The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I would hope not, and I’m not saying that’s what happened. I’m not even saying this person’s ever been to McLean, been a patient there.”

  He didn’t need to say it. Scarpetta had no doubt that Dodie Hodge had been a patient at McLean.

  “I’m also not saying she had anything to do with what was left at our building,” he added.

  He didn’t need to say that, either. She knew Benton feared his former patient had left the package.

  “What I will say is others might suspect she did, no matter what we discover to the contrary.” Benton spoke softly, the intimacy of his tone incongruous with the conversation.

  “Marino suspects it and in fact is probably convinced of it, and you’re not convinced. That’s what you’re saying.” Scarpetta didn’t believe it.

  She believed Benton was convinced about this former patient named Dodie who had brazenly called CNN. Benton was convinced she was dangerous.

  “Marino might be right. And he might not be,” Benton said. “While someone like this particular former patient might be bad news and potentially harmful, it would be even more harmful if the package was sent by someone else and everyone has quit looking because they think they know the answer. And what if they don’t? Then what happens? What next? Maybe someone really gets hurt next time.”

  “We don’t know what the package is. It could be nothing. You’re getting ahead of yourself.”

  “It’s something. I can already promise you that,” he said. “Unless you starred in a Batman movie and didn’t tell me, you’re not the chief medical examiner of Gotham City. I don’t like the tone of that. Not exactly sure why it bothers me as much as it does.”

  “Because it’s snide. It’s hostile.”

  “Maybe. The handwriting interests me. Your description that it was so precise and stylized it looked like a font.”

  “Whoever wrote the address has a steady hand, maybe an artistic hand,” Scarpetta said, and she sensed he was thinking about something else.

  He knew something about Dodie Hodge that was causing him to focus on the handwriting.

  “You’re sure it wasn’t generated by a laser printer,” Benton said.

  “I had quite a long time to look at it on the elevator. Black ink, ballpoint. There was sufficient variation in the letter formation to make it obvious the address was hand-printed,” she said.

  “Hopefully there will still be something to look at when we get to Rodman’s Neck. The airbill might be our best evidence.”

  “If we’re lucky,” she said.

  Luck would be a big part of it. Most likely the bomb squad would foil any possible circuitry inside the FedEx box by blasting it with a PAN disrupter, more popularly known as a water cannon, which fires three to four ounces of water, propelled by a modified twelve-gauge shotgun round. The primary target would be the alleged explosive device’s power source—the small batteries that showed up on x-ray. Scarpetta could only hope that the batteries weren’t directly behind the hand-printed address on the airbill. If they were, there would be nothing left but soggy pulp to look at later this morning.

  “We can have a general conversation,” Benton then said, sitting up a little, rearranging pillows. “You’re familiar with the borderline personality. An individual who has breaks or splits in ego boundaries and, given enough stress, can act out aggressively, violently. Aggression is about competing. Competing for the male, for the female, competing for the person most fit for breeding. Competing for resources, such as food and shelter. Competing for power, because without a hierarchy there can’t be social order. In other words, aggression occurs when it’s profitable.”

  Scarpetta thought of Carley Crispin. She thought about the missing BlackBerry. She’d been thinking about her BlackBerry for hours. Anxiety was a tightness around her heart, no matter what she was doing; even while making love she felt fear. She felt anger. She was extremely upset with herself and didn’t know how Lucy would handle the truth. Scarpetta had been stupid. How could she be so stupid?

  “Unfortunately, these basic primitive drives that might make sense in terms of the survival of a species can become malignant and nonadaptive, can get acted out in grossly inappropriate and unprofitable ways,” Benton was saying. “Because when all is said and done, an aggressive act, such as harassing or threatening a prominent person like you, is unprofitable for the initiator. The result will be punishment, a forfeiture of all those things worth competing for. Whether it’s commitment to a psychiatric facility or imprisonment.”

  “So, I’m to conclude that this woman who called me on CNN tonight has a borderline personality disorder, can become violent, given sufficient stress, and is competing with me for the male, which would be you,” Scarpetta said.

  “She called you to harass me, and it worked,” he said. “She wants my attention. The borderline personality thrives on negative reinforcement, on being the eye of the storm. You add some other unfortunate personality disorders to the mix, and you go from the eye of the storm to maybe the perfect storm.”

  “Transference. All those women patients of yours don’t stand a chance. They want what I’ve got right now.”

  She wanted it again. She wanted his attention and didn’t want to talk anymore about work, about problems, about human beings who were horrors. She wanted to be close to him, to feel that nothing was off-limits, and her yearning for closeness was insatiable because she couldn’t have what she wanted. She’d never had what she wanted with Benton, and that was why she still wanted him, wanted him palpably. It was why she’d wanted him to begin with, felt drawn to him, felt an intense desire for him the first time they’d met. She felt the same way now, twenty years later, a desperate attraction that fulfilled her and left her empty, and sex with him was like that, a cycle of taking and giving and filling and emptying and then rearming the mechanism so they could go back for more.

  “I do love you, you know,” she said into his mouth. “Even when I’m angry.”

  “You’ll always be angry. I hope you’ll always love me.”

  “I want to understand.” She didn’t and probably couldn’t.

  When she was reminded, she couldn’t understand the choices he’d made, that he could have left her so abruptly, so finally, and never checked on her. She wouldn’t have done what he did, but she wasn’t going to bring that up again.

  “I know I’ll always love you.” She kissed him and got on top of him.

  They rearranged themselves, knew intuitively how to move, the days long past when they needed to consciously calculate which was whose best side or the limits before fatigue and discomfort set in. Scarpetta had heard every permutation of the expected jokes about her skills in anatomy and what a bonus that must be in bed, which was ridiculous, not even that, because she didn’t find it amusing. Her patients were with rare exception dead, and their response to her touch therefore moot and not helpful. That didn’t mean the morgue hadn’t taught her something vital, because certainly it had. It had conditioned her to refine her senses, to see, smell, and feel the most subtle nuances in people who could no longer speak, unwilling people who needed her but could give nothing back. The morgue had empowered her with strong, capable hands and strong cravings. She wanted warmth and touch. She wanted sex.

  Afterward, Benton fell asleep, a deep sleep. He didn’t stir when she got out of bed, her mind moving rapidly again, anxieties and resentments swarming back again. It was a few minutes past three a.m. She faced a long day that would inform her as it unfolded, one of those days that was what she called “unscripted.” The range at Rodman’s Neck and her possible bomb, and perhaps the labs, and maybe the office to dictate autopsy reports and catch up on phone calls and paperwork. She wasn’t scheduled to do autopsies, but that could always change depending on who was out and what came in. What to do about her BlackBerry. Maybe Lucy had answered her. What to do about her niece. She’d been acting so odd of late, so easily irritated, so impatient, and then what she’d done about the smartphones, sw
apping them out and not asking permission, as if that was generous and considerate. You should go back to bed and get some rest. Fatigue and everything seems worse, Scarpetta told herself. Going back to sleep wasn’t a possibility right now. She had things to take care of, needed to deal with Lucy, get it over with. Tell her what you did. Tell her how stupid her Aunt Kay is.

  Lucy probably was the most technically gifted person Scarpetta had ever known, curious about the way everything worked from the day she was born, putting this and that together and taking them apart, always confident she could improve the functioning of whatever it was. Such a proclivity plus a massive insecurity plus an overriding need for power and control and the result was a Lucy, a wizard who could easily destroy just as much as she fixed, depending on her motive and mostly on her mood. Swapping out phones without permission had not been an appropriate act, and Scarpetta still didn’t understand why her niece suddenly had done it. In the past she would have asked. She wouldn’t have become the self-appointed system administrator for everyone without permission, without so much as a warning, and she was going to be incensed when she learned the truth about Scarpetta’s folly, her foolishness. Lucy would say it was like not looking before you cross the street, like walking into the tail rotor.

  Scarpetta dreaded the lecture she was certain to get when she confessed to disabling the password on her BlackBerry two days after receiving it, her frustration had been that great. You shouldn’t have, you absolutely shouldn’t have—the thought was caught in a loop in her mind. But every time she’d pulled the device out of its holster she’d had to unlock it. If she didn’t use it for ten minutes, it was locked again. Then the last straw, scaring the hell out of herself when her typos had resulted in her entering the password incorrectly six times in a row. Eight failed attempts—it was clearly written in Lucy’s instructions—and the BlackBerry rather much self-destructed, everything in it eradicated like those tape recordings in Mission: Impossible.

  When Scarpetta had e-mailed Lucy that the BlackBerry had been “misplaced,” she’d neglected to mention the detail about the password. If someone had her smartphone, it would be a very bad thing, and Scarpetta was deeply afraid of that, and she was afraid of Lucy, and most of all she was afraid of herself. When did you start becoming so careless? You carried a bomb into your apartment and you disabled the password on your smartphone. What the hell’s the matter with you? Do something. Fix something. Take care of things. Don’t just fret.

  She needed to eat, that was part of the problem, her stomach sour from having nothing in it. If she ate something, she’d feel better. She needed to do something with her hands, engage them in an act that was healing, an act besides sex. Preparing food was restorative and soothing. Making one of her favorite dishes, paying attention to details, helped return order and normalcy. It was either cook or clean, and she’d done enough cleaning, could still catch the scent of Murphy Oil Soap as she walked through the living room and into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, scanning for inspiration. A frittata, an omelet, she wasn’t hungry for eggs or bread or pasta. Something light and healthy, and with olive oil and fresh herbs, like an Insalata Caprese. That would be good. It was a summer dish, to be served only when tomatoes were in season, preferably handpicked from Scarpetta’s own garden. But in cities like Boston and New York, wherever there was a Whole Foods or gourmet markets, she could find heirloom tomatoes all year round, rich Black Krims, lush Brandywines, succulent Caspian Pinks, mellow Golden Eggs, sweetly acidic Green Zebras.

  She selected a few from a basket on the counter and placed them on a cutting board, quartering them into wedges. She warmed fresh buffalo mozzarella to room temperature by enclosing it in a zip-lock bag and submerging it in hot water for several minutes. Arranging the tomato and the cheese in a circular pattern on a plate, she added leaves of fresh basil and a generous dribble of cold-pressed unfiltered olive oil, finishing with a sprinkle of coarse sea salt. She carried her snack to the adjoining dining room, with its view due west of lighted apartment high-rises and the Hudson, and the distant air traffic in New Jersey.

  She took a bite of salad as she opened the browser on her MacBook. Time to deal with Lucy. She’d probably answered her by now. May as well face the music and deal with the missing BlackBerry. It wasn’t a trivial worry, nothing trifling about it, and had been on Scarpetta’s mind since she’d first noticed it gone, and now it was an obsession. For hours she’d been trying to recall what was on it, trying to imagine what someone might have access to, while a part of her wished she could return to a past when her biggest concern was snooping, someone flipping through a Rolodex or riffling through the call sheets, autopsy protocols, and photographs that routinely were on her desk. In the old days, her answer to most potential indiscretions and leaks was locks. Highly sensitive records went into locked file cabinets, and if there was something on her desk that she didn’t want others to see, she locked her office door while she was out. Plain and simple. Just good common sense. All manageable. Just hide the key.

  When she was the chief medical examiner of Virginia and her office got its first computer, that, too, was manageable and she’d felt no great fear of the unknown, felt she could handle the bad with the good. Of course, there were glitches in security, but all was fixable and preventable. Cell phones hadn’t been a significant problem back then, not at first, when her distrust of them had more to do with the potential use of scanners for eavesdropping and, more mundanely, people developing the uncivilized and reckless habit of having conversations that could be overheard. Those dangers didn’t begin to compare to ones that existed today. There was no adequate description for what she found herself fretting about regularly. Modern technology no longer seemed like her best friend. It bit her often. This time it may have bitten her badly.

  Scarpetta’s BlackBerry was a microcosm of her personal and professional life, containing phone numbers and e-mail addresses of contacts who would be incensed or compromised if an ill-intended individual got hold of their private information. She was most protective of the families, of those left behind in the wake of a tragic death. In a way, these survivors became her patients, too, depending on her for information, calling her about a detail they suddenly remembered, a question, a theory, simply needing to talk, often at anniversaries or at this time of year, the holidays. The confidences Scarpetta shared with the families and loved ones of decedents were sacred, the most sacred aspect of her work.

  How unspeakably awful if the wrong person, a person who worked for a cable news network, for example, came across some of these names, many of them associated with highly publicized cases, a name like Grace Darien. She was the last person Scarpetta had talked to, at about seven-fifteen p.m., after getting off the conference call with Berger, hurrying to get ready for CNN. Mrs. Darien had called Scarpetta’s BlackBerry, near hysteria because the press release that identified Toni Darien by name also had stated she’d been sexually assaulted and beaten to death. Mrs. Darien had been confused and panicked, had assumed a blow to the head was different from being beaten to death, and nothing Scarpetta could tell her had been reassuring. Scarpetta hadn’t been dishonest. She hadn’t been misleading. It wasn’t her press release, wasn’t her wording, and as difficult as it was, Mrs. Darien needed to understand why Scarpetta couldn’t go into any more detail than she already had. She was so sorry, but she simply couldn’t discuss the case further.

  “Remember what I said?” Scarpetta had been changing her clothes while she talked to her. “Confidentiality is critical, because some details are known only by the killer, the medical examiner, and the police. That’s why I can’t tell you more at this time.”

  Here she was, the torchbearer for discretion and ethical conduct, and for all she knew, someone had found Grace Darien’s information in a BlackBerry that wasn’t password-protected and had contacted the distraught woman. Scarpetta couldn’t stop thinking about what Carley had blasted all over the news, the detail about the yellow cab and its allege
dly connecting Toni Darien to Hannah Starr, and the false information about Hannah’s decomposing head hair being found. Of course a journalist, especially a cold-blooded, desperate one, would want to talk to the Grace Dariens of the world, and the list of possible egregious violations caused by Scarpetta’s missing smartphone was getting longer as she remembered more. She continued conjuring up names of contacts she’d been keeping since the beginning of her career, first on paper, then eventually in electronic format, exported from cell phone to cell phone as she upgraded, finally ending up in the device Lucy had bought.

  Hundreds of names were in Scarpetta’s contacts subfolder, she guessed, many of them people who might never trust her again if someone like Carley Crispin called them on their cell phones, on their direct lines, or at home. Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly, Dr. Edison, countless powerful officials here and abroad, in addition to Scarpetta’s extensive network of forensic colleagues and physicians and prosecutors and defense attorneys, and her family, friends, doctors, dentist, hairstylist, personal trainer, housekeeper. Places she shopped. What she ordered on Amazon, including books she read. Restaurants. Her accountant. Her private banker. The list got longer the more she thought about it, longer and more troubling. Saved voicemails that were visualized on the screen and could be played without entering a password. Documents and PowerPoint presentations that included graphic images she’d downloaded from e-mails—including Toni Darien’s scene photographs. The one Carley had shown on the air could have come from Scarpetta’s phone, and then her anxieties turned to IM, instant messaging, all those applications that allowed and prompted constant contact.

  Scarpetta didn’t believe in IM, considered such technologies a compulsion, not an improvement, possibly one of the most unfortunate and foolhardy innovations in history, people typing on tiny touch screens and keypads while they should be paying attention to rather important activities such as driving, crossing a busy street, operating dangerous machinery, such as aircraft or trains, or sitting in a classroom, a lecture hall, attending Grand Rounds or the theater or a concert, or paying attention to whoever was across from them in a restaurant or next to them in bed. Not long ago, she caught a medical student on rotation in the New York office instant messaging during an autopsy, pushing tiny keys with latex-sheathed thumbs. She’d kicked him out of the morgue, expelled him from her tutelage, and encouraged Dr. Edison to ban all electronic devices from any area beyond the anteroom, but that was never going to happen. It was too late for that, would be turning back the hands on the clock, and no one would comply.