Postmortem Read online

  Benton’s input had been unusually toothless, maybe even patronizing, which made more sense to her now. He’d said she was looking for stability, and often people move backward instead of forward when they are overwhelmed by change. Feeling the desire to hire someone she’d known since the early days of her career was understandable, Benton had said. But the danger in looking back was that we saw only what we wanted to see, he’d added. We saw what made us feel safe.

  What Benton had chosen to avoid is why she didn’t feel safe to begin with. He hadn’t wanted to get within range of how she really felt about her domestic life with him, which was as chaotic and dissonant as it had ever been. Since their relationship began with an adulterous affair more than fifteen years ago, they’d never lived in the same place, didn’t know the meaning of day-to-day togetherness, until last summer. Theirs had been a very simple ceremony in the garden behind her carriage house in Charleston, South Carolina, where she’d just set up a private practice that she then was forced to close.

  Afterward, they’d moved to Belmont, Massachusetts, to be near his psychiatric hospital, McLean, and her new headquarters in Watertown, where she’d accepted the position of chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth’s Northeastern District. Because of their proximity to New York, she thought it a fine idea for them to accept John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s invitation to serve as visiting lecturers there, which included offering pro bono consultation for the NYPD, the New York Medical Examiner’s office, and forensic psychiatric units such as the one at Bellevue.

  “. . . I know it’s not the sort of thing you’d look at or maybe even be a big deal to you, but at the risk of pissing you off, I’m going to point it out.” Bryce’s voice penetrated her preoccupations.

  She said, “What big deal?”

  “Well, hello? Don’t mind me. I was just talking to myself.”

  “I’m sorry. Rewind the tape.”

  “I didn’t say anything after staff meeting because I didn’t want to distract you from all the shit going on this morning. Thought I’d wait until you were done and we could have a little heart-to-heart behind your closed door. And since nobody’s said anything to me, I don’t think they saw it. Which is good, right? As if Jack isn’t pissy enough this morning. Of course, he’s always pissy, which is why he has eczema and alopecia. And by the way, did you see the crusty lesion behind his right ear? Home for the holidays. Does wonders for the nerves.”

  “How much coffee have you had today?”

  “Why is it always me? Kill the messenger. You zone out until what I’m trying to convey reaches critical mass, and then kaboom, and I’m the bad guy, and bye-bye messenger. If you’re going to be in New York more than a night, please let me know a-sap so I can get coverage. Should I set up some sessions with that trainer you like so much? What’s his name?”

  Bryce thought, touching a finger to his lips.

  “Kit,” he answered himself. “Maybe one of these days when you need me as your boy Friday in New York, he can have a go at me. Love handles.”

  He pinched his waist.

  “Although I hear liposuction’s the only thing that works once you turn thirty,” he said. “Truth serum time?”

  He glanced over at her, his hands gesturing as if they were something alive and not part of him.

  “I did look him up on the Internet,” he confessed. “I’m surprised Benton lets him anywhere near you. Reminds me of, of what’s-his-name on Queer as Folk? The football star? Drove a Hummer and quite the homophobe until he hooked up with Emmett, who everyone says looks just like me, or the other way around, since he’s the one who’s famous. Well, you probably don’t watch it.”

  Scarpetta said, “Kill the messenger because of what? And please keep at least one hand on the wheel since we’re driving in a blizzard. How many shots did you get in your Starbucks this morning? I saw two Venti cups on your desk. Hopefully not both of them from this morning. Remember our talk about caffeine? That it’s a drug, and therefore addictive?”

  “You’re the whole damn thing,” Bryce went on. “Which I’ve never seen before. It’s really weird. Usually it’s not just one famous person, you know? Because whoever the columnist is, he roams around the city like some undercover asshole, and shits on a lot of celebs at once. The other week, it was Bloomberg, and, oh, what’s her name? That model always getting arrested for throwing things at people? Well, this time she was what got thrown—out of Elaine’s for saying something lewd to Charlie Rose. No, wait a minute. Barbara Walters? No. I’m crossing over into something I saw on The View. Maybe what’s-her-name the model went after that singer from American Idol. No, he was on Ellen, not in Elaine’s. And not Clay Aiken or Kelly Clarkson. Who’s the other one? TiVo’s simply killing me. It’s like the remote surfs through channels when you’re not touching anything. You ever have that happen?”

  Snow was like a swarm of white gnats hitting the windshield, the wipers hypnotically useless. Traffic was slow but steady, Logan just a few minutes out.

  “Bryce?” Scarpetta said in the tone she used when she was warning him to shut up and answer her question. “What big deal?”

  “That disgusting online gossip column. Gotham Gotcha.”

  She’d seen ads for it on New York City buses and taxicab tops, the anonymous columnist notoriously vicious. The guessing game of who was behind it ranged from a nobody to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was having great fun making mean-spirited mischief and money.

  “Nas-ty,” Bryce said. “Now, I know it’s supposed to be nasty, but this is nasty below the belt. Not that I read such tripe. But for obvious reasons, I have you as a Google alert. There’s a photograph, which is the worst part. It’s not flattering.”

  2

  Benton leaned back in his desk chair, looking out at his view of ugly red brick in the flat wintry light.

  “Sounds like you got a cold,” he said into the phone.

  “I’m slightly under the weather today. Which is why I didn’t get back to you sooner. Don’t ask me what we did last night to deserve it. Gerald won’t get out of bed. And I don’t mean it in a good way,” Dr. Thomas said.

  She was a colleague at McLean. She was also Benton’s psychiatrist. There was nothing unusual about it. As Dr. Thomas, who was born in the coal-mining hinterlands of western Virginia, liked to say, “Hospitals are more incestuous than hillbillies.” Practitioners treated one another and their families and friends. They prescribed drugs for one another and their families and friends. They fucked one another, but hopefully not their families and friends. Occasionally, they got married. Dr. Thomas had married a McLean radiologist who scanned Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy, in the neuroimaging lab where Benton had his office. Dr. Thomas knew Benton’s business, pretty much all of it. She was the first person he’d thought of some months back when he’d realized he had to talk to someone.

  “Did you open the link I e-mailed to you?” Benton asked her.

  “Yes, and the real question is who are you more worried about? I think the answer might be you. What do you think?”

  “I think that would make me incredibly selfish,” Benton said.

  “It would be normal to feel cuckolded, humiliated,” she said.

  “I forgot you were a Shakespearean actor in an earlier life,” he said. “Can’t remember the last time I heard someone refer to anyone as cuckolded, and it doesn’t apply. Kay didn’t wander out of the nest and into the arms of another man. She was grabbed. Were I to feel cuckolded, it should have been when it happened. But I didn’t. I was too worried about her. Don’t say ‘the lady doth protest too much.’ ”

  “What I’ll say is when it happened, there wasn’t an audience,” Dr. Thomas said. “Perhaps it makes it more real when everybody knows? Did you tell her what’s on the Internet? Or had she already seen it?”

  “I didn’t tell her, and I’m sure she hasn’t seen it. She would have called to warn me. Funny how she’s like that.”

  “Yes. Kay and her fragile he
roes with their feet of clay. Why didn’t you tell her?”

  “Timing,” Benton said.

  “Yours or hers?”

  “She was in the morgue,” he said. “I wanted to wait and do it in person.”

  “Let’s retrace our steps, Benton. You talked to her at the crack of dawn, let me guess. Isn’t that what you always do when you’re away from each other?”

  “We talked early this morning.”

  “So when you talked to her early this morning, you already knew what was on the Internet, because Lucy called you when?” Dr. Thomas said. “At one a.m. to tell you, since your hypomanic niece by marriage has audible alarms programmed into her computer to wake her up like a fireman if one of her search engines finds something important in cyberspace?”

  Dr. Thomas wasn’t joking. Lucy did have alarms that signaled her when one of her search engines found something she needed to know about.

  He said, “Actually, she called me at midnight. When the damn thing was posted.”

  “But she didn’t call Kay.”

  “To her credit, she didn’t, and she let it go when I said I would handle it.”

  “Which you didn’t do,” Dr. Thomas said. “So we’re back to that. You talked to Kay early this morning, by which time you’d known for many hours what’s on the Internet? Yet you said nothing. You’ve still said nothing. I don’t believe it’s about telling her in person. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance she might find out from someone other than you—if she hasn’t already.”

  Benton took a deep, quiet breath. He pressed his lips together and wondered when it was, exactly, that he’d begun to lose faith in himself and his ability to read his environment and react accordingly. For as far back as he could remember, he had possessed the uncanny ability to size up people at a glance or a quick listen. Scarpetta called it his party trick. He’d meet someone or overhear a snippet of a conversation, and that was it. Rarely was he wrong.

  But he’d completely missed the danger at the door this time, and still didn’t fully comprehend how he could have been so devastatingly obtuse. He’d watched Pete Marino’s anger and frustration build over the years. He knew damn well it was a matter of time before Marino’s self-loathing and rage reached flashover. But Benton didn’t fear it. He didn’t give Marino enough credit to be feared like that. He wasn’t sure he’d ever imagined Marino having a dick prior to its becoming a weapon.

  It made no sense, in retrospect. For virtually everybody else, it was impossible to get past Marino’s rough-hewn machismo and volatility, and that particular recipe was Benton’s bread and butter. Sexual violence, no matter its catalyst, was what kept forensic psychologists in business.

  “I’m having homicidal thoughts about him,” Benton said to Dr. Thomas. “Of course, I wouldn’t do it. Just thoughts. I’m having a lot of thoughts. I believed I’d forgiven him and felt proud of myself, really proud of myself, because of the way I handled it. Where would he be without me? All I’ve done for him, and now I want to kill him. Lucy wants to kill him. The reminder this morning didn’t help, and now everyone knows. It’s made it happen all over again.”

  “Or maybe happen for the first time. It feels real to you now.”

  “Oh, it feels real. It always felt real,” Benton said.

  “But it’s different when you read it on the Internet and know a million other people are, too. That’s a different level of real. You’re finally having an emotional response. Before, it was intellectual. Out of self-defense, you processed it in your head. I think this is a breakthrough, Benton. A very unpleasant one. I’m sorry for that.”

  “He doesn’t know Lucy’s in New York, and if she sees him—” Benton intercepted his thought. “Well, not true. She wouldn’t really think about killing him, because she’s been through that. She’s long past that. She wouldn’t kill him, just so you know.”

  Benton watched the gray sky subtly change the redness of the old bricks beyond his window, and when he shifted in his chair and rubbed his chin, he caught his own male scent and felt stubble that Scarpetta always said looked exactly like sand. He’d been up all night, had never left the hospital. He needed a shower. He needed a shave. He needed food and sleep.

  “Sometimes I catch myself by surprise,” he said. “When I say things like that about Lucy? It’s literally a consideration and a reminder of what a warped life I live. The only person who never wanted to kill him is Kay. She still thinks she’s somehow to blame, and it makes me angry. Just incredibly angry. I avoid the subject completely with her, and that’s probably why I didn’t say anything. The whole goddamn world is reading about it on the goddamn Internet. I’m tired. I was up all night with someone I can’t tell you about who is going to be a major problem.”

  He stopped looking out the window. He didn’t look at anything.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Dr. Thomas said. “I’ve wondered when you’d cut the crap about what a saint you are. You’re angry as hell, and you’re no saint. There are no saints, by the way.”

  “Angry as hell. Yes, I’m angry as hell.”

  “Angry at her.”

  “Yes, I really am,” Benton said, and admitting it frightened him. “I know it’s not fair. Good God, she’s the one who was hurt. Of course she didn’t ask for it. She’d worked with him for half her life, so why wouldn’t she let him into her house when he was drunk and half out of his mind? That’s what friends do. Even knowing what he felt about her doesn’t make it her fault.”

  “He’s wanted her sexually since they first met,” Dr. Thomas said. “Rather much the way you felt. He fell in love with her. As did you. I wonder who fell in love with her first? Both of you met her around the same time, didn’t you? Nineteen-ninety.”

  “His wanting her. Well, that had been going on for a long time, true. His feeling that way and her stepping around it and trying so hard not to hurt his feelings. I can sit here and analyze it all I want, but honestly?”

  Benton was looking out his window again, talking to the bricks.

  “There isn’t anything different she could have done,” he said. “What he did to her absolutely wasn’t her fault. In many ways, it wasn’t his fault. He would never do that sober. Not even close.”

  “You certainly sound convinced,” Dr. Thomas said.

  Benton turned away from the window and stared at what was on his computer screen. Then he looked out his window again as if the steely cold sky was a message for him, a metaphor. He removed a paper clip from a journal article he was revising and stapled the pages together, suddenly furious. The American Psychological Society probably wasn’t going to accept yet another damn research article on emotional responses to members of social outgroups. Someone from Princeton just published basically the same damn thing Benton was about to submit. He straightened the paper clip. The challenge was to straighten it without a trace of a kink. In the end, they always snapped.

  “Of all people, to be so irrational,” he said. “So out of touch. And I have been. From day one. Irrational about everything, and now I’m about to pay for it.”

  “You’re about to pay for it because other people know what your friend Pete Marino did to her?”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “I thought he was. I thought you thought he was,” Dr. Thomas said.

  “We never socialized. We have nothing in common. Bowling, fishing, motorcycles, watching football, and drinking beer. Well, not beer. Not now. That’s Marino. That’s not me. Now that I think about it, I don’t recall ever even going out to dinner with him, just the two of us. Not in twenty years. We have nothing in common. We’ll never have anything in common.”

  “He’s not from an elitist New England family? He didn’t go to graduate school, was never an FBI profiler? He’s not on the faculty of Harvard Medical School? Is that what you mean?”

  “I’m not trying to be a snob,” Benton said.

  “Seems as if the two of you have Kay in common.”

  “Not that way. It neve
r went that far,” Benton said.

  “How far did it need to go?”

  “She told me it never went that far. He did other things. When she finally got undressed in front of me, I could see what he did. She made excuses for a day or two. Lied. I knew damn well she hadn’t shut the hatchback on her wrists.”

  Benton remembered bruises as dark as thunderclouds and shaped exactly the way they would be had someone pinned her hands behind her and held her against the wall. She’d offered no explanation at all when Benton finally saw her breasts. No one had ever done anything like that to her before, and he had never seen anything like that before except in cases he worked. When he’d sat on the bed looking at her, he’d felt as if a monstrous cretin had mangled the wings of a dove or mauled a child’s tender flesh. He’d imagined Marino trying to eat her.

  “Have you ever felt competitive with him?” Dr. Thomas’s voice was distant as Benton envisioned stigmatas he didn’t want to remember.

  He heard himself say, “What’s bad, I guess, is I never felt much of anything about him.”

  “He’s spent a lot more time with Kay than you have,” Dr. Thomas said. “That might make some people feel competitive. Feel threatened.”

  “Kay’s never been attracted to him. If he were the last person on the planet, she wouldn’t be.”

  “I guess we won’t know the answer to that unless there’s just the two of them left on the planet. In which case, you and I still won’t know.”

  “I should have protected her better than I did,” Benton said. “That’s one thing I know how to do. Protect people. Those I love, and myself, or people I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I’m an expert at it or I would have been dead a long time ago. A lot of people would be.”

  “Yes, Mr. Bond, but you weren’t home that night. You were up here.”

  Dr. Thomas may as well have thrown a punch. Benton silently took it, could barely breathe. He worked the paper clip back and forth, bending and unbending, until it broke.