“I not only don’t have to answer that, I won’t. And I can’t.” Berger said it without an edge, almost gently. “Maybe you could be so kind as to ask who wants coffee and what they might want in it?”

Lucy walked out of the kitchen and didn’t ask anyone anything. She unplugged her power supply. She calmly looped the cord around her hand and tucked it into a pocket of her nylon case. Then the MacBook went inside.

“Got to head back to my office,” she said to everyone as Berger returned.

Berger asked about coffee, as if everything was fine.

“We haven’t listened to the nine-one- one tape,” Bacardi suddenly remembered. “I want to hear it, anyway. Don’t know about everyone else.”

“I should hear it,” Marino said.

“I don’t need to hear it,” Lucy said. “Someone can e-mail the audio file to me if they want me to hear it. I’ll be in touch if I have any new information. I’ll see myself out,” she said to Jaime Berger without looking at her.

30

Kay Scarpetta 16 - Scarpetta

30

“Poor doormen,” Scarpetta said. “I think I spooked them more than usual.”

When they arrived at their luxury apartment building, one glimpse of her crime scene case and the doormen always stayed clear. But this early morning, the reaction was stronger than usual because of the news. A serial killer was terrorizing New York’s East Side, and may have killed before, years earlier, in Maryland and Connecticut, and Benton and Scarpetta looked pretty scary themselves.

They stepped onto the elevator and rode up to the thirty-second floor. The minute they were inside the door, they started undressing.

“I wish you wouldn’t go down there,” Benton said.

He yanked off his tie as he took off his jacket, his coat already draped over a chair.

“You’ve gotten swabs, you know what killed her. Why?” he said.

Scarpetta replied, “Maybe just once today people will treat me as if I have a mind of my own or even half the one I used to have.”

She dropped her suit jacket and blouse into the biohazard hamper near the door, a practice so normal for them, it only rarely occurred to her what an odd sight they would be if anybody was watching, perhaps with a telescope. Then she thought of the new helicopter the NYPD had gotten, something Lucy had mentioned. It had a camera that could recognize faces up to two miles away, or something like that.

Scarpetta unzipped her pants and tugged them off, and she grabbed a remote from the Stickley mission oak coffee table in a living room full of Stickleys and Poteet Victory oils on canvas. She closed the electronic blinds. She felt rather much like Oscar, hiding from everyone.