The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Tell me about it,” Lobo was saying as they walked and icy wind blasted in from the Sound, through the fence and between berms. “You buy these perfectly legal Spoof Cards and can make any number you want appear in the caller ID screen of whoever you’re calling and trying to spoof.”

  Marino contemplated that if Dodie Hodge had a connection to Warner Agee, who obviously had a connection to Carley Crispin, whose show Agee had been on multiple times this fall, and Dodie had called last night, maybe the three of them were connected. This was crazy. How could Agee, Dodie, and Carley be connected, and why? It was like all those offshoots on the data wall at RTCC. You search one name and find fifty others linked to it, reminding him of Saint Henry’s Catholic School, of the cluttered tree branches he’d draw on the chalkboard when he was forced to diagram compound sentences in English class.

  “A couple months ago,” Lobo went on, “my phone rings and there’s this number on my caller ID. It’s the number for the fucking switchboard at the White House. I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ So I answer and it’s my ten-year-old daughter trying to disguise her voice, and she says, ‘Please hold for the president.’ I’m not amused. This is my cell phone I use for work, and it’s like my heart stopped for a minute.”

  If there was one name all the offshoots had in common, Marino asked himself, what would it be?

  “Turns out she got the Spoof Card and the idea from one of her friends, some boy who’s maybe eleven,” Lobo said. “You go on the Internet, the number for the White House is right there. It’s fucked up. Like every time we figure out how to stop this bullshit, there’s something else out there to defeat our efforts.”

  Hannah Starr, Marino decided. Except now it seemed that the one thing everybody had in common was the Doc, he worried. That’s why he was walking through the explosives range in the freezing cold at dawn. He turned up the collar of his coat, his ears so cold they were about to fall off.

  He said to Lobo, “Seems like if you buy a SpoofCard, you can get traced through the carrier.”

  Ann Droiden was walking toward the white metal day box with an empty milk jug. She held it under a tank and started filling it with water.

  “If the carrier’s served with a subpoena, maybe you’ll get lucky, but that’s assuming you’ve got a suspect. You got no suspect, how the hell do you know who the fake number traces back to, especially if they don’t use their own phone to make the call? It’s a fucking nightmare,” Lobo said. “So this Dodie Hodge lady, saying she’s clever, at least as clever as a ten-year-old, could have spoofed to get us off the scent. Maybe she spoofed when she called The Crispin Report last night, and it looks like she’s at the Hotel Elysée when, truth is, we don’t know where the hell she is. Or maybe she was setting up this Agee guy you were telling me about. Maybe she didn’t like him, like a really bad practical joke. But the other thought is what makes you so sure she sent the singing card, for example?”

  “She’s singing on it.”

  “Who says?”

  “Benton. He should know, since he spent time with her in the bin.”

  “Doesn’t mean she’s the one who sent the card. We should be careful of assumptions, that’s all. Shit, it’s cold. And nothing we do out here lets me wear gloves that are worth a damn.”

  Droiden set the jug of water on the ground near a big black hard case that held twelve-gauge shotgun cartridges and components of the PAN disrupter, the water cannon. Nearby was a portable metal magazine and several Roco gear and equipment bags, big ones that likely held more equipment and gear, including the bomb disposal suit and helmet she’d be putting on when she was set up and ready to retrieve the package from the day box. She squatted by the open case and picked up a black plastic plug, a screw-on breech, and one of the shotgun cartridges. A diesel engine sounded in the distance—an EMS ambulance showing up, parking on the dirt road, at the ready in case all didn’t go according to plan.

  “Again,” Lobo said, removing a bag from his shoulder, “I’m not saying this Dodie lady used a SpoofCard. I’m just saying that caller ID doesn’t mean shit anymore.”

  “Don’t talk to me about it,” Droiden said, plugging one end of the tubing. “My boyfriend got spoofed, some asshole he has a restraining order against. She calls him and the caller ID says it’s his mother.”

  “That’s too bad,” Marino said. He didn’t know she had a boyfriend.

  “It’s like these anonymizers people use so you can’t trace their IP, or you do and think they’re in another country when they’re your next-door neighbor.” She inserted the shotgun round into the breech, which she screwed to the plugged back end of the tube. “You can’t be sure anything’s what it appears to be when it’s got to do with phones, with computers. Perps wear cloaks of invisibility. You don’t know who’s doing what, and even if you do, it’s hard to prove. Nobody’s accountable anymore.”

  Lobo had removed a laptop computer from his bag and was turning it on. Marino wondered why a computer was okay out here and not his phone. He didn’t ask. He was in overload, like his engine might overheat any minute.

  “So I don’t need a suit on or anything,” he said. “You sure there’s nothing in there like anthrax or some chemical that’s going to give me cancer?”

  “Before I put the package in the day box last night,” Droiden said, “I checked it out soup to nuts with the FH Forty, the Twenty-two-hundred R, and APD Two thousand, a high-range ion chamber, a gas monitor, every detector you can think of, in part because of the target.”

  She meant Scarpetta.

  “It was taken seriously, to say the least,” Droiden went on. “Not that we’re lax out here on any given day, but this is considered special circumstances. Negative for biological agents, at least any known ones like anthrax, ricin, botulism, SEB, and plague. Negative for alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron radiation. No CW agents or irritants. No nerve or blister agents—again, no known ones. No toxic gases, such as ammonia, chlorine, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide. No alarms went off, but whatever’s in the package is off-gassing something. I could smell it.”

  “Probably what’s in the vial-shaped thing,” Marino said.

  “Something with a foul smell, a fetid, tarry-type odor,” she answered. “Don’t know what it is. None of the detectors could identify it.”

  “At least we know what it’s not,” Lobo said. “Which is somewhat reassuring. Hopefully it’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Maybe picking up on a contaminant out here?” Marino was thinking about all the different devices that were rendered safe on the range. Decades of bombs and pyrotechnics being shot with water cannons and detonated.

  “Like we’re saying, we didn’t get a reading,” Droiden said. “In addition, we account for potential interference vapors that can cause false positives. Devices we’ve rendered safe out here that might off-gas anything from gasoline to diesel fuel to household bleach? There wouldn’t be enough of an interferent vapor at this point for detectable levels. Nothing false-alarmed last night, although cold temperatures aren’t ideal, the LCDs sure as hell don’t like the weather out here, and we weren’t going to carry the frag bag inside any sort of shelter when we don’t know what type of device we might be dealing with.”

  She tilted the PAN disrupter, pointing it almost straight up, and filled it with water, then plugged the front end with a red cap. She leveled the steel tube and tightened the clamps. Reaching back into the open case, she picked out a laser aiming device that slid over the tip of the barrel like a bore sight. Lobo set the laptop on a sandbag, an x-ray of Scarpetta’s package on the screen. Droiden would use the image to map a targeting grid that she would align with the laser sight so she could take out the power source—button batteries—with the water cannon.

  “Maybe you could hand me the shock tube,” she said to Lobo.

  He opened the portable magazine, a midsize Army green steel box, and lifted out a reel of what looked like bright yellow plastic-coated twelve-gauge wire, a low-strengt
h det-cord that was safe to handle without fire-retardant clothing or an EOD bomb disposal suit. The inside of the tubing was coated with the explosive HMX, just enough to transmit the necessary shock waves to hit the firing pin inside the breech, which in turn would strike the primer of the cartridge, which would ignite the powder charge, only this shotgun cartridge was a blank. There were no projectiles. What got blasted out of the tube was about five ounces of water traveling at maybe eight hundred feet per second, enough to blow a good-size hole in Scarpetta’s FedEx box and take out the power source.

  Droiden unrolled several yards of the tube and attached one end to a connector on the breech and the other end to a firing device, what looked like a small green remote control with two buttons, one red, one black. Unzipping two of the Roco bags, she pulled out the green jacket, trousers, and helmet of the bomb suit.

  “Now, if you boys will excuse me,” she said. “I need to get dressed.”

  Warner Agee’s laptop, a Dell several years old, was connected to a small printer, both devices plugged into the wall. Cords ran across the carpet, printouts piled and scattered, making it hard to walk without tripping or stepping on paper.

  Scarpetta suspected Agee had worked nonstop in the hotel room Carley apparently had rented for him. He’d been busy doing something not long before he removed his hearing aids and glasses, and left his magnetic key card on the vanity, then took the stairs and likely got into a cab, eventually headed to his death. She wondered what he’d been able to hear those last moments of his life. Probably not the ESU rescuers with their ropes and harnesses and gear, risking their own safety as they tried to reach him. Probably not the traffic on the bridge. Not even the wind. He’d turned off the volume and blurred the picture so it would be easier to descend into nothingness with no turning back. He not only didn’t want to be here anymore, for some reason he’d decided it wasn’t an option.

  “Let’s start with the most recent calls,” Lucy said, turning her attention to Agee’s phone, which she’d plugged into a charger she’d found in an outlet near the bed. “Doesn’t look like he spent a lot of time on it. A couple calls yesterday morning, then nothing until six minutes past eight last night. After that, one more call about two and a half hours later, at ten-forty. Starting with this first one at eight-oh-six, I’ll do a search and see who it comes back to.” She started typing on her MacBook.

  “I disabled the password on my BlackBerry.” Scarpetta wasn’t sure why she said it at this exact moment. It had been on her mind but not on her tongue, and now it was before them, as if it was overripe and had dropped from a tree. “I don’t think Warner Agee looked at my BlackBerry. Or that Carley did, unless she got into scene photographs. From what I can tell, any calls, messages, or e-mails that have come in since I used it last haven’t been opened.”

  “I know all about it,” Lucy said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Jesus. Like a million people have had this number that called Agee’s cell phone. His cell phone’s registered to him, by the way, with a D.C. address. A Verizon account, the cheapest low-minute plan. Doesn’t appear he was much of a talker, maybe because of his hearing.”

  “I doubt that’s why. His hearing aids are the newest technology, Bluetooth-enabled,” Scarpetta said.

  She could look around the hotel room and deduce that Warner Agee had spent most of his time in a claustrophobic world that often was silent. She doubted he had friends, and if he had family, he wasn’t close to them. She wondered if his only human contact, his only emotional connection in the end, was the woman who had become his self-serving patron: Carley. She gave him work and a roof over his head, it seemed, and now and then showed up with a new key. Scarpetta suspected Agee had no money, and she wondered what had happened to his wallet. Maybe he’d gotten rid of it after leaving the room last night. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to be identified but had overlooked the Siemens remote control, which most likely he kept in his pocket as a matter of routine. He may have forgotten about the message on it that would lead someone like Scarpetta directly to him.

  “What do you mean, you know all about it?” she again asked Lucy. “What do you know? You already knew that no one had gotten into my BlackBerry?”

  “Hold on. I’m going to try something.” Lucy got on her own BlackBerry and dialed a number she was looking at on her MacBook. She listened for a long moment before ending the call and saying, “It just rang and rang. Bet you it’s a disposable phone, explaining why so many different people have had that same number and why voicemail hasn’t been set up.” She was looking at Agee’s cell phone again. “I did some checking,” she then said. “When you e-mailed me and I told you I wanted to nuke your BlackBerry and you said no, I checked right then and saw that new messages, e-mails, voicemails hadn’t been accessed. That’s one reason I didn’t just go on and nuke it anyway, regardless of your instructions. Why did you disable the password?”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Not until you told me you’d lost your phone.”

  “I didn’t lose it.”

  Lucy was having a hard time looking her in the eye. Not because she was feeling remorse, because that wasn’t what Scarpetta sensed. Her niece was emotional. She was scared, her eyes a dark green like the deep water of a quarry, and her face was unusually defeated and spent. She looked thin, as if she hadn’t been working out as much, her trademark strength and fitness at a low ebb. In the course of the several weeks since Scarpetta had seen her last, Lucy had gone from looking fifteen to forty.

  Lucy tapped keys and said, “Now I’m looking at this second number that called his phone last night.”

  “The call made at ten-forty?”

  “Right. Comes back as unlisted and unpublished, but the person didn’t bother blocking caller ID, which is why it’s showing up on Agee’s cell phone. Whoever this is, it’s the last person he talked to. At least that we know of. So he was still alive and well at ten-forty.”

  “Alive, but I doubt he was well.”

  Lucy typed some more on the MacBook and was rolling through files on the Dell laptop as well, able to do about ten tasks at once. She could do almost anything except have a truthful conversation about what was really important in her life.

  “He was smart enough to delete his history and empty his cache,” she said. “In case you’re interested. Won’t stop me from finding what he thought he’d gotten rid of. Carley Crispin,” she then said. “The unlisted number that called him at ten-forty. It was her. It was Carley. That’s her cell phone, an AT&T account. She called Agee, and they talked for about four minutes. Must not have been a good conversation if a couple hours later he jumped off a bridge.”

  At ten-forty last night Scarpetta was still at CNN, in the makeup room, talking to Alex Bachta with the door shut. She tried to pinpoint exactly when she’d left. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, and she had a sinking feeling that what she’d feared was true. Carley had been eavesdropping and had heard enough to realize what lay ahead. Scarpetta was going to take her place as a talk show host, or that was what Carley would have assumed, at any rate, because it would never occur to her that someone might say no to the sort of offer Alex had made. Carley was going to be let go, and she must have been devastated. Even if she’d hovered outside the door long enough to overhear Scarpetta resisting the notion and voicing why she thought it was a bad idea, Carley had to accept an inevitability she’d fought like hell to prevent: At the age of sixty-one, she was going to have to look for another job, and the odds were almost impossible that she’d find one with a network as well respected and powerful as CNN. In this economy and at her age, she might find nothing.

  “Then what?” Scarpetta asked, after describing to Lucy what had happened last night after Carley’s show. “Did she step away from the door, perhaps return to her dressing room and make a quick call to Warner? What did she say to him?”

  “Maybe that his services were no longer going to be needed,” Lucy said. “She
loses her show, what would she need him for anymore? If she’s not on the air, he wasn’t going to be, either.”

  “Since when do talk-show hosts provide long-term hotel rooms for guests.” Scarpetta got around to that. “Especially these days, when everybody is cutting back.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I sincerely doubt CNN was reimbursing her. Does she have money? This hotel for two months would cost a fortune, no matter how reasonable a rate they gave her. Why would she spend that kind of money? Why not put him somewhere else, rent him something infinitely less expensive?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Maybe it had to do with the location,” Scarpetta considered. “Maybe someone else was involved and funding this. Or him. Someone we know nothing about.”

  Lucy didn’t seem to be listening.

  “And if she called at ten-forty to tell Warner he was fired and about to get evicted, then why would she go to the trouble to drop off my BlackBerry?” Scarpetta continued thinking out loud. “Why not just tell him to pack his things and leave the hotel the next day? If she planned to kick him out, why would she bring him my phone? Why would he feel obliged to help her with anything further if she was about to cut him off? Possible Agee was supposed to give my BlackBerry to someone else?”

  Lucy didn’t answer.

  “Why is my BlackBerry so important?”

  It was as if Lucy didn’t hear a word Scarpetta said.

  “Except that it’s a conduit to me. To everything about me. To everything about all of us, really,” she answered her own question.

  Lucy was silent. She wasn’t eager to talk further about the stolen BlackBerry, because she didn’t want to talk about why she’d bought it to begin with.

  “It even knows where I am because of the GPS receiver you put in it,” Scarpetta added. “As long as I had it with me, of course. Although I don’t think you were particularly worried about where I’ve been or might be.”