He realizes she is staring at him.
“Who were you on the phone with a little earlier?” he asks. “I heard you talking to someone.”
She’s called her lawyer, he thinks. She’s called Lucy. She’s called someone to say she’s leaving him and means it this time.
“I called Dr. Self,” she says. “Tried her, left her a message.”
He is perplexed and shows it.
“I’m sure you remember her,” she says. “Or maybe you listen to her on the radio,” she adds wryly.
“Please.”
“Millions of people do.”
“Why would you call her?” he asks.
She tells him aboutDavidLuck and his prescription. She tells him that Dr. Self wasn’t the least bit helpful the first time she called.
“No surprise. She’s a crackpot, an egomaniac. She lives up to her name. Self.”
“Actually, she was well within her right. I don’t have jurisdiction. Nobody’s dead, as far as we know. Dr. Self doesn’t have to respond to any medical examiner at this point, and I’m not so sure I’d call her a crackpot.”
“How about a psychiatric whore? Have you listened to her lately?”
“Then you do listen to her.”
“Next time, invite a real psychiatrist to speak at the Academy, not some radio jackass.”
“It wasn’t my idea, and I made it clear I was against it. But the buck stops with Lucy.”
“That’s ridiculous. Lucy can’t stand people like her.”
“I believe it was Joe’s suggestion to invite Dr. Self as a guest lecturer, his first big coup when he started his fellowship. Getting a celebrity lined up for the summer session. That and getting on her show, a repeat guest. In fact, they’ve talked about the Academy on the air, which I’m not happy about.”
“Idiot. They deserve each other.”
“Lucy wasn’t paying attention. Never, of course, attended the lectures. She didn’t care what Joe did. There’s a lot she doesn’t seem to care about anymore. What are we going to do.”
She isn’t talking about Lucy now.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re a psychologist. You should know. You deal with dysfunctions and misery every day.”
“I’m miserable this morning,” he says. “You’re right about that. I suppose if I were your psychologist, I might suggest that you’re venting your pain and anger on me because you can’t vent it on Lucy. You can’t get angry with someone who has a brain tumor.”
Scarpetta opens the screen and places another split log on the fire, and sparks fly and wood pops.
“She’s made me angry most of her life,” she confesses. “There’s never been anyone who tries my patience the way she does.”
“Lucy’s an only child raised by a borderline personality disorder,”Bentonsays. “A hypersexual narcissist. Your sister. Add to the equation, Lucy is unusually gifted. She doesn’t think like other people. She’s gay. And all that equals someone who learned a long time ago to be self-contained.”
“Someone supremely selfish, you mean.”
“Insults to our psyche can make us selfish. She was afraid if you knew about the tumor you’d treat her differently, and that would play right into her secret fear. If you know, then somehow it becomes real.”
She stares out the window behind him as if transfixed by the snow. Already it is at least eight inches deep, and cars parked along the street are beginning to look like snowdrifts, and even the neighborhood children are staying in.
“Thank goodness I went to the store,”Bentoncomments.
“On that subject, let me see what I can throw together for lunch. We should have a nice lunch. We should try to have a good day.”
“You ever had a body that was painted?” he asks.
“Mine or somebody else?”
He smiles a little. “Decidedly not yours. There is nothing dead about your body. This case up here. The red handprints on her body. I’m wondering if it was done while she was alive or after she was killed. Wish there was a way to tell.”
She looks at him for a long moment, the fire moving behind her and sounding like the wind.
“If he did it while she was alive, we’re dealing with a very different sort of predator. How terrifying and humiliating would that be?” he says. “To be restrained…”
“Do we know she was restrained?”
“There are some marks around her wrists and ankles. Reddish areas that the medical examiner lists as possible contusions.”
“Possible?”
“As opposed to postmortem artifact,”Bentonsays. “Especially since the body was exposed to the cold. That’s what she says.”
“She?”
“The chief here.”
“Left over from theBostonMEoffice’s not-so-glorious past,” Scarpetta says. “Too bad. She single-handedly has pretty much ruined the place.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d look over the report. I have it on a disk. I want to know what you think of the bodypainting, of everything. It’s really important for me to know if he did it when she was alive or dead. Too bad we couldn’t scan her brain and replay what happened.”
She treats it like a serious comment. “That’s a nightmare I’m not sure you want. Not even you would want to see that. Assuming it was possible.”
“Basil would like me to see it.”
“Yes, dear Basil,” she says, not at all happy about Basil Jenrette’s intrusion intoBenton’s life.
“Theoretically,” he says, “would you want to see it? Would you want to see the replay if it were possible?”
“Even if there were a way to replay a person’s final moments,” she replies from the hearth, “I’m not sure how reliable it would be. I suspect the brain has the remarkable capacity to process events in a way that ensures the least amount of trauma and pain.”
“Some people disassociate, I suspect,” he says as her cell phone rings.
It’s Marino.
“Call extensiontwo forty-three,” he says. “Now.”
50
Extension 243 is the fingerprints lab. It is also a favorite forum for Academy staff, a place to gather and talk about evidence that requires more than one type of forensic analysis.
Fingerprints are no longer just fingerprints. They can be a source of DNA, not just the DNA of whoever left them but the DNA of the victim the perpetrator touched. They can be a source of drug residues or a material that was on the person’s hands, perhaps ink or paint, that requires analysis by such lofty instruments as the gas chromatograph or the infrared spectrophotometer or the Fourier transform infrared microscope. In the old days, a piece of evidence usually walked onstage alone. Now, with the sophistication and sensitivity of scientific instruments and processes, a solo becomes a string quartet or a symphony. The problem remains what to collect first. Testing for one thing can eradicate another. So scientists get together, usually in Matthew’s lab. They debate and decide what should be done and who goes first.
When Matthew received the latex gloves from Daggie Simister’s scene, he was faced with a plethora of possibilities, none of them foolproof. He could put on cotton examination gloves, and on top of those wear the inside-out latex gloves. By using his own hands to fill out otherwise-limp latex, he makes it easier to lift and photograph latent prints. But in doing so, he runs the risk of ruining any possibility of fuming prints with superglue or looking for them with an alternate light source and luminescent powders or processing them with chemicals such as ninhydrin or diazafluoren. One process can interfere with another, and once the damage is done, there is no going back.