The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  The sharp scent of cinnamon returned, reminding Scarpetta of fire scenes, of the symphony of unexpected odors in places that had burned to the ground. Lobo touched her shoulder and said, “So, nothing about this guy’s familiar. Doesn’t bring anything to mind.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Looks like a mean bastard,” Lobo added.

  “The concierge, Ross, said there wasn’t anything about him that was cause for alarm,” Scarpetta said.

  “Yeah, that’s what he said.” Chewing gum. “Course, he also got the job in your building because he was out of work after getting fired by the last building. For leaving the desk unattended. Least he was honest about it. Course, he failed to mention he was charged with possession of a controlled substance last March.”

  “We sure he’s got no connection with this guy?” Benton meant the man on the computer screen.

  “Not sure of anything,” Lobo said. “But this guy?” Indicating the man with the tattooed neck. “He’s probably not FedEx, to state the obvious. You can buy caps like that on eBay, no problem. Or make one. What about when you were walking back from CNN?” Lobo asked Scarpetta. “You see anyone, especially anyone that for some reason caught your eye?”

  “A homeless person sleeping on a bench is all that comes to mind.”

  “Where?” Benton asked.

  “Near Columbus Circle. Right there.” Scarpetta turned around and pointed.

  She realized the emergency vehicles and the curious were gone, and halogen lights had been extinguished, the street returned to incomplete darkness. Soon traffic would resume, residents would reenter the building, and traffic cones, barriers, and yellow tape would vanish as if nothing had happened. She knew of no other city where emergencies could be contained so rapidly and the usual order of things resumed just as fast. The lessons of 9/11. Expertise at a terrible price.

  “Nobody in the area now,” Lobo said. “Nobody on any benches, but all this activity would have cleared them out. And nobody else caught your eye when you were walking home?”

  “No,” Scarpetta replied.

  “It’s just that sometimes when people leave antisocial presents, they like to hang around and watch or show up after the fact to see the damage they caused.”

  “Any other photos?” Benton asked, his breath touching Scarpetta’s ear and stirring her hair.

  Marino clicked on two more video stills, displaying them side by side, full-length shots of the man with the tattoo walking through the apartment building lobby, toward the desk, and away from it.

  “No FedEx uniform,” Scarpetta observed. “Plain dark pants, black boots, and a black coat buttoned up to his neck. And gloves, and I think Ross was right. I think I see a hint of fur, could be lined with something like rabbit fur.”

  “Still nothing ringing any bells,” Lobo said.

  “Not for me,” Benton said.

  “Or me,” Scarpetta agreed.

  “Well, whoever he is, he’s either the messenger or the sender, and the question of the night is if you know of anybody who might want to hurt you or threaten you,” Lobo said to her.

  “Specifically, I don’t.”

  “What about in general?”

  “In general it could be anyone,” she said.

  “What about any unusual fan mail, communications sent to your office in Massachusetts or to the ME’s office here? Maybe to CNN?”

  “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “Something comes to my mind,” Benton said. “The woman who called you on the show tonight. Dodie.”

  “Exactly,” Marino said.

  “Exactly?” Lobo said.

  “Dodie Hodge, possibly a former patient at McLean’s.” Marino always got the name of the hospital wrong. There was no apostrophe S, never had been. “Didn’t run her through the RTCC yet because I got interrupted by the Doc’s little incident.”

  “I don’t know her,” Scarpetta said, and the reminder of the caller who had mentioned Benton by name, referring to some article he’d never written, sent another wave of queasiness through her.

  She turned around and said to Benton, “I’m not going to ask.”

  “I can’t say anything,” he answered.

  “Allow me, since I don’t give a shit about protecting nutcases,” Marino said to her. “This particular lady checks out of McLean’s, and Benton gets a singing Christmas card from her, which is also addressed to you, and next thing you get called on live TV and a package is delivered.”

  “Is this true?” Lobo asked Benton.

  “Can’t verify any of it, and I never said she was a patient at McLean.”

  “You going to tell us she wasn’t?” Marino pushed.

  “I’m not going to tell you that, either.”

  “Okay,” Lobo said. “How ’bout this. Do we know if this patient, Dodie Hodge, is in this area, maybe in the city right now?”

  “Maybe,” Benton said.

  “Maybe?” Marino said. “Don’t you think we should be told if she is?”

  “Unless we know she’s actually done something illegal or is a threat,” Benton started to say. “You know how it works.”

  “Oh, geez. Regulations that protect everybody but innocent people,” Marino said. “Yeah, I know how it works. Whack jobs and juveniles. These days you got eight-year-old kids shooting people. But by all means protect their confidentiality.”

  “How was the singing card delivered?” Lobo asked.

  “FedEx.” Benton said that much. “I’m not saying there’s no connection. I’m not saying there is. I don’t know.”

  “We’ll check with CNN, trace the call Dodie Hodge made to the show,” Lobo said. “See where she made it from. And I need a recording of the show, and we’re going to want to find her, talk to her. She ever give you any reason to worry she might be dangerous?” he asked Benton. “Never mind. You can’t talk about her.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Good. When she blows somebody up, maybe then,” Marino said.

  “We don’t know who left the package, except that it’s a black male with a tattoo on his neck,” Benton said. “And we don’t know what’s in the package. We don’t know for a fact it’s some sort of explosive device.”

  “We know enough to make me uncomfortable,” Lobo said. “What we saw on x-ray. Some wires, button batteries, a microswitch, and what really disturbs me, a small transparent container, sort of like a test tube with some type of stopper in it. No radiation detected, but we didn’t use any other detection equipment, didn’t want to get that close.”

  “Great,” Marino said.

  “Did you smell anything?” Scarpetta asked.

  “I didn’t approach it,” Lobo said. “Those of us who went to your floor worked out of the stairwell, and the tech who entered your apartment was fully contained in the bomb suit. She wasn’t going to smell anything unless the odor was really strong.”

  “You going to deal with it tonight?” Marino asked. “So maybe we know what the hell’s in it?”

  “We don’t render things safe at night. Droiden, who’s also a Hazmat tech, is en route to Rodman’s Neck, should be there shortly for the transfer from the TCV to a day box. She’ll use detectors to determine if there’s a possibility of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear contamination, if something’s off-gassing that they can safely pick up. Like I said, no radiation alarms went off and no evidence of a white powder, but we don’t know. On x-ray we did see a vial-like shape that obviously could have something in it, which is of concern. The package will be locked up in a day box, and we’ll take care of it first thing in the morning, render it safe so we can see what we’re dealing with.”

  “You and I will be talking,” Marino said to Lobo as he got out of the car. “I’ll probably be at RTCC all night, seeing what I can find on this Dodie whack job and the tattoo and anything else that comes up.”

  “Good deal.” Lobo shut the door.

  Scarpetta watched him walk off toward a dark-blue SUV. She slip
ped her hands in her pockets for her phone, and was reminded it wasn’t her coat and she didn’t have her BlackBerry.

  “We need to make sure Lucy doesn’t hear about this on the news or see a briefing on OEM,” she said.

  The Office of Emergency Management published constant updates on the Internet, and personnel with a need to know had access to briefings on everything from missing manhole covers to homicides. If Lucy saw that the bomb squad had been dispatched to Central Park West, she would be unnecessarily worried.

  “Last I checked they were still in the air,” Marino said. “I can call her on the helicopter phone.”

  “We’ll call when we get inside.” Benton wanted to get out of the car. He wanted to get away from Marino.

  “Don’t call the helicopter phone. She doesn’t need to be distracted while she’s flying,” Scarpetta said.

  “Tell you what,” Marino decided. “Why don’t the two of you go inside and try to relax and I’ll get hold of them. I got to tell Berger what’s going on anyway.”

  Scarpetta thought she was fine until Benton opened their apartment door.

  “Dammit,” she exclaimed, taking off the ski jacket and throwing it down on a chair, suddenly so angry she was tempted to yell.

  The police had been considerate, not so much as a dirty footprint on the hardwood floor, her handbag undisturbed on the narrow table in the entryway where she’d left it before heading over to CNN. But the millefiori sculpture she’d watched a master glass artisan make on the Venetian island of Murano had been returned to the wrong spot. It wasn’t on the coffee table but on the stone-top sofa table, and she pointed this out to Benton, who didn’t say a word. He knew when to be silent, and this was one of those times.

  “There are fingerprints on it.” She held the sculpture up to the light, showing him discernible ridges and furrows, whorls and a tented arc, identifiable patterns of minutiae on the bright-colored glass rim. Evidence of a crime.

  “I’ll clean it,” he said, but she wouldn’t give it to him.

  “Someone didn’t have gloves on.” She furiously wiped the glass with the hem of her silk blouse. “It must have been the bomb tech. Bomb techs don’t wear gloves. What’s her name. Ann. She didn’t have on gloves. She picked it up and moved it.” As if the bomb tech named Ann was a burglar. “What else did they touch in here, in our apartment?”

  Benton didn’t answer because he knew better. He knew what to do and what not to do on the rare occasion Scarpetta got this upset, and she thought she smelled the package again, and then she smelled the embayment, the Laguna Veneta. The shallow salt water and the warmth of the spring sun as she and Benton climbed out of the water taxi at the landing stage in Colonna, following the fondamenta to Calle San Cipriano. Factory visits weren’t allowed, but that hadn’t stopped her, tugging Benton by the hand past a barge filled with waste glass, to the “Fornace-Entrata Libera” entrance sign and inside, asking for a demonstration in an open space with furnaces like crematoriums and dark-red-painted brick walls and high ceilings. Aldo the artisan was small with a mustache, in shorts and sneakers, from a dynasty of glassblowers, an unbroken lineage stretching back seven hundred years, his ancestors having never left the island, not allowed to venture beyond the lagoon upon penalty of death or having their hands cut off.

  Scarpetta had commissioned him on the spot to make something for them, for Benton and her, the happy couple, whatever Aldo liked. It was a special trip, a sacred one, and she wanted to be reminded of the day, of every minute. Benton later said he’d never heard her talk so much, explaining her fascination with the science of glass. Sand and soda lime transitioning into what is neither a liquid nor a solid, but no empirical data that it continues to flow after it’s been fashioned into a windowpane or a vase, she’d said in her less-than-perfect Italian. After it’s crystallized, only vibrational degrees of freedom remain active, but the form is set. A bowl still looks like a bowl a thousand years later, and prehistoric obsidian blades don’t lose their edge. Somewhat of a mystery, maybe why she loved glass. That and what it does to visible light, Scarpetta had said. What happens when color agents are added, such as iron, cobalt, boron, manganese, and selenium for green, blue, purple, amber, and red.

  Scarpetta and Benton had returned to Murano the next day to pick up their sculpture after it had been slowly annealed in the kiln and was cool and cocooned in Bubble Wrap. She’d hand-carried it, tucked it in the overhead bin all the way home from a professional trip not at all intended for pleasure, but Benton had surprised her. He’d asked her to marry him. Those days in Italy had become, at least for her, more than memorable. They were an imagined temple where her thoughts retreated when she was both happy and sad, and her temple felt trampled on and sullied as she set the glass sculpture back on the cherry coffee table, where it belonged. She felt violated, as if she’d walked in and discovered their home bur glarized, ransacked, a crime scene. She began pacing about, looking for anything else out of place or missing, checking sinks and soaps to see who washed his hands or flushed the toilets.

  “No one was in the bathrooms,” she announced.

  She opened the windows in the living room to get rid of the odor.

  “I smell the package. You must smell it,” she said.

  “I don’t smell anything.” Benton was standing by the front door with his coat on.

  “Yes,” she insisted. “You must smell it. It smells like iron. You don’t smell it?”

  “No,” he said. “Maybe you’re remembering what you smelled. The package is gone. It’s gone and we’re safe.”

  “It’s because you didn’t touch it and I did. A fungal-metallic odor,” she explained. “As if my skin came in contact with iron ions.”

  Benton reminded her very calmly that she had been wearing gloves when she held the package that might be a bomb.

  “But it would have touched my bare flesh between my gloves and the cuffs of my coat when I was holding it.” She walked over to him.

  The package had left a bouquet on her wrists, an evil perfume, lipid peroxides from the oils on the skin, from sweat, oxidized by enzymes causing corrosion, decomposition. Like blood, she explained. The odor smelled like blood.

  “The way blood smells when it’s smeared over the skin,” she said, and she held up her wrists and Benton sniffed them.

  He said, “I don’t smell anything.”

  “Some petroleum-based something, some chemical, I don’t know what. I know I smell rust.” She couldn’t stop talking about it. “There’s something in that box that’s bad, very bad. I’m glad you didn’t touch it.”

  In the kitchen, she washed her hands, her wrists, her forearms with dish detergent and water, as if scrubbing for surgery, as if deconning. She used Murphy Oil Soap on the coffee table where the package had been. She fussed and fumed while Benton silently stood by, watching her, trying not to interfere with her venting, trying to be understanding and rational, and his demeanor only made her more annoyed, more resentful.

  “You could at least react to something,” she said. “Or maybe you don’t care.”

  “I care very much.” He took off his coat. “It’s not fair to say I don’t. I realize how awful this is.”

  “I can’t tell you care. I never can. I’ve never been able to tell.” As if it was Benton who had left her the package that might be a bomb.

  “Would it make you feel better if I lost my temper?” His somber face looked at her.

  “I’m taking a shower.”

  She angrily undressed as she stalked off down the hall to the master bedroom and stuffed her clothes into a dry-cleaning bag. She dropped her underwear into a hamper. She got into the shower, turning on the water as hot as she could stand it, and the steam drove the odor deeper up her nose, into her sinuses, the odor of the package, of fire and brimstone, and the heat and her senses started another slide show. Philadelphia and darkness and hell burning, ladders stretching into the night sky, the sounds of saws cutting holes in the roof and water gushin
g out of hoses, fifteen hundred gallons a minute, a master stream from the top of the truck for a big fire like that.

  Water arched from trucks around the block, and the charred carcass of a car was twisted like an ice cube tray, the tires burned off. Melted aluminum and glass, and beads of copper, scrubbing on walls and deflection of steel, alligatored wood around broken windows, and heavy black smoke. A utility pole looked like a burned match. They said it was a rolling fire, the sort that fools firefighters, not too hot and then so hot it boils your hat. Wading through filthy water, a rainbow of gasoline floating on top of it, flashlights probing the pitch-dark, dripping sounds, water dripping from square ax holes in the tar-paper roof. The thick air smelled like acrid scorched marshmallows, sweet and sharp and sick, as they led her to him, to what was left. Much later they said he was dead when it started, lured there and shot.

  Scarpetta turned off the water and stood in the steam, breathing in clouds of it through her nose and mouth. She couldn’t see through the glass door, it was so fogged up, but shifting light was Benton walking in. She wasn’t ready to talk to him yet.

  “I brought you a drink,” he said.

  The light shifted again, Benton moving past the shower. She heard him pull out the vanity chair, sitting.

  “Marino called.”

  Scarpetta opened the door and reached out for the towel hanging next to it, pulling it inside the shower. “Please shut the bathroom door so it doesn’t get cold in here,” she said.

  “Lucy and Jaime are just a few minutes out from White Plains.” Benton got up and shut the door. He sat back down.

  “They still haven’t landed? What the hell is going on?”

  “They got such a late start because of the weather. Just a lot of delays because of weather. He talked to Lucy on the helicopter phone. They’re fine.”

  “I told him not to do that, goddamn it. She doesn’t need to be talking on the damn phone when she’s flying.”

  “He said he talked to her just for a minute. He didn’t tell her what’s happened. He’ll fill her in when they’re on the ground. I’m sure she’ll call you. Don’t worry. They’re fine.” Benton’s face looking at her through steam.