Now it is nine P.M. I sit in Anna's kitchen, picking at a thick slice of cheddar cheese and sipping a glass of red wine, going easy, unwilling to cloud my thinking and simply finding it almost impossible to swallow solid food. I have lost weight. I don't know how much. I have no appetite and have developed a wretched routine of going outside periodically to smoke. Every half hour or so, I try to contact Marino with no success. And I keep thinking about the Tlip file. It has hardly been out of my mind since I looked at it on Christmas Day. The telephone rings at close to midnight and I assume it is Marino finally returning my page. "Scarpetta," I answer.
"It's Jaime," Berger's distinctive, confident voice sounds over the line.
I pause in surprise. But then I remember: Berger seems to have no hesitation in talking to people she intends to send to jail, doesn't matter the hour.
"I've been on the phone with Marino," she starts off. "So I realize you know my situation. Or I guess I should say, our situation. And actually you ought to feel all right about it, Kay. I'm not going to coach you, but let me say this. Just talk to the jury the same way you do to me. And try not to worry."
"I think I'm beyond worrying," I reply.
"Mainly I'm calling to pass on some information. We got DNA on the stamps. The stamps from the letters in the Tlip file," she informs me as if she is in my mind again. So now the Richmond labs are dealing directly with her, it occurs to me. "It appears Diane Bray was all over the map, Kay. At least she licked those stamps, and I will assume she wrote the letters and was smart enough not to leave her prints on them. The prints that were left on several of the letters are Benton's, probably from when he opened them before he realized what they were. I assume he knew they were his prints. Don't know why he didn't make a note of it. I'm just wondering if Benton ever mentioned Bray to you. Any reason to think they knew each other?"
"I don't remember him mentioning her," I reply. My thoughts are locked. I can't believe what Berger has just said.
"Well, he certainly could have known her," Berger goes on. "She was in D.C. He was a few miles down the road in Quan-tico. I don't know. But it baffles me that she would send this stuff to him, and I'm wondering if she wanted it posted in New York so he would go down the path of believing the crank mail was from Carrie Grethen."
"And we know he did go down that path," I remind her.
"Then we also have to wonder if Bray possibly_just possibly_had anything to do with his murder," Berger adds the final touch.
It flashes in my mind that she is testing me again. What is she hoping? That I will blurt out something incriminating. Good. Bray got what was coming to her or She got what she deserved. At the same time, I don't know. Maybe it is my paranoia speaking and not reality. Maybe Berger is simply saying what is on her mind, nothing more.
"I don't guess she ever mentioned Benton to you," Berger is saying.
"Not that I recall," I reply. "I don't remember Bray ever saying a word about Benton."
"What I just can't get," Berger goes on, "is this Chandonne thing. If we consider that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne knew Bray_saying they were in business together_then why would he kill her? And in the manner he killed her? That strikes me as a non-fit. It doesn't profile right. What do you think?"
"Maybe you should Mirandize me before you ask me what I think about Bray's murderer," is what I say. "Or maybe you should save your questions for the hearing."
"You haven't been arrested," she replies, and I can't believe it. She has a smile in her tone. I have amused her. "You don't need to be Mirandized." She gets serious. "I'm not toying with you, Kay. I'm asking for your help. You should be goddamn glad it will be me in that room interviewing witnesses and not Righter."
"I'm just sorry anyone will be in that room. No one should be. Not on my account," I tell her.
"Well, there are two key pieces that we've got to figure out." She is impervious and has more to tell me. "The seminal fluid in Susan Pless's case isn't Chandonne's. And now we have this newest information about Diane Bray. It's just instinct. But I don't think Chandonne knew Diane Bray. Not personally. Not at all. I think all of his victims are people he had experienced only from a distance. He watched and stalked and fantasized. And that, by the way, was Benton's opinion, too, when he profiled Susan's case."
"Was it his opinion that the person who murdered her also left the seminal fluid?" I ask.
"He never thought more than one person was involved," Berger concedes. "Until your cases in Richmond, we were still looking for that well-dressed, good-looking guy who ate with her in Lumi. We sure weren't looking for some self-proclaimed werewolf with a genetic disorder, not back then we weren't."
I don't. I fade in and out, now and then picking up the alarm clock to check the time. Hours advance imperceptibly and weightily, like glaciers. I dream I am in my house and have a puppy, an adorable female yellow Labrador retriever with long, heavy ears and huge feet and the sweetest face imaginable. She reminds me of Gund stuffed animals in FAO Schwarz, that wonderful toy store in New York where I used to pick up surprises for Lucy when she was a child. In my dream, this wounded fiction I spin in my semi-conscious state, I am playing with the puppy, tickling her, and she is licking me, her tail wagging furiously. Then somehow I am walking into my house again, and it is dark and chilled and I sense nobody home, no life, absolute silence. I call out to the puppy_ I can't remember her name_and frantically search every room for her. I wake up in Anna's guest room, crying, sobbing, just bawling.
Chapter 33
MORNING COMES AND HAZE DRIFTS LIKE SMOKE AS we fly low over trees. Lucy and I are alone in her new machine because Jack woke up with aches and chills. He stayed home, and I have a suspicion that his illness is self-induced. I think he is hung over, and I fear that the unbearable stress I have brought upon the office has encouraged bad habits in him. He was perfectly satisfied with his life. Now everything has changed.
The Bell 407 is black with bright stripes. It smells like a new car and moves with the smooth strength of heavy silk as we fly east, eight hundred feet above the ground. I am preoccupied with the sectional map in my lap, trying to match depictions of power lines, roads and railroad tracks with those we pass over. It isn't that we don't know exactly where we are, because Lucy's helicopter has enough navigational equipment to pilot the Concorde. But whenever I feel the way I do right now, I tend to obsess over a task, any task.
"Two antennas about one o'clock." I show her on the map. "Five hundred and thirty feet above sea level. Shouldn't be a factor, but don't see them yet."
"I'm looking," she says.
The antennas will be well below horizon, meaning they aren't a danger even if we get close. But I have a special pho- bia of obstructions, and there are more of them going up all the time in this world of constant communication. Richmond air traffic control comes over the air, telling us radar service is terminated and we can squawk VFR. I change the frequency to twelve hundred on the transponder as I barely make out the antennas several miles ahead. They don't have high-intensity strobes and are nothing more than ghostly, straight pencil lines in thick, gray haze. I point them out.
"Got 'em," Lucy replies. "Hate those things." She pressures the cyclic right, curving well to the north of them, wanting nothing personal with antenna guy wires, for the heavy steel cables are the snipers. They will get you first.
"The governor going to be pissed at you if he finds out you're doing this?" Lucy's question sounds inside my headset.
"He told me to take a vacation from the office," I reply. "I'm out of the office."