He turned around at the sound of quick footsteps on tile, and a woman he’d never seen before was walking toward him, brunette, compellingly pretty, nice body, mid-thirties, dressed in a soft tawny leather jacket, dark slacks, and boots. The Bureau had a habit of hiring more than its quota of good-looking, accomplished people. Not a stereotype but a fact. It was a wonder they didn’t fraternize more, men and women shoulder to shoulder, day in and day out, high-caliber, a little power-drunk, and with a hefty dose of narcissism. They restrained themselves for the most part. When Benton had been an agent, affairs on the job were the exception or so deep undercover they were rarely found out.
“Benton?” She offered her hand and shook his firmly. “Marty Lanier. Security said you were on your way up and I didn’t mean to make you wait. You’ve been here before.”
It wasn’t a question. She wouldn’t ask if she didn’t already know the answer and everything else she could possibly find out about him. He had her instantly typed. Smart as hell, hypomanic, didn’t know failure. What he called an IPM. In perpetual motion. Benton had his BlackBerry in hand. Didn’t care if she saw it. Was blatant about checking his messages. Don’t tell him what to do. He wasn’t a goddamn visitor.
“We’re in the SAC conference room,” she said. “We’ll get coffee first.”
If she was using the special agent in charge’s conference room, the meeting wasn’t going to be just the two of them. Her accent was shades of Brooklyn or uptown white New Orleans, hard to tell apart. Whatever her dialect, she’d worked to flatten it out.
“Detective Marino’s not here,” Benton said, tucking the BlackBerry in his pocket.
“He’s not essential,” she replied, walking.
Benton found the remark annoying.
“I spoke to him earlier, as you know, and in light of the most recent developments, he’s more helpful to all involved if he’s where he is.” She glanced at her watch, a black rubber Luminox popular with Navy SEALs, was probably a member of the Dive Team, another Bureau Wonder Woman. “He should be there soon.” She was referring to Rodman’s Neck. “Sun rises at oh-seven-hundred plus fifteen or so. The package in question should be rendered safe shortly, and we’ll know what it is and how to proceed.”
Benton didn’t say anything. He was irritated. Feeling hostile.
“I should say if. If there’s a reason to proceed. Don’t know for sure it’s germane to other matters.” She continued answering questions that hadn’t been asked.
Classic FBI, as if new agents go to some Berlitz school of bureaucratic language to learn to double-talk like that. Tell people what you want them to know. Doesn’t matter what they need. Mislead or evade or, most commonly, tell them nothing.
“Hard to know what exactly is germane to what at this moment,” she added.
He felt as if a glass dome had dropped over him. No point in commenting. He wouldn’t be heard. His voice wouldn’t carry. He may not even have one.
“I called him originally because he was listed as the contact on a data request electronically sent by RTCC,” she was saying. “A tattoo on a subject who delivered the package to your building. That much I explained to you during our brief phone conversation, Benton, and I realize what you don’t know is anything else. I apologize for that but can assure you we wouldn’t have summoned you out at this early hour if it wasn’t a matter of extreme urgency.”
They walked down a long corridor, passing interview rooms, each bare with a table and two chairs and a steel handcuff rail, everything beige and blue, what Benton called “federal blue.” The blue background of every photo he’d ever seen taken of a director. The blue of Janet Reno’s dresses. The blue of George W. Bush’s ties. The blue of people who lie until they’re blue in the face. Republican blue. There were a hell of a lot of blue Republicans in the FBI. It had always been an ultraconservative organization. No fucking wonder Lucy had been driven out, fired. Benton was an Independent. He wasn’t anything anymore.
“Do you have any questions before we join the others?” Lanier stopped before a beige metal door. She entered a code on a keypad and the lock clicked.
Benton said, “I infer you’re expecting me to explain to Detective Marino why he was told he should be here. And how it came to pass that we’re here for your meeting and he knows nothing about it.” Anger simmered.
“You have a long-standing affiliation with Peter Rocco Marino.”
It sounded odd hearing someone call him by his full name. Lanier was walking briskly again. Another hallway, this one longer. Benton’s anger. It was beginning to boil.
“You worked a number of cases with him in the nineties when you were the unit chief of BSU. What’s now BAU,” she said. “And then your career was interrupted. I assume you know the news.” Not looking at him as they walked. “About Warner Agee. Didn’t know him, never met him. Although he’s been of interest for a while.”
Benton stopped walking, the two of them alone in the middle of an endless empty corridor, a long monotony of dingy beige walls and scuffed gray tile. Depersonalized, institutionalized. Intended to be unprovocative and unimaginative and unrewarding and unforgiving. He placed his hand on her shoulder and was mildly surprised by its firmness. She was small but strong, and when she met his eyes, a question was in hers.
He said, “Don’t fuck with me.”
A glint in her eyes like metal, and she said, “Please take your hand off me.”
He dropped it to his side and repeated what he’d said quietly and with no inflection, “Don’t fuck with me, Marty.”
She crossed her arms, looking at him, her stance slightly defiant but unafraid.
“You may be the new generation and have briefed yourself up to your eyeballs, but I know more about how it works than you will if you live ten lives,” he said.
“No one questions your experience or your expertise, Benton.”
“You know exactly what I’m saying, Marty. Don’t whistle for me to come like some goddamn dog and then trot me off to a meeting so you can show everybody the tricks the Bureau trained me to perform in the dark ages. The Bureau didn’t train me to do a goddamn thing. I trained myself, and you’ll never begin to understand what I’ve been through and why. And who they are.”
“ ‘Who they are’?” She didn’t seem even slightly put off by him.
“The people Warner was involved with. Because that’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it? Like a moth, Warner took on the shadings of his environment. After a while, you can’t tell entities like him from the polluted edifices they cling to. He was a parasite. An antisocial personality disorder. A sociopath. A psychopath. Whatever the hell you people call monsters these days. And just when I was starting to feel sorry for the deaf son of a bitch.”
“Can’t imagine your feeling sorry for him,” she said. “After what he did.”
It knocked Benton off guard.
“Suffice it to say, if Warner Agee hadn’t lost everything, and I don’t just mean financially, and decompensated beyond his ability to control himself, become desperate, in other words?” she went on. “We’d have a hell of a lot more to worry about. As for his hotel room, Carley Crispin might have been paying, but that’s for a mundanely practical reason. Agee has no credit cards. They’re all expired. He was destitute, and likely was reimbursing Carley in cash, or at least contributing something. I sincerely doubt she has anything to do with this, by the way. For her it was all about the show going on.”
“Who did he get involved with.” It wasn’t a question.
“I have a feeling you know. Find the right pressure points and eventually you disable someone twice your size.”
“Pressure points. As in plural. More than one,” Benton said.
“We’ve been working on these people, not sure who they are, but we’re getting closer to bringing them down. That’s why you’re here,” she said.
“They’re not gone,” he said.
She resumed walking.
“I couldn’t get rid of al
l of them,” he said. “They’ve had years to be busy, to cause trouble, to figure out whatever they want.”
“Like terrorists,” she said.
“They are terrorists. Just a different sort.”
“I’ve read the dossier on what you did get rid of in Louisiana. Impressive. Welcome back. I wouldn’t have wanted to be you during all that. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Scarpetta. Warner Agee wasn’t completely wrong—you were in the most extreme danger imaginable. But his motives couldn’t have been more wrong. He wanted you to disappear. It was worse than killing you, really.” She said it as if she was describing which was more unpleasant, meningitis or the avian flu. “The rest of it was our fault, although I wasn’t around back then, was a fledgling Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Orleans. Signed on with the Bureau a year later, got my master’s in forensic psychology after that because I wanted to get involved with behavioral analysis, am the NCAVC coordinator for the New Orleans field office. I won’t say I wasn’t influenced by the situation down there or by you.”
“You were there when I was. When they were. Sam Lanier. The coroner of East Baton Rouge,” Benton said. “Related?”
“My uncle. I guess you could say that dealing with the darker side of life runs in the family. I know what happened down there, am actually assigned to the field office in New Orleans. Just got here a few weeks ago. I could get used to this, to New York, if I could ever find a parking place. You should never have been forced out of the Bureau, Benton. I didn’t think so at the time.”
“At the time?”
“Warner Agee was obvious. His evaluation of you ostensibly on behalf of the Undercover Safeguard Unit. The hotel room in Waltham, Mass. Summer of 2003 when he deemed you no longer fit for duty, suggested a desk job or teaching new agents. I’m quite aware. Again, the right thing for the wrong reason. His opinion had to be allowed, and maybe it was for the best. If you’d stayed, just what do you think you would have done?” She looked at him, stopping at the next shut door.
Benton didn’t answer. She entered her code and they walked into the Criminal Division, a rabbit warren of partitioned work spaces, all of them blue.
“Still, it was the Bureau’s loss, a very big loss,” she said. “I suggest we get coffee in the break room, such as it is.” She headed in that direction, a small room with a coffeemaker, a refrigerator, a table, and four chairs. “I won’t say what goes around comes around. About Agee,” she added, pouring coffee for both of them. “He sui cided your career, or tried to, and now he’s done the same to his.”
“He started self-destructing his career long before now.”
“Yes, he did.”
“The one who escaped death row in Texas,” Benton then said. “I didn’t get rid of all of them. I didn’t get rid of him, couldn’t find him. Is he still alive?”
“What do you take in it?” Opening a Tupperware container of creamer, rinsing a plastic spoon in the sink.
“I didn’t get rid of all of them. I didn’t get him,” Benton said it again.
“If we could ever get rid of all of them,” Lanier said, “I’d be out a job.”
The NYPD Firearms and Tactics Section on Rodman’s Neck was surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire. Were it not for that unfriendly obstruction and the heavy weapons going off and signs everywhere that said DANGER BLASTING and KEEP AWAY and DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE, the south ernmost tip of the Bronx, jutting out like a finger into the Long Island Sound, would be, in Marino’s opinion, the choicest real estate in the Northeast.
The early morning was gray and overcast, eelgrass and bare trees agitated by the wind as he rode with Lieutenant Al Lobo in a black SUV through what was to Marino a fifty-something-acre theme park of ordnance bunkers, tactical houses, maintenance shops, hangars of emergency response trucks and armored vehicles, and firing ranges indoors and out, including one for snipers. Police and FBI and officers from other agencies went through so many rounds of ammunition that metal drums of their spent brass were as common as trash barrels at a picnic. Nothing was wasted, not even police vehicles totaled in the line of duty or simply driven to death. They ended up out here, were shot and blown up, used in urban simulations, such as riots and suicide bombings.
For all its seriousness, the base had its touches of cop humor, a comic-book motif of brightly painted bombs and rockets and Howitzer rounds buried nose-first in the ground and sticking out of the strangest places. During downtime when the weather was nice, the techs and instructors cooked out in front of their Quonset huts and played cards or with the bomb dogs, or this time of year, sat around and talked while fixing anything electrical that was broken in toys donated to needy families who couldn’t afford Christmas. Marino loved the Neck, and as he and Lobo drove and talked about Dodie Hodge, it occurred to Marino that this was the first time he’d ever been here when he didn’t hear gunfire, semiautomatics and full auto MP5s, the noise so constant it was calming to him, like being at the movies and hearing popcorn popping.
Even the sea ducks got used to it and maybe came to expect it, eiders and old-squaws swimming by and waddling up on the shore. No wonder some of the best waterfowl shooting was in these parts. The ducks didn’t recognize danger in guns going off—pretty damn unsportsmanlike, if you asked Marino. They should call it “sitting duck season,” he thought, and he wondered what the constant discharging of weapons and detonations did to fishing, because he’d heard there were some pretty nice black sea bass, fluke, and winter flounder in the sound. One of these days he’d have his own boat and keep it at a marina on City Island. Maybe even live over there.
“I think we should get out here,” Lobo said, stopping the Tahoe midway in the explosive demolition range, about a hundred yards downwind of where Scarpetta’s package was locked up. “Keep my truck out of the way. They get upset when you accidentally blow up city property.”
Marino climbed out, careful where he stepped, the ground uneven with rocks and scrap metal and frag. He was surrounded by a terrain of pits and berms built of sandbags, and rough roadbeds leading to day boxes and observation points of concrete and ballistic glass, and beyond was the water. For as far as he could see, there was water, a few boats far off in the distance and the Yacht Club on City Island. He’d heard stories about vessels coming loose from their moorings and drifting with the tides, ending up on the shores of Rodman’s Neck and civilian tow services not fighting over the job of retrieving them, some saying you couldn’t pay them enough. Finders keepers, it ought to be. A World Cat 290 with twin Suzuki four-strokes high and dry in sand and cobble, and Marino would brave a hailstorm of bullets and shrapnel as long as he didn’t have to give it back.
Bomb tech Ann Droiden was up ahead, in a Tactical Duty Uniform, TDUs, dark-blue canvas seven-pocket pants, probably lined with flannel because of the weather, a parka, ATAC Storm Boots, and amber-tinted wraparound glasses. She didn’t wear a hat, and her hands were bare as she clamped the steel tube of a PAN disrupter to a folding stand. She was something to look at but probably too young for Marino. Early thirties, he guessed.
“Try and behave yourself,” Lobo said.
“I believe she should be reclassified to a weapon of mass destruction,” Marino said, and he always had a hard time not openly gawking at her.
Something about her strong-featured good looks and amazingly agile hands, and he realized she reminded him a little of the Doc, of what she was like when she was that age, when they’d just started working together in Richmond. Back then, for a woman to be the chief of a statewide medical examiner’s system as formidable as Virginia’s was unheard of, and Scarpetta had been the first female medical examiner Marino had ever met, maybe even ever seen.
“The phone call made from the Hotel Elysée to CNN. It’s just a thought I had, and I’ll mention it even if it sounds far-fetched, because this lady’s, what, in her fifties?” Lobo got back to the conversation they’d started in the SUV.
“What’s Dodie Hodge’s age got t
o do with her making the call?” Marino said, and he wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing, leaving Lucy and Scarpetta alone at the Hotel Elysée.
He didn’t understand what was going on over there, except that Lucy sure as hell knew how to take care of herself, was probably better at it than Marino, if he was honest. She could shoot a lollipop off its stick at fifty yards. But he was tied in knots, trying to figure things out. According to Lobo, the phone call Dodie Hodge made to CNN last night traced back to the Hotel Elysée. That was the number captured by caller ID, yet Dodie Hodge wasn’t a guest at the hotel. The same manager Marino had dealt with earlier said there was no record of anybody by that name ever staying there, and when Marino had provided Dodie’s physical description, based on information he’d gotten when he was at RTCC, the manager had said absolutely not. He had no idea who Dodie Hodge was, and furthermore, no outgoing call had been made to The Crispin Report’s 1-800 number last night. In fact, no outgoing call had been made from the Hotel Elysée at the precise time—nine-forty-three—when Dodie had called CNN and was put on hold before she was put on the air.
“How much do you know about spoofing?” Lobo said, as he and Marino walked. “You heard of buying these Spoof Cards?”
“I’ve heard of it. Another pain-in-the-ass thing for us to fucking worry about,” Marino said.
He wasn’t allowed to use his cell phone on the range, nothing that emitted an electronic signal. He wanted to call Scarpetta and tell her about Dodie Hodge. Or maybe he should tell Lucy. Dodie Hodge might have some sort of connection to Warner Agee. He couldn’t call anyone, not on the demolition range, where there was at least one possible bomb locked up in a day box.
The Scarpetta Factor Page 33