“I’m not naive about security,” Shrew said. “You don’t have to take a dog out if it’s small enough. Wee Wee Pads work fine. I had a Yorkie quite a long time ago and taught it to use the litter box. I could fit him in the palm of one hand, but talk about a bark. He would go for the ankles. I had to pick him up whenever we were on an elevator or when people would come over. Until he got used to them. Obviously, I didn’t take Ivy out. Not something that young and sickly on these filthy sidewalks. I’ve no doubt she already had the parvovirus when the boyfriend bought her at that dreadful Puppingham Palace.”

“What makes you so certain her boyfriend bought the puppy?”

“Goodness,” Shrew said.

She held her drink in both hands and contemplated what he was implying.

The recliner creaked as he waited.

“I’m jumping to conclusions,” she said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Here’s what you do. What I tell every witness I talk to.”

“Witness?”

“You knew her. You live across the street.”

What was she a witness to? she asked herself as she shredded bits of tissue and stared up at the ceiling, hoping there was no access door beyond it.

“Pretend you’re writing a movie,” he said. “You got a pen and paper? Terri gives you little Ivy. Write me the scene. I’m going to sit right here while you write it up, then you’re going to read it to me.”

Kay Scarpetta 16 - Scarpetta

7

After Nine-Eleven, the city decided to build the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office a fifteen-story DNA building that looked like a blue-glass office high-rise.

Technology, including STRs and SNPs and low-copy- number profiling, was so advanced, scientists could analyze a sample as small as seventeen human cells. There was no backlog. If Berger wanted DNA testing in a high-priority case, theoretically she could get results in a matter of hours.

“No smoking gun,” Berger said.

She handed Benton a copy of the report as the waitress refilled their coffees.

“Just a hell of a lot of smoke,” she said. “In fact, Terri Bridges’s vaginal swabs are as confusing as I’ve seen in any case that comes to mind. No seminal fluid, and DNA from multiple donors. I spoke to Dr. Lester about it, which wasn’t helpful. I can’t wait to hear what Kay has to say about this.”

“Have all the profiles been run through CODIS?” Benton asked.

“One hit. It gets weirder. A woman.”

“In the database for what reason?” Benton scanned the report.

It didn’t tell him much—just that Dr. Lester had submitted swabs, and then the results that Berger was discussing.

“Vehicular manslaughter in 2002,” Berger said. “Fell asleep at the wheel and hit a kid on a bicycle, convicted, sentence suspended. Not here, where we wouldn’t be so nice, even if she is elderly and was stone-cold sober at the time of the accident. This was in Palm Beach, Florida, although she does have a Park Avenue apartment and is here, actually, even as we speak. But she was attending a New Year’s Eve party last night at the time Terri Bridges was murdered, not that I have any reason to suspect for a nanosecond she had anything to do with it. Another reason the judge in Palm Beach was so forgiving? She broke her back when she hit the kid on the bike. So you got any brilliant ideas why a seventy-eight- year-old female paraplegic’s DNA was in Terri Bridges’s vagina along with a host of other people’s?”