The CD was already in his computer, and he opened an audio file and turned up the volume:

911 OPERATOR: “Nine-one- one, what is your emergency?”

OSCAR (hysterical): “Yes! Police … ! My girlfriend … !”

911 OPERATOR: “What’s the problem, sir?”

OSCAR (almost inaudible): “My girlfriend … when I walked in … !”

911 OPERATOR: “Sir, what’s the problem?”

OSCAR (screaming): “She’s dead! She’s dead! Someone killed her! Someone strangled her!”

911 OPERATOR: “She was strangled?”

OSCAR: “Yes!”

911 OPERATOR: “Do you know if the person who strangled her is still in the house?”

OSCAR (crying, almost inaudible): “No … She’s dead … !”

911 OPERATOR: “We have units en route. Just stay where you are, okay?”

OSCAR (crying, unintelligible): “They …”

911 OPERATOR: “They? Is someone with you?”

OSCAR: “No …” (inaudible)

911 OPERATOR: “Stay on the line. The police are almost there. What happened?”

OSCAR: “I got here and she was on the floor …” (unintelligible)

Benton closed the file and said, “Then he hung up and wouldn’t answer when the operator called him back. If he’d stayed on the line, it would have been easier and quicker for the police to get inside the apartment. Instead of them having to go around back and bang on the window.”

“He sounded genuinely terrified and hysterical,” Scarpetta said.

“So did Lyle Menendez when he called nine-one- one to report his parents had been murdered. And we know how that story ended.”

“Just because the Menendez brothers—” she started to say.

“I know. I know it doesn’t mean Oscar killed Terri Bridges. But we don’t know he didn’t,” Benton said.

“And your explanation for why he said they? As if implying more than one person killed her?” Scarpetta asked.

“His paranoia, obviously,” Benton said. “Which I do think he genuinely feels. But that isn’t necessarily to his advantage in terms of how the police view it. Paranoid people commit murder because of their paranoid delusions.”

“And that’s what you’re really thinking?” Scarpetta said. “That basically this is a domestic homicide?”

She doesn’t believe it, Benton thought. She believes something else. What did Oscar say to her?

He answered, “I can understand why the police think it. But I’d like some real evidence.”

“What else do we know?”

“What he said.”

“At the scene or when he was in the detective’s car, Morales’s car?”

“Oscar wasn’t cooperative with him once they were out of the apartment,” Benton said.

He tossed the bits of paper clip into his wastepaper basket, and they binked against empty metal.

“By that point,” Benton said, “all he wanted was to go to Bellevue. Said he wouldn’t talk unless it was to me. Then he demanded that you come here. And here we are.”

He started on another paper clip. She watched him work on it.

“What did he tell the police while he was still inside the apartment?” she asked.