“He made a mistake. He had to have made at least one mistake. I know you can figure it out. You always say you can figure out anything.”
She never said that, either.
“Maybe it’s your voice and the way you express yourself. Your lack of pretense. You’re beautiful.”
He clenched his fists in his lap.
“Now that I see you in person, I can tell it isn’t from some makeup artist or perfect camera angle.”
His blue-green eyes fastened to her face.
“A little bit like Katharine Hepburn, only you’re blonde and not as tall.”
His clenched hands trembled, as if he was trying with all his might not to do something with them.
“You look very good in slacks, same as her. Actually, she wore trousers, didn’t she? Is there a difference? I don’t mean anything inappropriate. I’m not coming on to you. I wish you would hug me. I need you to hug me!”
“I can’t hug you. You understand why I can’t?” she said.
“You always say you’re very sweet with dead people. That you’re considerate and touch them as if they’re alive, talk to them as if they can feel and hear you. That people can still be attractive and desirable when they’re dead, and that’s why necrophilia’s not as hard to understand as the public thinks, especially if the body’s still warm. If you can touch dead people, why can’t you touch me? Why can’t you hug me?”
She’d never said she touched dead bodies as if they were alive, or talked to them as if they could feel and hear her. She’d never said dead bodies were desirable or that necrophilia was understandable. What the hell was he talking about?
“Did the person who attacked you try to choke you?” she asked.
The fingernail marks on the back of his neck were vertical. Perfectly vertical.
“At one point he had his hands around my neck, and he kept digging in his nails as I rolled around and managed to get myself free,” Oscar said. “Because I’m strong. I don’t know what would have happened if I weren’t so strong.”
“You said the spying started when you got involved with Terri. How did you meet her?”
“Online. She was one of my students, had been for a while. I know. You can’t talk about it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t bother. I’ll go along with it,” he said. “She was enrolled in my history of psychiatry course. Wanted to be a forensic psychologist. Curious so many women want to be forensic psychologists. This ward’s overrun with pretty young grad students from John Jay. Wouldn’t you expect women, especially pretty ones, to be afraid of the patients up here?”
Scarpetta began examining his broad, hairless chest, measuring more shallow abrasions. She touched his wounds and he rested his manacled wrists over his groin, and his blue-green eyes were like hands trying to explore what was under her lab coat.
“Wouldn’t you think women would be afraid to work in a place like this?” he said. “Are you afraid?”
When Shrew had gotten the cryptic phone call a year and a half ago, she’d had no idea how life-altering it would be.
The Italian-sounding man identified himself as an agent from a British trust company and said he had gotten her name indirectly because of the consulting group where she’d been a database marketing manager. In his bad English, he’d said he wanted to e-mail her a job description. Shrew had printed it out. It was still taped on her refrigerator to remind her of life’s synchronicities:
Webmaster: Must be able to take initiative, work unsupervised out of the home, have people skills and a flair for the dramatic. Limited technical experience required. Confidentiality utmost. Other requirements to be discussed. Great earning potential!
She had replied immediately, saying she was very interested but would like a little more information. In response to certain questions, the agent explained in his limited way that having people skills simply meant Shrew had to be interested in them, period. She wasn’t allowed to talk to them but needed to know what appealed to their “mostly basic instinct,” which she realized soon enough was voyeurism and taking immense pleasure in other people’s humiliation and extreme discomfort.
Shrew’s e-mailed acceptance, formatted exactly like the offer had been, was also taped to her refrigerator:
I agree with all conditions and am honored. Can start this minute and have no problem with working whenever needed, including weekends and holidays.
In a way, Shrew had become an anonymous cyber version by proxy of the comedian she adored, Kathy Griffin, whose shows and stand-up routines Shrew watched obsessively, always picking up a new pointer or two about how to fillet the rich and famous and serve them up to an insatiable audience that grew exponentially as the world got worse. People were desperate to laugh. They were desperate to vent their frustrations, resentments, and fury at the golden scapegoats, as Shrew thought of the privileged untouchables who might be angered and annoyed but never really wounded by the slings and arrows of slights and ridicule.
After all, what damage could be done, really, to a Paris Hilton or a Martha Stewart? Gossip, savage insinuation, and exposés—even incarceration—only enhanced their careers and made people envy and love them all the more.
The cruelest of punishments was to be ignored, dismissed, made to feel invisible and nonexistent, exactly the way Shrew had felt when scores of computer technical assistance and marketing management jobs, including hers, were outsourced to India. She’d been pushed overboard with no notice and no parachute. She would never forget packing up her personal effects and carrying them out in a cardboard box, just like she saw in the movies. Miraculously, right about the time she feared she could no longer afford to live in Murray Hill and was asking around about more affordable housing that wasn’t in the slums, the Boss’s UK-BASED Italian agent called.
If Shrew had any chronic complaint now, it was a loneliness that unexpectedly had given her insight into serial killers and hit men, and caused her to feel slightly sorry for them. How burdensome and isolating it was to keep a secret when the stakes were so high, and she often imagined what people would do if they knew that the lady next to them in line at CVS or Whole Foods was largely responsible for the most popular Internet gossip column in history.
But she couldn’t tell a soul, not even the police investigator who had just been here. She couldn’t take credit. She couldn’t have friends and run the risk she might make a slip. It was just as well she didn’t confide in her daughters or have much contact with them. It was probably wise never to date or marry again. Even if she quit the website, she could never breathe a word of her former remarkable anonymous career. She’d signed enough nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements to send her to prison for life, land her in the poorhouse, or—and maybe she was getting silly—result in unnatural death if she committed even the smallest infraction. But what could she divulge?
She didn’t know who Gotham Gotcha was. The columnist could be a man, a woman, old, young, American, or not. Or the website phenomenon could be a collection of people, maybe a bunch of young smart alecks from MIT or spies in China or a small pool of genius kids at a mega Internet search technology company. Shrew was paid well enough, and took enormous pride in being an anonymous celebrity by proxy, but the arrangement had begun to seriously wear on her in a way she hadn’t seen coming. She was beginning to doubt her own raison d’être, which probably had something to do with why she had behaved like such a fool when Investigator Marino had stopped by.