Then he would release the pressure and, when she was revived, start again.
She said nothing the entire time, just made the expected awful guttural gagging sounds as her eyes bulged and her tongue protruded from her mouth and spittle ran down her chin. It took exactly twenty-four and a half minutes for her to finally die, because that’s how long it took for him to ejaculate and finish her off, because he had no further interest.
He flushed the condom down the toilet, and he turned off the camera.
“Let’s start it again,” Berger said. “I want to listen a little more carefully to what’s said when he takes her into the bathroom. I’m getting the impression they’d had sex before. And the other things said suggest maybe why he did this. The premeditation factor. He may have had motive that went beyond his sexually sadistic compulsions. Did she call him Juan? Or was that just a sound she made?”
“I suspect she’d been having sex with him long before she had it with Oscar,” Lucy said. “Based on the familiarity, the comments he’s making. She would have known him from Dr. Stuart’s office—for a couple of years. I don’t care if we don’t yet know for a fact that he’s Juan Amate. I’m telling you they’re the same person. They have to be. I think she might have said Juan. I agree, hard to tell.”
She pressed the play button on the remote. The film began mid-sentence with a shot of the vanity and Terri’s terrified face in the oval mirror. Behind her was a man’s naked body. He moved, adjusting himself and the camera angle, exposing his erect condom-sheathed penis, poking it between her shoulder blades as if it were the barrel of a gun. He was visible only from the waist down.
“Just our usual, baby, with a little extra hot sauce thrown in,” the killer’s voice said.
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice quavering as his gloved hand held up a scalpel in the mirror and twirled it, and its steel blade caught the light.
The sound of fabric slitting as he cut open her robe, her lacy red bra. It was a shelf bra, and her breasts protruded from it, her nipples exposed. He slit off her matching red lacy panties. He turned the camera on the pink robe and pink slippers and the bra as he dropped them into the tub. His gloved hands waved the cut lacy red panties in front of the camera lens.
“Capturing the flag.” His Hispanic voice. “In my pocket so I can enjoy later, right, little girl?”
“Let’s don’t,” she said. “I don’t think I can.”
“Should have thought about that when you told the little man all our secrets.”
“I didn’t tell him. You sent the e-mails. That’s how.”
“Now, that was a really big mess you made. How’s that going to work? He complained to the fucking DA. How’s that going to work, baby? I trusted you. I did you a favor. And you told him.”
“I never told him. He told me. You were sending him the e-mails, and finally he told me. He got freaked out. Why? Why are you doing this?” And it sounded as if she said Juan.
“You gonna ask me why anything?” The scalpel stroking the air, almost touching her cheek, then withdrawing and vanishing.
“No.”
“So, who’s your man? The little one. Or me?”
“You are,” her terrified face said to the mirror, his gloved hands pinching her nipples.
“Now you know that’s not right, or you wouldn’t have told him.” The killer’s voice chiding her.
“I promise I didn’t. He found out because of the e-mails, those maps you sent him. He told me. You scared him.”
“Now, baby.” Pinching her nipples harder. “I don’t want to hear no more of your lies. And now I gotta figure out how to get that fucking thing out of his ass before somebody else does.”
Lucy hit pause, and the recording froze on a blurry image of Terri’s wide-eyed face talking while his hands squeezed her breasts in the mirror.
“Right there,” Lucy said. “The way he says it. Possible he’s hinting he’s going to murder Oscar? He’s going to be the one to retrieve the thing out of his ass?”
“I’m wondering the same thing,” Berger said.
She triple-underlined a key phrase in notes on her legal pad: Terri’s idea—GPS?
She said to Lucy, “I don’t think there’s any doubt about how this started—that Terri asked Morales to follow Oscar, because she was a jealous, controlling person. It wasn’t her nature to trust anyone, and before she’d even considered making any sort of a commitment to him or perhaps telling her family about him, she wanted proof he was honorable.”
“If one can make psychopathology logical.”
“We have to. Jurors expect reasons for things. You can’t just say someone’s evil or felt like it.”
“She may have said something about wanting to know what Oscar was up to, but I doubt an implanted GPS was her idea,” Lucy said. “I don’t think she ever imagined Morales would do her the favor, and then take it a little further by anonymously e-mailing GPS track logs to Oscar to drive him crazy, to torment the living hell out of him. The e-mailing of the tracking logs stopped when Oscar finally said something about it to Terri, and she obviously must have flown all over Morales about it.”
“Right. That’s what Morales is referring to.” Berger indicated the frozen image on the TV screen. “She did the wrong thing and complained to Morales, berated him, perhaps. A guy like this? You insult his narcissism? And then he’s the typical psychopath and blames it on her because she’s the one who wanted Oscar spied on. Suddenly, it’s her fault that Oscar called my office and reported everything.”
“To Marino, on December third,” Lucy said. “And at that point, Oscar destroyed his computer’s hard drive and hid the thumb drive in his library, where my aunt and Benton found it. And Morales stopped e-mailing the logs to him, because Terri knew, and the gig was up.”
“Kay mentioned the thread on the carpet outside Oscar’s apartment door. The roof access and fire escape. I’m wondering if Morales went in there trying to find this log, and while he was at it, planted a jar of Aqualine. I’m wondering if he came in through the window, set off the alarm, then left through the roof access so the doorman didn’t see him. He had a key and the alarm code, the password. After killing Terri, he got some unexpected surprises. Oscar demanded to go to Bellevue. He demanded to see Benton and Kay. Now the stakes have been raised considerably. Morales has some worthy adversaries to deal with. Including you. He wants that damn tracking log so it’s not traced back to him by someone like you. And he wanted Oscar to take the fall for at least four homicides.”
“A classic case of someone who’s decompensating,” Lucy said. “Morales didn’t need to kill Eva Peebles, not really. For that matter, he didn’t need to kill Terri. He used to be smart and stick with strangers. What I still can’t figure out is why would Oscar let anybody do that?”
“You mean the implant.”
“We just listened to him say it. He stuck something in Oscar’s ass and has to get it back. What else could that mean? I’m thinking there’s only one thing. But you don’t just walk up to someone and say, hey, can I implant a GPS microchip under your skin?”