“Do you want to cause Jaime Berger harm?” Scarpetta asked.
“I’d never harm anybody. But she’s harmed herself. It’s her fault. The universe repays in kind. If she loses someone she loves, it will be her fault.”
“I’ll try to impress it upon you again. If you’re charged with a crime, I can be subpoenaed and will have no choice but to disclose anything I’ve observed. Yes. I absolutely can be subpoenaed by Jaime Berger. Do you understand that?”
His different-colored eyes stared at her, his body rigid with anger. Scarpetta was aware of the heavy steel door, wondering if she should open it.
“They won’t find any justifiable cause to pin this on me,” he said. “I didn’t stop them from taking my clothes, my car. I’ve given consent to go inside my apartment because I’ve got nothing to hide, and you can see for yourself the way I’m forced to live. I want you to see it. I insist you see it. I said you have to see it or they can’t go in. There’s no evidence I’ve ever hurt Terri unless they make it up. And maybe they will. But you’ll protect me because you’re my witness. You’ll watch after me no matter where I am, and if anything happens to me, you’ll know it’s part of a plan. And you can’t tell anyone anything I don’t want them to know. Right now, legally, you can’t reveal anything that goes on between us. Not even to your husband. I allowed him to do my psychological eval, and he’ll tell you from my mental-health assessment that I’m not crazy. I trust his expertise. More important, I knew he could get to you.”
“Did you tell him what you’re telling me?”
“I let him do the eval, and that’s all. I said he could check my mind and you could check the rest of me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t cooperate. You can’t tell him what I say. Not even him. If that changes and I get falsely accused and you get subpoenaed? By then you’ll believe in me and fight for me anyway. You should believe in me. It’s not like you’ve never heard of me.”
“Why would you think I’ve heard of you?”
“I see.” His stare was fierce. “You’ve been instructed not to talk. Fine. I don’t like this game. But okay. Fine. All I ask is you listen to me and not betray me or violate your sworn oath.”
Scarpetta should stop now. But she was thinking about Berger. Oscar hadn’t threatened Berger. Not yet. Unless he did, Scarpetta couldn’t reveal a word he said, but that didn’t stop her from worrying about Berger, about anybody close to Berger. She wished he would come right out with it and say in no uncertain terms that he was a danger to Berger or to someone. Then no more confidentiality, and at the very least, he would be arrested for communicating a threat.
“I’m going to take notes, which I’ll keep in a file as a consultation,” Scarpetta said.
“Yes, notes. I want a record of the truth in your hands. In case something happens.”
She slipped a pad of paper and pen out of a pocket of her lab coat.
“In case I die,” he said. “There’s probably no way out. They’ll probably get me. This will probably be my last New Year’s Day. Probably I don’t care.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Whatever I do, wherever I go, they know.”
“What about right now?”
“Maybe. But you know?” He looked at the door. “There’s a lot of steel to get through. I’m not sure they can get through it, but I’m going to be careful what I say and what I think. You need to listen carefully. You need to read my mind while you can. Eventually, they’ll completely control what’s left of my free will, my thoughts. Maybe what they’re doing is practice. They have to practice on someone. We know the CIA’s had covert behavior-modification neuro-electromagnetic programs for half a century, and who do you think they practice on? And what do you think happens if you go to the police? Mysteriously, no report is filed. Same thing that happened when I reported it to Ms. Berger. I was ignored. And now Terri’s dead. I’m not paranoid. I’m not suffering some schizoid, psychotic episode. I don’t have a personality disorder. I’m not delusional. I don’t believe the Air Loom Gang is after me with their infernal machine, although one has to wonder about the politicians and if that’s why we’re at war in the Middle East. Of course, I’m being facetious, although not much would surprise me anymore.”
“You seem very well versed in psychology and psychiatric history.”
“I have a Ph.D. I teach the history of psychiatry at Gotham College.”
She’d never heard of it and asked him where it was.
“It’s nowhere,” he said.
Chapter 5
Her username was Shrew because her husband used to call her that. He didn’t always mean it as an insult. Sometimes it was a term of endearment.
“Don’t be such a goddamn shrew,” he would say, verbatim, after her complaints about his cigars or not picking up after himself. “Let’s have a drink, my darling little shrew” usually meant it was five p.m. and he was in a decent mood and wanted to watch the news.
She’d carry in their drinks and a bowl of cashews, and he’d pat the cushion next to him on the tawny corduroy couch. After a half-hour of the news, which, needless to say, was never good, he would get quiet and not call her a shrew or talk to her, and dinner would be the sounds of eating, after which he would retreat to the bedroom and read. One day he went out on an errand and never came back.
She had no illusions about what he’d have to say were he still here. He wouldn’t approve of her being the anonymous system administrator for the Gotham Gotcha website. He would call what she did disgusting detritus that was intended to ruthlessly exploit and inflict disease upon people, and would say it was insane for her to work a job where she’d never met any of those involved or for that matter didn’t know their names. He would say it was outrageously suspicious that Shrew did not know who the anonymous columnist was.
Most of all, he would be aghast that she had been hired over the phone by an “agent” who wasn’t an American. He said he lived in the UK, but he sounded about as English as Tony Soprano, and had forced Shrew to sign numerous legal documents without her own counsel reviewing them first. When she’d done everything asked of her, she was given a trial run of one month. Without pay. At the end of that period, no one had called to tell her what a marvelous job she’d done or how thrilled the Boss (as Shrew thought of the anonymous columnist) was to have her onboard. She’d never heard a word.
And so she continued, and every two weeks, money was wired into her bank account. No taxes were withheld, and she received no benefits, nor was she reimbursed for any expenses she might incur, such as when she’d needed a new computer some months back and a range extender for the wireless network. She wasn’t given sick leave or vacation days or paid overtime, but as the agent had explained, it was part of the job description to be “on the call twenty-forty-seven.”
In an earlier life, Shrew had held real jobs with real companies, her last one a database marketing manager for a consulting firm. She was no tabula rasa, was all too aware that her current employment demands were unreasonable and she had grounds to sue the company if she knew whom she worked for. But she wouldn’t think of complaining. She was paid reasonably well, and it was an honor to work for an anonymous celebrity whose column was the most talked-about one in New York, if not the entire country.
The holidays were an especially busy time for Shrew. Not for personal reasons, because she really wasn’t allowed to have personal reasons for anything. But website traffic inevitably surged, and the banner on the home page was a tremendous challenge. Shrew was clever, but admittedly had never been an especially gifted graphic artist.