Marino looked up at the fifty-two-story glass-and-metal building, fixing on the penthouse facing the park. The grand entrance had TRUMP in huge gold letters. But then, so did everything expensive around here.
“If Oscar doesn’t ever see it on TV”—Marino seemed to be talking to himself now, Benton had gotten so quiet—“then I don’t want to think about why that might be. Unless he’s done surgery on himself, his every move is tracked by GPS—you know whose GPS, right? So you did a good thing. The only thing you could do.”
He continued until he realized the call had been lost. Marino had no idea he’d been talking to no one.
The gun barrel jammed against the base of Scarpetta’s skull didn’t evoke the fear she would have imagined. She really couldn’t comprehend it.
There seemed to be no synapse between her actions and consequence, cause and effect, if and then, now and later. All she was vividly aware of was a dismay of biblical proportions that it was her fault Morales was inside Jaime Berger’s penthouse, and that at the end of Scarpetta’s life she had managed to commit the only sin that was unforgivable. She was to blame for tragedy and pain. Her weakness and naïveté had done unto others what she had always warred against.
Everything was her fault, after all. Her family’s poverty and the loss of her father. Her mother’s unhappiness, her sister Dorothy’s borderline personality and extreme dysfunction, and every harm that had ever befallen Lucy.
“He wasn’t there when I rang the bell.” She said it again, and Morales laughed at her. “I wouldn’t have let him in.”
Berger’s eyes were unblinking and fastened to Morales as she stood motionless at the foot of her spiral staircase, her cell phone in hand. Above her was a gallery displaying magnificent works of art in her magnificent penthouse, the New York skyline all around them beyond a curved wall of spotless glass. Ahead was the sunken living room with furniture in fine woods and earth-tone upholsteries where all of them had sat not that long ago, allies, friends, together in a campaign against the enemy, who now was revealed and was here again.
Mike Morales.
Scarpetta felt the barrel of the revolver leave her skull. She didn’t turn around. She kept her eyes on Berger, hoping she understood that when she’d gotten off the elevator and rung the bell and announced herself, she was alone. Then suddenly, a force out of hell grabbed her arm and escorted her through Berger’s door. The only reason she might have been the slightest bit forewarned was a comment one of the concierges had made when Scarpetta had entered the building a few minutes ago.
The lovely young woman in her lovely suit had smiled at her and said, “The others are waiting for you, Dr. Scarpetta.”
What others?
Scarpetta should have asked. Dear God, why hadn’t she? All Morales had to do was show his badge, but even that hadn’t been necessary, most likely. He’d been here hours earlier. He was charming, persuasive, didn’t like to be told no.
Morales’s eyes looked around, his pupils dilated, and his latex-gloved hands dropped a small gym bag to the floor. He unzipped it. Inside were the retracted legs of a tripod and colorless nylon ties, and other items Scarpetta couldn’t discern, but it was the ties that caused her heart to pump harder. She knew what those ties could do, and she was afraid of them.
“Just let Jaime go and do what you want to me,” she said.
“Oh, shut up.”
As if he found her tedious.
In one snap, he lashed Berger’s wrists behind her first, and led her to the couch and pushed her down hard, making her sit.
“Behave,” he said to Scarpetta, and he lashed her wrists next, very tightly.
Instantly, her fingers contracted and the pain was terrific, as if something metal was clamped around her wrists, compressing blood vessels and biting into bone. He pushed her down on the couch, next to Berger, as a cell phone started ringing upstairs.
His eyes slowly moved from the cell phone he had removed from Berger’s grip to the gallery upstairs and the rooms beyond it.
The cell phone rang, then stopped, and water was running somewhere. And it stopped. And Scarpetta thought about Lucy the same time Morales did.
“You can stop this now, Mike. You don’t need to do this . . .” Berger started to say.
Scarpetta was on her feet and Morales shoved her hard, and she fell back onto the couch.
He bounded up the spiral stairs, his feet scarcely seeming to touch them.
Lucy toweled off her very short hair and breathed in a lungful of steam inside one of the nicest showers she’d been in for a while.
Greg’s. Glass-enclosed, with rain-forest showerheads, body jets, steam bath, surround-sound music, a heated seat if you wanted to just sit and listen to music. Berger had Annie Lennox in the CD player. Maybe it was a coincidence, since Lucy had played it last night in the loft. Greg and his whiskeys, and his fine things, and his barrister, and Lucy was baffled by a man who truly knew how to live but had chosen someone he could never do it with, all because of a slight genetic murmur.
Sort of like being one digit off in math. By the time you finished the long, complicated equation, you were light years from the answer, and you failed. Berger was the right person but the wrong answer. Lucy felt a little sorry for him but not for herself. For herself she felt a happiness that was indescribable, unlike anything she’d ever known before, and it seemed all she did was relive and relive.
It was like listening to the same intoxicating piece of music again and again, as she’d just done in the rain shower, every touch, every look, every accidental intention that resulted in a grazing of bodies that was so erotic and at the same time so moving because it really meant something. It wasn’t cheap. It wasn’t guilt-ridden or headed into shame. It felt perfectly right, and she simply didn’t believe it could be happening to her.
This was a dream she’d never known enough to have, because no part of her had ever feared or wanted it any more than she had nightmares about extraterrestrials or fantastic dreams about flying machines and race cars. Those didn’t exist or were real and within reach. Jaime Berger wasn’t an impossibility or a possibility that had ever crossed Lucy’s mind, although certainly during early encounters she’d felt a giddiness, a nervousness, on the rare occasions she’d been around her, as if she were being offered an opportunity to toy with a very large, undomesticated cat, like a cheetah or a tiger, that she would never be in the same room with, much less pet.
Lucy stood up inside the steam-filled shower, unable to see through the clouded glass, contemplating how best to have an open conversation with her aunt, to explain, to just talk.
She pushed open the door at the same time a shape moved in front of it, and steam dissolved around Mike Morales’s face. He smiled at her, a pistol pointed inches from her head.
“Die, bitch,” he said.
The door yielded to one blow of the battering ram and slammed against the wall.
Bacardi and a uniformed officer whose name she thought was Ben walked into the soft music of Coldplay as they entered apartment 2D and were confronted by Dr. Kay Scarpetta.
“What the hell?” Bacardi said.
Scarpetta was all over the walls. Posters, some of them from ceiling to floor, not poses but newsy photos of her on the set of CNN or walking through Ground Zero or in the morgue, preoccupied and unaware that someone was taking what Bacardi called a “thinking action shot.” Didn’t mean the person was doing something powerful, but he or she was doing it mentally.