The apartment at the back of the building, one floor above Terri Bridges’s, was unfurnished except for a simple maple desk facing a wall and, tucked under it, a small office chair. On the desk was a laptop, one of those new PowerBooks or AirBooks or whatever they were called, expensive and weighing almost nothing. Bacardi had heard stories about people accidentally throwing them away with a stack of newspapers, and could see how that might happen. The laptop was plugged into a charger, and “Clocks” was playing on iTunes—the volume turned low, playing over and over again, God knows for how long, because someone had selected repeat on the menu.

Also on the desk were four bud vases, cheap cut glass, and in each one a withered rose. She went to the desk and pulled down one of the rose petals.

“Yellow,” she said.

Officer Ben, as she now thought of him, was too busy looking around at the shrine to Scarpetta to care about a few dead roses, or to understand that from the female perspective, yellow mattered. Bacardi’s need of reassurance wanted red when it came to roses, but her instinct knew better. A man who gave you yellow roses was one you’d never have, and that’s the one you wanted and should move heaven and earth to get. She glanced at Officer Ben, for an instant fearing she just might have said that out loud.

“Well, guess what?” she said, her voice bouncing off old plaster walls as she walked on bare hardwood floors, going from room to room. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, because it looks like the only thing in here’s a computer and toilet paper.”

When she walked back in, Officer Ben was still looking around at photographs of Scarpetta that were as big as Times Square in proportion to their location. He shone his flashlight on them as if that might tell him something.

“While you gawk,” Bacardi said, “I’m going to call Pete— Investigator Marino to you—and find out just what the hell we’re supposed to do with Gotham Gotcha. You got any idea how to arrest a website, Ben?”

“Ban,” he corrected her. “For Bannerman,” he said.

His light trailed over the huge posters like a comet on its last legs.

“If I were Dr. Scarpetta,” he said, “I might hire a couple body-guards.”

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Kay Scarpetta 16 - Scarpetta

34

The house phone rang, and Berger told Morales it was the intercom.

“It’s probably security,” she said from the couch, and she was pale and in pain.

Her hands were cherry-red behind her back. Scarpetta couldn’t feel her own hands at all now. They could be rocks.

“They probably heard the gunshot.” If a voice could be gray, Berger’s was gray.