It also served somebody else. It served Mike Morales, and not in the way everybody thought, which was why it hadn’t occurred to Lucy to check. And she was furious with herself.
Since it was known that another device was connected to the network—the camera that Morales said he had installed himself—it hadn’t entered Lucy’s mind to access the log to the wireless router. It hadn’t occurred to her she ought to check the router’s admin page.
Had she done that last night, she would have discovered what she now knew, and she tried Marino again. For the past half-hour, she’d tried him and Berger, and had gotten voicemail.
She didn’t leave a message. She wasn’t about to leave a message the likes of the one she had.
This time Marino answered, thank God.
“It’s me,” she said.
“You in a wind tunnel, or what?” he said.
“The camera you saw Morales install up here on this roof, where I’m right now sitting? He wasn’t installing it when you surprised him up here. He was probably removing it.”
“What are you talking about? I saw him . . . Well. Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t actually see him do anything. I just got off the phone with your aunt, let me tell you real quick, because she’s trying to get hold of you. Something about our person of interest being tracked by a GPS or something? And he might work as a vet tech at Dr. Stuart’s office? Long and short of it, Terri might have known the killer through the dermatologist’s office, some Hispanic guy . . .”
“Listen to me, Marino! This fucking camera’s been up here for fucking three weeks! And it’s motion- sensitive, so every time it records something it’s e-mailing it to someone who’s about to get hacked into. I’ve got Morales’s damn IP. I’ve got his fucking machine access code, and it’s the same fucking one as Scarpetta six-twelve. Do you understand what that means?”
“I’m not fucking retarded.”
Just like the old days. How many times had he said that to her over the years?
“It means whoever set up this camera and is getting images e-mailed from it is the same person sending e-mails to Terri, pretending to be my aunt. Probably some type of PDA, and the asshole stands out in front of John Jay, hijacks their wireless network, so that’s what the IP comes back to. The machine access code is also the same one for the device used to e-mail the photograph to Terri—the photograph e-mailed from the Internet cafe near Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s office. Morales is the one who instructed Terri to delete that photograph on December third. . . .”
“Why?”
“He plays fucking games, that’s why. He was probably in the morgue when the damn photo was taken, probably is behind it. Just like the photo of Jaime at Tavern on the Green. He probably orchestrated that and sent it to Gotham Gotcha .”
“Then he’s probably connected to Gotham Gotcha .”
“Got no idea, but I do know Eva Peebles worked for whoever Gotham Gotcha is. And I doubt she could tell you who Gotham Gotcha is, if she were still alive to tell us anything, poor lady. Nothing in her computer identifies who it is. I’m setting up sniff packets even as we speak, looking at info at junction points. Fuckhead Morales. He’s probably your fucking Hispanic vet tech, too. Fucking piece of shit. I’m about to pay him a home visit.”
She was typing on her MacBook as she talked, doing a port scan. Marino had gotten deadly quiet.
“You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“You want to tell me why the fuck a cop would put up a surveillance camera three weeks before a murder?” she said.
“Jesus Christ. Why would he be sending shit pretending to be her?”
Lucy heard a woman’s voice in the background. Bacardi.
“Why don’t you ask him,” Lucy said. “He’s probably the one who gave Terri the brilliant idea to post something on the John Jay site about her needing to get in contact with my aunt. And Terri does, and then, miracle of miracles, guess who writes her? He obviously knew Terri or he wouldn’t have been e-mailing her. He’s probably the fucking vet tech, like I said, and she knew him because of the dermatologist.”
“He probably gave her the sick puppy. Thought it was funny.” Marino’s voice, muttering. “Then Eva Peebles gets it. The puppy dies. She dies. What’d she do to deserve any of this? Wonder if he’s the one who fixed things in Terri’s apartment. What the landlord was talking about. That would be like him to be a pal, a confidant, to someone who could use a big strong pissant like him. Be like him to get someone like Terri, a forensic psych grad student, to post something on a website, to fuck with everyone. But why the Doc?”
“Because he’s a failed doctor, and my aunt isn’t. I don’t know why. Why does anybody do anything?”
“You’re not going to remove the camera, right? We don’t want him knowing it’s down.”
“Of course not,” Lucy said as the wind ripped at her, as if trying to rip her off the roof. “He’d probably come up here to remove the damn thing, and last thing he expected was you climbing up the fire-escape ladder. Now he has to cover his ass. So he puts on the big act that he’s installing a surveillance camera in case the perp returns to the scene of the crime. Well, bullshit. I’ve got the log open right here on my laptop. This camera’s e- mailed over ten thousand images in the past three weeks and is still grinding away even as we speak. According to the tab status, the asshole’s accessing the network right now. You’ll be happy to know I’ve disabled the audio function. Not that you’d hear a damn thing up here but wind.”
“You absolutely sure about this?” Marino said.
“And I’m in. This is completely illegal,” Lucy said.
“Oh, God,” she said, shocked, as she scrolled through video files.
Video files in Mike Morales’s personal e-mail account. His username was Forenxxx.
She landed on a video file that had been recorded by an entirely different device than the rooftop camera. She opened it and clicked play.
“Oh, Christ,” she said. “A recording made New Year’s Eve. Only this one isn’t from the roof, it’s from inside Terri’s apartment. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”
Berger’s penthouse was two levels, the master area on the upper one, where she and Lucy watched the murder of Terri Bridges on a huge plasma flat screen in a sitting area off the bedroom.
It was almost more than either one of them could stomach, and there was virtually nothing either of them hadn’t seen. They sat rigidly on a sofa, watching Terri’s face in her vanity mirror as a pair of latex-gloved hands garroted her from behind with a rubbery blue tourniquet, the type used in doctor’s offices when blood is being drawn. Victim and assailant were nude, her hands bound behind her back as she kicked savagely from the chair with the heart-shaped back, while he almost lifted her off it as he strangled her into unconsciousness.
Then he would release the pressure and, when she was revived, start again.
She said nothing the entire time, just made the expected awful guttural gagging sounds as her eyes bulged and her tongue protruded from her mouth and spittle ran down her chin. It took exactly twenty-four and a half minutes for her to finally die, because that’s how long it took for him to ejaculate and finish her off, because he had no further interest.
He flushed the condom down the toilet, and he turned off the camera.
“Let’s start it again,” Berger said. “I want to listen a little more carefully to what’s said when he takes her into the bathroom. I’m getting the impression they’d had sex before. And the other things said suggest maybe why he did this. The premeditation factor. He may have had motive that went beyond his sexually sadistic compulsions. Did she call him Juan? Or was that just a sound she made?”
“I suspect she’d been having sex with him long before she had it with Oscar,” Lucy said. “Based on the familiarity, the comments he’s making. She would have known him from Dr. Stuart’s office—for a couple of years. I don’t care if we don’t yet know for a fact that he’s Juan Amate. I’m telling you they’re the same person. They have to be. I think she might have said Juan. I agree, hard to tell.”
She pressed the play button on the remote. The film began mid-sentence with a shot of the vanity and Terri’s terrified face in the oval mirror. Behind her was a man’s naked body. He moved, adjusting himself and the camera angle, exposing his erect condom-sheathed penis, poking it between her shoulder blades as if it were the barrel of a gun. He was visible only from the waist down.
“Just our usual, baby, with a little extra hot sauce thrown in,” the killer’s voice said.
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice quavering as his gloved hand held up a scalpel in the mirror and twirled
