“So let’s hear it. Tell me about the photograph. The worm, or whatever the media’s calling it.”
“There are dead pictures of her on the Internet,” Marino said. “A couple of ’em. That’s what happens. Some asshole who works in a morgue sells a picture. We could stop letting people bring in their phones,” he said to Scarpetta. “Make them leave them in the morgue office like I have to leave my gun when I go into lockup. Have a safe or something.”
“It’s not a real photograph,” Lucy said. “Not exactly. Just from the neck up. The rest of it I cut and pasted and enhanced.”
“You think it’s true she was murdered?” Bacardi asked very seriously.
Scarpetta had seen the altered photograph and what Eva had written about it, and was quite familiar with all of the records pertaining to the case. If she hadn’t been more than halfway through her single-malt Scotch, straight and neat, she might not have been so candid.
“Probably,” she said.
“Probably not smart to say that on CNN,” Benton said to Scarpetta.
She took another sip. The Scotch was smooth with a peaty finish that drifted up her nose and evaporated somewhere in her brain, deeper than before.
“People would be surprised if they knew what I don’t say,” she said. “Eva Peebles had it mostly right.”
Lucy curled her fingers around her glass, raising it to her aunt, then to her lips, exploring it with her nose and tongue the way a Tastevin treats a fine wine. She looked at Scarpetta from the shadow of her baseball cap and smiled.
