“You saw his apartment, Kay. Oscar believes this stuff. But if someone else has been sending these track logs to him, can you imagine?”

“No.”

Benton scrolled through more of them. Locations for grocery stores, several gyms, office-supply stores, or as Benton put it, just locations where he might have walked but didn’t actually go inside the restaurant, bar, or other business.

“And as you can see,” Benton said, rubbing her back, “as time goes on, his destinations become more erratic and variable. He’s changing his locations daily. None of the tracks are the same. You can actually see his fear, the way he’s zigzagging, literally all over the map. Or his simulated fear. If, once again, he’s staged all this. But his fear seems real. His paranoia isn’t faked, I really don’t think so.”

“You can imagine how this will look to a jury,” Scarpetta said, getting up. “It will look like the mad cyber professor manufactured this elaborate plan to make it appear he’s the target of some clandestine organization or hate group or God knows what. It will look as if he followed himself, so to speak, with a GPS, and planted all sorts of bizarre devices all over his apartment, and carried them on his person and in his car.”

She finished undressing, because she had to get into the shower. There was so much to do. And Benton’s eyes were intense on her as he got off the bed.

“No one on earth will believe him,” she said as Benton put his hands on her and kissed her.

“I’ll help you take your shower,” he said, guiding her in that direction.

31

Kay Scarpetta 16 - Scarpetta

31

The wind buffeted Lucy as she sat on concrete as cold as ice on the brownstone’s roof and took photographs of the camera attached to the footing of the satellite dish.

It was an inexpensive Internet camera that included audio, and was connected to the building’s wireless network and served any tenant who wished to join it.

It also served somebody else. It served Mike Morales, and not in the way everybody thought, which was why it hadn’t occurred to Lucy to check. And she was furious with herself.

Since it was known that another device was connected to the network—the camera that Morales said he had installed himself—it hadn’t entered Lucy’s mind to access the log to the wireless router. It hadn’t occurred to her she ought to check the router’s admin page.

Had she done that last night, she would have discovered what she now knew, and she tried Marino again. For the past half-hour, she’d tried him and Berger, and had gotten voicemail.

She didn’t leave a message. She wasn’t about to leave a message the likes of the one she had.

This time Marino answered, thank God.

“It’s me,” she said.