Scarpetta continued to hold the body still as she got a closer look at the gelatinous material clumped in gray pubic hair and in the folds of the labia. She didn’t want to close the window—not before the police processed it with whatever forensic methods they deemed best.
“Some sort of lubricant,” she said. “Can you ask Lucy if her plane has already left La Guardia?”
They were three rooms away from each other, and Berger called her.
“Bad luck is good luck in this case. Tell them to hold off,” Berger said to Lucy. “We’ve got something else that needs to go down there . . . Great. Thanks.”
She ended the call and said to Scarpetta, “A wind shear warning in effect. They’re still on the ground.”
The shoe impressions recovered from the toilet seat in Eva Peebles’s bathroom were an exact match to the tread pattern of the shoes that Oscar Bane had been wearing last night when he’d allegedly discovered Terri’s body.
More incriminating were fingerprints lifted from the glass light fixture that the killer had removed from the ceiling and placed in the tub. The prints were Oscar’s. At shortly past midnight, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and an all points bulletin went out over the air and over the Internet.
The “Midget Murderer” was now being called the “Midget Monster,” and police nationwide were looking for him. Morales had also alerted Interpol, in the event Oscar somehow managed to evade airport and border security and escaped the country. There had been plenty of reported sightings. In fact, the latest news break as of the three a.m. broadcast was that some little people, especially young men, were staying home for fear of harassment or worse.
It was now almost five o’clock Wednesday morning, and Scarpetta, Benton, Morales, Lucy, Marino, and a Baltimore investigator who insisted on being called her surname, Bacardi, were in Berger’s penthouse apartment living room, and had been, for about four hours. The coffee table was covered with photographs and case files, and cluttered with coffee cups and bags from a nearby all-night deli. Power supply cords ran from wall outlets to the laptops they were plugged into, everybody tapping keys and looking at files as they talked.
Lucy was sitting cross-legged in a corner of the wraparound couch, her MacBook in her lap, and every now and then she glanced up at Morales, wondering how she could be right about what she was thinking. Berger had a bottle of Knappogue Castle single-malt Irish whiskey and a bottle of Brora single-malt Scotch. They were clearly visible behind glass in the bar directly across from her. She’d noticed the bottles immediately when everyone had first gotten here, and when Morales had noticed her noticing, he’d walked over to look.
“A girl with my taste,”he’d said.
The way he’d said it had given Lucy a sick feeling she couldn’t shake, and she’d had a hard time concentrating on anything since. Berger had been sitting next to her in the loft when they’d read the alleged interview in which Scarpetta supposedly told Terri Bridges that she drank liquor that cost far more than Terri’s schoolbooks. Why hadn’t Berger said anything? How could she have the same extremely rare and expensive whiskeys in her own bar and not mention that detail to Lucy?
It was Berger who drank the stuff. Not Scarpetta. And more unsettling than that was Lucy’s fear about who Berger might drink it with. That was what had entered her mind when Morales had noticed her noticing the bottles in the bar. He was almost smirking, and whenever he looked at her now, there was a glint in his eyes as if he’d won a contest Lucy knew nothing about.
Bacardi and Scarpetta were arguing, and had been at it for a while.
“No, no, no, Oscar couldn’t have done my two.” Bacardi was shaking her head. “I hope I’m not offending anybody when I say dwarf, but I can’t get used to saying little people or little person. Because I’ve always called myself a little person because I’m not the longest drink of water, like we say down south. I’m an old dog. No new tricks, can barely hang on to the ones I got.”
She might be relatively short, but she wasn’t little. Lucy had seen countless Bacardis in her life, almost all of them on Harleys, women on the downhill side of five feet who insisted on having the biggest touring bike, about eight hundred pounds of metal, their boots barely touching the pavement. In one of her earlier manifestations with the Baltimore PD, Bacardi had been a motorcycle cop, and she had a face that went with it, one that had enjoyed too much intimacy with the sun and wind. She squinted a lot, and did a fair amount of scowling, too.
She had short dyed red hair and bright blue eyes, was sturdy but not fat, and probably thought she’d gotten dressed up when she’d decided on her brown leather pants, cowboy boots, and snug scoop-neck sweater that exposed the tiny butterfly tattooed on her left breast and plenty of cleavage whenever she’d bend over to dig into her briefcase on the floor. She was sexy in her own way. She was funny. She had an Alabama accent as thick as fudge. She wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, and Marino hadn’t stopped looking at her since she’d walked through the door carrying three boxes of files from the homicides that had been committed five years ago in Baltimore and Greenwich.
“I’m not attempting to make the point that a little person could or couldn’t have done anything,” Scarpetta replied.
Unlike most people, she was always polite enough to stop typing, to unglue her eyes from her computer screen when she talked to someone.
“But he couldn’t have,” Bacardi said. “And I don’t mean to keep interrupting like Old Faithful going off, but I just had to get this out and make sure all of you are hearing me. Okay?”
She looked around the room.
“Okay,” she answered herself. “My lady, Bethany, was almost six feet tall. Now, unless she was lying down, there’s no way someone four feet tall could have garroted her.”
“I’m simply pointing out she was garroted. Basing that on the photographs you’ve shown me and the autopsy findings I’ve reviewed,” Scarpetta patiently said. “The angle of the marks on her neck, and the fact there are more than one of them, et cetera. I’m not saying who did or didn’t do it—”
“But that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying who did or didn’t. Bethany didn’t kick or struggle, or if she did, by some miracle she didn’t scrape or bruise herself. I’m telling you, someone normal size was behind her, and both of them were standing up. I think he raped her from behind while he was doing it, because that’s what got him off. And same thing with Rodrick. The kid was standing up, and this guy was behind him. The advantage the perp had in my cases is he was big enough to control them. He intimidated them into letting him bind their hands behind their backs. It doesn’t appear they struggled with him at all.”
“I’m trying to remember how tall Rodrick was,” Benton said, and his hair was very messy, his face covered with stubble that reminded Lucy of salt.
Two all-nighters, back-to-back, and he looked like it.
“Five-foot-ten,” Bacardi said. “One hundred and thirty-six pounds. Skinny and not strong. And not much of a fighter.”
“We can say all of the victims have one thing in common,” Benton then said. “I should say all of the victims we know about. They were vulnerable. They were impaired or at a disadvantage.”
“Unless the killer’s Oscar,” Berger reminded everybody. “Then the odds change. I don’t care if you’re a skinny kid on oxys. You’re not at a disadvantage, necessarily, if your assailant is only four feet tall. And I hate to keep saying it, but unless there’s another logical explanation for how his fingerprints turned up at Eva Peebles’s crime scene? And prints made by a size-five women’s shoe, a Brooks Ariel? And Oscar just happens to wear that exact same shoe, and he buys it in a size-five women’s?”
“Can’t overlook the fact he’s disappeared, either,” Marino said. “He’s got to know we’re looking for him, and he’s choosing to be a fugitive. He could turn himself in. It would be in his best self-interest. He’d be safer.”
“You’re talking about someone profoundly paranoid,” Benton said. “There is nothing on earth that would convince him it’s safe to turn himself in.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” Berger said, looking at Scarpetta.
She was going through autopsy photographs and didn’t notice Berger’s thoughtful stare.
“I don’t think so,” Benton said, as if he knew what was on Berger’s mind. “He wouldn’t do it, not even for her.”
Lucy decided that Berger must be hatching a plan for Scarpetta to make an appeal to Oscar.
