Berger asks what time I got home from Paris and went grocery shopping. She mentions my going to the hospital to visit
Jo that night, and the phone conversation with Lucy afterward. The window narrows. It gets tighter and tighter. When did I have time to rush over to Bray’s house, beat her to death, plant evidence and stage the crime? And why would I bother buying a chipping hammer almost twenty-four hours after the fact unless it was for the very purpose I have stated all along: to conduct tests? She lets these questions hover while Buford Righter sits at the prosecution table and studies notes on a legal pad. He avoids looking at me as much as he can.
I answer Berger point by point. It gets harder and harder for me to talk. The inside of my mouth was abraded from the gag, and then the wounds became ulcerated. I haven’t had mouth sores since I was a child and had forgotten how painful they are. When my ulcerated tongue hits my teeth as I speak, it sounds as if I have a speech impediment. I feel weak and strung out. My left arm throbs, in a cast again because it was re-injured when Jay wrenched my arms above my head and bound them to the bed’s headboard.
“I notice you’re having some trouble talking.” Berger pauses to point this out. “Dr. Scarpetta, I know this is off the subject.” Nothing is off the subject for Jaime Berger. She has a reason for every breath she takes, every step she makes, every expression on her faceeverything, absolutely everything. “But can we digress for a moment?” She stops pacing and raises her palms in a shrug. “I think it would be instructive if you would tell the jury what happened to you last week. I know the jury must be wondering why you’re bruised and having difficulty speaking.”
She digs her hands in the pockets of her trousers and patiently encourages me to tell my story. I apologize for not being the sharpest knife in the drawer at the moment, I say, and the jurors smile. I tell them about Benny and their faces are pained. One man’s eyes fill with tears as I describe the boy’s drawings that led me up into the deer stand where I believe Benny spent much of his time watching the world and recording it in images on his sketchpad. I express my fears that young Benny may have met up with foul play. His gastric contents, I explain, could not be explained by what we knew about the last few hours of his life.
“And sometimes pedophileschild molesterslure children with candy, food, something that will entice them. You’ve had cases like this, Dr. Scarpetta?” Berger questions me.
“Yes,” I reply. “Unfortunately.”
“Can you give us an example of a case in which a child was lured by food or candy?”
“Some years ago we got in the body of an eight-year-old boy,” I offer a case from personal experience. “On autopsy I determined he had asphyxiated when the perpetrator forced the boy, this eight-year-old child, to perform oral sex. I recovered gum from the child’s stomach, a rather large wad of chewing gum. It turned out an adult male neighbor had given the boy four sticks of gum, Dentyne gum, and this man did, in fact, confess to the killing.”
“So you had good reason, based upon your years of experience, to be concerned when you found popcorn and hotdogs in Benny White’s stomach,” Berger states.
“That is correct. I was very concerned,” I answer.
“Please continue, Dr. Scarpetta,” Berger says. “What happened when you left the deer stand and followed the footpath through the woods?”
THERE is A WOMAN JUROR. SHE is ON THE FRONT row of the jury box, second from the left, and she reminds me of my mother. She is very overweight and must be close to seventy, at least, and wears a frumpy black dress with big red flowers on it. She doesn’t take her eyes off me, and I smile at her. She seems like a kind woman with a lot of sense, and I am so glad my mother isn’t here, that she is in Miami. I don’t think she has any idea what is happening in my life. I haven’t told her. My mother’s health is poor and she doesn’t need to worry about me. I keep going back to the juror in the flower-printed dress as I describe what happened at The Fort James Motel.