The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  She wasn’t seeing any evidence that anyone had looked at what was on her BlackBerry, but she couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t possible for her to tell if someone had looked at PowerPoint presentations or scene photographs or any files she’d already perused. But she had no reason to believe Warner Agee had gotten around to looking at what was on her BlackBerry, and that was perplexing. Certainly he would have been curious about phone messages left by the mother of the murdered jogger. What rich information for Carley to leak on her show. Why hadn’t he? If Carley had gotten here around eleven-forty-five, he wasn’t dead by then, assuming he was the man on the GW Bridge some two and a half hours later. Depression and not caring anymore, she thought. Maybe that was it.

  Marino was finished with the key cards, and she got another pair of gloves from him, their used ones a tidy pile on the floor, like magnolia petals. She took the key that had been on the bathroom vanity and tried it on the room door. The light flashed yellow.

  “Nope,” she said, and she tried the other key that had been on the coffee table near her BlackBerry, and the light flashed green and the lock made a promising click. “The new one,” she said. “Carley left my BlackBerry and a new key for him and must have kept a key for herself.”

  “The only thing I can think of is he wasn’t here,” Marino said, using a Sharpie to label an evidence bag he neatly arranged with others inside his field case.

  Scarpetta was reminded of the old days when he used to deposit evidence, a victim’s personal effects, police equipment, in whatever was handy, usually walking out of a crime scene with multiple brown-paper grocery bags or recycled boxes that he would slam shut in the Bermuda Triangle of a trunk that might also have fishing gear, a bowling ball, and a case of beer in it. Somehow he’d managed to never lose or contaminate anything that mattered, and she could recall but a few instances when his lack of discipline posed so much as a minor setback in a case. Mostly he’d always been a threat to himself and anyone who depended on him.

  “She shows up and stops by the desk because she doesn’t have much choice. She needs to make sure she has a key that works, and she wants to change the reservation, then upstairs she lets herself in and finds him gone.” Marino was trying to figure out what Carley had done when she’d gotten here last night. “Unless she decided to use the john while she was here, no reason for her to notice what was in there. All his hair, his hearing aids. Me, personally? I don’t think she saw all that or him. I think she left your phone and a new key and then snuck out, taking the stairs, wanting to draw as little attention to herself as possible because she was up to no good.”

  “So maybe he was out for a while, wandering around.” Scarpetta’s mind was on Agee. “Thinking about it. Thinking about what he intended to do. Assuming he did something tragic.”

  Marino snapped shut his field case as his phone rang. Looking at the display, he handed it to Scarpetta. It was the office.

  “Nothing in his pockets, which were inside out,” Dennis said. “From the police already going through them, looking for something that might ID him, contraband, a weapon, whatever. They put a few things in a bag, some loose change and what looks like a really small remote control. Maybe something that goes to a boom box or satellite radio?”

  “Does it have a manufacturer’s name on it?” Scarpetta asked.

  “Siemens,” and Dennis spelled it.

  Someone started knocking on the door, and Marino answered it as Scarpetta said to Dennis, “Can you tell if the remote’s turned on?”

  “Well, there’s a little window, you know, a display.”

  Lucy walked in, handing Marino a manila envelope and taking off her black leather bomber jacket. She was dressed for flying, in cargo pants, a tactical shirt, and lightweight boots with rubber soles. Slung over her shoulder was the dark earth-colored PUSH pack, Practical Utility Shoulder Hold-all, that she carried everywhere, an off-duty bag with multiple mesh and stash pockets and pouches, and probably in one of them a gun. She slipped the pack off her shoulder, unzipped the main compartment, and slid out a MacBook.

  “There should be a power button,” Scarpetta said, watching Lucy open her computer as Marino directed her attention to Scarpetta’s BlackBerry, the two of them talking in low voices that Scarpetta blocked out. “Press it until you think you’ve turned off the remote,” she instructed Dennis. “Did you send a photo?”

  “You should have it. I think this thing’s off now.”

  “Then it must have been on while in his pocket,” Scarpetta said.

  “I’m thinking it was.”

  “If it had been, the police wouldn’t have seen anything in the display that would identify him. You don’t see messages like that until you power up whatever it is. Which is what you need to do now. Hold the button down again to power it up and see if you get any sort of system message. Similar to when you power up your phone and your number appears on the display. I think the remote you have belongs to a hearing aid. Actually, two hearing aids.”

  “There’s no hearing aids with the body,” Dennis told her. “Of course, they probably would come off when you jump from a bridge.”

  “Lucy?” Scarpetta said. “Can you log on to my office e-mail and open a file just sent? A photograph. You know my password. It’s the same one you enabled for my BlackBerry.”

  Lucy placed her computer on the console under the wall-mounted TV. She started typing. An image appeared on the computer screen, and she dug into her pack and pulled out a VGA adapter and a display cable. She plugged the adapter into one of the computer’s ports.

  “I got something in the display. If lost, please contact Dr. Warner Agee.” And Dennis recited a phone number. “Now, that’s something.” His excited voice in Scarpetta’s ear. “That makes my night. What’s two-oh-two? Isn’t that the area code for Washington, D.C.?”

  “Call the number and let’s see what happens.” Scarpetta had a pretty good idea.

  Lucy was plugging the cable into the side of the wall-mounted TV when the cell phone rang on the bed inside the hotel room. The ringtone was loud, Bach’s Fugue in D Minor, and a gory image of a dead body on a gurney filled the flat screen on the wall.

  “That’s the guy on the bridge,” Marino said, walking closer to the TV. “I recognize the clothes he had on.”

  The black body pouch was unzipped and spread wide, the shaved and beardless face covered with dark dried blood and deformed beyond recognition. The top of his head was fragmented, blood and brain extruding from the torn tissue edges of his badly lacerated scalp. His left mandible was fractured in at least one place, his jaw gaping and crooked, bared lower teeth bloody and broken and some of them gone, and his left eye was almost completely avulsed, the orb barely attached to the socket. The dark jacket he had on was torn at the shoulder seams, and his left trouser seam was split, and the jagged end of his femur protruded from torn khaki fabric like a snapped-off stick. His ankles were bent at unnatural angles.

  “He landed feetfirst and then hit on his left side,” Scarpetta said as the cell phone stopped ringing on the bed and Bach’s Fugue quit. “I suspect his head struck some abutment on the bridge on his way down.”

  “He had on a watch,” Dennis said over the phone. “It’s in the bag with the other effects. Smashed. An old silver metal Bulova on a stretch band that stopped at two-eighteen. I guess we know his time of death. You want me to call the police with the info?”

  “I have the police with me,” Scarpetta said. “Thank you, Dennis. I’ll take care of it from here.”

  She ended the call, and Marino’s BlackBerry started ringing as she was handing it back to him. He answered and started walking around.

  “Okay,” he said, looking at Scarpetta. “But it will probably be just me.” He got off the phone and told her, “Lobo. He just got to Rodman’s Neck. I need to head out.”

  “I’ve barely gotten started here,” she said. “His cause and manner of death aren’t going to be hard. It’s the rest of it.”

  The au
topsy she needed to perform on Dr. Warner Agee was a psychological one, and her niece might just need one, too. Scarpetta retrieved her kit bag from where she’d left it on the carpet against the wall, just inside the door. She pulled out a transparent plastic evidence bag that had a FedEx envelope and Dodie Hodge’s singing Christmas card inside. Scarpetta hadn’t looked at the card. She hadn’t listened to it. Benton had given it to her when she’d left without him earlier this morning.

  She said to Marino, “You probably should take this with you.”

  The lights of Manhattan cast a murky glow along the horizon, turning it a purplish blue like a bruise as Benton traveled south on the West Side Highway, following the Hudson, headed downtown in the dark.

  Between warehouses and fences he caught glimpses of the Palm-olive Building, and the Colgate clock showed that the time was twenty of seven. The Statue of Liberty was in bas relief against the river and the sky, with her arm held high. Benton’s driver cut over on Vestry Street, deeper into the financial district, where the symptoms of the languishing economy were palpable and depressing: restaurant windows covered with brown paper, notices of seized businesses taped to their doors, clearance sales, retail spaces and apartments for rent.

  As people moved out, graffiti moved in, spray paint marring abandoned restaurants and stores and metal shutters and blank billboards. Crude, crass scrawls, most of it outrageous and nonsensical, and cartoons everywhere, some of them stunning. The stock market as Humpty Dumpty having his big fall. The U.S.S. Economy sinking like the Titanic. A mural of Freddie Mac as the Grinch in a sleigh piled high with debt, his eight subprime-lender reindeer galloping over the rooftops of foreclosed homes. Uncle Sam bending over so AIG could fuck him in the ass.

  Warner Agee was dead. Scarpetta hadn’t informed Benton. Marino had. Just a few minutes ago he’d called, not because he knew or could even guess the role Agee had played in Benton’s life. Marino simply thought Benton would want to know that the forensic psychiatrist had jumped off a bridge, and Scarpetta’s BlackBerry had been found in the hotel room where he had been staying since mid-October, in time for CNN’s fall season. Carley Crispin must have worked out an arrangement with Agee—or someone had. She’d bring him to New York and put him up, take care of him, in exchange for information and appearing on her show. For some reason she assumed he was worth it. Benton wondered how much she really believed or if she didn’t care about the veracity of Agee’s claims as long as she could get away with making a name for herself on prime-time TV. Or was Agee involved in something Benton couldn’t imagine? He didn’t know, didn’t know anything, really, and wondered if he could ever put Warner Agee behind him and why he didn’t feel relief or vindication, why he didn’t feel something, feel anything at all. He was numb. The way he’d felt when he’d finally emerged from deep cover, from being presumed dead.

  The first time he’d walked along the harbor in Boston, the city of his youth, where he’d been hiding in various hovels on and off for six years, and he’d realized he no longer had to be the fictitious man Tom Haviland, he hadn’t felt euphoric. He hadn’t felt free. He simply hadn’t felt. He’d understood completely why some people get out of prison and rob the first convenience store they see so they can go right back. Benton had wanted to go back to being exiled from himself. It had gotten easy to no longer bear the burden of being Benton. He’d gotten good at feeling bad. He’d found meaning and solace in his meaningless existence and suffering even as he’d worked desperately to calculate his way out of it, plotting and planning with surgical precision to eliminate those who made his nonexistence necessary, the organized-crime cartel, the French family of Chandonne.

  Spring 2003. Cool, almost cold, the wind blowing off the harbor and the sun out, and Benton was standing on Burroughs Wharf watching the Boston Fire Department’s Marine Unit escort a de stroyer flying a Norwegian flag, the red fireboats circling the huge shark-gray ship, the firemen in good spirits as they manned deck guns, aiming them up, a plumage of water spraying high in the air, a playful salute. Welcome to America. As if the welcome had been for him. Welcome back, Benton. But he hadn’t felt welcome. Hadn’t felt anything. He’d watched the spectacle and pretended it was just for him, the equivalent of pinching himself to see if he was still alive. Are you? he kept asking himself. Who am I? His mission finally executed in the dark heart of Louisiana, in the bayous and decaying mansions and the ports, where he’d used his brain and his gun to free himself from his oppressors, the Chandonnes and their henchmen, and he’d won. It’s over, he’d told himself. You won, he’d said. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this, he kept thinking as he’d walked along the wharf, watching the firemen having fun. His fantasies of the joy he would feel had turned phony and tasteless in the blink of an eye, like biting into a steak and realizing it was plastic, like driving along a sun-scorched highway and never getting one inch closer to a mirage.

  He’d found himself terrified of returning to something that was no longer there, found himself just as afraid of having choices as he’d been of having none, just as afraid of having Kay Scarpetta as he’d been afraid of never having her again. Life and its complexities and contradictions. Nothing makes sense and everything does. Warner Agee got what he deserved and he did it to himself and it wasn’t his fault and he shouldn’t be blamed. A case of meningitis at the age of four had crashed his destiny as surely as if it had been rear-ended by a car and the chain reaction had continued, one collision after the next, not stopping until his body did on the pavement of a bridge. Agee was in the morgue and Benton was in a taxi, both of them sharing one thing in common at this precise point in time: They had a day of reckoning staring them in the eye, were about to meet their Maker.

  The FBI occupied six floors inside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and Customs Courthouse in the heart of the government center, a complex of modernist glass-and-concrete architecture surrounded by the more traditional columned buildings of the U.S. Courthouse and state office buildings, and blocks away, City Hall, One Police Plaza, One Hogan Place, and the city jail. As was true of most federal centers, this one was cordoned off with yellow tape and fencing, and concrete blast barriers had been strategically placed to prevent vehicles from getting too close. The entire front plaza, a maze of curling green benches and dead grass mounds patched with snow, was inaccessible to the public. To enter the building, Benton had to get out of the taxi at Thomas Paine Park, trot across Lafayette, already busy with traffic. He turned right on Duane Street, also closed to cars, a pop-up barrier with a tire shredder and a guard booth in case you didn’t notice the Do Not Enter signs.

  The forty-one-story glass-and-granite building wasn’t open yet, and he pressed a buzzer and identified himself to a uniformed FBI police officer on the other side of the side entrance’s glass door. Benton said he was here to see Special Agent Marty Lanier, and after a moment of checking, the officer let him in. Benton handed over a driver’s license, emptied his pockets, and walked through the x-ray scanner, having a status no more special than the immigrants who lined up along Worth Street every business day in quest of becoming U.S. citizens. Across a granite lobby was a second checkpoint, this one behind a heavy glass-and-steel door near the elevators, and he went through the same process again, only this time he was required to surrender his driver’s license and in exchange was given a key and an ID.

  “Any electronic devices, including phones, go in there,” the officer said from his booth, pointing at a bank of small lockers above a table, as if Benton had never been here before. “Keep your ID displayed at all times, and you’ll get your license back when you return your key.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see if I can remember all that.”

  Benton pretended to lock up his BlackBerry, tucked it up his sleeve instead. As if there was some great threat he was going to take photographs or a video of a fucking field office. He slipped the locker key in his coat pocket, and inside the elevator he pushed the button for the twenty-eighth floor. The ID with its big V
indicating he was a visitor was yet another insult, and he tucked it in his pocket, contemplating whether what he’d done was right when Marino had called about Agee’s suicide.

  Marino had mentioned he was on his way to Rodman’s Neck and he’d see Benton later on at the meeting, whenever the FBI got around to deciding on a time. Benton, having just gotten in the cab, was on his way downtown to the very meeting Marino was talking about, and Benton had chosen to say nothing. He’d rationalized that the information wasn’t his to offer. Clearly, Marty Lanier hadn’t requested Marino’s presence. Benton didn’t know whose presence she had requested, but Marino wasn’t on the list or he would be here and not on his way to the Bronx. Benton considered that when Marino had talked to Lanier earlier, maybe he’d said something to piss her off.

  The elevator doors opened in front of the Executive Management Section, behind glass doors etched with the Department of Justice seal. Benton didn’t see any sign of anyone, and he didn’t go inside to sit down, preferring to wait in the corridor. He wandered past the typical display cases every Bureau headquarters he’d ever been in boasted—trophies from the hunt, as he thought of them. He took off his coat, looking and listening for any sign of anyone as he idly perused remnants of the Cold War. Hollowed-out rocks and coins and cigarette packs for the clandestine transfer of microfilm. Antitank weapons from the Soviet bloc.

  He wandered past FBI movie posters. “G” Men, The FBI Story, The House on 92nd Street, Thunderheart, Donnie Brasco. A wall of them that kept on going, and he was constantly amazed by the public’s insatiable interest in all things Bureau, not just here but abroad, nothing about FBI agents ever boring unless you were one. Then it was a job, except they owned you. Not just you, but they owned everyone connected to you. When the Bureau had owned him, it had owned Scarpetta, and it had allowed Warner Agee to pry them apart, to tear them from each other, to force them on separate trains bound for different death camps. Benton told himself he didn’t miss his old life, didn’t miss the fucking FBI. Fucking Agee had done him a fucking favor. Agee was dead. Benton felt a spike of emotion, was startled by it, as if he’d been shocked.