It was Berger who drank the stuff. Not Scarpetta. And more unsettling than that was Lucy’s fear about who Berger might drink it with. That was what had entered her mind when Morales had noticed her noticing the bottles in the bar. He was almost smirking, and whenever he looked at her now, there was a glint in his eyes as if he’d won a contest Lucy knew nothing about.
Bacardi and Scarpetta were arguing, and had been at it for a while.
“No, no, no, Oscar couldn’t have done my two.” Bacardi was shaking her head. “I hope I’m not offending anybody when I say dwarf, but I can’t get used to saying little people or little person. Because I’ve always called myself a little person because I’m not the longest drink of water, like we say down south. I’m an old dog. No new tricks, can barely hang on to the ones I got.”
She might be relatively short, but she wasn’t little. Lucy had seen countless Bacardis in her life, almost all of them on Harleys, women on the downhill side of five feet who insisted on having the biggest touring bike, about eight hundred pounds of metal, their boots barely touching the pavement. In one of her earlier manifestations with the Baltimore PD, Bacardi had been a motorcycle cop, and she had a face that went with it, one that had enjoyed too much intimacy with the sun and wind. She squinted a lot, and did a fair amount of scowling, too.
She had short dyed red hair and bright blue eyes, was sturdy but not fat, and probably thought she’d gotten dressed up when she’d decided on her brown leather pants, cowboy boots, and snug scoop-neck sweater that exposed the tiny butterfly tattooed on her left breast and plenty of cleavage whenever she’d bend over to dig into her briefcase on the floor. She was sexy in her own way. She was funny. She had an Alabama accent as thick as fudge. She wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, and Marino hadn’t stopped looking at her since she’d walked through the door carrying three boxes of files from the homicides that had been committed five years ago in Baltimore and Greenwich.
“I’m not attempting to make the point that a little person could or couldn’t have done anything,” Scarpetta replied.
Unlike most people, she was always polite enough to stop typing, to unglue her eyes from her computer screen when she talked to someone.
“But he couldn’t have,” Bacardi said. “And I don’t mean to keep interrupting like Old Faithful going off, but I just had to get this out and make sure all of you are hearing me. Okay?”
She looked around the room.
“Okay,” she answered herself. “My lady, Bethany, was almost six feet tall. Now, unless she was lying down, there’s no way someone four feet tall could have garroted her.”
“I’m simply pointing out she was garroted. Basing that on the photographs you’ve shown me and the autopsy findings I’ve reviewed,” Scarpetta patiently said. “The angle of the marks on her neck, and the fact there are more than one of them, et cetera. I’m not saying who did or didn’t do it—”
“But that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying who did or didn’t. Bethany didn’t kick or struggle, or if she did, by some miracle she didn’t scrape or bruise herself. I’m telling you, someone normal size was behind her, and both of them were standing up. I think he raped her from behind while he was doing it, because that’s what got him off. And same thing with Rodrick. The kid was standing up, and this guy was behind him. The advantage the perp had in my cases is he was big enough to control them. He intimidated them into letting him bind their hands behind their backs. It doesn’t appear they struggled with him at all.”
“I’m trying to remember how tall Rodrick was,” Benton said, and his hair was very messy, his face covered with stubble that reminded Lucy of salt.
Two all-nighters, back-to-back, and he looked like it.
“Five-foot-ten,” Bacardi said. “One hundred and thirty-six pounds. Skinny and not strong. And not much of a fighter.”
“We can say all of the victims have one thing in common,” Benton then said. “I should say all of the victims we know about. They were vulnerable. They were impaired or at a disadvantage.”
“Unless the killer’s Oscar,” Berger reminded everybody. “Then the odds change. I don’t care if you’re a skinny kid on oxys. You’re not at a disadvantage, necessarily, if your assailant is only four feet tall. And I hate to keep saying it, but unless there’s another logical explanation for how his fingerprints turned up at Eva Peebles’s crime scene? And prints made by a size-five women’s shoe, a Brooks Ariel? And Oscar just happens to wear that exact same shoe, and he buys it in a size-five women’s?”
“Can’t overlook the fact he’s disappeared, either,” Marino said. “He’s got to know we’re looking for him, and he’s choosing to be a fugitive. He could turn himself in. It would be in his best self-interest. He’d be safer.”
“You’re talking about someone profoundly paranoid,” Benton said. “There is nothing on earth that would convince him it’s safe to turn himself in.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” Berger said, looking at Scarpetta.
She was going through autopsy photographs and didn’t notice Berger’s thoughtful stare.
“I don’t think so,” Benton said, as if he knew what was on Berger’s mind. “He wouldn’t do it, not even for her.”
Lucy decided that Berger must be hatching a plan for Scarpetta to make an appeal to Oscar.
Morales said, “Don’t know how we’d get the message to him, anyway. Unless she calls his home phone. Maybe he can’t resist, is checking his messages.”
“Never happen,” Benton said. “Be Oscar for a minute, get inside his mind. Who’s going to call him that he wants to hear from? The only person who mattered to him, the only person he seemed to trust, is dead. And I’m not sure how much he trusts Kay anymore. No matter. I don’t believe he’s checking his voicemail remotely. He already thinks he’s being monitored, spied on, which is the main reason he’s hiding, in my opinion. The last thing he’s going to do is take the chance he might end up on the enemy’s radar again.”
“What about e-mail?” Morales asked. “Maybe if she sent him an e-mail? Sent it from Scarpetta six-twelve. I mean, he believes that really is you.”
He looked at Scarpetta, who was looking up at everyone now, listening to them strategize about what she might do that could convince Oscar to turn himself in to the police. Lucy could tell by the look on her face that she wasn’t interested in playing bait and switch with Oscar Bane. Except now she could. Confidentiality didn’t matter anymore. Oscar was a fugitive from justice. There were warrants out for his arrest and, barring some miracle, when he was apprehended, he would go to trial and he would be convicted. Lucy didn’t want to think about what might happen to him in prison.
Lucy said, “I think he would assume we’ve been in his e-mail. He’s not going to log on to his account. Not unless he’s stupid or desperate or losing control. I agree with Benton. You want my suggestion? Try television. Unless he believes people can find him when he turns on a TV in a Holiday Inn, that’s probably the only thing he’s monitoring. He’s watching the news.”
“You could make an appeal to him on CNN,” Berger said.
“I think that’s genius,” Morales agreed. “Go on CNN and tell Oscar to please turn himself in. That it’s the best plan for his useless life, under the circumstances.”