Book of the Dead (52 page)

    
“I should never have let him into the house.”

    
“You have for twenty years. Why wouldn’t you have that night? Especially when he was so drunk and dangerous to himself. One thing you are is kind.”

    
“Rose told you. Maybe Lucy.”

    
“An e-mail from Dr. Self, indirectly. You and Marino are having an affair. I found out the rest of it from Lucy. The truth. Look at me, Kay. I’m looking at you.”

    
“Promise me you won’t do anything to him. And make it worse, because then you’ll be like him. This is why you’ve avoided me, didn’t tell me you were coming to Charleston. Have scarcely called me.”

    
“I haven’t avoided you. Where do I start? There’s so much.”

    
“What else?”

    
“We had a patient,” he says. “Dr. Self befriended her – I use the word loosely. She basically called this patient an imbecile, and from Dr. Self, it wasn’t name-calling or a joke. It was a judgment, a diagnosis. It was worse because Dr. Self said it, and the patient was going home where she wasn’t safe. She went to the first liquor store she could find. It appears she drank nearly a fifth of vodka, and she hanged herself. So I’ve been dealing with that. And so much else you don’t know about. That’s why I’ve been distant. Not talked to you much these past several days.”

    
He snaps open the clasps of his briefcase and lifts out his laptop.

    
“I’ve been very reluctant to use the hospital’s phones, their wireless Internet, been very careful on every front. Even the home front. One reason I wanted to get out of there. And you’re about to ask me what’s going on, and I’m about to tell you I don’t know. But it’s got to do with Paulo’s electronic files. The ones Lucy got into because he left them surprisingly vulnerable to anyone who might want to get into them.”

    
“Vulnerable if you knew where to look. Lucy isn’t exactly anyone.”

    
“She was also limited because she had to get into his computer remotely as opposed to having access to the actual machine.” He turns on his laptop. He inserts a CD into the drive. “Come closer.”

    
She moves her chair flush against his and looks at what he’s doing. Momentarily, he has a document on his screen.

    
“The notes we’ve already looked at,” she says, recognizing the electronic file that Lucy found.

    
“Not quite,” Benton says. “With all due respect to Lucy, I have access to a few bright people, too. Not as bright as she is, but they’ll do in a pinch. What you’re looking at is a file that’s been deleted and then recovered. It’s not the file you saw, the one Lucy found after tricking the system admin password out of Josh. That particular file was several copies removed from this. Several later.”

    
She taps the down arrow and reads. “It looks the same.”

    
“The text isn’t what’s different. It’s this.” He touches the file name at the top of the screen. “Do you notice the same thing I did when Josh first showed me this?”

    
“Josh? I hope you trust him.”

    
“I do, and for a good reason. He did the same thing Lucy did. Got into something he shouldn’t, and birds of a feather. Thankfully, they’re allies and he forgives her for duping him. In fact, he was impressed.”

    
“File name’s MSNote-ten-twenty-one-oh-six,” Scarpetta says. “From which I assume MSNotes are the initials of the patient and the notes Dr. Maroni made. And ten-twenty-one-oh-six is October twenty-first, two thousand six.”

    
“You just said it. You said MSNotes and the file name is MSNote.” He touches the screen again. “A file that’s been copied at least once, and inadvertently the name got changed. A typo. I don’t know how, exactly. Or maybe it was deliberate, so he didn’t keep copying over the same file. I do that sometimes if I don’t want to lose an earlier draft. What’s important is that when Josh recovered every deleted file pertaining to the patient of interest, we find the earliest draft was written two weeks ago.”

    
“Maybe it’s just the earliest draft he stored on that particular hard drive?” she suggests. “Or maybe he opened the file two weeks ago and saved it, which would have changed the date stamp? But I suppose that begs the question of why would he have looked at those notes before we even knew he had seen the Sandman as a patient? When Dr. Maroni left for Rome, we’d never heard of the Sandman.”

    
“There’s that,” Benton says. “And there’s the fabrication of the file. Because it is a fabrication. Yes, Paulo wrote those notes right before he left for Rome. He wrote them the very day Dr. Self was admitted to McLean on April twenty-seventh. In fact, several hours before she arrived at the hospital. And the reason I can say this with a reasonable degree of certainty is because Paulo may have emptied his trash, but even those deletions aren’t gone. Josh recovered them.”

    
He opens another file, this one a rough draft of the notes Scarpetta is familiar with, but in this version, the patient’s initials aren’t MS but WR.

    
“Then it would seem to me Dr. Self must have called Paulo. We assume that, anyway, because she couldn’t just show up at the hospital. Whatever she told him over the phone inspired him to begin writing these notes,” Scarpetta says.

    
“Another sign of fabrication,” Benton says. “Using a patient’s initials for a file name. We’re not supposed to do that. Even if you do stray from protocol and good judgment, it doesn’t make sense he changed his patient’s initials. Why? To rename him. Why? To give him an alias? Paulo knows better than to do any such thing.”

    
“Maybe the patient doesn’t exist,” Scarpetta says.

    
“Now you see what I’m leading up to,” Benton says. “I don’t think the Sandman was ever Paulo’s patient.”

Chapter 20

    
Ed the doorman is nowhere to be seen when Scarpetta walks into Rose’s apartment building at almost ten. It’s drizzling, and the dense fog is lifting, and clouds are rushing across the sky as the front moves out to sea.

    
She steps inside his office and looks around. There isn’t much on the desk: a Rolodex, a notebook with Residents on the cover, a stack of unopened mail – Ed’s and two other doormen’s – pens, a stapler, personal items such as a plaque with a clock on it, an award from a fishing club, a cell phone, a ring of keys, a wallet. She checks the wallet. Ed’s. He’s on duty tonight with what appears to be three dollars to his name.

    
Scarpetta walks out, looks around, still no sign of Ed. She returns to his office and thumbs through the Residents book until she finds Gianni Lupano’s apartment on the top floor. She takes the elevator, and listens outside his door. Music is playing, but not loudly, and she rings the bell, and she hears someone moving around. She rings the bell again and knocks. Footsteps and the door opens and Scarpetta is face-to-face with Ed.

    
“Where’s Gianni Lupano?” She walks past Ed, into the surround sound of Santana.

    
Wind blows through a window open wide in the living room.

    
Ed’s eyes are panicked as he talks frantically. “I didn’t know what to do. This is so terrible. I didn’t know what to do.”

    
Scarpetta looks out the open window. She looks down and can’t make out anything in the dark, just dense shrubbery and a sidewalk and the street beyond. She steps back and glances around a lavish apartment of marble and pastel-painted plaster, ornate molding, Italian leather furniture, and bold art. Shelves are filled with handsomely bound old books that some interior decorator probably bought by the yard, and an entire wall is occupied by an entertainment center too elaborate for a space this small.

    
“What’s happened?” she says to Ed.

    
“I get this call maybe twenty minutes ago.” Excitedly. “First he says, ‘Hey, Ed, you start my car?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, why do you ask?’ And I was nervous about it.”

    
Scarpetta notices what must be half a dozen tennis rackets in cases propped against the wall behind the couch, a stack of tennis shoes still in their boxes. On a glass coffee table with an Italian glass base is a stack of tennis magazines. On the cover of the one on top is Drew Martin, about to pound a lob.

    
“Nervous about what?” she asks.

    
“That young lady, Lucy. She started his car because she wanted to look at something, and I was afraid he somehow found out. But that wasn’t it, I don’t guess, because then he said, ‘Well, you’ve always taken such good care of it, I want you to have it.’ And I said, ‘What? What are you talking about, Mr. Lupano? I can’t take your car. Why are you trying to give away that beautiful car?’ And then he said, ‘Ed, I’ll write it down on a piece of paper so people know I gave you the car.’ So I hurried up here as fast as I could and found the door unlocked, like he wanted to make it easy for anyone to get inside. And then I found the window open.”

    
Walking toward it and pointing, as if Scarpetta can’t see it for herself.

    
She calls nine-one-one as they run down the hallway. She tells the operator someone may have jumped out a window and gives the address. On the elevator, Ed continues to talk disjointedly about searching Lupano’s apartment just to make sure, and he found the piece of paper but left it where it was, on the bed, and he kept calling out for him and he was about to call the police but Scarpetta showed up.

    
In the lobby, an old woman with a cane clicks her way across marble. Scarpetta and Ed rush past, and out of the building. They run through the dark around the corner, stopping directly below Lupano’s open window. It is filled with light at the top of the building. Scarpetta shoves through a tall hedge, branches snapping and scratching, and finds what she feared. The body is nude and contorted, limbs and neck at unnatural angles against the brick side of the building, blood glistening in the dark. She presses two fingers against the carotid and feels no pulse. She repositions the body flat on its back and begins CPR. When she looks up, she wipes blood off her face, off her mouth. Sirens wail, blue and red lights flashing blocks away on East Bay. She gets to her feet and pushes back through the hedge.

    
“Come here,” Scarpetta says to Ed. “Take a look and tell me if that’s him.”

    
“Is he…?”

    
“Just look.”

    
Ed pushes through the bushes, then crashes back through them.

    
“My God in heaven,” he says. “Oh, no. Oh, Lord.”

    
“Is it him?” she asks, and Ed nods yes. In the back of her mind, it bothers her that she just did mouth-to-mouth without protection. “Right before he called you about his Porsche, you were where?”

    
“Sitting at my desk.” Ed is scared, his eyes darting. He’s sweating and keeps wetting his lips and clearing his throat.

    
“Did anyone else come inside the building maybe about that time, or maybe a little before he called?”

    
Sirens wail as police cars and an ambulance stop on the street, red and blue light pulsing on Ed’s face. “No,” he says. Except for a few of the residents, he says, he saw no one.

    
Doors slam, radios chatter, diesel engines rumble. Police and EMTs get out of their vehicles.

    
Scarpetta says to Ed, “Your wallet’s out on the desk. Maybe you’d taken your wallet out, then you got the call? Am I right?” Then she says to a plainclothes cop, “Over there.” She points to the hedge. “Came from up there.” She points to the lighted open window on the top floor.

    
“You’re that new medical examiner.” The detective looks at her, doesn’t seem entirely sure.

    
“Yes.”

    
“You pronounced him?”

    
“That’s for the coroner to do.”

    
The detective starts walking toward the bushes as she confirms that the man – Lupano, it seems – is dead. “I’ll need a statement from you, so don’t go anywhere,” he calls back to her. Bushes crack and rustle as he pushes through them.

    
“I don’t understand what all this is about. My wallet,” Ed says.