else working out of that apartment or maybe no one working out of it. So sounds like we need a warrant and should go in there. Or maybe we go in and then get a warrant. Whatever. We don’t waste time, since Eva Peebles indirectly worked for this Cesare Ingicco guy across the street but probably not the one who actually lives across the street, probably on his island and we’re going to find—you watch—that he dealt with Eva over the phone, long distance. Eva didn’t know shit, whatever the case. How fucked up is that?”
“Why don’t I hook up with some of your guys over there,” Bacardi said. “I think you should hang around this area. When Benton goes live on the air, all hell might break loose.”
“I agree,” Benton said. “Morales is going to know, if he had any doubt at all, that we think he might be after Oscar, and the rest of the world is after him, after Morales.”
“You think there’s any chance at all Oscar and Morales are partners in all this?” Bacardi asked. “Maybe I’m crazy, but how do we know they don’t work as a team, sort of like Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. And to this day there are plenty of people who think the Son of Sam didn’t act alone, either. You just never know.”
“Extremely unlikely,” Benton said as Scarpetta put on her coat by the door. “Morales is far too narcissistic to work with anyone. He can’t work with anyone else no matter what he’s doing.”
“You got that right,” Marino said.
“But what about Oscar’s shoe prints and fingerprints we found in Eva Peebles’s apartment?” Bacardi made a good point. “I don’t know if we should just ignore them and assume they were doctored or there’s a mistake.”
“Guess who collected the shoeprints and fingerprints?” Marino said. “Fucking Morales. Plus, he has a pair of Oscar’s sneakers, from when he took his clothes the other night.”
“Anybody witness him lifting the prints off the light fixture?” Bacardi went on. “It’s not easy to cheat. I mean, it’s one thing if it’s a pair of sneakers you took from the suspect. But it’s another to take his fingers and leave prints, so to speak. My point is you got to have a pretty clever conspiracy to process prints at a crime scene and have them get a hit in the computer system. In IAFIS.”
“Yeah, well, Morales is a clever guy,” Marino said.
Bacardi got up and said, “I’m going to go on over to Murray Hill. Who’s meeting me?”
“Sit back down.” Marino tugged softly on the back of her belt. “You ain’t taking a damn cab. You’re a homicide detective. I’ll drop you off and head right back here. I got a battering ram in the trunk you can have. I pinched it last night when they brought me one at the Peebles scene, special order. Oops. I forgot to give it back.”
“I’m going,” Scarpetta said. “Everybody be careful, please. Mike Morales is an evil man.”
“Actually?” Berger said to Lucy. “And I’ve never told anybody this before.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Lucy said.
“I think Morales may have broken in the barrister for Greg, and in typical fashion, Morales goes from being the philanderer to the confidant you can tell your troubles to. The more I think about it, he’s very bizarre that way, among other ways. To say the least.”
“You think Greg knew?”
“No, I sure don’t. Should I get us more coffee?”
“How do you know Morales was screwing around with the barrister?”
“It’s not hard to tell these things when you’re in an office with other people. I don’t pay much attention, or maybe it appears I don’t, but it registers. In retrospect, it becomes clear. Morales has probably done this sort of thing countless times, practically under my nose, or I’ve heard stories. He seduces someone into cheating on the boyfriend, the husband, and next thing, Morales has a bedside manner if not caretaking relationship with his victim. Helps her patch things up. Or he gets to know the man he fucked over, who doesn’t know he’s been fucked over, because Morales loves being pals with someone who has no idea he’s the devil. Sadistic games and more sadistic games. He and Greg used to sit downstairs and drink his expensive liquor and talk. Probably about me, at least some of the time. Not in a good way.”
“How long ago?”
“Morales got transferred into investigations about a year ago. It was right about that time. Toward the end. Not long before Greg moved to London. I’m sure Morales encouraged it. Might even have been his idea—for Greg to just end it with me.”
“Maybe so Morales could start something with you?”
“Finish me and start me. He’d get off on that,” Berger said.
“Then Greg is how Morales would have gotten the idea for the Irish whiskey and Scotch he wrote about in that phony interview he sent to Terri, when he was pretending to be my aunt,” Lucy said. “And Greg shouldn’t have let himself be talked into anything. Fuck that. He made his choice. And Morales won’t be finishing or starting anything, except he’s going to finish himself. You watch.”
“If you check the bottles downstairs,” Berger said, “my guess, he and Greg put a hefty dent in both of them. Morales would want the most expensive thing in the bar. That’s him, all right. And it was a nasty dig to imply Kay routinely drinks whiskey that costs five, six, seven hundred dollars a bottle and say it was more than Terri’s schoolbooks. He was painting quite the portrait of her, and if she’d finished her thesis, her so-called book? That would have been extremely unfortunate. I’m sure it’s occurred to you he might be Gotham Gotcha. Seems that sort of thing would be right up his alley.”
“The IP of whoever writes those columns is anonymized, and the Internet service provider has an account that traces to an LLC with an address in the Isle of Man,” Lucy said. “Which has one of the strongest offshore trust jurisdictions in the world. The machine access code doesn’t match anything I’ve seen so far, so those columns aren’t written on any laptop or any other device we’re familiar with, nor is it one used to send any e-mails we’ve been looking at. Problem is, jurisdictions like the Isle of Man, Nevis, Belize offer such stringent privacy protection, it’s very difficult to penetrate the shield and find out who’s behind an LLC. I’ve got a contact at the IRS pulling some strings for me. Interesting it’s the UK. I would have expected the Caymans. As in about seventy-five percent of all hedge funds registered. But I don’t think Morales is Gotham Gotcha .”
“The implication, of course, is whoever it is, this person has a lot of money parked offshore,” Berger said.
“Of course she would,” Lucy said. “Her endorsements alone, her product promotions. She’s probably getting staggering kick-backs wired into accounts that are sheltered. My hope is she’s a little too clever about bypassing certain tax laws, and that’s what will lead us to a physical address. I mean, she rents, she owns, she’s paying bills, or someone is on her behalf, and she’s likely got a place in this city and was paying an employee in this city, and we know that for a fact. Someone was wiring Eva Peebles money from the UK on behalf of Gotham Gotcha. This agent who used to be ATF and now is IRS, I gave him Marino’s name, too, and he’s tying down more info from Eva Peebles’s bank. I want to know who Gotham Gotcha is and where the hell she is. And if she’s screwing the IRS? Oh, well. Have fun in prison.”
“She? Her?”
“After that first column came out, I ran language analysis on maybe fifty archived ones. No, I really don’t think it’s Morales who writes those columns and has a site like that. Would require too much maintenance, too much work. He’s a hit-and-run guy, just like everybody says. He’s got a careless streak in him, and that’s going to be what nails him in the end.”
“You ran this analysis on the website about the same time you crashed it?” Berger said.
“I didn’t crash it. Marilyn Monroe crashed it.”
“A subject for another day. For the record, I don’t approve of infecting sites with worms,” Berger said.
“Same words and phrases constantly pop up, and allusions, metaphors, similes.” Lucy was talking about the language analysis she ran.
“How can a computer possibly recognize a simile?” Berger asked.
“An example. Search for the words like and as, then the computer searches for those followed by adjectives, nouns. Like the long hard leg of a chair—as if he had three of them. And here are a few more good ones from Gotham Gotcha ’s purple prose. Gently curved like a firm banana inside Calvin Kleins that seemed melted on him. Then let me see if I remember. Her tiny tits as flat as cookies, her nipples as small as raisins.
Berger said, “And your computer recognizes a metaphor how, exactly?”
“Discrete bodies of information with nouns and verbs that are inconsistent with each other. My skull
