“Does anybody know if these filing cabinets were empty when the police got here?” Scarpetta asked.

Marino flipped through his list and said, “Mail and personal papers, is what it says they took. A file box of stuff like that was removed from the closet.”

“Meaning nothing was taken from actual filing cabinets,” Scarpetta supposed. “That’s rather interesting. There are two of them in here with nothing in them, not even an empty folder. As if they’ve never been used.”

Marino came toward her and asked, “What about dust?”

“You can look. But Terri Bridges and dust weren’t compatible. There’s no dust, not a speck.”

Marino entered the guest room office and opened the filing cabinets, and Scarpetta noted the indentations his booted feet left in the deep-pile dark blue wall-to- wall carpet. She realized there were no other indentations at all, except those left by her when she’d walked in, and that was odd. The police might be fastidious about not tracking dirt and evidence in and out of a scene, but they weren’t about to bother brushing the carpet when they were done.

“It’s as if no one was in here last night,” she said.

Marino closed file drawers.

He said, “Doesn’t look to me like anything was in there, unless someone wiped down the bottom of the drawers. No dust outline of any hanging files that might have been there. But the cops was in here.”

He finally met her eyes, and his were tentative.

“You can see on the list the file box was taken out of the closet in here.” He frowned, looking at the carpet, apparently noticing the same thing she had. “Well, that’s fucking weird. I was in here this morning. That closet there”—he pointed—“is where her suitcases were, too.”

He opened the closet door, where draperies in dry-cleaning bags hung from the rod and more luggage was neatly upright on the floor. Everywhere he stepped, he flattened the pile of the carpet.

“But it’s like nobody walked in here or else came in after the fact and swept the carpet,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Scarpetta said. “But what I’m hearing you say is nobody has walked through this apartment since last night except you. When you came in earlier today.”

“Well, maybe I lost weight, but I don’t float off the ground,” Marino said. “So where the hell are my footprints?”

On the floor near the desk, a magnetic power connecter was plugged into the wall, and Scarpetta found this curious, too.

“She packed her laptops for the trip home to Arizona and left a power connecter behind?” she said.

“Somebody’s been in here,” Marino said. “Probably that fucking Morales.”

24

Kay Scarpetta 16 - Scarpetta

24

Lucy was alone in her loft, her old bulldog asleep by her chair.

She read more e-mails from Terri and Oscar as she talked to Scarpetta over the phone: