murder. Someone straps your wrists behind your back, your ankles—tight as hell with some sort of flex-cuff. And you’re nude. . . .”
“Not flex-cuffs. Looks like the same type of strap used on Terri Bridges’s wrists. And also like Terri’s case? The clothes were cut off.” Scarpetta pointed to what was in the tub. “I think he wants us to know the chronology of what he does. Seems to go out of his way to make it pretty clear. Even left the lamps where he’d set them so we could see, since the only light in here, in the bathroom, is the one he removed and placed in the tub.”
“You’re conjecturing he set up the lamps like that for our benefit?”
“For himself first. He needed to see what he was doing. Then he left them. Made it more of a rush for whoever found her. The shock effect.”
“Sort of like Gainesville. The severed head on a bookshelf,” Berger said, looking past her, at the body slowly twirling in its infernal, mocking pirouette.
“Sort of,” Scarpetta said. “That and the body winding and unwinding, which may very well be the reason the window’s open. I’m guessing it was his final brushstroke on his way out.”
“To artificially speed up the cooling of the body.”
“I don’t think he gave a damn about that,” Scarpetta said. “I think he opened the window so the air blowing in would do exactly what it’s doing. To make her dance.”
Berger silently watched the body slowly dance.
Scarpetta retrieved her camera and two LCD chemical thermometers from her crime scene case.
“But since there are buildings everywhere around us,” Scarpetta said in a hard voice, “he would have, at the very least, had the blinds shut while he was doing his handiwork in here. Otherwise, someone might have seen the entire ordeal. Maybe filmed it with a cell phone. Posted it on YouTube. So he was callous enough to draw up the blinds before he left, to make sure the wind blew in and created his special effects.”
“I’m sorry you had to encounter Marino like this,” Berger said, aware of Scarpetta’s anger but not the reason for it.
Scarpetta’s mood had nothing to do with Marino. She’d dealt with that drama earlier and felt quite done with it for the time being. It wasn’t important right now. Berger was unfamiliar with Scarpetta’s demeanor at crime scenes because she had never worked one with her, and had no clue what she was like when confronted with such blatant cruelty, especially if she was worried that a death might have been prevented, that maybe she could have helped prevent it.
This had been an awful way to die. Eve Peebles had suffered physical pain and abject terror while the killer had his sadistic fun with her. It was a wonder and a pity she didn’t die of a heart attack before he’d finished her off.
Based on the sharp upward angle of the rope around her neck, she wasn’t rendered unconscious quickly, but likely suffered the agony of not being able to breathe as the pressure of the rope under her chin occluded her airway. Unconsciousness due to a lack of oxygen can take minutes that seem forever. She would have kicked like mad had he not bound her ankles together, which might be why he’d done so. Maybe he’d refined his technique after Terri Bridges, realizing it was better not to let his victims kick.
Scarpetta saw no sign of a struggle, just an abraded bruise on the left shin. It was very recent, but that was as much as she could say about it.
Berger said, “Do you think she was already dead when he hung her from the chain?”
“No, I don’t. I think he bound her, cut her clothes off, placed her in the tub, then slipped the noose around her neck and hoisted her up just far enough for the weight of her body to tighten the slipknot and compress her trachea,” Scarpetta said. “She couldn’t thrash but so much because of her bindings. And she was frail. At most she’s five-foot-three and weighs a hundred and five pounds. This was an easy one for him.”
“She wasn’t in a chair. So she didn’t watch herself.”
“This time, I don’t think so. That’s a good question for Benton as to why. If we’re talking about the same killer.”
Scarpetta was still taking photographs. It was important she capture what she was seeing before she did anything else.
Berger asked, “Do you have a doubt?”
“What I feel or think doesn’t matter,” Scarpetta said. “I’m staying away from that. I’ll tell you what her body’s telling me, which is there are profound similarities between this case and Terri’s.”
The shutter clicked and the flash went off.
Berger had moved to one side of the doorway, her hands clasped behind her back as she looked in and said, “Marino’s in the living room with Lucy. She thinks the victim might have something to do with Gotham Gotcha. ”
Scarpetta said without turning around, “Crashing the site wasn’t a good way to deal with it. I hope you’ll impress that upon her. She doesn’t always listen to me.”
“She said something about a morgue photograph of Marilyn Monroe.”
“That wasn’t the way to handle it,” Scarpetta said to the flash of the camera. “I wish she hadn’t.”
The body slowly turned, the rope winding and unwinding. Eva Peebles’s blue eyes were dull and open wide in her thin, wrinkled face. Strands of her snowy hair were caught in the noose. The only jewelry she had on was a thin gold chain around her left ankle—just like Terri Bridges.
“She admitted to it?” Scarpetta asked. “Or is it the process of elimination?”
“She’s admitted nothing to me. I’d prefer it stay that way.”
“All these things you’d rather she not tell you,” Scarpetta said.
“I have plenty to say to her without doing so in a way that might be disadvantageous,” Berger said. “But I get your point completely.”
Scarpetta studied the black-and-white tile floor before stepping her paper-booted feet inside. She set one thermometer on the edge of the sink, and tucked the other under Eva Peebles’s left arm.
“From what I gather,” Berger said, “whatever virus brought down the website also enabled her to hack into it. Which then allowed her to hack into Eva Peebles’s e-mail—don’t ask me to explain it. Lucy’s found an electronic folder containing virtually every Gotham Gotcha column ever written, including the one posted this morning and a second one posted later in the day. And she’s found the Marilyn Monroe photograph, which Eva Peebles apparently opened. In other words, it seems this woman”—she meant the dead one—“didn’t write them. They were e-mailed to her from IP addresses that Lucy says have been anonymized, but since this is yet another violent death that is possibly related to e-mails, we won’t have any trouble getting the service provider to tell us who the account belongs to.”
Scarpetta handed her a notepad and pen and said, “You want to scribe? Ambient temp is fifty-eight degrees. Body temp is eighty-nine-point-two. Doesn’t tell us a whole lot, since she’s thin, unclothed, the room’s been steadily cooling. Rigor’s not apparent yet. Not surprising, either. Cooling delays its onset, and we know she called nine-one-one at what time, exactly?”
“Eight-forty-nine, exactly.” Berger made notes. “What we don’t know is exactly when she was in the pet shop. Only that it was approximately an hour before she called the police.”
“I’d like to hear the tape,” Scarpetta said.
She placed her hands on the body’s hips to stop its slow, agitated turns. She examined it more closely, exploring it with the flashlight, noting a shiny residue in the vaginal area.
Berger said, “We know she said she believed the man she encountered was Jake Loudin. So if he’s the last person to see her alive . . . ?”
“Question is whether he literally was the last person. Do we know if there might be any personal connection between Jake Loudin and Terri Bridges?”
“Just a possible connection that might be nothing more than a coincidence.”
And Berger began telling her about Marino’s earlier interview, about a puppy that Terri didn’t want, a Boston terrier named Ivy. She continued to explain that it was unclear who had given the sick puppy to Terri, perhaps Oscar had. Perhaps someone else. Perhaps it originally had come from one of Jake Loudin’s shops, hard to know, maybe impossible to know.
“I don’t need to tell you that he’s very upset,” Berger said, and she meant Marino. “Always the biggest thing any cop fears. You talk to a witness, and then the person is murdered. He’s going to worry he could have done something to prevent it.”
