The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “If I talk to the Doc before you do? Okay if I tell her about Dodie?”

  The idea of Marino talking to Scarpetta before Benton did was more than a little irritating.

  Benton said, “If for some reason you talk to her before I do, it would be much appreciated if you’d tell her I’ve been trying to reach her.”

  “I hear you, and I’m heading out,” Marino said. “I’m kind of surprised she’s still not home. I could get a couple of marked units to be on the lookout.”

  “I wouldn’t at this point unless you want it all over the news. Remember who she’s with. She left with Carley Crispin. Cops roll up on the two of them, what do you suppose the lead will be on Carley’s show tomorrow night?”

  “My guess is The Taxi Terror in Manhattan.”

  “You making up headlines now?” Benton said.

  “Not me. They’re already saying it. Talking about the yellow-cab connection. That’s probably all we’ll be hearing on the news this holiday. Maybe the Doc and Carley stopped for coffee or something.”

  “I can’t imagine why Kay would want to have coffee with her after what she just did.”

  “Let me know if you need anything else.” Marino hung up.

  Benton tried Scarpetta again and the call went straight to voicemail. Maybe Alex was right and she’d forgotten to turn her phone back on and no one had reminded her, or maybe the battery was dead. It wasn’t like her, no matter the explanation. She must be preoccupied. It wasn’t her habit to be out of communication when she was en route and knew he was expecting her within a certain time frame. Alex wasn’t answering, either. Benton began studying the recording he’d made of Scarpetta’s appearance on The Crispin Report an hour earlier while he opened a video file on the computer notebook in his lap, this one a recording he’d made at McLean Hospital in mid-November.

  “. . . The other morning I was reading an article by Dr. Benton Wesley, who is Kay’s highly respected forensic psychologist husband . . .” Dodie’s breathy voice, disembodied, sounding from the flat-screen TV.

  Benton fast-forwarded the video file on his notebook as he watched Scarpetta on the TV over the nonworking fireplace inside their prewar apartment on Central Park West. She looked stunning, her fine-featured face youthful for her age, her blond hair casual, brushing the collar of a fitted skirt suit, navy with a hint of plum. It was incongruous and disconcerting to look at her, then at the recording of Dodie Hodge playing on the computer in his lap.

  “. . . You can relate a teeny-weeny bit, can’t you? You’re almost in my same boat, aren’t you, Benton?” A hefty homely woman frumpily dressed, her graying hair in a bun, the Book of Magick in its black cover with yellow stars in front of her. “Of course it’s not like having a movie star in the family, but you do have Kay. I hope you’ll tell her I never miss her when she’s on CNN. Why don’t they have you on with her instead of that stuffed shirt Warner Agee, those hearing aids of his like flesh-colored leeches behind his ears?”

  “You seem to resent him.” Because Dodie had made similar comments before.

  Benton watched the recorded image of himself, sitting stiffly, inscrutably, in a proper dark suit and tie. He was tense and Dodie sensed it. She was enjoying his discomfort and seemed to intuit that the subject of Agee might make Benton squirm.

  “He had his chance.” Dodie smiled but her eyes were flat.

  “What chance was that?”

  “We have people in common, and he should have been honored . . . ”

  Benton hadn’t given the comment much thought at the time, was too consumed by his desire to get the hell out of the interview room. Now a singing card had been sent and Dodie had called CNN, and he wondered what she’d been implying by her comment about Agee. Who could Benton and Dodie possibly have in common unless it was Warner Agee, and why would she know him? Unless she didn’t. Maybe her Detroit lawyer did. The absurd request for Agee to be the expert who evaluated her at McLean was presented by her counsel, someone named Lafourche, slow talking, sounded Cajun, and seemed to have an agenda. Benton had never met him and knew nothing about him, but they’d talked a number of times on the phone when Lafourche would page Benton, track him down to check on how “our girl” was doing, making jokes and cracks about a client “who can tell tales as tall as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ ”

  “. . . It’s a pity you’re so banal and rude. . . .” Dodie’s voice on the television over the fireplace.

  The camera on Scarpetta, absently touching her earpiece as she listened, then returning her hands to the table, folding them placidly. A gesture you’d have to know her as well as Benton did to recognize. She was working hard to control herself. He should have warned her. The hell with HIPAA regulations and confidentiality. He resisted the impulse to rush out into the freezing December night to find his wife. He watched and listened and felt how much he loved her.

  The lights of Columbus Circle pushed back the darkness of Central Park, and near the gateway leading into it, the Maine Monument’s fountain and its gilded sculpture of Columbia Triumphant were deserted.

  The red booths of the holiday market were closed, their crowds this season dramatically diminished, and there wasn’t a soul milling around the news kiosk, not even the usual cops, just an old man who looked homeless, wrapped in layers, sleeping on a wooden bench. Taxis speeding by were minus advertising in their lighted tops, and gone were long lines of limousines outside apartment buildings and hotels. Everywhere Scarpetta looked she found symbols and signs of dismal times, of the worst times she could recall. She had grown up poor in a marginal part of Miami, but that had felt different because it wasn’t everybody. It was just them, the Scarpettas, of struggling Italian immigrant stock.

  “Aren’t you the lucky one to live right here?” Carley peeked over the turned-up collar of her coat as she and Scarpetta followed the sidewalk in the uneven glow of lamplight. “Someone pays you well. Or maybe it’s Lucy’s apartment. She’d be perfect to have on my show to talk about forensic computer investigations. She still good friends with Jaime Berger? I saw them one night at the Monkey Bar. Don’t know if they mentioned it. Jaime refuses to be on, and I’m not going to ask again. It really isn’t fair. It wasn’t anything I did.”

  Carley didn’t seem to have a glimmer that there would be no future shows, at least not with her as the host. Or maybe she was fishing because she suspected what was going on behind the scenes at CNN. It nagged at Scarpetta that when she and Alex had walked out of the makeup room, they’d discovered Carley waiting in the hallway not two feet from the door. Ostensibly, she was just that second leaving and she and Scarpetta should walk together, which hadn’t made any sense. Carley didn’t live nearby, but in Stamford, Connecticut. She didn’t walk or take the train or a cab, always used a car service supplied by the network.

  “After she was on American Morning last year. I don’t know if you saw it.” Carley stepped around dirty patches of ice. “That animal abuse case she prosecuted, the pet shop chain. CNN had her on to talk about it, really as a favor. And she got annoyed because she got asked hard questions. So, guess who gets punished? Me. If you asked her, she’d probably go on. I bet you could talk anybody into it you wanted, with the connections you have.”

  “Why don’t we get you a cab,” Scarpetta said. “You’re going out of your way, and I’m fine to walk alone. It’s just up ahead.”

  She wanted to call Benton so he’d know why she was taking so long and wouldn’t worry, but she didn’t have her BlackBerry. She must have left it in the apartment, had probably set it down by the sink in the master bath, and it had occurred to her several times now to borrow Carley’s phone. But that would mean using it to call a private and unpublished number, and if Scarpetta knew nothing else after tonight, Carley wasn’t to be trusted.

  “I’m glad Lucy didn’t have her fortune invested with Madoff, not that he’s the only crook,” Carley then said.

  A train clattered underfoot and warm air billowed up from a grate. Scarpetta wa
sn’t going to take the bait. Carley was fishing.

  “I didn’t get out of the market when I should have, waited until the Dow fell below eight thousand,” Carley continued. “Here I am, sometimes at the same events as Suze Orman, and did I ask her for advice? How much did Lucy lose?”

  As if Scarpetta would tell her, assuming she knew.

  “I know she made a fortune in computers and investments, always on the Forbes list, in the top hundred. Except now,” Carley continued. “I noticed she’s not listed anymore. Wasn’t she once, well, not that long ago, worth in the billions because of high-speed technologies and all sorts of software she’s been inventing since she was practically in diapers? Plus, I’m sure she’s been getting good financial advice. Or she was.”

  “I don’t look at Forbes lists,” Scarpetta said, and she didn’t know the answer. Lucy had never been all that forthcoming about her finances, and Scarpetta didn’t ask. “I don’t talk about my family,” she added.

  “There certainly are a lot of things you don’t talk about.”

  “And we’re here.” They had reached Scarpetta’s building. “You take care of yourself, Carley. Have a happy holiday and a happy new year.”

  “Business is business, right? All’s fair. Don’t forget we’re friends.” Carley hugged her. She’d never done that before.

  Scarpetta entered the polished-marble lobby of her building, digging in her coat pockets for her keys, seeming to remember that’s where her BlackBerry had been last. Was she certain? She couldn’t remember, tried to reconstruct what she’d done tonight. Had she used her phone at all, maybe taken it out at CNN and left it somewhere? No. She was sure she hadn’t.

  “You were good on TV.” The concierge, young and recently hired, and sharp in his neat blue uniform, smiled at her. “Carley Crispin put you through it, huh? If it had been me, I would have gotten mad. Something just came for you.” He reached down behind the desk. Scarpetta remembered his name was Ross.

  “Just came?” she said. “At this hour?” Then she remembered. Alex was sending over a proposal.

  “The city that never sleeps.” Ross handed her a FedEx box.

  She boarded the elevator and pressed the button for the twentieth floor, glancing at the airbill, looking at it more closely. She searched for confirmation that the package was from Alex, from CNN, but there was no return address and her own address was unusual:

  DR. KAY SCARPETTA

  CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER of GOTHAM CITY

  1111 CENTRAL PARK WEST USA 10023

  Referring to her as the chief medical examiner of Gotham City was sarcastic. It was kooky. The handwriting was so precise it looked like a font, almost looked computer-generated, but she could tell it wasn’t, and she sensed a mocking intelligence guiding the hand that had held the pen. She wondered how the person knew that she and Benton had an apartment in this building. Their addresses and phone numbers were unpublished and unlisted, and she realized with growing alarm that the sender’s copy was still attached to the airbill. The package hadn’t been sent by FedEx. Dear God, don’t let this be a bomb.

  The elevator was old, with ornate brass doors and an inlaid wood ceiling, and it climbed excruciatingly slowly, and she imagined a muffled explosion and hurtling down the dark shaft, crashing at the bottom. She smelled a foul tarry chemical odor, like a petroleum-based accelerant, sweet but disgusting. She focused on it, unsure what it was or if it was real. Diesel fuel. Diphorone Pentaperoxide and acetone peroxide and C4 and nitroglycerine. Odors and dangers she knew from working fires and explosions, from teaching at post-blast schools in the late nineties when Lucy was a special agent with ATF, when Scarpetta and Benton were members of its International Response Team. Before Benton was dead, then alive again.

  Silver hair, charred flesh and bone, his Breitling watch in a soup of sooty water at that fire scene in Philadelphia where she’d felt her world end. What she’d thought were Benton’s remains. His personal effects. Didn’t just suspect it, was certain he was dead because she was supposed to be certain. The dirty, foul odor of arson and accelerants. Emptiness yawning before her, impenetrable and forever, nothing left but isolation and pain. She feared nothingness because she knew what it felt like. Year after year of nonexistence, her brain going strong but not her heart. How to describe it? Benton still asked her, but not often. He’d been hiding from the Chandonne cartel, from organized criminals, murderous scum, and of course had been protecting her, too. If he was in danger, she was in danger. As if she was in less danger, somehow, with him not around. Not that she was asked. Better if everyone believed he was dead. The Feds said. Please, God, don’t let this be a bomb. A petroleum, asphalt smell. The offensive fuel odor of coal tar, of naphthenic acid, of napalm. Her eyes watered. She was nauseated.

  The brass doors opened and she jostled the package as little as possible. Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t leave the FedEx box in the elevator. She couldn’t set it down, couldn’t get rid of it without placing other residents or building employees at risk. Her fingers fumbled nervously with keys as her heart raced and she hypersalivated, could barely catch her breath. Metal against metal. Friction, static electricity, could set it off. Breathe deeply, slowly, and stay calm. Unlocking the apartment door with a startlingly loud click. Please, God, don’t let this be what I think.

  “Benton?”

  She stepped inside, leaving the door open wide.

  “Hello? Benton?”

  She carefully set the FedEx box on the middle of the coffee table in their empty living room of fine art and mission-style furniture. She imagined expansive windows exploding, a massive glass bomb blowing up and raining razor-sharp shards down twenty stories. She picked up an art-glass sculpture, an undulating bowl in vibrant colors, moved it off the coffee table, set it on the rug, making sure there was a clear path from the doorway to the FedEx box.

  “Benton, where are you?”

  A stack of paperwork was in his usual Morris recliner by windows overlooking the lights of the Upper West Side and the Hudson. In the distance, planes looked like UFOs above the blazing runways of Teterboro. Lucy was probably flying her helicopter, heading to New York, to Westchester County. Scarpetta didn’t like it when Lucy flew after dark. If she lost her engine she could auto-rotate, but how did she see where to set down? What if she lost her engine over miles of trees?

  “Benton!”

  Scarpetta headed down the hallway toward the master bedroom. She took deep breaths and swallowed repeatedly, trying to slow her heart and settle her gut. She heard a toilet flush.

  “Christ, what the hell’s going on with your phone?” Benton’s voice was followed by him appearing in the bedroom doorway. “Have you gotten any of my messages? Kay? What the hell’s the matter?”

  “Don’t come any closer,” she said.

  He was still in his suit, simple dark-blue flannel that didn’t suggest money because he never wore anything expensive on prison wards or in forensic units, was careful what he telegraphed to prisoners and psychiatric patients. He had taken off his tie and his shoes, and his white shirt was open at the neck and untucked. His silver hair looked the way it did when he’d been running his fingers through it.

  “What’s happened?” he said, not moving from the doorway. “Something’s happened. What?”

  “Get your shoes and coat,” Scarpetta said, clearing her throat. “Don’t come close. I don’t know what I’ve got on me.” Desperate to scrub her hands with a solution of bleach, to decon, to take a long, hot shower and remove layers of makeup and shampoo her hair.

  “What’s happened? Did you run into someone? Did something happen? I’ve been trying to get hold of you.” Benton was a statue in the doorway, his face pale, his eyes looking past her, toward the front door, as if he feared someone had come in with her.

  “We need to leave.” Her television makeup felt sticky, cloying, like glue. She smelled the smell, thought she did. Tar, sulfur, its molecules trapped in her makeup, in her hairspray, trapped in the
back of her nose. The smell of fire and brimstone, of hell.

  “The caller from Detroit? I tried to get hold of you,” Benton said. “What’s going on? Did someone do something?”

  She took off her coat, her gloves and dropped them in the hallway, kicking them out of the way, and said, “We need to leave. Now. A suspicious package. It’s in the living room. Get warm coats for both of us.” Don’t be sick. Don’t throw up.

  He disappeared inside the bedroom and she heard him go into his closet, hangers scraping along the rod. He reappeared carrying a pair of hiking boots, a wool coat, and a ski jacket he hadn’t worn in so long, it still had a lift ticket attached to the zipper. He handed her the jacket and they hurried down the hallway. Benton’s face was hard as he looked at the wide-open door, as he looked at the FedEx box in the living room, at the art glass bowl on the Oriental rug. Open the windows to minimize pressure and damage if there’s an explosion. No, you can’t. Do not go into the living room. Do not go near the coffee table. Do not panic. Evacuate the apartment, close the door, and keep others from entering. Do not make noise. Do not create shock waves. She shut the door softly, leaving it unlocked so the police could get in. There were two other apartments on this floor.

  “You ask the desk how it got here?” Benton said. “I’ve been up here all night. They didn’t call to say anything was delivered.”

  “I didn’t notice certain details until I was already in the elevator. No, I didn’t ask. It has a strange odor.” She put on his ski jacket and it engulfed her, was almost to her knees. Aspen. When were they there last?

  “What sort of odor?”

  “A sweet, tarry, rotten-egg sort of smell. I don’t know. I might have imagined it. And the airbill, the way it was addressed. I shouldn’t have carried it upstairs. Should have left it on the desk and made Ross get out of the way, kept everybody out of the way until the police got here. God, I’m stupid.”