‘No problem.’
The guardian angel of felons had a Brooklyn accent as coarse and tightly packed as a garbage barge.
‘Have a seat,’ she said to me as the director disappeared.
‘When was Carrie remanded here?’ I asked.
‘Five years ago.’
She would not look up from her paperwork.
‘You’re aware of her history, of the homicide cases that have yet to go to trial in Virginia?’
‘You name it, I’m aware of it.’
‘Carrie escaped from here ten days ago, on June tenth,’ I went on. ‘Has anyone figured out how that might have happened?’
Blaustein flipped a page and picked up a coffee cup.
‘She didn’t show up for dinner. That’s it,’ she replied. ‘I was as shocked as anyone when she disappeared.’
‘I bet you were,’ I said.
She turned another page and had yet to give me her eyes. I’d had enough.
‘Ms Blaustein,’ I said in a hard voice as I leaned against her desk. ‘With all due respect to your clients, would you like to hear about mine? Would you like to hear all about men, women, and children who were butchered by Carrie Grethen? A little boy abducted from a 7-Eleven where he’d been sent to buy his mother a can of mushroom soup? He’s shot in the head and areas of his flesh are removed to obliterate bitemarks, his pitiful body clad only in undershorts propped against a Dumpster in a freezing rain?’
‘I told you, I know about the cases.’ She continued to work.
‘I suggest you put down that brief and pay attention to me,’ I warned. ‘I may be a forensic pathologist, but I’m also a lawyer, and your shenanigans get nowhere with me. You just so happen to represent a psychopath who as we speak is on the outside murdering people. Don’t let me find out at the end of the day that you had information that might have spared even one life.’
She gave me her eyes, cold and arrogant, because her only power in life was to defend losers and jerk around people like me.
‘Let me just refresh your memory,’ I went on. ‘Since your client has escaped from Kirby, it is believed she has either murdered or served as an accomplice to murder in two cases, happening within a matter of days of each other. Vicious homicides in which an attempt was made to disguise them by fire. These were predated by other fire-homicides which we now believe are linked, yet in these earlier ones, your client was still incarcerated here.’
Susan Blaustein was silent as she stared at me.
‘Can you help me with this?’
‘All of my conversations with Carrie are privileged. I’m sure you must know that,’ she remarked, yet I could tell she was curious about what I was saying.
‘Possible she was connecting with someone on the outside?’ I went on. ‘And if so, how and who?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Did she ever talk to you about Temple Gault?’
‘Privileged.’
‘Then she did,’ I said. ‘Of course, she did. How could she not? Did you know she wrote to me, Ms Blaustein, asking me to come see her and bring her Gault’s autopsy photos?’
She said nothing, but her eyes were coming alive.
‘He was hit by a train in the Bowery. Scattered along the tracks.’
‘Did you do his autopsy?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Then why would Carrie ask you for the photos, Dr Scarpetta?’
‘Because she knew I could get them. Carrie wanted to see them, blood and gore and all. This was less than a week before she escaped. I’m just wondering if you knew she was sending out letters like that? A clear indication, as far as I’m concerned, that she had premeditated all she was about to do next.’
‘No.’
Blaustein pointed her finger at me.
‘What she was thinking was how she was being framed to take the heat because the FBI couldn’t find its damn way out of a paper bag and needed to hang all this on someone,’ she accused.
‘I see you read the papers.’
Her face turned angry.
‘I talked to Carrie for five years,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t the one sleeping with the Bureau, right?’