just now deleted it from mine.—Scarpetta
“Terri Bridges was writing a book?” Marino asked.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “But based on what Jaime and I have seen of this master’s thesis? Could very well be that’s where it was headed.”
Berger said, “Especially if she really believed all this material was coming from Kay, and I do think she believed that. I think Lunasee was Terri. For the record. Although I know it’s speculative.”
“I do, too,” Lucy said. “Obviously, the critical question is whether whoever’s been posing as my aunt in these e-mails to Terri has anything to do with her murder.”
“What about the IP?” Marino asked.
“When can you guys get the info from the ISP—the Internet service provider—to identify the customer? Because the address I get is a twenty-something block of the Upper East Side that includes the Guggenheim, the Met, and the Jewish Museum. That’s not real helpful.”
Lucy knew the exact location but wasn’t going to be forthcoming about it. Berger didn’t like her to break the rules, and Lucy had her friends in the world of ISPs, some of them going back to her federal law-enforcement years, and others further back than that, who knew people who knew people. What she’d done was no different from cops getting a warrant after they’d already opened the trunk of a car and discovered a hundred kilos of cocaine inside.
She said, “Also right around in that area, which is basically Museum Mile, is Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s dermatology practice.”
Berger’s face was close to hers in the dark backseat, her fragrance a spell.
Berger said, “Right around in that area? How right around are we talking about?”
“The dermatologist to the stars has an apartment that’s the entire thirtieth floor in the building where her office is,” Lucy said. “She’s away for the holidays. Her office doesn’t reopen until Monday the seventh.”
Scarpetta waited to go inside the library until she could find an excuse to be alone, and Lucy’s call provided it.
Leaving Morales and Benton in the bedroom, she walked back toward the living room and entered the library as Lucy told her over the phone about a posting on the John Jay website and asked if she was aware of it. Scanning shelves of old psychiatric volumes, Scarpetta told her that she wasn’t.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Scarpetta added. “Everything I’m hearing makes me feel sorry, really sorry. I wish I’d known she was trying to get hold of me.”
She didn’t see the book Oscar had told her about, The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor, where he claimed to have hidden the CD. Her doubts about him proliferated. What kind of game was he playing with her?
“And the photograph on the Internet this morning,” Lucy said. “Taken in the morgue here in New York. You were talking to Dr. Lester. Does that sound familiar?”
“I have no recollection of anybody taking my picture when I’ve been there or I would have thought of it when I first saw the photo today.”
“When you look at the photo again, fill in the background with a countertop and a security camera video display. Maybe you can figure out where the person might have been standing. Maybe that will tell you something.”
“It would have been from the direction of an autopsy table. There are three of them in the autopsy suite, so maybe it was somebody there for another case. I promise I’ll think about it carefully, but not right now.”
All she could think about right now was talking to Oscar again and telling him the book wasn’t here. She could imagine his reply. They must have gotten hold of the CD. That would explain the thread on the floor outside his door. They had gotten in. That’s what he would say. She hadn’t mentioned the book or the hidden CD to Morales or Benton. She couldn’t tell them the book and CD were there, and she couldn’t tell them that they weren’t. She was Oscar Bane’s physician. What had gone on between the two of them, within reason, remained confidential.
“You got something to write with?” Lucy asked. “I’m giving you Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s phone numbers. The dermatologist.”
“I know who she is.”
Lucy explained that the photograph was e-mailed to Terri Bridges on December 3, at around noon, from an Internet coffee shop across the street from Dr. Stuart’s office. She gave Scarpetta a cell phone number, and also a number for a time-share presidential suite at the St. Regis in Aspen, Colorado, and said Dr. Stuart always stayed there under her husband’s name, which was Oxford.
“Ask for Dr. Oxford,” Lucy said. “Amazing what people will tell you, but I didn’t pass along all this to anyone else. Jaime has this thing about going through legal channels, imagine? Anyway, can you ask Morales something for me and then tell Benton to call me?”
“I’m walking that way now.”
“I’m in the foyer of Terri’s brownstone, logged on to the wireless network, which is accessible to all the apartments,” Lucy said. “And it’s broadcasting, meaning it’s visible to anybody on it. There’s a device on it.”
Oscar’s home gym was in the master bedroom, his foil-tented bed in the midst of it, and Benton and Morales were talking.
“What is it you want me to ask him, exactly?” Scarpetta said.
She could see why Morales was popular with women and be-grudgingly respected but resented by just about everybody else, including judges. He reminded her of a couple of the star athletes on scholarship at Cornell when she was there as an undergraduate, these scrappy, supremely self-assured young men who compensated for their relatively small stature by being wiry and fast, brazen and outrageous. They listened to no one, had little regard for their team or coaches, and were intellectually lazy but scored points and were crowd pleasers. They weren’t nice people.
