The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  When Benton had first walked into the conference room several hours earlier, he’d instantly recognized Granny and the notes she passed. The handwriting was so perfect it looked like a font. The FBI said it was virtually identical to a typeface called Gotham, the unassuming basic lettering of urban landscapes, the straightforward design commonly seen in signage, the same writing used by whoever had addressed the FedEx envelope that had contained Dodie Hodge’s singing card, and possibly the same writing on the address of the FedEx package that contained the bomb. It was hard to know with exactitude about the latter. According to the flurry of e-mails from Marino, the airbill on the bomb had not survived the water cannon. But maybe it didn’t matter.

  Images of Dodie Hodge in various disguises and her handwriting were all over the SAC conference room’s walls, video stills of her in “Aunt Bee” attire, as innocent as Mayberry, walking in and out of banks. Benton would have recognized her anywhere, regardless of her efforts at disguise. She wasn’t going to get rid of her big jowly face and thin lips and bulbous nose and the way her ears stuck out. There was only so much she could do about her matronly body and disproportionately thin legs. In the majority of the robberies she was white. In a few she was black. In a recent one this past October, she was brown. A harmless neighbor, a grandmother, innocent and sweet-looking. In some of the stills she was smiling as she hurried out with at most ten thousand dollars inside her fire-resistant tote deposit bag, a different-colored one each time: red, blue, green, black, all offering adequate protection if her written instructions were ignored and a dye pack exploded, spraying an aerosol of red smoke and dye and possibly tear gas.

  It was possible Dodie Hodge never would have come to the attention of anyone and would be robbing banks again, maybe robbing them for a long time, had her partner in crime, whose real name was Jerome Wild, not decided to get a distinctive tattoo on his neck when he was at Camp Pendleton last May right before he went AWOL. The tattoo was one he never successfully covered, didn’t even make an effort, not with a high collar or a bandana or the professional-quality makeup Dodie used, trace residues of it recovered from the getaway cars. Mineral makeup, Marty Lanier had explained. The FBI labs in Quantico had identified boron nitride, zinc oxide, calcium carbonate, kaolin, magnesium, iron oxides, silica, and mica—the additives and pigments used in technically sophisticated eye shadows, lipsticks, foundations, and powders popular with actors and models.

  Jerome Wild’s tattoo was large and elaborate, and began just above his left collarbone and ended behind his left ear, and maybe he didn’t think it was a problem. He was the getaway driver and never stepped inside the banks, and likely assumed he would never be captured on camera. He assumed wrong. In one of the robberies, a security camera at the corner of another bank across the street captured him clearly behind the wheel of a stolen white Ford Taurus, a hand out the window adjusting the side mirror. He was wearing black gloves lined with rabbit fur.

  That photo, which was his downfall, was on a video screen inside the SAC conference room, and it was a face Benton had seen before, just last night, in security stills from Benton and Scarpetta’s own building. Jerome Wild in dark glasses and a cap and black-leather rabbit fur-lined gloves. Skeletons climbing out of a coffin covering the left side of his neck. The still from a bank robbery and the still from last night, next to each other in windows on a big flat screen. They were the same man, a pilot fish, a small predator, a recruit who was too unsophisticated and reckless to believe he’d ever get caught or to give it a thought. Wild didn’t know or care about tattoo databases, and Jean-Baptiste didn’t either, it seemed.

  Wild was only twenty-three, was bright and craved excitement and loved taking risks, but he had no values or beliefs. He had no conscience. He certainly wasn’t patriotic and didn’t give a damn about his country or those who fought for it. When he’d enlisted in the Marines, it was for money, and when he was sent to Camp Pendleton he hadn’t served in the Corps long enough to suffer the loss of fallen comrades yet. He hadn’t boarded the C-17 yet that was to take him to Kuwait, hadn’t done a damn thing except have a good time in California, all expenses paid. The only inspiration required for what was a deeply symbolic and serious tattoo had been the idea of getting a tattoo, any tattoo, as long as it was “cool,” according to another soldier who had been interviewed several times now by the FBI.

  Wild got his cool tattoo and soon after returned to his birthplace of Detroit for a weekend furlough before he was to be deployed. He never went back to the Marine Corps base. The last reported sighting was by someone who’d gone to high school with him and was fairly certain he recognized Wild in the Grand Palais hotel casino playing the slot machines, and hotel security recordings had confirmed it was him. Playing slots, at the roulette table, at one point walking the floor with a well-dressed elderly man the FBI had identified as Freddie Maestro, believed to have ties to organized crime and the owner of, among other establishments, High Roller Lanes here in New York. Two weeks later in early June, a bank branch near Detroit’s Tower Center Mall was robbed by a frumpy white woman in a linen suit who was driven away by a black man in a stolen Chevy Malibu.

  Benton was stunned, and he felt foolish. He needed to reexamine his life, and now wasn’t a good time to do it, not during a discussion like this with people like this inside an SAC conference room. For all practical purposes, he had gone from being an enforcement agent of the law, an officer of the court, to becoming a fucking academic. A bank robber had been his goddamn patient, and he’d had no idea because he wasn’t allowed to do a background check on Dodie Hodge, wasn’t allowed to look into anything about who or what she was beyond a loathsome woman with a severe personality disorder who claimed to be the aunt of Hap Judd.

  Benton could tell himself all he wanted that even if he’d done a thorough background check on her, what was there to know? Logically, the answer was nothing. He felt angry and humiliated, wishing he was FBI again, wishing he was carrying a gun and a badge and had the imprimatur to find out whatever the hell he wanted. But you wouldn’t have found anything, he kept telling himself as he sat at the conference table inside a room that was, of course, blue, from the carpet to the walls to the upholstery of the chairs. Nobody found out anything until you saw her pictures on the wall, he said to himself. She wasn’t recognized. She wasn’t searchable by computers.

  Dodie had no identifying feature, such as a tattoo, that might end up in a database. She’d never been charged with anything more serious than being disorderly on a bus in the Bronx, and shoplifting and disturbing the peace in Detroit last month, and on neither occasion was there any reason under the sun for anyone to link this fifty-six-year-old bombastic and unpleasant woman to a series of cleverly executed heists that not so coincidentally completely stopped while she was a patient at McLean. Benton reminded himself repeatedly he could have checked her all he wanted and never linked her to Jerome Wild or the Chandonnes. The link was dumb luck. Jean-Baptiste’s bad dumb luck, because nothing was ever enough for him. He’d carelessly left his DNA in a stolen Mercedes, had done a number of things of late that went too far. He was decompensating, and now he was before them, before Benton again. Not just a link or a branch but the root.

  His mug shot was on a flat screen across the table from Benton, the last known photograph, taken by the Texas Department of Justice almost ten years ago. What did the bastard look like now? Benton couldn’t stop staring at the image on the wall-mounted screen. It seemed the two of them were looking at each other, squared off, confrontational. The shaved head, the asymmetrical face, one eye lower than the other and the flesh around them an inflamed, angry red from a chemical burn that Jean-Baptiste claimed had made him blind. It hadn’t. Two guards on the Polun sky Unit had found that out the hard way when Jean-Baptiste slammed them against a concrete wall and crushed their throats. In the spring of 2003, Jean-Baptiste walked out of his death-row cell wearing a uniform and a name tag, a murdered guard’s car keys conveniently in a pocket.
/>
  “Not an offshoot but a segue,” Lanier was saying to Berger, and the two tended to argue a lot and Benton really hadn’t been listening.

  Another e-mail from Marino just landed:

  On my way to the DNA bldg to meet lucy and the doc

  “It will be more obvious when we get a visual. I agree with Benton. But Jerome’s nonviolent,” Lanier was saying. “He’s always been nonviolent. So nonviolent he went AWOL. Went into the military because he couldn’t get a job, and then bailed out because he happened upon an illegal opportunity.”

  Benton e mailed Marino:

  Why?

  Lanier kept talking. “The Chandonnes’ tentacles are in Detroit. Just as they’re in Louisiana, Las Vegas, Miami, Paris, Monte Carlo. Port cities. Casino cities. Maybe even Hollywood. Anything that attracts organized crime.”

  Benton reminded everyone at the table, “But not the father anymore. And not Jean-Baptiste’s brother. We carved up the rotten apple in 2003. We didn’t get the core, but he’s not the same breed.”

  Marino’s e mailed reply:

  Toni dariens watch

  Benton continued, “You’re talking about a lust murderer, someone much too compulsive, much too impulse driven, to successfully run a cartel, to run anything as complex as his family business has been for the better part of a century. We can’t work this like an organized-crime case. We have to work it like a repetitive sexual murder case.”

  “It was a viable bomb,” Berger said to Lanier, as if Benton hadn’t said anything. “It could have severely injured or even killed Kay. How can you possibly construe that as falling within the rubric of nonviolent?”

  “You’re missing my point,” Lanier told her. “Depends on his intent, and if, in fact, Wild is just the messenger, then he may not have even known what was in the FedEx box.”

  “That and the guy’s MO? In all these bank robberies? There’s been nothing violent. He’s a coward, stays in the car. Even the gun is fake.” Stockman spoke up as he worked on getting the decision tree—the decision forest, as he’d called it—on a flat screen. “I have to agree with Marty that he and Granny . . . this Dodie woman. Sorry. I’ve been calling her Granny for the past six months. Anyway, Jerome and Dodie, they’re minions.”

  “Dodie Hodge isn’t anybody’s minion,” Benton said. “She goes along with something if she receives gratification from it. If she’s having fun. But she’s not a drone. She’s cooperative and supervis able only up to a point, which is why Jean-Baptiste made a mistake picking her, picking Jerome, picking anybody he’s likely picked. They’re all going to be flawed, because he is.”

  “Then why steal the DVDs, for God’s sake?” Berger said to Lanier. “A few Hap Judd movies were worth getting arrested?”

  “That wasn’t why,” Benton said. “She couldn’t help herself. And now the network has a problem. One of their bank robbers has just been arrested. They get a lawyer who’s in bed with them, and he in turn tries to get a forensic expert who’s in bed with them. Instead they ended up with me because of Dodie’s histrionics, her narcissism. She wanted to go to the same hospital where the rich and famous go. Again, she’s not a minion. She’s a bad recruit.”

  “A bad move stealing those DVDs,” Stockman agreed with Berger. “They’d still be robbing banks if she hadn’t stuck those damn movies down her pants.”

  “A bad move shooting off her mouth about Hap Judd,” Benton added. “Not that she could help herself, but she’s causing problems, creating exposures. We don’t know exactly what Hap Judd’s involvement in all this is, but he’s linked to Dodie, and he’s linked to Hannah Starr, and a photograph of him and Freddie Maestro is in High Roller Lanes, which could link Hap to Toni Darien as well. We need to get the tree on the wall, have a visual. I’m going to show you how all this is connected.”

  “Let’s get back to the bomb,” Berger said to Lanier. “Just so I’m clear. You’re thinking someone else is behind the delivery of this package, Jean-Baptiste is, and that theory is based on?”

  “I don’t mean to say common sense. . . .” Lanier said.

  “You mean to say it, and you just did,” Berger answered. “And condescension isn’t helpful.”

  “Let me finish. I don’t mean to imply anything even remotely condescending toward you, Jaime. Or toward anyone at this table. From an analytical perspective”—and what Lanier really meant was, From the perspective of an FBI criminal investigative analyst, a profiler—“what was done to Dr. Scarpetta, or attempted, is personal.” Lanier looked at Benton. “I would say intimately personal.” Almost as if to imply that Benton might have been the one who left a bomb for his wife.

  “I’m not getting the commonsense part.” Berger looked Lanier in the eye.

  Berger didn’t like her. It probably wasn’t about jealousy or insecurity or any of the usual reasons powerful women went after each other. There was a practical problem to be faced. If the FBI took over the entire investigation, including whatever involvement Dodie Hodge or Hap Judd or anyone else being discussed in this room might have with Hannah Starr, it would be the U.S. attorney’s office that prosecuted the cases and not the New York County DA, not Berger. Get over it, Benton thought. This was fucking bigger than five boroughs. This was federal. It was international. It was dirty and extremely dangerous. If Berger thought about it for a minute, she shouldn’t even want to get within a mile of this case.

  “The type of bomb, as it’s been described,” Lanier was saying to Berger. “An implicit threat. Intimidation. Mockery. And a prior knowledge of the victim and her habits and what was important to her. Dodie Hodge might have served as chief consort, but the bang for the buck, if you’ll forgive the pun, would have been Chandonne’s.”

  “I’d like to get over there.” Stockman was looking at something on his computer. “Dodie Hodge’s place in Edgewater.” He started typing an e-mail. “She got a drinking problem? Wine bottles everywhere.”

  “We need to get in.” O’Dell looked at what was on Stockman’s computer screen. “See if we find notes, other things linking her to the robberies and who knows what. I mean, it’s fine for these guys to look, but they don’t know what we know.”

  “A more pressing concern is Jean-Baptiste,” Benton said, because police, the FBI were looking for Dodie, but no one was looking for Chandonne.

  “No notes so far but a couple toy guns,” O’Dell said to Stockman as agents and cops from the Joint Bank Robbery Task Force searched Dodie’s house and sent electronic information in real time. “Bingo,” Stockman then said as he read. “Drugs. Looks like Granny does coke. Plus, she’s a smoker. Hey, Benton. To your knowledge, does Dodie smoke French cigarettes? Gauloises? I know I didn’t pronounce that right.”

  “She may have had someone staying with her,” Stockman said, as he replied to his colleagues in the field.

  Benton said, “I’m going to stop listening for a minute.”

  It was a line that worked almost without exception. When people were arguing and distracted and their agendas were breaking the surface and blowing like whales, if Benton announced he was going to stop listening, everybody stopped talking.

  “I’m going to say what I think, and you need to hear this because it will help you understand what you’re about to see when these links are made, are on the wall,” Benton said. “How are we doing with our tree diagram?” he pointedly asked.

  “Anybody besides me need some coffee?” O’Dell said in frustration. “Too damn much going on at once, and I need to visit the little boys’ room.”

  On the eighth floor of the OCME’s DNA Building, Scarpetta, Lucy, and Marino were alone inside a lab used for scientific training. Criminal cases weren’t analyzed in here, but the regulations for working in a clean-room environment still applied.

  The three of them were difficult to recognize in disposable protective gowns, hair and shoe covers, masks, gloves, and safety glasses they had donned in the bio vestibule before passing through an air lock into an uncontaminated work spac
e equipped with the latest assay technology, what Marino called contraptions: genomic analyzers, gene amplifiers, centrifuges, vortex mixers, real-time rotary cyclers, and extraction robots for handling large volumes of liquids, such as blood. He moved about restlessly, rustling and making papery sounds, tugging at blue Tyvek and poking and prodding his safety glasses and mask and what he referred to as his “shower cap,” constantly readjusting this and that as he griped about his garb.

  “You ever put paper shoes on a cat?” His face mask moved as he talked. “The thing runs around like hell trying to shake them off? That’s what I fucking feel like.”

  “I didn’t torture animals, set fires, or wet my bed when I was a kid,” Lucy said, picking up a micro USB cable she had sterilized and wrapped.

  In front of her on a brown paper-covered counter were two MacBooks that had been wiped off with isopropyl alcohol and enclosed in transparent polypropylene, and the BioGraph watchlike device, which had been swabbed for DNA late yesterday in the evidence exam room down the hall and was now safe for handling. Lucy plugged the cable into the BioGraph and connected it to one of the laptops.

  “Like plugging in your iPod or iPhone,” she said. “It’s syncing with something. What have we got?”

  The screen went black and prompted her for a username and password. In a banner at the top was a long string of zeros and ones that Scarpetta recognized as binary code.

  “That’s odd,” she said.

  “Very odd,” Lucy said. “It doesn’t want us to know its name. It’s encrypted in binary, which is meant to be a deterrent, to be off-putting. If you’re one of these people who surf the Net and somehow find this site, you have to go to some trouble to even have a hint what you’ve landed on. Even then, you can’t get into it unless you’re authorized or have a skeleton key.”