“She’s always let him be what he is. She would have continued to. She loves him. She probably couldn’t be with anybody else, in truth, because there are three things she can’t abide and won’t tolerate. Being controlled, betrayed, or bored. Any one of them, and she’d rather be alone.”

“Sounds like a few other suspects I know,” Berger said.

“Probably true,” Lucy said.

“Well,” Berger said, returning her attention to what was on the computer screen. “Unfortunately, what’s on these laptops is evidence, and people involved in the case will read it. And yes, it could become public.”

“It would destroy her.”

“It won’t destroy her,” Berger said. “But we’ve got to find out where this information came from. I don’t think it was fabricated from whole cloth. Terri, or whoever wrote this, knows too much. Benton and Kay’s first meeting in Richmond twenty years ago, for example.”

“They didn’t start their affair then.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because I was staying in her house that summer,” Lucy said. “Benton never came over, not once. And when she wasn’t at the office or at a scene, she was with me. I was a screwed-up pudgy little brat, mad as hell and desperate for her attention. In other words, just looking to get into trouble, and not in a position to really understand that the kind of trouble she dealt with caused people to end up raped and murdered. She didn’t run around and leave me alone, not for a minute, not with a serial killer terrorizing the city. I never saw a Seven-Eleven coffee cup, just so you know.”

“It means nothing that you didn’t see one,” Berger said. “Why would she show it to you, much less explain why she’d carried it home from her office conference room?”

“She wouldn’t have,” Lucy said. “But I’m sort of sorry I didn’t see one. She was really all alone back then.”

20

Kay Scarpetta 16 - Scarpetta

20

Scarpetta turned Terri Bridges’s body on its side to look at it, front and back.

Other than the marks on the neck and a small cut on one wrist, the only injuries Scarpetta saw began mid-thigh, anteriorly, or on the front. These were long, narrow bruises with multiple linear abrasions that would have bled, most of them horizontal, as if she had been struck with something like a board that had a flat surface with an edge.

Her knees were badly bruised and abraded, as were the tops of her feet, and under the magnification of the hand lens, Scarpetta discovered tiny blondish splinters as fine as hair embedded in each. The vivid redness and lack of swelling of the wounds indicated all of them had been inflicted close to the time of death. That could have been minutes. It could have been an hour.