“Have no idea. I doubt he has much money. Olive complexion, dark hair. Hispanic. Speaks Spanish, which is helpful. Speaks English fluently, which is a requirement in my practice.”

“Is he a U.S. citizen?”

“He should be. But that’s not for me to check on. I suppose the answer is I don’t know.”

“Anything else you can tell me? For example, do you have any idea where the police might find him right now, to ask questions?”

“No idea whatsoever. I know nothing else. I just didn’t like it when he gave me that Chinese puppy,” she said. “I felt there was something mean about the gesture. As if he were jerking me around somehow—of all people? To give me an extremely ugly dog with hair and skin problems? I just remember it being very upsetting, and then I looked bad to my staff because I made him take the pathetic little thing out of there immediately, and he said he didn’t know what he’d do with it, as if I was sentencing the pitiful creature to … Well, it’s as if he wanted to make me look heartless, and I think I actually started almost thinking about firing him after that. Obviously, I should have.”

Benton had placed his hand on Scarpetta’s bare thigh, and when she ended the call, he put his arm around her and directed her attention to what he had been looking at while she was on the phone.

He scrolled through maps, scores of them.

“Track logs,” Benton said. “These thick colored lines, the dark pink ones?” He traced one that ran from Amsterdam to an Upper East Side location on Third Avenue. “An actual track mapped by a GPS.”

“Simulated or real?” Scarpetta asked.

“I think these are real tracks. It appears they’re recordings of routes Oscar took, hundreds of them. Some kind of recording process was on while he was going to various locations. As you can see.”

He scrolled through about a dozen maps.

“Most of them either begin or terminate at the address of his apartment building on Amsterdam. Based on what I’m seeing, these track logs began this past October tenth and ended December third.”

“December third,” Scarpetta said. “The same day the morgue photograph of me appears to have been simultaneously deleted in Scarpetta six-twelve’s and also Terri’s e-mail.”

“And the same day Oscar called Berger’s office and ended up on the phone with Marino,” Benton said.

“What the hell is going on here?” Scarpetta said. “Was he walking around with some kind of bracelet or something that has a GPS chip, and maybe using a PDA that has a GPS, and downloading all of his movements and perhaps emailing it to himself? To make it appear he’s being followed, spied on, all those things he’s said?”