The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Right about now she’s coming into view.” Berger always sounded like she was in charge, even if she was just talking normally, didn’t matter about what. “In a dark-green parka with fur trim around the hood. She’s wearing the hood up and has black gloves on and a red scarf. A black shoulder bag, black pants, and running shoes.”

  “Be good to get a close-up of the running shoes.” Scarpetta’s voice. “To see if they’re the same ones she had on when she was found this morning. Asics Gel-Kayano, white with a red lightning flash and red accents on the heel collar. Size nine and a half.”

  “The shoes in this, whitish with some red,” Marino said, aware of how close Bonnell was to him. He could feel her warmth next to his leg, next to his elbow.

  The figure in the green parka was captured from the back, her face not visible because of where she was in relation to the camera and because of the fur-trimmed hood. She turned right and skipped up the wet front steps of the apartment building and already had her keys out, suggesting to Marino that she was organized and gave thought to what she was doing, was aware of her surroundings and security-conscious. She unlocked the door and disappeared inside. The time stamp on the video was five-forty-seven p.m., December 17, yesterday. Then a pause, and another recording of the same figure in the green parka with the hood up, the same large black bag over her shoulder, coming out of the building and going down the steps, turning right and walking off in the rainy night. The time stamp was seven-oh-one p.m., December 17.

  “I’m curious.” It was Benton talking. “Since we can’t see her face, how do the analysts at RTCC know who it is?”

  “I wondered the same thing,” Berger said. “But I believe it’s because of earlier images that obviously are her—ones you’ll see shortly. According to RTCC, what we’re looking at now is the last image of her, the last time she’s recorded entering or leaving her building. It appears she returned to her apartment and was there for a little more than an hour, then left. The question is, where was she after that?”

  “I should add,” and it was Scarpetta talking, “that the time on the text message Grace Darien received from Toni’s cell phone was approximately an hour after this second video clip. At around eight p.m.”

  “I left Mrs. Darien a voicemail,” Marino said. “We’ll get the phone from her so we can see what else is on it.”

  “I don’t know if you want to get into this now. But the time on the text message and these video clips are in conflict with what I noted when I examined the body,” Scarpetta said.

  “Let’s focus on what RTCC found first,” Berger replied. “Then we’ll get to the autopsy results.”

  Berger had just said she considered what RTCC had found more important to the case than what Scarpetta had to report. One statement by one witness, and Berger had it all figured out? But then, Marino didn’t know the details, only what Bonnell had told him, and she’d been vague, finally admitting she and Berger had talked on the phone, and that Berger had instructed her to say nothing to anyone about what they’d discussed. All Marino had managed to coax out of Bonnell was that a witness had come forward with information that would make it “crystal clear” why Toni’s apartment wasn’t relevant to her murder.

  “As I’m looking at the clips here,” Marino said, “I’m wondering once again what happened to her coat. The green parka isn’t in her apartment and hasn’t showed up.”

  “If someone had her cell phone”—Scarpetta was still on that subject—“he or she could send a text message to anyone in Toni’s contacts directory, including her mother. You don’t need a password to send a text message. All you need is the cell phone of the person you want the text message to appear to be from—in this case, Toni Darien. If someone had her phone and reviewed messages sent and received, that person could get an idea of what to write and how to word it if the goal was to fool someone into thinking the message was from Toni, if the goal was to make people think she was still alive last night when she wasn’t.”

  “It’s been my experience that typically, homicides aren’t as elaborately planned or as clever as what you’re suggesting,” Berger said.

  Marino couldn’t believe it. She was basically telling Scarpetta this wasn’t Agatha Christie, wasn’t a friggin’ murder mystery.

  “Ordinarily, it would be me making that point,” Scarpetta answered, without registering the slightest insult or irritation. “But Toni Darien’s homicide is anything but ordinary.”

  “We’ll try to trace where the text message was sent from, the physical location,” Marino said. “That’s all we can do. It’s a legitimate thing to raise, since her cell phone’s missing. I agree. What if someone else has it and that person sent the message to Toni’s mother? May sound far-fetched, but how do we know?” He wished he hadn’t said “far-fetched.” It sounded like he was criticizing Scarpetta or doubting her.

  “As I’m looking at this video clip, I’m also asking, How do we know the person in the green coat is Toni Darien?” It was Benton who spoke. “I can’t see her face. Not in either clip.”

  “Just that she looks white.” Marino backed up the video to check again. “I’m seeing her jaw, a glimpse of her chin, because her hood’s up and it’s dark out and she’s not facing the camera. It’s catching her from behind, and she’s looking down as she walks. Both when she’s entering the building and leaving.”

  “If you’ll open the second file Lucy sent with the name Recording Two,” Berger said, “you’re going to see a number of stills from earlier recordings, ones made days earlier, same coat, same figure, only we get a clear visual of Toni’s face.”

  Marino closed the first file and opened the second one. He clicked on the slide show and began looking at video stills of Toni in front of her building, going in and coming out. In all of them she had on a bright red scarf and the same green parka with a fur-trimmed hood, only in these images it wasn’t raining and the hood was down, her dark-brown hair long and loose around her shoulders. In several of the video stills she had on running pants and in others she had on slacks or jeans, and in one she was wearing olive-green and tan mittens, and in none was she wearing black gloves or carrying a big black shoulder bag. Each time she was on foot, except once when it was raining and the camera recorded her getting into a cab.

  “It corroborates the statement her neighbor gave me,” Bonnell said, brushing against Marino’s arm, the third time she had done it, barely making contact but noticeable as hell. “That’s the coat he described,” she went on. “He told me she had on a green coat with a hood and was carrying her mail, which she must have gotten right after she entered her building at five-forty-seven p.m. I assume she unlocked her mailbox, got whatever was in it, then went up the stairs, which was when her neighbor saw her. She entered her apartment and placed the mail on the kitchen counter, where I found it this morning when I was there with CSU. The mail was unopened.”

  “She had her hood up when she was inside the building?” Scarpetta asked.

  “The neighbor wasn’t specific. Just said she had on a green coat with a hood.”

  “Graham Tourette,” Marino said. “We need to check him out, check out the super, too, Joe Barstow. Neither of them have a record except traffic violations, failure to yield, invalid registration, a broken taillight, going way back, none resulting in an arrest. I had RTCC pull up everything on everyone in the building.”

  “Graham Tourette made a point of telling me he and his male partner were at the theater last night, someone had given them tickets to Wicked,” Bonnell said. “So I’ll just go ahead and ask Dr. Wesley . . .”

  “Improbable,” Benton said. “Highly improbable that a gay man committed this crime.”

  “I didn’t see any mittens inside her apartment,” Marino said. “And they weren’t at the scene. She’s not wearing black gloves or carrying a black bag in the earlier stills, either.”

  “It’s my opinion this is a sexually motivated homicide,” Benton added, as if Marino wasn’t on the phone.<
br />
  “Signs of sexual assault on autopsy?” Berger asked.

  “She has injuries to her genitalia,” Scarpetta answered. “Bruising, reddening, evidence of some type of penetration, of trauma.”

  “Seminal fluid?”

  “Not that I saw. We’ll see what the labs find.”

  “I believe the possibility the Doc’s raising is maybe the crime scene and maybe the crime itself was in fact staged,” Marino said, still feeling bad about saying “far-fetched” a little while ago, hoping Scarpetta didn’t think he’d meant anything by it. “If so, it could be a gay guy, right, Benton?”

  “Based on what I know, Jaime,” Benton answered Berger instead of Marino, “I suspect staging is for the purpose of disguising the true nature and motive of crime and when it was committed and what the connection might be between the victim and the assailant. Staging in this case is for the purpose of evasion. Whoever did it fears being caught. And I reiterate, the murder is sexually motivated.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you think it was a stranger who did it,” Marino said, and Benton didn’t answer.

  “If what the witness says is true, sounds to me like that’s exactly what we’re dealing with,” Bonnell said to Marino, touching him again. “I don’t think we’re talking about a boyfriend, maybe not even anybody she’d ever met before last night.”

  “We’ll need to bring in Tourette for an interview. And the super,” Berger said. “I want to talk to both of them, especially the super, Joe Barstow.”

  “Why especially Joe Barstow?” Benton wanted to know, and he sounded a little pissed.

  Maybe Benton and the Doc weren’t getting along. Marino had no idea what was going on with either of them, hadn’t seen them in weeks, but he was tired of going out of his way to be nice to Benton. It was getting old being dissed all the time.

  “I have the same information from RTCC that Marino does. You happen to notice Barstow’s employment history?” Berger was asking Marino. “A couple of livery companies, a taxi driver, in addition to a lot of other jobs. Bartender, waiter. He worked for a taxi company as recently as 2007. Looks like he’s been doing a lot of things while going to school part-time, to Manhattan Community College, on and off for the past three years, based on what I’m seeing.”

  Bonnell had gotten up and flipped open a notepad, was standing next to Marino.

  She said, “Trying to get his associate’s degree in video arts and technology. Plays bass guitar, used to play in a band, would like to get involved in producing rock concerts, and still hoping for his big break in the music business.”

  Reading her notes, her thigh touching Marino.

  “Of late, he’s been working part-time at a digital production company,” she went on, “doing odd jobs, mostly working the desk, being a runner, what he called a production assistant and I’d call a gopher. He’s twenty-eight. I talked to him about fifteen minutes. He said he only knew Toni because of any contact he might have with her in the building, that he—and I quote—had never dated her but had thought about asking her out.”

  “Did you ask him directly if he’d ever dated her or thought about it?” Berger said. “Or did he volunteer it?”

  “Volunteered it. Also volunteered that he hadn’t seen her for several days. He says he was in his apartment all last night, had a pizza sent in and watched TV because the weather was so bad and he was tired.”

  “Offering a lot of alibis,” Berger said.

  “It would be fair to conclude that, but also not unusual in cases like this. Everybody figures they’re a suspect. Or they have something going on in their lives they don’t want us to know about, if nothing else,” Bonnell replied, flipping pages. “Described her as friendly, someone who didn’t complain a lot, and he wasn’t aware of her being the party type or bringing people into the building, such as—and again I quote—a lot of guys. I noted he was extremely upset and scared. It doesn’t appear he’s a taxi driver now,” she added, as if the detail was important.

  “We don’t know that as fact,” Berger said. “We don’t know that he doesn’t have access to taxicabs, what he might do off the books so he doesn’t pay taxes, for example, like a lot of the freelance drivers in the city, especially these days.”

  “The red scarf looks similar to the one I removed from Toni’s neck,” Scarpetta said, and Marino imagined her sitting somewhere with Benton, looking at a computer screen, probably their apartment on Central Park West, not far from CNN. “Solid red, a bright red made of a high-tech fabric that’s thin but very warm.”

  “That’s what it looks like she has on,” Berger said. “What these video clips and the text message on her mother’s phone seem to establish is she was alive yesterday when she left her building at one minute past seven and was still alive an hour later at around eight. Kay, you started to tell us you might have a different opinion about her time of death, different from what’s implied by these video clips, for example.”

  “My opinion is that she wasn’t alive last night.” Scarpetta’s voice, even keel, as if what she’d just said shouldn’t surprise anyone.

  “Then what did we just look at?” Bonnell asked, frowning. “An imposter? Someone else wearing her coat and entering her building? Someone who had keys?”

  “Kay? Just so we’re clear? Now that you’ve seen the video clips? You still of the same opinion?” Berger asked.

  “My opinion is based on my examination of her body, not video clips,” Scarpetta answered. “And her postmortem artifacts, specifically her livor and rigor mortis, place her time of death at much earlier than last night. As early as Tuesday.”

  “Tuesday?” Marino was amazed. “As in day before yesterday?”

  “It’s my opinion she received her head injury at some point on Tuesday, possibly in the afternoon, several hours after she ate a chicken salad,” Scarpetta said. “Her gastric contents were partially digested romaine lettuce, tomatoes, and chicken meat. After she was struck in the head, her digestion would have quit, so the food remained undigested as she died, which I think took a little time, possibly hours, based on the vital response to her injury.”

  “She had lettuce and tomatoes in her refrigerator,” Marino remembered. “So maybe she ate her last meal in her apartment. You sure that couldn’t have happened when she was in there last night, when it appears she was there for an hour? During that interval we just watched on the video clip?”

  “Would make sense,” Bonnell said. “She ate, and several hours later, at nine or ten o’clock, let’s say, she was out and was assaulted.”

  “It wouldn’t make sense. What I saw when I examined her indicates that she wasn’t alive last night, and it’s very unlikely she was alive yesterday.” Scarpetta’s calm voice.

  She almost never sounded flustered or sharp and never was a smart ass, and she sure as hell had a right to sound any way she wanted. After all the years Marino had worked with her, most of his career in one city or another, it was his experience that if a dead body told her something, it was true. But he was having a hard time with what she was saying. It didn’t seem to make any sense.

  “Okay. We’ve got a lot to discuss,” Berger spoke up. “One thing at a time. Let’s focus on what we’ve just seen on these video clips. Let’s just assume the figure in the green coat isn’t an imposter, is in fact Toni Darien, and that she also text-messaged her mother last night.”

  Berger didn’t buy what Scarpetta was saying. Berger thought Scarpetta was mistaken, and incredibly, Marino wondered it, too. It entered his mind that maybe Scarpetta had started believing her own legend, really thought she could figure out the answer to anything and was never wrong. What was that phrase CNN used all the time? The exaggerated way her crime-busting abilities were described? The Scarpetta Factor. Shit, Marino thought. He’d seen it happen time and again, people believe their own press and quit doing the real work, and then they fuck up and make fools of themselves.

  “The question is,” Berger continued, “where was Toni after s
he left her apartment building?”

  “Not at work,” Marino said, trying to remember if Scarpetta ever made the kind of error that impeaches an expert, gets a case ruined in court.

  He couldn’t think of a single example. But she didn’t used to be famous and on TV all the time.

  “Let’s start with work, with High Roller Lanes.” Berger’s voice was strong and loud over speakerphone. “Marino, let’s start with you and Detective Bonnell.”

  Marino was disappointed when Bonnell got up and moved to the other side of the desk. He made a drinking motion, maybe she could bring out the Diet Cokes. He had a different feeling as he looked at her, noting the color in her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes, how energized she seemed. He could feel her against his arm even though she was nowhere near him, could feel the firm roundness, the weight of her against him, and he imagined what she looked like, what she would feel like, and he was attentive and awake in a way he hadn’t been in a while. She had to know what she was doing when she was brushing against him.

  “First off, let me describe the place because it’s not your typical bowling alley,” he said.

  “More like something out of Vegas,” Bonnell said, opening a paper bag, getting out two Diet Cokes, handing one to him, her eyes touching his briefly, like sparks.

  “Right,” Marino said as he opened the can, Diet Coke spurting up and running over, dripping on his desk. He mopped up the mess with several sheets of paper, wiped his hands on his pants. “Definitely a place for high-roller bowlers. Neon lights, movie screens, leather couches, and a glitzy lounge with a huge mirrored bar. Twenty-something lanes, pool tables, a damn dress code. You can’t go in there looking like a bum.”

  He’d taken Georgia Bacardi to High Roller Lanes last June for their six-month anniversary. It was highly unlikely they’d be celebrating their twelfth. Last time they saw each other, first weekend of this month, she hadn’t wanted sex, had about ten different ways to tell him the same thing, which was forget about it. Didn’t feel good, too tired, her job at Baltimore PD was just as important as his, she was having hot flashes, he had other women in his life and she was sick and tired of it. Berger, Scarpetta, even Lucy. Including Barcardi, that was four women Marino had in his life, and the last time he’d had sex was November 7, almost six damn weeks ago.