reassurance wanted red when it came to roses, but her instinct knew better. A man who gave you yellow roses was one you’d never have, and that’s the one you wanted and should move heaven and earth to get. She glanced at Officer Ben, for an instant fearing she just might have said that out loud.
“Well, guess what?” she said, her voice bouncing off old plaster walls as she walked on bare hardwood floors, going from room to room. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, because it looks like the only thing in here’s a computer and toilet paper.”
When she walked back in, Officer Ben was still looking around at photographs of Scarpetta that were as big as Times Square in proportion to their location. He shone his flashlight on them as if that might tell him something.
“While you gawk,” Bacardi said, “I’m going to call Pete— Investigator Marino to you—and find out just what the hell we’re supposed to do with Gotham Gotcha. You got any idea how to arrest a website, Ben?”
“Ban,” he corrected her. “For Bannerman,” he said.
His light trailed over the huge posters like a comet on its last legs.
“If I were Dr. Scarpetta,” he said, “I might hire a couple body-guards.”
The house phone rang, and Berger told Morales it was the intercom.
“It’s probably security,” she said from the couch, and she was pale and in pain.
Her hands were cherry-red behind her back. Scarpetta couldn’t feel her own hands at all now. They could be rocks.
“They probably heard the gunshot.” If a voice could be gray, Berger’s was gray.
When Morales had bounded up the stairs after the cell phone sounded up there, the ring tone a familiar one, Scarpetta had asked the question that would change eternity for her.
She’d said to Berger, “Is Lucy up there?”
Berger’s answer was her wide eyes, and then they heard the gunshot .
It had sounded like a metal door slamming shut, almost like the steel barrier doors at Bellevue.
And silence.
And now Morales was back, and at this point, Scarpetta no longer cared about anything in this world except Lucy.
“Please get an ambulance,” she said to him.
“Let me tell you what’s up, Doc.” He waved the pistol and was becoming more bizarre. “What’s up is your little superhero niece has a fucking bullet in her fucking head. You imagine the IQ I’m killing off this morning, whew.”
He picked up the unzipped gym bag and walked around the couch, to the front of it. Displayed on the PDA clipped to his low-riding jeans was a GPS track log, a heavy pink line snaking through a map of someplace.
He dropped the gym bag on the coffee table and squatted next to it. His latex-gloved hands reached inside the bag, and he pulled out a small pair of Brooks running shoes and a plastic Baggie containing the polyvinyl impressions Scarpetta had made of Oscar’s fingertips. The Baggie was greasy, as if Morales had oiled or lubricated the polyvinyl impressions. He balanced the revolver on his thigh.
He removed the impressions from the Baggie and slipped them over the fingers of his left hand, and that was the first time Scarpetta realized he was left-handed.
He held the gun with his other hand, and stood up and splayed his left hand with its freakish irregular white rubbery fingertips, and he grinned, his pupils so dilated it was as if he had black holes for eyes.
“I won’t be around to reverse the reverse of them,” he said. “These are reversed.”
Slowly moving his rubbery fingertips and enjoying himself.
“Right, Dr. Sher-lock? You know what I’m talking about. How many people would think of it?”
He meant that since the prints were from an impression, they would be reversed when they were transferred to a surface. Morales must have remedied that when he’d photographed the prints he’d planted on the light fixture in the tub at Eva Peebles’s apartment. Whoever photographed and lifted the prints in Berger’s apartment would discover a reverse-sequence arrangement, a mirror image of what was expected, and wonder how that could have happened. A fingerprints examiner would have to make adjustments, display different perspectives to make an accurate geometric analysis for a comparison of these planted prints with Oscar’s prints in IAFIS.
“You answer when I talk to you, bitch.” Morales got up and loomed so close Scarpetta smelled his sweat.
He sat down next to Berger and stuck his tongue between her lips and slowly rubbed the gun between her legs.
“Nobody would think of it,” he said to Scarpetta as he fondled Berger with the barrel of the revolver and she didn’t move.
“Nobody would,” Scarpetta said.
He got up and started pressing various silicone fingertips on the glass coffee table. He went to the bar, flicked open a glass door, and plucked out the Irish whiskey. He picked out a colorful tumbler that looked like hand- blown Venetian glass, and he poured whiskey into it. He left Oscar’s prints all over the bottle and the tumbler as he drank in gulps.
The apartment phone rang again.
Again, Morales ignored it.
“They have a key,” Berger said. “They hear something in this building and you don’t answer, they’ll finally come in. Let me answer it and tell them we’re fine. Nobody else needs to be hurt.”
Morales drank some more. He swished whiskey in his mouth and waved his gun at Berger.
“Tell ’em to go away,” he said. “You try anything, everybody’s dead right now.”
“I can’t pick it up.”
Morales exhaled an exasperated breath as he came close and picked up the cordless phone and held it against her mouth and ear.
Scarpetta noticed tiny specks of red on his light-skinned face, like his freckles but not his freckles, and something moved inside her like plates of the earth sliding before a huge quake.
The pink line on the map on the PDA snaked, moving. Someone or something moving fast. Oscar.
“Please call an ambulance,” she said.
Morales mouthed Sor-ry, and shrugged.
“Hello?” Berger said into the phone he held. “Really? You know what? Probably the TV. A Rambo movie or something he’s got on. Thanks for your concern.”
Morales removed the phone from her drained face.
“Hit zero,” she said with no inflection. “To disconnect the intercom.”
He hit zero and dropped the cordless phone into its charger.
Marino touched the door with his index finger and pushed it open an inch as he slid his Glock out of a pocket in his leather jacket and the alarm-system chime sounded its warning tone that a door or window had been breached.
Marino swung himself around inside Berger’s penthouse, the pistol in both hands. He crept forward, and through an archway he saw the sunken living room that reminded him of a spaceship.
Berger and Scarpetta were on the couch, their arms behind their backs, and he knew by the looks on their faces that it was too late. An arm snaked up from behind the wraparound couch and poked a gun in the back of Scarpetta’s head.
“Drop it, asshole,” Morales said as he stood up.
Marino was pointing his Glock at Morales, who had a gun buried in the back of Scarpetta’s blond hair, his finger on the trigger.
“You hear me, Gorilla Man? Drop the fucking gun or you’re going to see genius brains all over this penthouse apartment.”
“Don’t do it, Morales. Everybody knows it’s you. You can quit,” Marino’s mouth said while his thoughts streaked through possibilities that kept pinning him against the same wall, a wall he couldn’t get away from no matter what.
