“What the hell was that about?” Scarpetta asked. “What was Lucy saying? What are you sorry about, and who has nowhere else to turn?”
Benton’s face was pale but impassive, and he said, “Sometimes she has no sense of time and place, and what I don’t need right now is one of her rages.”
“Rage? Over what?”
“You know how she gets.”
“Usually when she has good reason to get that way.”
“We can’t get into it now.” He said the same thing to her that he’d said to Lucy.
“How the hell am I supposed to concentrate after overhearing a conversation like that? Get into what?”
He was silent. She never liked it when he stopped to think after she’d asked him a question.
“Gotham Gotcha,”he said, to her surprise and annoyance.
“You’re not really going to make a big deal out of that.”
“You read it?”
“I started reading it in the cab. Bryce said I needed to.”
“Did you read all of it?”
“I was interrupted by being thrown out on the street.”
“Come look.”
He typed something as she moved next to him.
“That’s odd,” Benton said, frowning.
The Gotham Gotcha website had a massive programming error or had crashed. Buildings were dark, the sky flashing red, and Rockefeller Center’s huge Christmas tree was upside down in Central Park.
Benton impatiently scooted the mouse around on its pad and clicked it repeatedly.
“The site’s down for some reason and completely fucked up,” he said. “However, unfortunately, I can pull up the damn column anyway.”
Typing, he executed a search, hitting keys vigorously.
“It’s all the hell over the place,” he said.
The screen filled with references to Gotham Gotcha and Dr. Kay Scarpetta, and he clicked on a file and opened a copy of not one column but two that someone had cut and pasted on a forensic fan site. The unflattering photograph of Scarpetta filled the screen, and she and Benton looked at it for a moment.
“You think it was taken in Charleston?” he asked. “Or your new office? Do the scrubs tell you anything? The color? Don’t you wear cranberry scrubs in Watertown?”
“Depends on what we get from the medical linen service. They pick up and deliver, and one week it might be teal-green, the next week purple, different shades of blue, cranberry. That’s true at most morgues in recent years. The most I might specify is I don’t want something cute like SpongeBob, the Simpsons, Tom and Jerry. Literally true. I know pathologists who wear them, as if they’re pediatricians.”
“And you have no recollection of someone taking a picture of you during an autopsy? Maybe using their cell phone?”
She thought back, thought hard, and said, “No. Because if I saw it happen, I would have made the person delete it. I would never permit such a thing.”
“Most likely it happened since you moved and started with CNN. The celebrity factor. A cop. Someone from a funeral home, a removal service.”
“That would be bad,” she said, thinking about Bryce. “That would make me worry about someone on my staff. What’s this about Sister Polly? Who’s Sister Polly?”
“Don’t know. Read this. Then we’ll get to that.”
He moved the cursor to the first column that had been posted today, to the part he wanted her to see:
. . . yet beneath that impenetrable façade is a dirty secret she hides pretty well. Scarpetta may live in a world of stainless steel but she’s certainly no woman made of steel. She’s weak, a disgrace.
Guess what, she can be raped.
That’s right. Just like any other woman, only you can blame the victim this time. She brought it upon herself. Pushed away, mistreated, and belittled her investigative partner in crime until one drunken night in Charleston when he couldn’t take it anymore. You have to feel a little sorry for poor Pete Marino. . . .
Scarpetta returned to her chair. Gossip was one thing. This was another.
“I won’t ask why people are so hateful,” she said. “I learned a long time ago not to ask. Finally figured out the why part might give insight, but really doesn’t matter. Just the end result. That’s what matters. If I find out who this is, I’ll sue.”
“I won’t tell you not to let it get to you.”
“I believe you just told me by not telling me. What happened was never in the news. I never reported it. It’s not accurate. This is slander. I’ll sue.”
“Sue whom? An anonymous piece of shit in cyberspace?”
“Lucy could find out who.”
“Speaking of, I’m not sure it’s coincidental the site crashed,” he said. “That’s probably the best remedy. Maybe it will stay crashed forever.”
“Did you ask her to crash the site?”
“You just heard me on the phone with her. Of course not. But you know her, as do I. Sure as hell is something she’d do, and much more effective than a lawsuit. There’s no slander. You can’t prove that what this person’s written is a lie. You can’t prove what happened. And what didn’t.”
“You say that as if you don’t believe what I’ve told you.”
“Kay.” He met her eyes. “Let’s don’t turn this into a fight between us. What you need to brace yourself for, obviously, is the exposure. The public didn’t know, and now it does, and you’re going to be asked. Same thing with this. . . .” He read some more. “This other bullshit. Parochial school. Sister Polly. That’s a story I’m not familiar with.”
Scarpetta barely read it, didn’t need to, and she replied, “There’s no Sister Polly, and what was described didn’t happen, not like that. It was a different nun, and there certainly was no salacious whipping in the bathroom.”
“But some truth.”
“Yes. Miami, the scholarship to parochial school. And my father’s protracted, terminal illness.”
“And his grocery store. Did the other girls in school call you a Florida cracker?”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Benton.”
“I’m trying to determine what’s true and who would know it. What’s already out there? Any of this?”
“You know what’s out there. And no. None of this, true or false, is out there. I don’t know where the information came from.”
He said, “I’m not as concerned about what’s false. I want to know what’s out there that’s true, and if there’s a publicized source for what’s in these columns. Because if there isn’t, as you seem to be suggesting, then someone close to you is leaking information to whoever this hack writer is.”
“Marino,” she reluctantly said. “He knows things about me that other people don’t.”
“Well, obviously the Charleston information. Although I can’t imagine him using that word.”
“What word, Benton?”
He didn’t answer.
“You can’t bring yourself to say it, can you? The word rape. Even though that’s not what happened.”