Scarpetta was still taking photographs. It was important she capture what she was seeing before she did anything else.
Berger asked, “Do you have a doubt?”
“What I feel or think doesn’t matter,” Scarpetta said. “I’m staying away from that. I’ll tell you what her body’s telling me, which is there are profound similarities between this case and Terri’s.”
The shutter clicked and the flash went off.
Berger had moved to one side of the doorway, her hands clasped behind her back as she looked in and said, “Marino’s in the living room with Lucy. She thinks the victim might have something to do with Gotham Gotcha. ”
Scarpetta said without turning around, “Crashing the site wasn’t a good way to deal with it. I hope you’ll impress that upon her. She doesn’t always listen to me.”
“She said something about a morgue photograph of Marilyn Monroe.”
“That wasn’t the way to handle it,” Scarpetta said to the flash of the camera. “I wish she hadn’t.”
The body slowly turned, the rope winding and unwinding. Eva Peebles’s blue eyes were dull and open wide in her thin, wrinkled face. Strands of her snowy hair were caught in the noose. The only jewelry she had on was a thin gold chain around her left ankle—just like Terri Bridges.
“She admitted to it?” Scarpetta asked. “Or is it the process of elimination?”
“She’s admitted nothing to me. I’d prefer it stay that way.”
“All these things you’d rather she not tell you,” Scarpetta said.
“I have plenty to say to her without doing so in a way that might be disadvantageous,” Berger said. “But I get your point completely.”
Scarpetta studied the black-and-white tile floor before stepping her paper-booted feet inside. She set one thermometer on the edge of the sink, and tucked the other under Eva Peebles’s left arm.
“From what I gather,” Berger said, “whatever virus brought down the website also enabled her to hack into it. Which then allowed her to hack into Eva Peebles’s e-mail—don’t ask me to explain it. Lucy’s found an electronic folder containing virtually every Gotham Gotcha column ever written, including the one posted this morning and a second one posted later in the day. And she’s found the Marilyn Monroe photograph, which Eva Peebles apparently opened. In other words, it seems this woman”—she meant the dead one—“didn’t write them. They were e-mailed to her from IP addresses that Lucy says have been anonymized, but since this is yet another violent death that is possibly related to e-mails, we won’t have any trouble getting the service provider to tell us who the account belongs to.”
Scarpetta handed her a notepad and pen and said, “You want to scribe? Ambient temp is fifty-eight degrees. Body temp is eighty-nine-point-two. Doesn’t tell us a whole lot, since she’s thin, unclothed, the room’s been steadily cooling. Rigor’s not apparent yet. Not surprising, either. Cooling delays its onset, and we know she called nine-one-one at what time, exactly?”
“Eight-forty-nine, exactly.” Berger made notes. “What we don’t know is exactly when she was in the pet shop. Only that it was approximately an hour before she called the police.”
“I’d like to hear the tape,” Scarpetta said.
She placed her hands on the body’s hips to stop its slow, agitated turns. She examined it more closely, exploring it with the flashlight, noting a shiny residue in the vaginal area.
Berger said, “We know she said she believed the man she encountered was Jake Loudin. So if he’s the last person to see her alive . . . ?”
“Question is whether he literally was the last person. Do we know if there might be any personal connection between Jake Loudin and Terri Bridges?”
“Just a possible connection that might be nothing more than a coincidence.”
And Berger began telling her about Marino’s earlier interview, about a puppy that Terri didn’t want, a Boston terrier named Ivy. She continued to explain that it was unclear who had given the sick puppy to Terri, perhaps Oscar had. Perhaps someone else. Perhaps it originally had come from one of Jake Loudin’s shops, hard to know, maybe impossible to know.
“I don’t need to tell you that he’s very upset,” Berger said, and she meant Marino. “Always the biggest thing any cop fears. You talk to a witness, and then the person is murdered. He’s going to worry he could have done something to prevent it.”
Scarpetta continued to hold the body still as she got a closer look at the gelatinous material clumped in gray pubic hair and in the folds of the labia. She didn’t want to close the window—not before the police processed it with whatever forensic methods they deemed best.
“Some sort of lubricant,” she said. “Can you ask Lucy if her plane has already left La Guardia?”
They were three rooms away from each other, and Berger called her.
“Bad luck is good luck in this case. Tell them to hold off,” Berger said to Lucy. “We’ve got something else that needs to go down there . . . Great. Thanks.”
She ended the call and said to Scarpetta, “A wind shear warning in effect. They’re still on the ground.”
Chapter 29
The shoe impressions recovered from the toilet seat in Eva Peebles’s bathroom were an exact match to the tread pattern of the shoes that Oscar Bane had been wearing last night when he’d allegedly discovered Terri’s body.
More incriminating were fingerprints lifted from the glass light fixture that the killer had removed from the ceiling and placed in the tub. The prints were Oscar’s. At shortly past midnight, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and an all points bulletin went out over the air and over the Internet.
The “Midget Murderer” was now being called the “Midget Monster,” and police nationwide were looking for him. Morales had also alerted Interpol, in the event Oscar somehow managed to evade airport and border security and escaped the country. There had been plenty of reported sightings. In fact, the latest news break as of the three a.m. broadcast was that some little people, especially young men, were staying home for fear of harassment or worse.
It was now almost five o’clock Wednesday morning, and Scarpetta, Benton, Morales, Lucy, Marino, and a Baltimore investigator who insisted on being called her surname, Bacardi, were in Berger’s penthouse apartment living room, and had been, for about four hours. The coffee table was covered with photographs and case files, and cluttered with coffee cups and bags from a nearby all-night deli. Power supply cords ran from wall outlets to the laptops they were plugged into, everybody tapping keys and looking at files as they talked.
Lucy was sitting cross-legged in a corner of the wraparound couch, her MacBook in her lap, and every now and then she glanced up at Morales, wondering how she could be right about what she was thinking. Berger had a bottle of Knappogue Castle single-malt Irish whiskey and a bottle of Brora single-malt Scotch. They were clearly visible behind glass in the bar directly across from her. She’d noticed the bottles immediately when everyone had first gotten here, and when Morales had noticed her noticing, he’d walked over to look.
“A girl with my taste,”he’d said.
The way he’d said it had given Lucy a sick feeling she couldn’t shake, and she’d had a hard time concentrating on anything since. Berger had been sitting next to her in the loft when they’d read the alleged interview in which Scarpetta supposedly told Terri Bridges that she drank liquor that cost far more than Terri’s schoolbooks. Why hadn’t Berger said anything? How could she have the same extremely rare and expensive whiskeys in her own bar and not mention that detail to Lucy?