hibernated in the wet nest of my hair. Skull and hibernate in the same sentence would be flagged as an inconsistency. As would nest and hair, if you look at them literally. But what you have metaphorically is a line from the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. I’m sure you knew that wasn’t purple prose.”
“So your neural networking software reads poetry when it’s not busy tracking assholes on the Internet.”
“What it’s telling me is the author of Gotham Gotcha is likely female,” Lucy said. “One who’s snide, petty, resentful, and angry. A woman competitive with other women. A woman who so intensely loathes other women, she’ll mock one who was sexually assaulted. She’ll humiliate and degrade the victim all over again. Or try.”
Berger picked up the remote and pressed play.
Terri’s panicky face in the mirror talking as latex-gloved hands kneaded her breasts. Her eyes were watering. She was in pain.
Her voice shook badly as she said, “No. I can’t. I’m sorry. Don’t be angry with me. I don’t want us to do this.”
Her lips and tongue made sticky sounds, her mouth was so dry.
The killer’s voice. “Sure you do, baby. You love being tied up and fucked, don’t you? So this time we’re going for the jackpot, you know?”
Gloved hands set a jar of Aqualine on the counter, screwing off the lid, and his fingers dug into it. He smeared it into her vagina while she stood with her back to him, and he took his time, his condom-sheathed erect penis pushing hard into her upper back. He sexually assaulted her with the lubricant and his fingers. He raped her with fear. Unless he’d penetrated her with his penis off camera, that wasn’t what he did. It wasn’t what he wanted.
The chair scraped across tile as he made her sit.
“Look how pretty you are in the mirror,” he said. “Sitting all pretty. Almost the same height as when you’re standing. Who else can I say that about, right, little girl?”
“Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t. Oscar’s going to be here any minute. Please stop. My hands are numb. Please take it off. Please.”
She was crying but trying to act as if this was just that—an act. She was trying to act as if he really wasn’t doing anything harmful. It was a sex game, and based on references and demeanor, it seemed a certainty they’d had sex before, and domination might have been part of the drama. But nothing like this. Nothing even close. A part of her knew she was about to die, and die horribly, but she was doing her best to will it not to be so.
“He gets here at five, poor little punctual Oscar. It’s your fault, you know,” Morales’s voice said to her face in the mirror. “From now on, baby, it’s what you created. . . .”
Berger turned it off again. She wrote down a few more of her thoughts.
It all added up. But they couldn’t prove one damn bit of it. They had yet to see Mike Morales’s face, not once. Not in this video recording or the one he’d made when he’d murdered Bethany in his crappy Baltimore apartment the summer he’d finished medical school at Johns Hopkins in 2003, and not in the recording he made months later when he murdered Rodrick and dumped his graceful young boy’s body near the Bugatti dealership in Greenwich, where Rodrick probably found his way onto Morales’s radar because of the vet’s office where Morales had worked part-time. It was probably where he’d met Bethany, only a different vet’s office, that one in Baltimore.
In both those cases he’d done the same thing he’d done to Terri. He bound the victims’ wrists. He was wearing surgical gloves when he penetrated them digitally, using the same type of lubricant. Back then, five years ago, he was about to start the NYPD police academy, and his part-time work was with veterinarians, not dermatologists. But veterinarians use cauterizing applicators and lubricants like Aqualine. Morales’s pilfering a partially used jar of lubricant from his workplace was part of his MO, perhaps going back to his first murder.
Berger had no idea how many people he’d killed, but she wondered if the reason he used the lubricant was to confound police with a mixture of different DNA profiles.
“He would think that was funny,” she said to Lucy. “He must have been thrilled when one of the profiles actually got a hit in CODIS and turned out to be the paraplegic from Palm Beach. What a big ha-ha that must have been.”
“He won’t get away with it,” Lucy said.
“I don’t know.”
The police not only hadn’t found Morales yet, but at the moment there was no warrant for his arrest. The overwhelming problem, which would continue to be a problem, was proof. The scientific evidence did not prove Morales had killed anyone, and recovering his DNA at Terri’s crime scene and even from her body meant nothing, since he was inside the apartment and had actually touched her when he’d checked her vitals. He was the lead investigator in her case and had touched everything and everyone connected to it.
And his face wasn’t on the video recordings. And he wasn’t on video coming into or leaving Terri’s apartment building because he probably had used the roof access night before last, pulling the ladder up after him. Then returning it to its closet later. Prior to that, when he’d been with her, probably it was somewhere else. Not Terri’s apartment. That was too risky. Someone might have remembered seeing him in the area. Morales was too smart to take a chance like that.
It was possible, Berger considered, he used the roof then, too. She wouldn’t rule it out, and she might never know.
Morales was smart as hell. He’d finished Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins. He was a sadistic sexual psychopath, perhaps the most outrageous and dangerous one Berger had ever come across. She thought of the times she’d been alone with him. In his car. In Tavern on the Green. And in the Ramble, when she’d paid a retrospective visit to that crime scene where the marathon runner had been raped and manually strangled, and now Berger had to wonder about her. Did Morales kill that woman, too?
She suspected it. Couldn’t prove it. A jury wasn’t likely to trust any identification based on the sound of his voice, which, like O.J. and the bloody glove, could be altered on demand so he didn’t sound exactly like the murderer in the recordings. That man spoke with a heavy Spanish accent. Morales, when speaking normally, had no discernible accent. A case wasn’t going to be won solely based on forensic voice analysis, either. Didn’t matter how sophisticated the software.
It wasn’t likely anyone—certainly not a prosecutor as seasoned as Berger—was going to suggest anything as ridiculous as making a comparison of Morales’s penis with the penis in the video recordings, a normal penis, uncircumcised, nothing unusual about it, nothing remarkable one way or another, and wearing a condom over it was reminiscent of someone having a stocking over his face. Were there any identifying features, so much as a freckle, they were masked .
The most the cops could do—or Lucy could do—was prove these violent, seemingly damning videos were in his e-mail account, but where did he get them? Having them didn’t prove he’d killed anyone or even done the filming with a camcorder he must have set up on a tripod. Lucy was the first to say that getting jurors to understand IP addresses, machine access codes, anonymizers, cookies, packet sniffing, and about a hundred other terms that were part of her easygoing vernacular was like a throw-back to the early days, the late eighties and early nineties, when people like Berger were first trying to explain DNA to judges and jurors.
Eyes glazed over. Nobody trusted it. She’d spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on satisfying the Frye standard whenever she tried to admit DNA evidence into court. In fact, DNA hadn’t helped her marriage, not that much could have. But with the proliferation of new scientific techniques had come new pressures and demands, the likes of which no one had ever anticipated or seen. Maybe if forensic science had stayed where it was when she was still at Columbia, living with a woman who eventually broke her heart and scared her straight into Greg’s arms, she would have had something left over for her private life. Gone on more vacations, or even gone on one when she didn’t bring a briefcase. Gotten to know Greg’s children, really gotten to know them. Gotten to know people she worked with, like Scarpetta, who’d never received so much as a card from Berger after Rose died, and Berger had known about that.
Marino had told her.
Maybe Berger would have gotten to know herself.
“Kay will be here in a second. I’ve got to get dressed,” she said to Lucy. “Actually, maybe you should get dressed.”
Lucy was in a Jockey undershirt and briefs. Both of them had been watching what were called snuff films
