Oscar’s home gym was in the master bedroom, his foil-tented bed in the midst of it, and Benton and Morales were talking.
“What is it you want me to ask him, exactly?” Scarpetta said.
She could see why Morales was popular with women and be-grudgingly respected but resented by just about everybody else, including judges. He reminded her of a couple of the star athletes on scholarship at Cornell when she was there as an undergraduate, these scrappy, supremely self-assured young men who compensated for their relatively small stature by being wiry and fast, brazen and outrageous. They listened to no one, had little regard for their team or coaches, and were intellectually lazy but scored points and were crowd pleasers. They weren’t nice people.
“Just ask him if he’s aware that there’s a camera,” Lucy was saying.
“I can answer that,” Scarpetta said. “He installed a surveillance camera on the roof. Marino knows about it. Is Jaime with you?”
Scarpetta didn’t realize why she’d asked until the words were out. It was something she sensed, maybe had sensed it the first time she’d seen them together when Lucy was scarcely more than a child, at least in Scarpetta’s mind, practically a child. Berger was a good fifteen years older than Lucy.
Why did it matter?
Lucy certainly wasn’t a child.
She was explaining to Scarpetta that Berger and Marino had gone across the street to talk to a witness. She hadn’t been with them for a good half-hour.
Maybe it was the simple logic that a prosecutor as busy and important as Jaime Berger was unlikely to spend her evening inside a Greenwich Village loft watching a computer run a program. Anything Lucy discovered could have been relayed over the phone or electronically. While it was true that Berger was known for being hands-on and extremely energetic and fierce when it came to absorbing crime scenes in person and directing the evidence to be analyzed and quickly, and on occasion showing up at the morgue if there was an autopsy she wanted to see and Dr. Lester wasn’t the ME doing it, she didn’t watch computers. She didn’t pull up a chair in the labs and watch gas chromatography, microscopy, trace evidence examination, or low copy number DNA amplification in the works.
Berger gave marching orders and had meetings to go over the results. It bothered Scarpetta to think of Lucy and Berger alone in that loft for hours. Scarpetta’s uneasiness about it likely went back to the last time she’d seen them together, five years ago, when she’d appeared unannounced at Berger’s penthouse.
She hadn’t expected to discover Lucy there, confiding in Berger about what had happened in that hotel room in Szczecin, Poland, offering details that to this day Scarpetta didn’t know.
She’d felt she was no longer the center of her niece’s life. Or perhaps she had seen it coming, that one day she wouldn’t be. That was the truth, her selfish truth.
Scarpetta told Benton that Lucy needed to talk to him. He hesitated, waiting for a signal from her that she was all right.
“I’m going to check his cabinets,” she said, and that was her signal.
Benton should leave the bedroom so he could have a private conversation.
“I’ll be down the hall,” Benton said, entering a number on his cell phone.
Scarpetta could feel Morales watching her as she walked into Oscar’s bathroom. The more she saw of the way he lived, the more depressed she was by his obvious deteriorated mental state. Bottles in the medicine cabinet made it clear he believed his own nightmares, and the date on several prescription bottles validated the timeline, too.
She found l-lysine, pantothenic and folic and amino acids, bone calcium, iodine, kelp, the sort of supplements taken by people who had suffered radiation damage or feared they had. Beneath the sink were large bottles of white vinegar that she suspected he was adding to his baths, and early last October he had filled a prescription for eszopiclone, which was used to treat insomnia. Since then, he had refilled the prescription twice, most recently at a Duane Reade pharmacy, on December twenty-seventh. The name of the prescribing doctor was Elizabeth Stuart. Scarpetta would call her, but not now and not here.
She began going through a small closet where Oscar kept the expected over-the-counter medications and first-aid necessities such as Band-Aids, rubbing alcohol, gauze—and a lubricant called Aqualine. She was looking at it when Morales walked in. The price sticker was missing from the unopened jar, so she had no idea where it had been purchased.
“Isn’t that sort of like Vaseline?” he asked.
“Sort of,” she replied.
“You think the labs can tell if this is the same stuff that was recovered from her vagina?”
“It’s more commonly used as a healing ointment,” Scarpetta said. “To treat burns, irritated or cracked skin, atopic dermatitis, eczema, that sort of thing. None of which Oscar has, by the way. Popular with runners, bikers, race walkers. Rather ubiquitous. You can get it at any pharmacy and most grocery stores.”
It almost sounded as if she was defending Oscar Bane.
“Yeah. We know little Oscar’s quite the little walker, flat-footed fella that he is. The doorman says he goes out in his little warm-ups almost every day, no matter the weather. The ladder’s on the roof, how about that for strange? The building’s got no idea why. I’m thinking the little guy climbed up the fire escape and came in one of his windows, then went out through the roof access and pulled the ladder up behind him. That explains why it’s on the roof.”
“Why might he do that?”
“To get in.” Morales stared intensely at her.
“And opening his window wouldn’t set off the alarm?” she asked.
“It was set off. I called the alarm company to inves-ti-gate. Not long after Oscar checked out of Bellevue, yup, the alarm went off. The service called his apartment, and a man answered and said it was an accident and gave the password. It’s not that loud. The building wouldn’t have heard it, especially if it was deactivated quickly. So what do you think?”
“I don’t have a thought about it.”
“Shit, you have thoughts about everything, Dr. CNN. That’s what you’re known for. You’re known for all these amazing thoughts you have.”
He walked to the closet she was searching. He bumped against her as he picked up the jar of Aqualine.
“Chemically,” he said, “we could tell if this is the same stuff recovered from her body, correct?”
“Certainly,” she said, “you could determine what it’s not, such as K-Y jelly, which has certain antiseptic and preservative additives like sodium hydroxide and methylparaben. Aqualine is preservative-free, mainly mineral oil and petrolatum. I’m pretty sure nothing like this was found in Terri’s apartment. At least it’s not on the evidence inventory, and I checked the medicine cabinet, looked around when I was just there. You would know better than anybody.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t bring it in his murder kit, and leave with it. I’m not saying Oscar did, I’m saying the killer did. But I’m also not saying they aren’t the same person, either.”
Morales’s brown eyes were intense on hers. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and at the same time angry.
“But you’re on the money about nothing being in her apartment,” he said. “Last night I didn’t know we were looking for a lubricant because the autopsy hadn’t been done yet. But I did look when I went back.”