it, and its steel blade caught the light.
The sound of fabric slitting as he cut open her robe, her lacy red bra. It was a shelf bra, and her breasts protruded from it, her nipples exposed. He slit off her matching red lacy panties. He turned the camera on the pink robe and pink slippers and the bra as he dropped them into the tub. His gloved hands waved the cut lacy red panties in front of the camera lens.
“Capturing the flag.” His Hispanic voice. “In my pocket so I can enjoy later, right, little girl?”
“Let’s don’t,” she said. “I don’t think I can.”
“Should have thought about that when you told the little man all our secrets.”
“I didn’t tell him. You sent the e-mails. That’s how.”
“Now, that was a really big mess you made. How’s that going to work? He complained to the fucking DA. How’s that going to work, baby? I trusted you. I did you a favor. And you told him.”
“I never told him. He told me. You were sending him the e-mails, and finally he told me. He got freaked out. Why? Why are you doing this?” And it sounded as if she said Juan.
“You gonna ask me why anything?” The scalpel stroking the air, almost touching her cheek, then withdrawing and vanishing.
“No.”
“So, who’s your man? The little one. Or me?”
“You are,” her terrified face said to the mirror, his gloved hands pinching her nipples.
“Now you know that’s not right, or you wouldn’t have told him.” The killer’s voice chiding her.
“I promise I didn’t. He found out because of the e-mails, those maps you sent him. He told me. You scared him.”
“Now, baby.” Pinching her nipples harder. “I don’t want to hear no more of your lies. And now I gotta figure out how to get that fucking thing out of his ass before somebody else does.”
Lucy hit pause, and the recording froze on a blurry image of Terri’s wide-eyed face talking while his hands squeezed her breasts in the mirror.
“Right there,” Lucy said. “The way he says it. Possible he’s hinting he’s going to murder Oscar? He’s going to be the one to retrieve the thing out of his ass?”
“I’m wondering the same thing,” Berger said.
She triple-underlined a key phrase in notes on her legal pad: Terri’s idea—GPS?
She said to Lucy, “I don’t think there’s any doubt about how this started—that Terri asked Morales to follow Oscar, because she was a jealous, controlling person. It wasn’t her nature to trust anyone, and before she’d even considered making any sort of a commitment to him or perhaps telling her family about him, she wanted proof he was honorable.”
“If one can make psychopathology logical.”
“We have to. Jurors expect reasons for things. You can’t just say someone’s evil or felt like it.”
“She may have said something about wanting to know what Oscar was up to, but I doubt an implanted GPS was her idea,” Lucy said. “I don’t think she ever imagined Morales would do her the favor, and then take it a little further by anonymously e-mailing GPS track logs to Oscar to drive him crazy, to torment the living hell out of him. The e-mailing of the tracking logs stopped when Oscar finally said something about it to Terri, and she obviously must have flown all over Morales about it.”
“Right. That’s what Morales is referring to.” Berger indicated the frozen image on the TV screen. “She did the wrong thing and complained to Morales, berated him, perhaps. A guy like this? You insult his narcissism? And then he’s the typical psychopath and blames it on her because she’s the one who wanted Oscar spied on. Suddenly, it’s her fault that Oscar called my office and reported everything.”
“To Marino, on December third,” Lucy said. “And at that point, Oscar destroyed his computer’s hard drive and hid the thumb drive in his library, where my aunt and Benton found it. And Morales stopped e-mailing the logs to him, because Terri knew, and the gig was up.”
“Kay mentioned the thread on the carpet outside Oscar’s apartment door. The roof access and fire escape. I’m wondering if Morales went in there trying to find this log, and while he was at it, planted a jar of Aqualine. I’m wondering if he came in through the window, set off the alarm, then left through the roof access so the doorman didn’t see him. He had a key and the alarm code, the password. After killing Terri, he got some unexpected surprises. Oscar demanded to go to Bellevue. He demanded to see Benton and Kay. Now the stakes have been raised considerably. Morales has some worthy adversaries to deal with. Including you. He wants that damn tracking log so it’s not traced back to him by someone like you. And he wanted Oscar to take the fall for at least four homicides.”
“A classic case of someone who’s decompensating,” Lucy said. “Morales didn’t need to kill Eva Peebles, not really. For that matter, he didn’t need to kill Terri. He used to be smart and stick with strangers. What I still can’t figure out is why would Oscar let anybody do that?”
“You mean the implant.”
“We just listened to him say it. He stuck something in Oscar’s ass and has to get it back. What else could that mean? I’m thinking there’s only one thing. But you don’t just walk up to someone and say, hey, can I implant a GPS microchip under your skin?”
Berger placed her hand on Lucy’s bare knee and leaned against her to pick up the cordless phone. She called Scarpetta for the second time in the past hour.
“Us again,” Berger said. “Maybe you and Benton should just come over here.”
“I can. He can’t,” Scarpetta said.
Berger put her on speakerphone and set the handset upright on the coffee table inside her handsome sitting area of leather and glass, and Agam polymorphic paintings and serigraphs that seemed to change and shimmer as Berger moved.
Greg’s room.
Where he used to plant himself in front of the TV while Berger was alone in bed, in the adjoining room, sleeping or working. It took her a while to figure out that one of the reasons he started keeping such strange hours, as if he were on UK time, was because he was on UK time. He’d sit in this room, and at some point after midnight New York time, he’d call his friend the barrister, who would just be waking up in London.
“Benton’s with Marino and Bacardi,” Scarpetta said. “They went out. He was rather cryptic about it. I’ve not heard anything from Dr. Lester. Still. I’m assuming you haven’t.”
Morales had dropped off Dr. Lester at the ME’s office earlier, because he didn’t know then what Lucy was about to find out. Now he was aware people were looking for him, because Berger had contacted him. All she’d had to say was, “I think you need to explain some things.”
She’d gotten as far as mentioning silver nitrate and Dr. Stuart, when he hung up on her.
“I suppose someone will tell me if I need to go down there,” Scarpetta said. “Although I seriously doubt it’s an issue, she really should x-ray Eva Peebles carefully. I’m repeating myself, because you don’t want her body leaving the morgue until every inch of it has been x-rayed. Same thing with Terri’s body. X-rayed again, every inch of it.”
“That’s what I’m getting around to,” Berger said. “This idea of the microchip implant. When you talked to Oscar, did you get any idea that might lead you to believe he’d ever, for any reason, allow something like that? Lucy and I are watching this God-awful video again, and that’s what the killer is implying. Morales, I mean. We know it’s him.”
“Oscar would never allow that,” Scarpetta said. “What’s far more likely is he complained about painful treatments, specifically, laser hair removal. And he has had hair removed from his back, possibly from his buttocks. He has no hair at all except on his face, his head. And he has pubic hair. He mentioned Demerol to me. If someone came in with scrubs and a mask on, and Oscar was on his belly, he would never have seen the tech or necessarily recognize him later. At Terri’s apartment, for example, when Morales encountered Oscar at the crime scene? Oscar wouldn’t necessarily connect him with some backroom tech at Dr. Stuart’s office.”
“In the video, we think Terri calls him Juan. We’re not sure. You need to listen,” Berger said.
Scarpetta said, “They’re doing R-and-D with wireless GPS glass-encapsulated chips that have miniature antennas and a power supply that can last up to three months. About the size of a grain of rice, maybe smaller. One of them could have been implanted into his buttocks and he’d never know, especially if it’s migrated, buried itself in deeper, which happens. We could find it with an x-ray, if we can find him. And by the way, he’s not the only
