“Poor doormen,” Scarpetta said. “I think I spooked them more than usual.”
When they arrived at their luxury apartment building, one glimpse of her crime scene case and the doormen always stayed clear. But this early morning, the reaction was stronger than usual because of the news. A serial killer was terrorizing New York’s East Side, and may have killed before, years earlier, in Maryland and Connecticut, and Benton and Scarpetta looked pretty scary themselves.
They stepped onto the elevator and rode up to the thirty-second floor. The minute they were inside the door, they started undressing.
“I wish you wouldn’t go down there,” Benton said.
He yanked off his tie as he took off his jacket, his coat already draped over a chair.
“You’ve gotten swabs, you know what killed her. Why?” he said.
Scarpetta replied, “Maybe just once today people will treat me as if I have a mind of my own or even half the one I used to have.”
She dropped her suit jacket and blouse into the biohazard hamper near the door, a practice so normal for them, it only rarely occurred to her what an odd sight they would be if anybody was watching, perhaps with a telescope. Then she thought of the new helicopter the NYPD had gotten, something Lucy had mentioned. It had a camera that could recognize faces up to two miles away, or something like that.
Scarpetta unzipped her pants and tugged them off, and she grabbed a remote from the Stickley mission oak coffee table in a living room full of Stickleys and Poteet Victory oils on canvas. She closed the electronic blinds. She felt rather much like Oscar, hiding from everyone.
“I’m not sure you agreed with me,” she said to Benton, both of them in their underwear and holding their shoes. “And by the way, this is us. Are you happy? This is what you married. Someone who has to change when she comes through the door because of the antisocial places she visits.”
He took her in his arms and buried his nose in her hair.
“You’re not as bad as you think,” he said.
“I’m not sure how you mean that.”
“No, I did agree with you. Or yes, I did. If it weren’t—” He held out his left arm behind her head, still holding her close, and looked at his watch. “Quarter past six. Shit. You might have to leave in a minute. That part I don’t agree with you about. No. Babysitting Dr. Lester. I’m going to pray for a big storm that prevents you from going anywhere. See your favorite painting in here? Mister Victory’s Balancing Elements? I’m going to pray to the Great Spirit that the elements will be balanced, and you’ll stay home and take a shower with me. We can wash our shoes together in the shower like we used to do after crime scenes. And then you know what we did after that.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing.”
“So you agree about my not going on television,” she said. “And please do pray. I don’t want to babysit her. Everything you said is true. I know what happened to Eva Peebles. She and I discussed it in her bathroom. I don’t need to discuss it with Dr. Lester, who doesn’t listen and isn’t as open-minded as Eva Peebles was. I’m tired and stressed out and sound like it. I’m angry. I’m sorry.”
“Not at me,” he said.
“Not at you,” she said.
He stroked her face, her hair, and looked deep into her eyes, the way he did when he was trying to find something he’d lost, or perhaps thought he’d lost.
“It’s not about protocols or whose side you’re on,” he said. “It’s about Oscar. It’s about everybody who’s been brutalized. When you’re not sure who’s doing what or how or why, it’s better to stay behind the scenes. This is a good time to stay away from Dr. Lester. To carry on quietly. Jesus,” he suddenly said.
He returned to the hamper and fished out his pants. He reached into a pocket and pulled out the thumb drive still wrapped in the pair of purple gloves.
“This,” he said. “This is important. Maybe the Great Spirit just heard my prayer.”
Scarpetta’s cell phone rang. It was Dr. Kiselstein at Y-12.
She said to him before he could say anything, “Lucy said it got there safely. I apologize a thousand times. I hope you weren’t waiting. I’m not sure where.”
Dr. Kiselstein’s German-accented voice in her earpiece: “Since I usually don’t receive samples from private jets, I treated myself and listened to music on the iPod my wife gave me for Christmas. So small, I could wear it as a tie clip. It was no problem. I know McGhee-Tyson, the Air National Guard base, except, as I said, usually not the jet of a millionaire. Usually a C-one-thirty or some other cargo plane bringing us something from Langley that NASA won’t admit to. Like faulty heat shields. Or prototypes, which I like much better because nothing bad has happened. Of course, when they are strange deliveries from you, it’s always bad. But I do have some results, as this is timely, I realize. No official report of the analysis. That will be a while.”
Benton gave up hovering. He touched her cheek and headed to the shower.
“What we have, basically, is an ointment that is mixed with blood, possibly sweat, and silver salts, and along with this are fibers of wood and cotton,” Dr. Kiselstein said.
Scarpetta moved toward the sofa. She got a pen and notepad from an end-table drawer and sat down.
“Specifically, silver nitrate and potassium nitrate. And carbon and oxygen, as you would expect. I’m e- mailing images to you, taken at different magnifications up to one thousand-X. Even at fifty-X you can see the blood, and the silver-rich regions are quite bright due to their higher atomic number. You can also see silver nitrate in the wood—small, whitish silver-rich specks evenly dispersed over the surface.”
“Interesting it’s evenly dispersed,” she said. “Same with the cotton fibers?”
“Yes. Visible at higher magnifications.”
To her an even dispersement implied something that might have been manufactured as opposed to a random transference due to contamination. If what she suspected was correct, however, they were likely dealing with both.
She asked, “What about skin cells?”
“Yes, definitely. We are still at the lab, and this will be going on for a day or two. No rest for the wicked. And this is very difficult because you sent many samples. What I’m calling you about is just two of them. One from each case. The chair and a swab. You might think the cotton and wood fibers are from the swabs you used on the body, and yes, maybe no. I can’t tell you. But not so with the chair, because you didn’t swab the chair seat?”
“No. That wasn’t touched.”
“Then we can conclude the cotton and wood fibers in the material on the chair cushion are there for another reason, perhaps transferred by the ointment, which presents a challenge as it’s nonconductive. That requires us to use variable pressure, which maintains the high vacuum in the gun needed to create the electron beam as the rest of the chamber is backfilled with dry filtered air. And we have reduced the scattering of the electron beam by minimizing the working distance. I suppose I am making excuses. The ointment is difficult to image because the electron beam actually melts it, I’m afraid. It will be better when it dries.”
“Silver nitrate applicators for cauterizing skin, possibly? That’s what comes to my mind right away,” she said. “Which might explain the presence of blood, sweat, skin cells. And a mixture of different DNA profiles if we’re talking about a communal jar of a healing ointment. If we’re talking about a source being, perhaps, a medical office? For example, a dermatologist?”
“I won’t ask about your suspects,” Dr. Kiselstein said.
“Anything else interesting about the chair?”
“The frame is iron with trace elements of gold in the paint. There was no one sitting in it when we placed it in the chamber. Suspects and punishment aren’t my department.” They hung up.
Scarpetta tried Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s numbers and got voicemail. She didn’t leave a message and stayed on the sofa, thinking.
She believed she was dealing with Marino just fine until she decided to call him and realized she didn’t have his cell phone number. So she called Berger, and the way the prosecutor answered, it was as if she knew who it was and that the call was personal.
