this. In fact, multiple pairs.”
“I keep forgetting what they call you,” he said.
He moved next to her.
“Eagle eye,” he said. “Among other things.”
He was close enough for her to see faint reddish freckles scattered over his light brown skin, and she smelled his loud cologne.
“Wears a Brooks Ariel made especially for people who overpronate and need a lot of stability,” he said. “Kind of an irony.”
He waved his hand around the bedroom.
“I’d say your fan Oscar could use all the stability he can get,” Morales added. “Good for flat-footed people. Wide-bodied, unique tread pattern. I got the pair he was wearing last night and dropped it off at the labs. With his clothes.”
“Meaning he wore what, exactly, when he checked himself out of Bellevue a little while ago?” she asked.
“Another eagle-eye question.”
She kept inching away from him, and he continued to crowd her. She was almost in the closet, and she placed the Nikes back on the floor and stepped around and away from him.
“Last night when I agreed to take him to the crazy hotel,” Morales said, “I made a little deal. I said if he’d let me have his clothes, we’d stop by his apartment first so he could get a jump-out bag. Then he’d be all set when he was ready to leave.”
“Sounds like you were expecting he wouldn’t stay long.”
“I was expecting exactly that. He wasn’t going to stay long because his reason for being there was to see Benton and, most of all, you. He got his dream come true and he boogied.”
“He came in here by himself last night to get his so-called jump-out bag of clothes?”
“Wasn’t under arrest. Could do what he wanted. I waited in the car, and he went in, took him maybe ten minutes. Max. Maybe that’s why his little booby trap thread was on the floor. He forgot to drape it over the top of the door when he was leaving. He was a little upset.”
“Do we know what was in his jump-out bag?”
“One pair of jeans, a navy blue T-shirt, another pair of his Brooks running shoes, socks, underwear, and a zip-up wool coat. The ward’s got an inventory. Jeb went through it. You met Jeb.”
She didn’t say anything as they stood near the aluminum-foil tent, eye to eye.
“The corrections officer outside your door this afternoon. Making sure you were safe,” he said.
She was startled by Rod Stewart singing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”
The music ringtone on Morales’s personal digital assistant, a hefty and expensive one.
He pressed his Bluetooth earpiece and answered, “Yeah.”
She walked out and found Benton inside the library, his gloved hands holding a copy of a book, The Air Loom Gang.
Benton said, “About a machine controlling someone’s mind back in the late seventeen hundreds. You okay? I didn’t want to interfere. Figured you’d yell if you needed me to crush him into a cube.”
“He’s an asshole.”
“Read that loud and clear.”
He returned the book to its empty slot on a shelf.
“I was telling you about The Air Loom Gang ,” he said. “This apartment’s like a scene out of it. Bedlam.”
“I know.”
Their eyes met, as if he was waiting for her to tell him something.
“Did you know Oscar had a bag packed with clothing on the ward, in case he got the urge to leave?” she said. “And that Morales brought him over here last night?”
“I knew Oscar could leave whenever he chose,” he replied. “We’ve all known that.”
“I just think it’s uncanny. Almost as if Morales was encouraging him to leave, wanted him out of the hospital.”
“Why would you think that?” Benton asked.
“Some things he said.”
She glanced around at the open doorway, worrying Morales might suddenly walk in.
“A feeling there was a fair amount of negotiating going on last night when he drove Oscar away from the scene, for example,” she said.
“That wouldn’t be unusual.”
“You understand the predicament I’m in,” she said, scanning old books again, and disappointed again.
Oscar said the book with the CD would be in the second bookcase, left of the door, fourth shelf. The book wasn’t there. The fourth shelf was stacked with archival boxes, each of them labeled Circulars.
“What should he have in his collection that he doesn’t, in your opinion? To make it more complete.” Benton said it for a reason.
“Why do you ask?”
“There’s a certain corrections officer named Jeb who tells me things. Unfortunately, Jeb tells a lot of people things, but he sure didn’t want you getting hurt today when you were in the infirmary, and he wasn’t happy at all with your making him step outside. When I called and found out Oscar was gone, Jeb and I had a chat. Anyway, what’s Oscar missing in here?”
“I’m surprised he doesn’t have The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor. By Littleton Winslow.”
“That’s interesting,” Benton said. “Interesting you would come up with that.”
She tugged his sleeve and they got on the floor in front of the second bookcase.
She started pulling archival boxes off the bottom shelf, and was beginning to feel unhinged, as if she’d lost her GPS, anything that might tell her which direction was the right one. She didn’t know who was crazy and who wasn’t, who was lying or telling the truth, who was talking and to whom, or who might turn up next that she wasn’t supposed to see.
She opened an archival box and found an assortment of nineteenth-century pamphlets about mechanical restraints and water cures.
“I would have thought he’d have it,” she said.
“The reason he doesn’t is because there’s no such book,” Benton said, his arm against hers as they looked at pamphlets.
His physical presence was reassuring, and she needed to feel it.
“Not by that author,” Benton added. “ The Experiences of an Asylum Doctorwas written by Montagu Lomax about fifty years after Littleton Winslow, son of Forbes Winslow, wrote his famous Plea of Insanity, his Manual of Lunacy.”
“Why would Oscar lie?”
“Doesn’t trust anyone. Truly believes he’s being spied on. Maybe the bad guys will hear where he’s hidden his only proof, and so he’s cryptic with you. Or maybe he’s confused. Or maybe he’s testing you. If you care about him enough, you’ll come into this library just as you have, and figure it out. Could be a number of reasons.”
Scarpetta opened another archival box, this one filled with circulars about Bellevue.
Oscar had said that she and Benton would be interested in what he’d collected about Bellevue.
She lifted out a manual on nursing, and an in-house published directory of the medical and surgical staff between 1736 and 1894. She picked up a stack of circulars and lectures going back to 1858.
At the bottom of the box was a thumb drive attached to a lanyard.
She pulled off her gloves, wrapped the thumb drive in them, and handed them to Benton.
She got up and felt Morales before she saw him, in the doorway. She hoped he hadn’t seen what she’d just done.
“We got to leave right now,” Morales said.
He was holding a paper bag of evidence, the top of it sealed with red tape.
Benton returned the archival box to its bottom shelf and got up, too.
