Postmortem Page 13

  Why would someone break a little kid’s pencils?

  Women like her ask for it. That’s why they’re attracted to crime.

  I’m surprised about the investigator but not about the nun.

  Shrew had been unusually unmotivated since Investigator Marino had left, and she’d better get with it and start weeding through the most recent information and images sent by fans, on the off chance there was something important she should post or move to the Boss’s research folder.

  She opened and deleted scores of banal, boring gossipy anecdotes, alleged sightings, and images taken with cell phone cameras until she came to an e-mail that had been sent several hours ago. Immediately, she was excited by the subject line but skeptical:

  NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTO! MARILYN MONROE IN THE MORGUE

  There was no message, only an attachment. Shrew downloaded the image, and as it appeared in high resolution on her screen, she felt a thrill that made her understand what people meant when they said their hair stood on end.

  “My word,” she muttered. “Oh, my dear Lord,” she exclaimed.

  Marilyn Monroe’s nude body was stitched up like a rag doll on top of a shiny steel autopsy table, her blond hair wetly clumped around her dead face, which was a bit swollen, but recognizable. Shrew began zooming in on every detail, the mouse clicking like mad as she did exactly what the fans were bound to do. She gawked and enlarged and gawked some more at the puckering and flattening of the movie goddess’s once gorgeous breasts caused by the dreadful railroad track of sutures that ran in a V from her collarbones to her cleavage, then all the way down her once gorgeous body, past old surgical scars, before disappearing in pubic hair. Her famous lips and blue eyes were shut, and at the highest magnification the software could muster, Shrew came upon the truth that the world had always wanted and certainly deserved.

  Just like that, she knew, and could prove it.

  It couldn’t be more obvious.

  The details were there. Evidence: The recently dyed blond hair without a hint of dark roots showing. The perfectly plucked eyebrows. The manicured finger- and toenails, and smoothly shaven legs. She was slender, not an unseemly ounce to spare.

  Marilyn had been fastidiously attending to her grooming and pampering herself, and keeping a keen eye on her weight right up to her tragic last breath. And severely depressed people didn’t do that. The photo was proof positive of what Shrew had always suspected.

  She excitedly typed the copy. It had to be short. The Boss was the writer, not Shrew, and she was never allowed to craft more than fifteen words for a cutline or any sort of text on the site:

  MARILYN MONROE MURDERED! (VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED)

  AN ASTONISHING NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN AUTOPSY PIC PROVES WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT THAT FILM GODDESS MARILYN MONROE WASN’T DEPRESSED AT THE TIME OF HER DEATH, AND DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE.

  DETAILS CLEARLY VISIBLE DURING THE AUTOPSY PERFORMED ON AUGUST 5, 1962, IN LOS ANGELES, REVEAL INDISPUTABLE EVIDENCE THAT EVIL—NOT AN ACCIDENT OR SUICIDE—ENDED MARILYN’S LIFE.

  Shrew should stop at that, for heaven’s sake. A word count of sixty-two, not including numbers and punctuation, almost five times the legal limit. But certainly the Boss would make an exception in this case and in fact would give Shrew a bonus and praise for once.

  She jumped into the search window and easily found what purported to be the famous Dr. Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report and lab results. She read them carefully, not sure what many of the words and phrases meant. She looked up “fixed lividity,” and “a slight ecchymotic area,” and “no refractile crystals found in the stomach or the duodenum.” She looked up a lot of things and got increasingly indignant.

  How dare a bunch of powermongering, womanizing, selfish men do this to Marilyn! Well, the world could stop speculating about what really happened. Shrew’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

  HIGHLY CLASSIFIED INFORMATION FROM THE ACTUAL AUTOPSY REPORT IS COMPLETELY CONSISTENT WITH WHAT’S PLAINLY VISIBLE IN THIS REMARKABLE PHOTO. MARILYN MONROE, NUDE AND HELPLESS, WAS FORCIBLY HELD DOWN ON HER BED (EXPLAINING BRUISES ON HER LEFT HIP AND LOWER BACK) WHILE HER KILLERS ADMINISTERED AN ENEMA HEAVILY LACED WITH BARBITURATES.

  SHE CERTAINLY DIDN’T DIE FROM A SUICIDAL OVERDOSE OF NEMBUTAL, OR THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN AT LEAST A TRACE OF PILL CAPSULES AND A YELLOWISH RESIDUE IN HER STOMACH AND DUODENUM—AND THERE WASN’T. ADDED TO THAT IS THE DISCOVERY THAT HER COLON WAS DISCOLORED AND DISTENDED—JUST AS ONE WOULD EXPECT IT TO BE AFTER A POISONOUS ENEMA!

  AND BY THE WAY, IF SHE GAVE HERSELF THE ENEMA AS OPPOSED TO OTHERS DOING IT, WHERE WERE ALL THOSE EMPTY PILL CAPSULES? WHERE WAS THE EMPTY ENEMA BOTTLE?

  ONCE THE DRUGS WERE IN HER SYSTEM, COMMON SENSE WOULD TELL YOU SHE COULDN’T POSSIBLY HAVE RUN OUT OF HER HOUSE TO DISPOSE OF THE EVIDENCE, THEN RETURNED, TAKEN OFF HER CLOTHES, CLIMBED BACK IN BED, AND TUCKED THE COVERS NEATLY UNDER HER CHIN. AFTER THAT ENEMA, SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN INCAPACITATED, UNCONSCIOUS, AND DEAD, FAST. IN FACT, SHE NEVER EVEN MADE IT TO THE BATHROOM! AT DEATH, HER BLADDER WAS FULL! IT SAYS SO ON THE AUTOPSY REPORT!

  MARILYN WAS MURDERED BECAUSE SHE WOULDN’T KEEP HER MOUTH SHUT—NO MATTER WHO GAVE THE ORDER!

  10

  The view from Jaime Berger’s office was of rampant lions carved in bas-relief on the granite building across from her eighth-floor office window.

  She happened to have been gazing out that same window when American Airlines Flight 11 roared abnormally loud and low in a clear blue sky and slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Eighteen minutes later, the second plane hit the south tower. In disbelief, she watched the symbols of power she had known much of her life burn and collapse, and rain ash and debris over lower Manhattan, and she was sure the world had come to an end.

  Since then, she wondered what would be different had she not been in New York that Tuesday morning, sitting in this same office, talking on the phone with Greg, who was in Buenos Aires without her because she had yet another big trial—one she could scarcely recall now.

  There were always extremely important, and later hard to recall, big trials requiring her to stay in the city while Greg squired his two children from a previous marriage to wondrous spots around the world. He decided he liked London best and took a flat there, and then it turned out what he’d really taken there was a mistress, a young English barrister he’d met several years earlier while she was spending a few weeks at Berger’s office during an excessively stressful trial.

  Berger had never thought twice about it when the young barrister and Greg had dinner together while Berger worked until the hands fell off the clock. As he used to put it.

  She remained in a state of conjugal unconsciousness until Greg dropped by her office unannounced one day last winter to take her to lunch. They walked to Forlini’s, a favorite hangout of criminal-justice potentates and politicians, and husband and wife sat across from each other, surrounded by dark paneling and heavy oil paintings of the Old Country. He didn’t tell her he was having an affair and had been for years, just that he wanted out, and at that time and of all things, Berger’s thoughts shifted to Kay Scarpetta. There was a logical reason.

  Forlini’s named booths after influential patrons, and the booth where Berger and Greg sat, coincidentally, was named for Nicholas Scoppetta, now the fire commissioner. Seeing the name Scoppetta on the wall made Berger think of Scarpetta, who Berger felt sure would have gotten up from that damn dusky rose leather booth and stalked out of the restaurant, instead of subjecting herself to, if not encouraging, blatant lies and humiliation.

  But Berger didn’t move or lodge a protest. She was her usual poised, controlled self listening to Greg make the insane bullshit point that he didn’t love her anymore. He had stopped loving her after Nine-Eleven, probably because he was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, even though he was well aware he wasn’t in the country when the terrorist attack happened, but the constant replays on the news made it almost as bad as being there.

  He said what
had happened to America, and was continuing to happen—especially to his real-estate investments and the plummeting value of the dollar—was unbearably traumatizing, and therefore he was moving to London. He wanted a discreet divorce, and the more discreet and uncontested it was, the better off everyone would be. Berger asked if another woman might discreetly have something to do with it, just to see if he might have it in him to be honest. He’d said the question was irrelevant when a couple wasn’t in love anymore, and then made a not-so-subtle accusation that Berger had other interests, and he didn’t mean professional ones. She didn’t object, redirect, or even offer proof that she’d never violated the terms of their marital contract, even if she’d thought about it.

  Berger was now discreetly divorced, discreetly rich, and discreetly isolated. Her office floor was vacant this late afternoon. It was, after all, a holiday, or a sick day, depending on how enthusiastically one had brought in the New Year. But Berger had no incentive to stay home. There was always work to be done. So with her former husband across the Pond, his children grown, and none of her own, she was alone in this cold stone Art Deco building not far from Ground Zero, nobody here to even answer the phone.

  When it rang at exactly five p.m., exactly twenty-four hours after Oscar Bane said he had arrived at Terri Bridges’s brownstone, Berger picked up the receiver herself, already knowing who it was.

  “No. Not the conference room,” she said to Lucy. “It’s just the two of us. We’ll do it in my office.”

  Oscar stared at the clock built into a plastic case on the wall, and then covered his face with his cuffed hands.

  At this time yesterday afternoon, Terri should have been opening her door to him, and maybe she did. Or maybe what he claimed was true, and by this time yesterday she was already dead. The minute hand on the wall clock twitched ahead to one past five.

  Scarpetta asked, “Did Terri have any friends?”

  “Online,” Oscar said. “That’s how she connected with people. That’s where she learned to trust them. Or realize she couldn’t. You know that. Why are you doing this? Why can’t you admit it? Who’s stopping you?”

  “I don’t know what it is you want me to admit.”

  “You’ve been instructed.”

  “What makes you think I’ve been instructed? And instructed to do what?”

  “Okay, fine,” Oscar said testily. “I’m getting very tired of this game. But I’ll tell you anyway. I have to believe you’re protecting me. I have to believe that’s why you’re so evasive. I’ll accept it and answer your question. Terri met people online. If you’re a little person and a woman, you’re much more vulnerable.”

  “At what point did the two of you get together, start seeing each other?”

  “After a year of exchanging e-mails. We discovered both of us were going to a meeting in the same location at the same time. Orlando. The LPA. That’s when we realized we both have achondroplasia. After Orlando, we began seeing each other. I told you. Three months ago.”

  “Why her apartment from the very start?”

  “She liked to be in her own place. She’s very neat, obsessively neat and clean.”

  “She worried your apartment might be dirty?”

  “She worried most places were dirty.”

  “Was she obsessive-compulsive? Phobic of germs?”

  “When we’d go out somewhere, she’d want both of us to shower when we got back to her place. At first I thought it was about sex, which was fine. Showering with her. Then I realized it was about being clean. I had to be very clean. I used to have long hair, but she made me cut it short because it’s easier to keep clean if it’s short. She said hair collects dirt and bacteria. I was a good sport but said there was one place I was keeping my body hair. Nobody was coming near me down there.”

  “Where do you get your hair removal done?”

  “A dermatologist on East Seventy-ninth. Laser removal. Other painful things I’ll never bother with again.”

  “What about Terri? Did she go to this same dermatologist?”

  “She referred me to her. Dr. Elizabeth Stuart. She has a big practice and is well respected. Terri’s been going to her for years.”

  Scarpetta wrote down Dr. Stuart’s name and asked about any other doctors or other practitioners Terri might have seen, and Oscar said he didn’t know or he didn’t remember, but he was sure there would be records of that type of information in Terri’s apartment. She was impeccably well organized, he said.

  “She never threw anything away that might be important, but everything has its proper place. If I draped my shirt over a chair, she was going to hang it up. I could barely finish eating before the dishes were in the dishwasher. She hated clutter. Hated things out of place. Her pocketbook, her raincoat, her snow boots, whatever it was, she tucked it out of sight even if she planned to use it again five minutes later. I realize that’s not normal.”

  “Is her own hair cut short like yours?”

  “I keep forgetting you never saw her.”

  “I’m sorry, but I didn’t.”

  “She didn’t cut her hair short, but she keeps it very clean. If she went somewhere, the minute she got back inside, she’d take a shower and wash her hair. Never a bath. Because you’re sitting in dirty water. That’s what she says, constantly. She uses a towel once, and then it went into the wash. I know it’s not normal. I told her she might want to talk to someone about her anxiety, that she’s obsessive-compulsive, not severely but has some of the symptoms. She didn’t wash her hands a hundred times a day or walk around the cracks in the sidewalk or refuse take-out food. Nothing like that.”

  “What about when you had sex? Any extra precautions because of her vigilance about cleanliness?”

  “Just that I’m clean. We shower afterwards, wash each other’s hair, and usually have sex again in the shower. She likes having sex in the shower. She calls it clean sex. I wanted to see her more than once a week. But that was all. Once a week. Always the same day, exact same time. Probably because she’s so organized. Saturday at five. We’d eat and make love. Sometimes we’d make love the minute I got there. I didn’t sleep there. She likes to wake up alone and get started on her work. My DNA’s all over her house.”

  “But you didn’t have sex with her last night.”

  “You already asked me that!”

  He clenched his fists and the veins stood out in his muscular arms.

  “How could I!”

  “I’m just making sure. You understand why I have to ask.”

  “I always use condoms. You’ll find them in the drawer by her bed. My saliva would be on her.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because I held her. I tried mouth-to-mouth. When I knew she was gone, I kissed her face. I touched her. I had her in my arms. My DNA’s on her.”

  “This and this.” Scarpetta touched bruises on his sternum. “When he hit you with the flashlight?”

  “Some of them. Maybe some from hitting the floor. I don’t know.”

  Bruises change color with time. They can indicate the shape of the object that caused them. His were reddish-purple. There were two on his chest, one on his left thigh, all about two inches wide and slightly curved. The most Scarpetta could say was they were consistent with a flashlight’s rim, and that he had been struck with what appeared to be moderate force around the same time he’d received his other injuries.

  She took close-up photographs, aware of how easy it would be for him to throttle her with his forearm. She wouldn’t be able to scream. In minutes she would be dead.

  She felt his body heat and smelled him. Then the air between them was cool again as she stepped back and returned to the counter, and began documenting injuries and making other notes while he watched her back. She could feel his mismatched eyes, only they weren’t as warm. They felt like cool drops of water. His devotion, his idealization, was beginning to chill. To him she wasn’t bigger than life on CNN. She was a woman, a real person who was disappointing him, betraying
him. Almost without exception, that was the path of hero worship, because it was never really about the object of it.

  “Nothing’s any better than it was thousands of years ago,” Oscar said to her back. “The fighting, the ugliness, the lies and hatefulness. People don’t change.”

  “If you believe that,” she asked, “why would you want to go into psychology?”

  “If you want to figure out where evil comes from, you have to follow where it goes,” he said. “Did it end up in a stab wound? Did it end up in the decapitated head of a hiker? Did it end up in discrimination? What part of our brain remains primitive in a world where violent aggression and hatred are counterproductive to survival? Why can’t we knock out that part of our genetic coding the way we knock out genes in mice? I know what your husband’s doing.”

  He talked fast and in a flinty tone while she retrieved a silicone casting extruder gun and a polyvinylsiloxane refill cartridge from her crime scene case.

  “The research he’s doing into that sort of thing. At his Harvard hospital, McLean. Using MRI. Functional MRI. Are we any closer to figuring it out? Or will we just keep tormenting, torturing, raping and killing and starting wars and committing genocide and deciding some people don’t deserve basic human rights?”

  Locking the cartridge in place, she removed the pink cover cap and pressed the trigger, squeezing the white base and clear catalyst on a paper towel until there was a steady flow. She attached the mixing tip and returned to the table, explaining she was going to use a silicone compound on his fingertips and his injuries.

  “This is very good for taking elastic impressions of rough or smooth surfaces, such as your fingernails and even your fingerprint pads,” she said. “There are no harmful side effects, and your skin should have no reaction to it. The scratches and nail marks are scabbed over and this shouldn’t hurt them, but if at any point you want me to stop, just tell me. I’m confirming I have your consent to do this.”