“What did your gut tell you?” Benton asked.
“That I shouldn’t be talking to him,” she replied. “That I shouldn’t be prevented from talking to you. My head tells me otherwise.”
“You’re an associate, a consultant here. We can have a professional discussion about him as a patient.”
“I don’t know anything about him as your patient. I can’t tell you anything about him as mine.”
“Before now you’d never heard of him? Or Terri Bridges?”
“That much I can say. Absolutely not. And I’m going to ask you not to cajole me. You know my limitations. You knew them when you called this morning.”
Benton opened a drawer and pulled out two envelopes. He reached across the desk to hand them to her.
“I didn’t know what might happen by the time you got here,” he said. “Maybe the cops would have found something, arrested him, and we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. But you’re right. At the moment, your priority has to be Oscar’s well-being. You’re his physician. But that doesn’t mean you have to see him again.”
Inside one envelope was a DNA report, and inside the other, a set of crime scene photographs.
“Berger wanted you to have a copy of the DNA analysis. The photographs and police report are from Mike Morales,” Benton said.
“Do I know him?”
“He’s relatively new to the detective division. You don’t know him, maybe won’t have to. Candidly speaking, I think he’s a jerk. Photos he took at the crime scene, his preliminary report. The DNA’s from swabs Dr. Lester took from Terri Bridges’s body. There’s a second set of photos I haven’t gotten yet. From a second search earlier this afternoon when luggage in her closet was checked, and it turned out Terri’s laptops were in it. Apparently, she was supposed to fly to Arizona this morning to spend a few days with her family. Why her luggage was packed and out of sight in her closet, no one knows.”
Scarpetta thought about what Oscar had told her. Terri didn’t leave luggage out. She was obsessively neat, and Oscar didn’t like good-byes.
Benton said, “One possible explanation is she was extremely neat. Perhaps obsessively so. You’ll see what I mean in the photos.”
“I’d say that’s a very plausible explanation,” she commented.
He held her gaze. He was trying to determine if she’d just given him information. She didn’t break their eye contact or the silence. He retrieved a number from his cell phone contact list and reached for the landline. He asked Berger if she could send someone by to pick up evidence Scarpetta had collected from Oscar Bane.
He listened for a moment, then looked up at Scarpetta and said to Berger, “I completely agree. Since he can leave whenever he wants, and you know how I feel about that. And no, I haven’t had a chance . . . Well, she’s right here. Why don’t you ask her?”
Benton moved the handset to the middle of the desk and held out the receiver to Scarpetta.
“Thanks for doing this,” Jaime Berger said, and Scarpetta tried to remember the last time they’d talked.
Five years ago.
“How was he?” Berger asked.
“Extremely cooperative.”
“Do you think he’ll stay put?”
“I think I’m in an awkward position.” Scarpetta’s way of saying she couldn’t talk about her patient.
“I understand.”
“All I can comfortably tell you,” Scarpetta said, “is if you can get his DNA analyzed quickly, that would be a good thing. There’s no downside to that.”
“Fortunately, there are plenty of people in the world right now who love overtime. One of them, however, isn’t Dr. Lester. While I’ve got you, I’ll ask you directly and let Benton off the hook, unless he’s already said something. Would you mind looking at Terri Bridges’s body tonight? Benton can fill you in. Dr. Lester should be on her way in from New Jersey. Sorry to subject you to something so unpleasant, and I don’t mean the morgue.”
“Whatever’s helpful,” Scarpetta replied.
“I’m sure we’ll talk later. And we should get together. Maybe dinner at Elaine’s,” Berger said.
It seemed to be the favorite line of professional women like them. They would get together, have lunch, maybe dinner. She and Berger had said it to each other the first time they met eight years ago, when Berger was brought to Virginia as a special prosecutor in a case that was one of the most stressful ones in Scarpetta’s life. And they’d said it to each other last time they met, in 2003, when both of them had been concerned about Lucy, who had just returned from a clandestine operation in Poland that Scarpetta still knew very little about, except that what Lucy had done wasn’t legal. It certainly wasn’t moral. In Berger’s penthouse apartment here in the city, the prosecutor had sat down with Scarpetta’s niece, and whatever had gone on between them had remained between them.
Oddly, Berger knew far more about Scarpetta than almost anybody she could think of, and yet they weren’t friends. It was unlikely they would get together and do anything except work, no matter how many times they suggested lunch or a drink and meant it. Their disconnection wasn’t simply due to the vicissitudes of very busy lives that collide and then resume their separate paths. Powerful women tended to be loners, because it was their instinct not to trust one another.
Scarpetta handed the receiver back to Benton.
She said, “If Terri were obsessive-compulsive, her body might offer a few hints. It seems I’ll have a chance to look for myself. Coincidentally.”
“I was about to tell you. Berger asked me earlier to see if you would.”
“Since Dr. Lester’s on her way back into the city, I guess I agreed to it before I knew about it.”
“You can leave afterwards, stay out of it,” Benton said. “Unless Oscar gets charged. Then I don’t know how it will involve you. That will be up to Berger.”
“Please don’t tell me this man killed someone to get my attention.”
“I don’t know what to tell you about anything. At this point, I don’t know what to think about anything. The DNA from Terri’s vaginal swabs, for example. Take a look.”
Scarpetta removed the lab report from an envelope and read it as he described what Berger had told him about a woman in Palm Beach.
“Well?” he said. “Can you think of any reason?”
“What’s not here is Dr. Lester’s report of what samples she took. You said vaginal.”
“That’s what Berger told me.”
“Exactly what they were and from where? Not here. So no. I’m not going to venture a guess about the unusual results and what they might mean.”
“Well, I will. Contamination,” he said. “Although I can’t figure out how an elderly woman in a wheelchair factors into that.”
“Any chance she has a connection with Oscar Bane?”
“I’m told no. Berger called her and asked.”
His phone rang. He answered, listening for a long silence, his closed face giving away nothing.
“Don’t think it was such a great idea,” he finally spoke to whoever was on the line. “Sorry that happened . . . Of course I regret it in light of . . . No, I didn’t want to tell you for this very reason . . . Because, no, hold on. Listen to me for a minute. The answer is, I have . . . Lucy, please. Let me finish. I don’t expect you to understand, and we can’t get into it now. Because . . . You don’t mean that. Because . . . When someone has nowhere else to turn . . . We’ll deal with it. Later, all right? Calm down and we’ll talk later,” and he got off the phone.