The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “What the hell are you looking at?” Lucy asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Scarpetta flipped pages, skimming, reading, stopping at certain sections.

  She said, “Students recruited for studies. The relationship between creative and artistic ability and psi. A study done at Juilliard here in New York. Research at Duke University, Cornell, Princeton. The Ganzfeld experiments.”

  “Psychic phenomena? ESP?” Lucy had a blank expression on her face.

  Scarpetta looked up at her and said, “Sensory deprivation. Why do we want to achieve a state of sensory deprivation?”

  “It’s inversely proportional to perception, to acquiring information,” Lucy answered. “The more I deprive my senses, the more I perceive and create. That’s why people meditate.”

  “Then why would we want the opposite for anyone? Overstimulation, in other words?” Scarpetta asked.

  “We wouldn’t.”

  “Unless you’re in the casino business,” Scarpetta said. “Then you would want to seek the most efficient means to overstimulate, to prevent a state of sensory deprivation. You want people to be impulse-driven, to lose their way, so you bombard the visual and auditory environment, the total field, the Ganzfeld, and your clients become a confused quarry without the slightest inkling of what’s safe and what’s not. You blind and deafen them with bright lights and noise so you can take what they’ve got. So you can steal.”

  Scarpetta couldn’t stop thinking about Toni Darien and her job in a glitzy place of flashing lights and fast-moving images on huge video displays, where people were encouraged to spend money on food, liquor, and games. Bowl badly and play some more. Bowl badly and drink some more. Hap Judd’s photograph was hanging in High Roller Lanes. He might have known Toni. He might know a former patient of Benton’s, Dodie Hodge. Marino had said something about it to Berger during the conference call last night. Warner Agee might have known Toni Darien’s boss, Freddie Maestro. These people might all know one another or be connected somehow. It was almost nine a.m., and Scarpetta was surrounded by the receipts, spent tickets, schedules, publications—the detritus of Agee’s self-serving, ill-purposed life. The soulless bastard. She got up from the floor.

  “We need to go,” she said to Lucy. “The DNA Building. Now.”

  Security camera images of a woman and a man filled multiple flat screens inside the SAC conference room. Since last June, at least nineteen different banks had been robbed by the same pair of brazen bandits the FBI had dubbed Granny and Clyde.

  “You getting all this?” Jaime Berger tilted her MacBook so Benton could see what she was looking at, another e-mail just sent.

  He nodded. He knew. He was opening messages as they landed on his BlackBerry, the same messages Lucy and Marino were sending Berger, the four of them communicating almost in real time. The package bomb had been viable and the bare voice module recovered from it was the same type used in Dodie Hodge’s singing card, only Benton no longer believed the card was from Dodie. She had recorded it and may have penned the address on the airbill, but Benton doubted the hostile holiday ditty was her idea. She wasn’t the mastermind who’d scripted anything that had happened thus far, including her call to CNN, the point of that to upset Benton, give him a warning before the next bomb dropped. Literally.

  Dodie thrived on drama, but this wasn’t her drama, wasn’t her show, wasn’t even her modus operandi. Benton knew whose it was, he was sure he did, and he should have figured it out before, but he hadn’t been looking. He had quit looking because he’d wanted to believe he didn’t need to look. Unbelievable to simply say he forgot, but he had. He’d forgotten to keep his scan going, and now the monster was back, had taken on a different shape, a different form, but his personal stamp was as recognizable as a stench. Sadism. Inevitably there had to be sadism, and once it started it wasn’t going to stop. Toy with the mouse and torture it within an inch of its life before mauling it to death. Dodie wasn’t creative enough, wasn’t experienced enough, wasn’t deranged or brilliant enough to come up with such a massive and intricate plot on her own. But she was histrionic and borderline, and she’d been willing and able to audition.

  At some point, Dodie Hodge had climbed into bed with organized crime. So had Warner Agee, who appeared to be responsible for unethical research projects that were connected to the international gaming industry, to casinos in the United States and abroad, particularly in France. Benton believed that Agee and Dodie were foot soldiers for the family of Chandonne, had gotten entangled with the worst one of them, the perversely violent surviving son, Jean-Baptiste, who had left his DNA in the backseat of a 1991 black Mercedes used in the commission of a bank robbery in Miami last month. What he was doing in the car was unknown. Maybe for the thrill of it, had gone along for the ride, or perhaps was as mundane as his being chauffeured in the stolen Mercedes for some reason prior to its being used as a getaway car. Jean-Baptiste certainly would know his DNA was in the FBI’s CODIS database. He was a convicted murderer and a fugitive. He was getting careless, his compulsions taking over. If his past history was any indication, he might be abusing alcohol and drugs.

  Three days after the Miami hit, there was another one, the last of the known nineteen, this time in Detroit. It just so happened to have occurred on the same day Dodie was arrested in that city for shoplifting and disturbing the peace, for making a scene after stuffing three Hap Judd DVDs down the front of her pants. She was out of control. With someone like her, it was only a matter of time and she would have an episode, would lose it, act out, and she did in Betty’s Bookstore Café. It was bad timing, a bad accident, and certain people had to figure out what to do with her before she created more of an exposure for those who couldn’t afford it. Someone got her a lawyer in Detroit, Sebastian Lafourche, originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the Chandonnes once had very strong ties.

  Lafourche had suggested that Dodie should be evaluated by Warner Agee. It wasn’t Agee’s newfound celebrity status that was appealing, it was his involvement with organized crime, with the Chandonne network, even if peripherally. It was like putting a gangster into the hands of a warden who was on the take from the Mob. But the plan didn’t work. The DA and McLean wouldn’t go for it. The network had to rethink, regroup, and take advantage of an opportunity for mischief and mayhem. Dodie goes to Belmont, and it signals the next act: The enemy has moved into a target’s camp, Benton’s camp, maybe indirectly Scarpetta’s camp. Dodie checked into the hospital and was breathing down Benton’s neck, and the toying and torturing continued while laughter rose to the rafters inside the medieval house of Chandonne.

  Benton looked across the table at Marty Lanier and said, “This new computer system of yours? Is it able to link data the way RTCC can? Give us something like a decision tree, so we see conditional probabilities? So we can visualize what we’re talking about? Because I’m thinking it would help clarify. The roots are deep and the branches are dense and have quite a reach, and it’s important to figure out as best we can what’s relevant and what isn’t. For example? The bank robbery this past August first in the Bronx. That Friday morning at ten-twenty, when American Union was hit.” He was looking at his notes. “Not even an hour later, Dodie Hodge was issued a TAB summons on a transit bus at Southern Boulevard and East One-forty-ninth. In other words, she was in the area, a few blocks from the bank that was robbed. Was agitated, hyped up, got into an argument.”

  “I don’t know anything about a TAB summons,” said NYPD Detective Jim O’Dell, early forties, thinning red hair, a bit of a paunch.

  He sat next to his Joint Bank Robbery Task Force partner, FBI Special Agent Andy Stockman, late thirties, black hair, plenty of it, and no paunch.

  “Came up during data mining when we were looking for anything that had to do with FedEx,” Benton said to O’Dell. “When Dodie was confronted by the officer because she was creating a disturbance on the bus, she told him he could FedEx his ass straight to hell, priority overnight. A l
ink RTCC made.”

  “A weird thing to say. Haven’t heard that one before,” Stockton said.

  “She likes to FedEx things. She’s always in a hurry and wants the results of her dramas instantly. I don’t know,” Benton said impatiently, because Dodie’s clichés and hyperbole weren’t important and the thought of her irritated the hell out of him. “What matters is a pattern you’re going to see repeatedly as we get deeper into this discussion. Impulsiveness. A leader, a Mob boss, who is compulsive and impulsive and is driven by inner forces he ultimately can’t control, and the people around him aren’t much better. Opposites don’t always attract. Sometimes sameness does.”

  “Birds of a feather,” Lanier said.

  “Jean-Baptiste and his birds,” Benton said. “Yes.”

  “We need a data wall like they got,” O’Dell said to Berger, as if she could do something about it.

  “Good luck.” Stockton reached for his coffee. “We’re paying for our own bottled water up here.”

  “Seeing the links, the connections would be helpful,” Berger agreed.

  “You don’t know what’s there until you do,” Benton said. “Especially in something this complex. Because these crimes didn’t just start this past June. They go back before Nine-Eleven, more than a decade, at least my involvement in them does. Not specifically the bank robberies, but the Chandonne family, the massive crime network that used to be theirs.”

  “What do you mean ‘used to be’?” O’Dell said. “Seems they’re alive and kicking, if everything I’m hearing is true.”

  “They’re not what they were. You can’t begin to understand. Suffice it to say it’s different,” Benton said. “It’s the bad seed taking over the family store and running it into the ground or over a cliff.”

  “Sounds like the last eight years in the White House,” O’Dell quipped.

  “The Chandonne family isn’t the organized-crime family it was, not even close.” Benton had no sense of humor this morning. “In the end, it’s disorganized, on its way to complete chaos, with Jean-Baptiste in the driver’s seat. His story can end only one way, no matter how many times he tells it or how many different characters he plays. He can keep focused for a while, and maybe he has while his intrusive and obsessional thoughts have continued, because they don’t quit. Not with him, and the outcome is predictable. His intrusive thoughts win. He strays a little. He strays a lot. He strays way out of bounds. There is no limit to his destructiveness. Except it always ends in death. Somebody dies. Then multiple people do.”

  “Sure, we can do a predictive model, put a graph on the wall,” Lanier said to O’Dell and Stockman.

  “It will take a minute.” Stockman started hitting keys on his laptop. “Not just the bank robberies but everything?” He glanced up at Lanier.

  “It isn’t just bank robberies we’re talking about,” she said with a hint of impatience. “I believe that’s the point Benton’s making and the point of this meeting. The bank robberies are incidental. The tip of the iceberg. Or in keeping with the time of year, the angel on top of the Christmas tree. I want the whole tree.”

  The reference reminded Benton again of Dodie’s stupid song, her breathy off-key voice wishing Scarpetta and him a Ho-Dee, Do-Dee Christmas, a greeting rife with sexually violent innuendo and a hint of what was to come. Scarpetta was going to be lynched, and Benton could shove it up his ass, or something like that, and he imagined Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s delight. Likely the card was his idea, the first taunt that soon would be followed by the next: a FedEx box containing a bomb. Not just an ordinary bomb. Marino’s e-mails referred to it as “a stink bomb that might have blown the Doc’s fingers off or maybe made her blind.”

  “Yeah, it’s ridiculous the Feds can’t put in something like that,” O’Dell was griping. “A damn data wall like RTCC. We need something ten times bigger than a conference room, because this isn’t a decision tree, it’s a damn decision forest.”

  Stockman told him, “I’ll throw it up on a screen. Sixty inches is as big as one of RTCC’s Mitsubishi cubes.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Nope. It’s going to take an IMAX theater.”

  “Quit complaining and let’s get it on the wall so we can see it.”

  “I’m just saying as complex as this is, we need a two-story wall, at least. All this on one flat screen? You’ll have to shrink it as small as newspaper print.”

  O’Dell and Stockman had spent so much time together, they tended to bicker and bitch like an old married couple. For the past six months, they’d been working the so-called Granny and Clyde pattern bank robberies in conjunction with other task forces in other FBI field offices, mostly Miami, New York, and Detroit. The Bureau had managed to keep the spree of robberies and their theories about them out of the news, and had done so deliberately and for good reason. They suspected the bandits were pawns in something much bigger and more dangerous. They were pilot fish, small carnivores that swam with sharks.

  It was the sharks the Bureau wanted, and Benton was sure he knew what type and family of sharks. French sharks. Chandonne sharks. But the question was what names they were calling themselves now and how to find them. Where was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? He would be the great white shark, the boss, the debauched head of what was left of the prominent crime family. The father, Monsieur Chandonne, was enjoying his retirement years at La Santé maximum-security prison outside Paris. Jean-Baptiste’s brother, the heir apparent, was dead. Jean-Baptiste wasn’t wired for a leadership role, but he was motivated, was fueled by violent fantasies and sexually obsessive thoughts, and he lusted for revenge. He could control himself for a while, keep his true inclinations contained for a discrete period of time before the fragile packaging ruptured, exposing neurons and nerves, a bundle of throbbing impulses capable of murderous lust and rages and cruel games more explosive than anything the bomb techs had ever rendered safe on their range. Jean-Baptiste had to be rendered safe. It had to happen right now.

  Benton believed Jean-Baptiste had sent the package bomb. He was behind it. He likely had made it. He may have watched it being delivered last night. Maim Scarpetta physically and mentally. Benton imagined Jean-Baptiste outside their building, somewhere in the dark, watching, waiting for Scarpetta to return home from CNN. Benton imagined her reluctantly walking with Carley Crispin, walking past a homeless man bundled in layers of clothing and a quilt on a bench near Columbus Circle. The mention of the homeless man had bothered Benton the first time Scarpetta had brought it up when they were talking to Lobo inside Marino’s car. A feeling in Benton’s gut, something unsettling. It had continued to disturb him as he’d thought about it more. Whoever was behind the bomb intended it for Scarpetta or for Benton or for both of them and would have found it difficult to resist watching her last night.

  Maiming her or maiming Benton. Whoever had been maimed, it may as well have been both of them wounded, ruined, maybe not dead, maybe worse than dead. Jean-Baptiste would have known Benton was in New York, was home last night, waiting for his wife to return from her live appearance on CNN. Jean-Baptiste knew whatever he wanted to know, and he knew what Scarpetta and Benton had together. Jean-Baptiste knew what they had, because he knew what he didn’t have and had never had. No one understood apartness better than Jean-Baptiste, and understanding hellish isolation made him understand its antithesis. Darkness and light. Love and hate. Creation and uncreation. The opposites of all things are intimately related. Benton had to find him. Benton had to stop him.

  The surest method was to attack vulnerabilities. Benton’s credo: You’re only as good as the people around you. He kept telling himself, reassuring himself, that Jean-Baptiste had made a mistake. He’d recruited badly, had enlisted small carnivores that were neither strong-minded nor properly programmed and certainly weren’t experienced, and he was going to pay for his snap decisions and sick desires and subjective choices. He would be undone by his unsound mind. Granny and Clyde woul
d bring him down. Jean-Baptiste should never have stooped to what by Chandonne standards was petty crime. He should have avoided people unfit for service, people unstable and driven by their own weaknesses and dysfunctions. Jean-Baptiste should have stayed the hell away from small-time character-disordered criminals and banks.

  The pattern was the same in each heist, textbook, as if someone had read the manual. The bank branch had been robbed at least once in the past, in some instances more than once, and had no bulletproof partition, known as a “bandit barrier,” separating the tellers from the public. The robberies always occurred on a Friday between the hours of nine and eleven a.m., when the branch was likely to have the fewest number of customers and the greatest amount of cash. A benign-looking older woman, who until this morning the FBI had known only as Granny, would walk in, looking like a Sunday-school teacher in a frumpy dress and tennis shoes, her head covered by a scarf or a hat. She always wore tinted glasses in old-style frames. Depending on the weather, she might have on a coat and wool gloves. If the robbery occurred when it was warm, she wore a pair of transparent plastic disposable gloves, the type used by people who work in food service, to obviate leaving her fingerprints or DNA.

  Granny always carried a tote deposit bag that she would begin to unzip as she approached a teller. She would reach inside the bag and pull out a weapon that forensic image enhancement indicated was the same type used each time, a nine-millimeter short-barrel pistol, a toy. The orange tip required by federal law on the barrels of realistic play guns had been removed. She would slide a note to the teller, the same type of note every time, that read: Empty the drawers in the bag! No dye packs! Or you’re dead! It was written precisely, boldly, on a small piece of paper from a plain white notepad. She’d hold open the deposit bag, and the teller would stuff it full of cash. Granny would zip it up as she hurried outside and got into a car driven by her accomplice, the man the FBI called Clyde. In each instance, the car had been stolen and was found abandoned a short time later in a shopping mall parking lot.