“The police found no evidence she was killed in any other area of the house. Nothing to suggest her body was moved into the bathroom after the fact. What food?”

“What we were going to have last night. When you say nothing suggests her body was moved, what does that mean? What might have suggested it?”

“I only know that Morales says nothing suggested it.”

“And likely nothing would in this case,” Scarpetta said. “If she’d been dead less than two hours, her body wasn’t going to tell anybody much of anything. Livor, rigor usually take at least six hours to be fully developed. Was she warm?”

“He said when he got there, he felt for a pulse. She was warm.”

“Then if Oscar didn’t kill her, whoever did must have left her apartment shortly before he got there and found her dead. Coincidence, amazing good luck for the killer that he wasn’t interrupted. He was just minutes away from Oscar walking in on him. Assuming the killer and Oscar aren’t one and the same.”

“If they aren’t,” Benton said, “you have to wonder why someone else would assume Terri would be home alone on New Year’s Eve. Unless it was random. Her lights were on in an otherwise dark building, and this time of year, most people who are home have their lights on all day, or at least by four, when the sun is going down. Question is whether she was a victim of opportunity.”

“What about an alibi? Oscar have one that you know of?”

“He have one that you know of?”

She watched him squeeze as much blood from his finger as he could.

“I’m trying to remember the last time you had a tetanus shot,” she said.

14

Kay Scarpetta 16 - Scarpetta

14

It hadn’t been difficult searching the NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center and finding the two cases Morales had mentioned. What took a little longer was getting a response from the investigators who had worked them.

Marino was unbuttoning his coat inside his apartment when his cell phone rang at six-twenty. The woman identified herself as Bacardi, like the rum he used to drink mixed with Dr Pepper. He called her back on his landline and gave her a synopsis of the Terri Bridges case, asking if she’d ever heard of Oscar Bane, or if someone fitting his description had been spotted in the area when the homicide in Baltimore had occurred in the summer of 2003.

“Before we go galloping off together on some great big man-hunt,” Bacardi said, “what makes you think the cases are connected?”

“First, let’s start with it wasn’t my idea. This other detective’s name is Mike Morales, and he got hits on our computer system. You know him?”

“Not off the top of my head. So you’re not taking credit. Must be shit, what you got.”