“Do you have anybody working for you or somehow connected with your practice who the police should be aware of?” Scarpetta asked. “Or let me ask it in a way easier to answer. What might you be thinking if you were me?”
“I’d be thinking about the staff,” she said. “In particular, part-timers.”
“Which part-timers?”
“Part-time techs, residents, particularly those who do menial things in the offices and come and go. For example, work at one of my offices during their summer breaks or after hours. It could be anything from cleaning up to answering the phones and paging the physician on call. I have one who’s also a vet tech. But has never been a problem. It’s just he’s more of an unknown, and I don’t work with him personally. He’s rather much a cleaner-upper and assists other doctors. I have a huge practice. More than sixty employees at four different locations.”
“Vet tech?” Scarpetta said.
“I believe that’s what he does for his full-time job. I know he has something to do with pet stores, because he’s gotten a few of my staff puppies. A vet tech who helps with the pets in these places. Probably not in a way I want to know about, truth be told,” Dr. Stuart said. “He’s an odd duck, tried to give me a puppy once, on my birthday last summer. One of those Chinese crested dogs that has no fur except on its head, tail, and feet. This was maybe an eight-week-old puppy that looked deformed, as if it had alopecia, and all it did was shiver and cough. He wrote in a card that I could tell everyone I was doing hair removal on dogs now, that I was adding pet dermatology to my practice, or something like that. It was peculiar and I wasn’t amused and made him take the puppy back. Frankly, it was an extremely upsetting experience.”
“Did you ever ask him what happened to the puppy?”
“I have a good idea.”
She said it ominously.
“He likes to give injections, put it like that,” Dr. Stuart said. “He’s very good with needles, has some phlebotomy training. Look, this is making me very upset. His name is Juan Amate.”
“That’s his full name? Often Hispanic names include the mother’s maiden name, not just the surname.”
“That I don’t know. He’s worked out of my Upper East Side office for the last several years. Maybe three or four years, not sure. I don’t know him personally, and he’s not allowed in the room when I’m with a patient.”
“Why?”
“Frankly? Most of the patients I see personally are VIPs, and I don’t allow part-time techs to assist me. I have my regular assistants, who are accustomed to dealing appropriately with very well-known people. You don’t have a part-time tech drawing blood from an A-list movie star.”
“Did you personally see Terri Bridges or Oscar Bane, or would that have been one of your other doctors?”
“I wouldn’t have reason to know them personally. But I do have a few other little people who are patients, since obesity is one of the most common problems, and an unfortunate side effect of dieting can be skin problems. Acne, premature lines and creases on the face and neck, and if one doesn’t have the proper fat intake, the skin doesn’t hold moisture as well, so now we add dry flakiness to the list.”
She didn’t see Terri or Oscar personally. They weren’t important enough.
“Is there anything else you can tell me about Juan Amate?” Scarpetta said. “I’m not saying he’s done anything wrong. But I don’t want anyone else hurt or dead, Dr. Stuart. Do you know where he lives, anything like that?”
“Have no idea. I doubt he has much money. Olive complexion, dark hair. Hispanic. Speaks Spanish, which is helpful. Speaks English fluently, which is a requirement in my practice.”
“Is he a U.S. citizen?”
“He should be. But that’s not for me to check on. I suppose the answer is I don’t know.”
“Anything else you can tell me? For example, do you have any idea where the police might find him right now, to ask questions?”
“No idea whatsoever. I know nothing else. I just didn’t like it when he gave me that Chinese puppy,” she said. “I felt there was something mean about the gesture. As if he were jerking me around somehow—of all people? To give me an extremely ugly dog with hair and skin problems? I just remember it being very upsetting, and then I looked bad to my staff because I made him take the pathetic little thing out of there immediately, and he said he didn’t know what he’d do with it, as if I was sentencing the pitiful creature to . . . Well, it’s as if he wanted to make me look heartless, and I think I actually started almost thinking about firing him after that. Obviously, I should have.”
Benton had placed his hand on Scarpetta’s bare thigh, and when she ended the call, he put his arm around her and directed her attention to what he had been looking at while she was on the phone.
He scrolled through maps, scores of them.
“Track logs,” Benton said. “These thick colored lines, the dark pink ones?” He traced one that ran from Amsterdam to an Upper East Side location on Third Avenue. “An actual track mapped by a GPS.”
“Simulated or real?” Scarpetta asked.
“I think these are real tracks. It appears they’re recordings of routes Oscar took, hundreds of them. Some kind of recording process was on while he was going to various locations. As you can see.”
He scrolled through about a dozen maps.
“Most of them either begin or terminate at the address of his apartment building on Amsterdam. Based on what I’m seeing, these track logs began this past October tenth and ended December third.”
“December third,” Scarpetta said. “The same day the morgue photograph of me appears to have been simultaneously deleted in Scarpetta six-twelve’s and also Terri’s e-mail.”
“And the same day Oscar called Berger’s office and ended up on the phone with Marino,” Benton said.
“What the hell is going on here?” Scarpetta said. “Was he walking around with some kind of bracelet or something that has a GPS chip, and maybe using a PDA that has a GPS, and downloading all of his movements and perhaps e-mailing it to himself? To make it appear he’s being followed, spied on, all those things he’s said?”
“You saw his apartment, Kay. Oscar believes this stuff. But if someone else has been sending these track logs to him, can you imagine?”
“No.”
Benton scrolled through more of them. Locations for grocery stores, several gyms, office-supply stores, or as Benton put it, just locations where he might have walked but didn’t actually go inside the restaurant, bar, or other business.
“And as you can see,” Benton said, rubbing her back, “as time goes on, his destinations become more erratic and variable. He’s changing his locations daily. None of the tracks are the same. You can actually see his fear, the way he’s zigzagging, literally all over the map. Or his simulated fear. If, once again, he’s staged all this. But his fear seems real. His paranoia isn’t faked, I really don’t think so.”
“You can imagine how this will look to a jury,” Scarpetta said, getting up. “It will look like the mad cyber professor manufactured this elaborate plan to make it appear he’s the target of some clandestine organization or hate group or God knows what. It will look as if he followed himself, so to speak, with a GPS, and planted all sorts of bizarre devices all over his apartment, and carried them on his person and in his car.”
She finished undressing, because she had to get into the shower. There was so much to do. And Benton’s eyes were intense on her as he got off the bed.
“No one on earth will believe him,” she said as Benton put his hands on her and kissed her.
“I’ll help you take your shower,” he said, guiding her in that direction.
The wind buffeted Lucy as she sat on concrete as cold as ice on the brownstone’s roof and took photographs of the camera attached to the footing of the satellite dish.
It was an inexpensive Internet camera that included audio, and was connected to the building’s wireless network and served any tenant who wished to join it.
