The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  Scarpetta envisioned the yellow paint chip she had recovered from Toni Darien’s hair, in the area of her head wound. She remembered thinking in the morgue when she was looking at the paint under a lens that the color reminded her of French’s mustard and yellow cabs.

  “Harvey Fahley, a twenty-nine-year-old project manager at Kline Pharmaceuticals in Brooklyn, has an apartment in Brooklyn,” Bonnell continued. “And his girlfriend does have an apartment in Manhattan, in Morningside Heights.”

  Scarpetta certainly didn’t know if the paint was automotive. It could be architectural, aerosol, from a tool, a bicycle, a street sign, from almost anything.

  “What he told me is consistent with what he said on the nine-one-one recording,” Bonnell said. “He’d spent the night with his girlfriend and was driving home, was headed to Fifth Avenue, planning to cut over on Fifty-ninth to the Queensboro Bridge so he could get ready for work.”

  It made sense why Berger was resistant to what Scarpetta believed was Toni’s time of death. If a cabdriver was the killer, it seemed more plausible that he was cruising and spotted Toni while she was out, possibly walking or jogging late last night. It seemed implausible that a cabdriver would have picked her up at some point on Tuesday, perhaps in the afternoon, and then kept her body until almost five o’clock this morning.

  As Bonnell continued to explain, “There was nothing suspicious about anything he said to me, nothing about his background. Most important, the description about the way the woman was dressed, his description of her as she was being helped out of the taxi? How could he possibly know those details? They haven’t been made public.”

  The body doesn’t lie. Scarpetta reminded herself of what she’d learned during her earliest days of training: Don’t try to force the evidence to fit the crime. Toni Darien wasn’t murdered last night. She wasn’t murdered yesterday. No matter what Berger wanted to believe or any witness said.

  “Did Harvey Fahley offer a more detailed description of the man who was allegedly helping the drunk-looking woman out of the taxi?” Benton asked, looking up at the ceiling, hands together, impatiently tapping his fingertips together.

  “A man in dark clothing, a baseball cap, maybe glasses. He got the impression the man was slender, maybe an average-size person,” Bonnell said. “But he didn’t get a good look, because he didn’t slow down and also because of the weather conditions. He said the taxi itself was blocking his view because the man and the woman were between it and the sidewalk, which would be true if you were driving east on One hundred and tenth, heading to Fifth Avenue.”

  “What about the taxi driver?” Benton asked.

  “He didn’t get a look but assumed there was one,” Bonnell answered.

  “Why would he assume that?” Benton asked.

  “The only door open was the back door on the right side, as if the driver was still up front and the man and woman had been in the back. Harvey said if it had been the driver helping her out at a location like that, he probably would have stopped. He would have assumed the lady was in trouble. You don’t just leave a drunk passed-out person on the roadside.”

  “Sounds like he’s making excuses about why he didn’t stop,” Marino said. “He wouldn’t want to think what he actually saw was a taxi driver dumping an injured or dead woman on the roadside. Easier to think it was a couple out drinking all night.”

  “The area he described in the nine-one-one recording,” Scarpetta said. “How far would that be from where the body was found?”

  “About thirty feet,” Bonnell said.

  Scarpetta told them about the bright-yellow paint chip she’d recovered from Toni’s hair. She encouraged them not to place too much stock in the detail, because none of the trace evidence had been examined yet and she’d also found red and black microscopic chips on Toni’s body. The paint could have been transferred from the weapon that fractured Toni’s skull. The paint could be from something else.

  “So if she was in a yellow cab, how could she have been dead thirty-six hours?” Marino voiced the obvious question.

  “It would have to be a cabdriver who killed her,” Bonnell replied with more confidence than any of them had a right to feel at the moment. “Either way you look at it, if what Harvey said is true, it had to be a cabdriver who picked her up last night, killed her, and dumped her body in the park early this morning. Or he had her for a while and then dumped her, if Dr. Scarpetta’s right about time of death. And the yellow cab could connect Toni Darien to Hannah Starr.”

  Scarpetta had been waiting for that assumption next.

  “Hannah Starr was last seen getting into a yellow cab,” Bonnell added.

  “I’m not at all prepared to connect Toni’s case to Hannah Starr,” Berger said.

  “Thing is, if we don’t say something and it happens again,” Bonnell said, “then we’re talking three.”

  “I have no intention of making any such connection at this time.” Berger said it as a warning: Nobody else had better think of making that connection publicly, either.

  “It’s not necessarily what I think, not about Hannah Starr,” Berger continued. “There are other factors about her disappearance. A lot of things I’ve been looking into point at her possibly being a very different type of case. And we don’t know that she’s dead.”

  “We also don’t know that somebody else didn’t see the same thing Harvey Fahley did,” Benton said, looking at Scarpetta, saying it for her benefit. “Wouldn’t be good if some other witness did the typical thing these days and instead of going to the police went to a news network. I wouldn’t want to be within five miles of CNN or any other media outlet if this detail about the yellow cab has been leaked.”

  “I understand,” Scarpetta said. “But whether it has or hasn’t, I’d be concerned that my being a no-show tonight would make matters only worse. Would only escalate the sensational value. CNN knows I’m not going to discuss Toni Darien or Hannah Starr. I don’t discuss active cases.”

  “I’d stay clear.” Benton looked intensely at her.

  “It’s in my contract. I’ve never had a problem,” she said to him.

  “I agree with Kay. I’d conduct business as usual,” said Berger. “If you cancel at the final hour, all it will do is give Carley Crispin something to talk about.”

  Dr. Warner Agee sat on the unmade bed inside his small suite of English antiques, the curtains closed to afford him privacy.

  His hotel room was surrounded by buildings, eye-to-eye with other windows, and he couldn’t help but think about his former wife and what it was like when he was forced to find his own place to live. He’d been appalled when he noticed how many downtown Washington apartments had telescopes, some decorative but functional, others for serious viewing. For example, an Orion binocular mount and tripod set in front of a reclining chair that didn’t face a river or a park but another high-rise. The Realtor was crowing about the view as Agee peered directly into the condo across the way at someone buck naked, walking around, the drapes not drawn.

  What purpose was there for telescopes and binoculars in congested areas of major cities like Washington, D.C., or here in New York unless it was spying, unless it was voyeurism? Obtuse neighbors undressing, having sex, arguing and fighting, bathing, sitting on the toilet. If people thought they had privacy in their own homes or hotel rooms, think again. Sexual predators, robbers, terrorists, the government—don’t let them see you. Don’t let them hear you. Make sure they aren’t watching. Make sure they aren’t listening. If they don’t see or hear you, they can’t get you. Security cameras on every corner, vehicle tracking, spy cams, sound amplifiers, eavesdropping, observing strangers in their most vulnerable and humiliating moments. All it takes is one piece of information in the wrong hands and your entire life can change. If you’re going to play that game, do it to others before they can do it to you. Agee didn’t leave blinds or curtains open, not even during the day.

  “You know what the best security system is? Window shades.” Adv
ice he’d been giving his entire career.

  Truer words never spoken, exactly what he’d said to Carley Crispin the first time they met at one of Rupe Starr’s dinner parties when she was a White House press secretary and Agee was a consultant who traveled in many orbits, not just the FBI’s. The year was 2000, and what a bombshell she’d been, outrageously attractive, with flaming red hair, edgy, smart, and a catbird when she wasn’t talking to reporters and could say what she really thought. Somehow the two of them ended up in Rupe Starr’s rare-book library, perusing old tomes on a few favorite subjects of Agee’s, the flying heretic Simon Magus and the flying saint Joseph of Cuper tino, who indisputably had the ability to levitate. Agee had introduced her to Franz Anton Mesmer and explained the healing powers of animal magnetism, and then Braid and Bernheim and their theories on hypnosis and nervous sleep.

  It was natural that Carley with her journalistic passions would be less interested in the paranormal and more drawn to the bookcase of photo albums, all bound in Florentine leather, the rogues gallery of Rupe’s so-called friends, as Agee referred to the most popular section in the rare-book room. For a long stretch of solitary hours on the third floor of that massive house, Agee and Carley cynically perused decades of pictures, the two of them sitting side by side, pointing out the people they recognized.

  “Amazing the friends money will buy, and he thinks they mean it. That’s what I’d find sad if I could bring myself to feel sorry for a multi-fucking-billionaire,” Agee said to someone who trusted no one because she was as amoral and just as much a user as anyone Rupe Starr might ever meet.

  Only Rupe never made Carley any money. She was simply an attraction for the other guests, the same thing Agee was. You couldn’t even get an interview at Rupe’s special club without a minimum of a million dollars, but you could be a guest if he liked you and thought you were an amusement of one sort or another. He’d invite you to dinners, to parties, as entertainment for his real guests. The ones with money to invest. Actors, professional athletes, the newest wizards on Wall Street would descend upon the Park Avenue mansion, and for the privilege of making Rupe richer would get to mingle with other luminaries whose commodity wasn’t cash. Politicians, television anchors, newspaper columnists, forensic experts, trial lawyers—it could be anyone in the news or with a good story or two who fit the profile of whomever Rupe was trying to impress. He researched his potential clients to find out what moved them, and then he would recruit. He didn’t have to know you to put you on his B list. You’d get a letter or a phone call. Rupert Starr requests the pleasure of your company.

  “Like throwing peanuts to the elephants,” Agee had told Carley on an evening he’d never forget. “We’re the peanuts, they’re the elephants. Heavyweights we’ll never be, even if we live to be as old as elephants, and the unfair irony is some of these elephants aren’t old enough to join the circus. Look at this one.” Tapping his finger on the picture of a ferociously pretty girl staring boldy into the camera, her arm around Rupe. The year written on the page was 1996.

  “Must be some young actress.” Carley was trying to figure out which one.

  “Guess again.”

  “Well, who?” Carley asked. “She’s pretty in a different way. Like a very pretty boy. Maybe it is a boy. No, I think I see breasts. Yup.” Moving Agee’s hand as she turned the page, and her touch startled him a little. “Here’s another one. Definitely not a boy. Wow. Rather gorgeous if you get past her Rambo clothing and no makeup; she’s got a very nice body, very athletic. I’m trying to remember what I’ve seen her in.”

  “You haven’t and you’ll never guess.” Leaving his hand where it was, hoping she might move it again. “Here’s a hint. FBI.”

  “Must be organized crime if she can afford to be in this Starr-studded collection.” As if human beings were no different than Rupe’s precious antique cars. “On the wrong side of the law, that’s the only FBI connection she could have if she’s filthy rich. Unless she’s like us.” Meaning the B list.

  “She’s not like us. She could buy this mansion and still have plenty left.”

  “Who the hell is she?”

  “Lucy Farinelli.” Agee found another photograph, this one of Lucy in the Starr basement garage, sitting behind the wheel of a Duesenberg, seeming intent on figuring out a priceless antique speedster she wouldn’t hesitate to drive and maybe did on that particular day or some other day when she was in Starr Counting House, counting out her money.

  Agee didn’t know. He hadn’t been to the mansion at the same time Lucy had, for the simple reason that Agee would be the last person invited for her entertainment or pleasure. At the very least she would remember him from Quantico, where as a high-school wunderkind she’d helped design and program the Criminal Artifi cial Intelligence Network, what the Bureau simply referred to as CAIN.

  “Okay, I do know who that is.” Carley was intrigued once she realized Lucy’s connections to Scarpetta, and especially to Benton Wesley, who was tall with chiseled granite good looks, “the model for that actor in The Silence of the Lambs,” in her words. “What’s his name, who played Crawford?”

  “Pure horseshit. Benton wasn’t even at Quantico when it was filmed. Was off in the field somewhere working a case, and even he will tell you as much, arrogant prick that he is,” Agee said, more than just ire aroused. He was feeling other stirrings.

  “Then you know them.” She was impressed.

  “The whole gaggle. I know them, and at best they might know about me, might know of me. I’m not friends with them. Well, excluding Benton. He knows me rather intimately. Life and its dysfunctional interconnections. Benton fucks Kay. Kay loves Lucy. Benton gets Lucy an internship with the FBI. Warner gets fucked.”

  “Why do you get fucked?”

  “What is artificial intelligence?”

  “A substitute for the real thing,” she’d said.

  “You see, it can be difficult if you have these.” Touching his hearing aids.

  “You seem to hear me well enough, so I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Suffice it to say I might have been given some tasks, some opportunities, if a computer system hadn’t come along that could do them instead,” he’d said.

  Perhaps it was the wine, a very fine Bordeaux, but he began to tell Carley about his ungratifying and unfair career and the toll it had taken, people and their problems, cops and their stresses and traumas, and the worst were the agents who weren’t allowed to have problems, weren’t allowed to be human, were FBI first and foremost and forced to unload on a Bureau-ordained psychologist or shrink. Babysitting, hand-holding, rarely being asked about criminal cases, never if they were sensational. He illustrated what he meant with a story set at the FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia, in 1985, when an assistant director named Pruitt had told Agee that someone who was deaf couldn’t possibly go into a maximum-security prison and conduct interviews.

  There were inherent risks in using a forensic psychiatrist who wore hearing aids and read lips, and to be blunt, the Bureau wasn’t going to use someone who might misinterpret what violent offenders were saying or had to continuously ask them to repeat themselves. Or what if they misinterpreted what Agee said to them? What if they misinterpreted what he was doing, a gesture, the way he crossed his legs or tilted his head? What if some paranoid schizophrenic who had just dismembered a woman and stabbed out her eyes didn’t like Agee staring at his lips?

  That was when Agee had known who he was to the FBI, who he would always be to the FBI. Someone impaired. Someone imperfect. Someone who wasn’t commanding enough. It wasn’t about his ability to evaluate serial killers and assassins. It was about appearances, about the way he might represent the Almighty Bureau. It was about being an embarrassment. Agee had said he understood Pruitt’s position and would do anything the FBI needed, of course. It was either do it their way or no way, and Agee had always wanted to get close to the fire of the FBI ever since he’d been a frail little boy playing cops and robbers, playing a
rmy and Al Capone, shooting cap guns he could barely hear.

  The Bureau could use him internally, he was told. Critical incidents, stress management, the Undercover Safeguard Unit, basically psychological services for law enforcement with an emphasis on agents coming up from deep cover. Included in the mix were the supervisory special agents, the profilers. Since the Behavioral Science Unit was still relatively new to training and development, the Bureau should be more than a little concerned about what the profilers were exposed to on a regular basis and whether it interfered with intelligence gathering and operational effectiveness. At this point in the somewhat one-sided dialogue, Agee asked Pruitt if the FBI had given much thought to paper assessments of the offenders themselves, because Agee could help with that. If he could have access to raw data such as interview transcripts, evaluations, scene and autopsy photographs, the entirety of case files, which he could assimilate and analyze, he could create a meaningful database and establish himself as the resource he ought to be.

  It wasn’t the same thing as sitting down with a murderer, but it was better than being Florence Nightingale with a bedside manner, a support system while the real work, the satisfying work that was recognized and rewarded, went to inferiors who didn’t have nearly the training or intelligence or insight he did. Inferiors like Benton Wesley.

  “Of course, you don’t need manual data analysis if you have artificial intelligence, if you have CAIN,” Agee told Carley as they’d looked at photographs in Rupe Starr’s library. “By the early nineties, statistical computations and different types of sorting and analysis were being done automatically, all of my efforts imported into Lucy’s nifty artificial-intelligence environment. For me to continue what I was doing would have been akin to cleaning cotton by hand after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. I was back to evaluating agents—that’s all I was good for in the eyes of the F-ing-BI.”

  “Imagine how I feel knowing the president of the United States is getting credit for my ideas.” Carley, as usual, had made it about her.