“Mind what?” Stubbornness holds him in his chair.
“Mind putting on a pot.” I look at him in a way that strongly suggests he leave me alone with Berger for a few minutes.
“I’m not sure I know how to work your machine here.” He makes a stupid excuse.
“I have complete faith you’ll figure it out,” I reply.
“I can see you two have a nice rhythm going,” I ironically observe when Marino is down the hall and can’t hear us.
“We had plenty of opportunity to get acquainted this morning, very early this morning, I might add.” Berger glances up at me. “At the hospital, before Chandonne was sent along his merry way.”
“Might I suggest, Ms. Berger, that if you’re going to spend some time around here, you might want to start by telling him to keep his mind on the mission. He seems to have some battle going with you that overshadows everything else, and it simply isn’t helpful.”
She continues studying photographs with no expression on her face. “God, it’s like an animal tore into them. Just like Susan Pless, my case. These could just as easily be photos of her body. I’m halfway ready to believe in werewolves. Of course, there’s the theory in folklore that the notion of werewolves might have been based on real people who suffered from hy-pertrichosis.” I am not sure if she is trying to show me how much research she has done, or if she is deflecting what I just said about Marino. She meets my eyes. “I appreciate your words of advice about him. I know you’ve worked with him forever, so he can’t be all bad.”
“He’s not. You won’t find a better detective.”
“And let me guess. He was obnoxious when you first met him.”
“He’s still obnoxious,” I reply.
Berger smiles. “Marino and I have a few issues that we still haven’t worked out. Clearly, he isn’t used to prosecutors who tell him how a case is going to work. It’s a little different in New York,” she reminds me. “For example, cops can’t arrest a defendant in a homicide case without the D.A.’s approval. We run the cases up there, and frankly”she picks up lab reports”it works a whole lot better, as a result. Marino feels it excruciatingly necessary to be in charge, and he’s overly protective of you. And jealous of anyone who comes into your life,” she sums it up, skimming the reports. “No alcohol on board, except Diane Bray. Point-zero-three. Isn’t the thought that she’d had a beer or two and pizza before the killer showed up at her door?” She pushes photographs around on the table. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody beaten this badly. Rage, unbelievable rage. And lust. If you can call something like this lust. I don’t think there’s a word for whatever he was feeling.”
“The word is ‘evil.’ ”
“I guess we won’t know about other drugs for a while.”
“We’ll test for the usual suspects. But it will be weeks,” I tell her.
She spreads out more photographs, sorting them as if she is playing solitaire. “How does it make you feel, knowing this might have been you?”
“I don’t think about that,” I answer.
“What do you think about?”
“What the injuries are saying to me.”
“Which is?”
I pick up a photograph of Kim Luonga bright, wonderful young woman by all reports, who was working to put herself through nursing school. “The blood pattern,” I describe. “Almost every inch of her exposed skin is smeared with bloody swirls, part of his ritual. He fingerpainted.”
“After they were dead.”
“Presumably. In this photo”I show her”you can plainly see the gunshot wound to the front of her neck. It hit her carotid and her spinal cord. She would have been paralyzed from the neck down when he dragged her into the storeroom.”
“And hemorrhaging. Because of the severed carotid.”
“Absolutely. You can see the arterial spatter pattern on the shelves he dragged her past.” I lean closer to her and show her in several photographs. “Big sweeps of blood that start getting lower and weaker the farther he dragged her through the store.”