“Did she believe you?”
“She was upset, but she wasn’t frightened.”
“Seems a little unusual for someone who has a lot of anxiety,” Scarpetta said. “I’m surprised she wasn’t frightened.”
“The communications from them stopped. It’s been weeks, and they’ve stopped. I began to hope they weren’t interested in me anymore. Of course, they were just setting me up for the cruelest thing of all.”
“What are these communications?”
“E-mails.”
“If they stopped after you told Terri about them, might that suggest the possibility they were from her? That she was sending you whatever these e-mails are that make you feel you’re being harassed, spied on? And when you said something about it, she stopped sending them?”
“Absolutely not. She would never do something so heinous. Especially not to me. It’s impossible.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“She couldn’t possibly do it. How would she know I took a detour when I was walking and ended up at Columbus Circle, for example, if I’d never told her? How could she know I went to the store for coffee creamer if I never mentioned it?”
“Is there any reason she might have to hire someone to follow you?”
“She wouldn’t do that. And after what’s happened, it makes no sense at all to think she had anything to do with it. She’s dead! They killed her!”
The steel door moved slightly, and the guard’s eyes appeared in the crack. “We okay in here?”
“We’re fine,” Scarpetta said.
The eyes vanished.
“But the e-mails stopped,” she said to Oscar.
“Eavesdropping.”
“You were raising your voice, Oscar. You need to stay calm or he’ll come back in here.”
“I made one backup copy of what I’d already gotten, and cleaned everything off my computer so they couldn’t get in there and delete them or alter them to make it look as if I’m lying. The only record of the original e-mails is on the CD that’s in the book. The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor. Littleton Winslow. I collect old books and documents.”
Scarpetta took photographs of abrasions and clusters of fingernail marks, all in the same area of his right lower back.
“Psychiatry, topics related to it, mainly,” he said. “A lot of them, including ones about Bellevue. I know more about this place than the people who work here. You and your husband would find my Bellevue collection of great interest. Maybe I’ll get to show it to you someday. You’re welcome to borrow it. Terri’s always been interested in the history of psychiatry, fascinated by people. She really cares about people and why they do what they do. She says she could sit in an airport, a park, all day and watch people. Why are you wearing gloves? Achondroplasia isn’t contagious.”
“For your protection.”
It was and it wasn’t. She wanted a latex barrier between his skin and hers. He had crossed the line with her already. Before she’d even met him, he’d crossed it.
“They know where I go, places I’ve been, where I live,” he said. “But not her apartment. Not Terri’s brownstone. Not Murray Hill. I never had any reason to believe they knew anything about her. They’ve never shown that location when they let me know where I’ve been on any given day. So why wouldn’t they show it? I go there every Saturday.”