The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Another recruit that would have been a poor choice,” Lanier said to everyone as she looked at Benton. “You think Jean-Baptiste would know?”

  “What?” Benton’s anger flared. “Know that Agee made sure I was exiled from my life and my reward was to be shunned by the FBI, and the reason he was able to do that was because of the Chandonnes?”

  Silence inside the FBI conference room.

  “Do I think he encountered Jean-Baptiste, that they were somehow acquainted? Yes, I do,” Benton said. “Agee the wannabe would have lusted to talk to a so-called monster like Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, and he would have been drawn to him even if he didn’t know who he was, saying it was an alias Agee met. He would have been drawn to Jean-Baptiste’s psychopathology, to the evil he emanates, and it would be the biggest fucking mistake Warner Agee would fucking ever make.”

  “Obviously,” Lanier said after a pause. “Since he’s in the morgue as we speak.”

  “The Hotel Elysée is very close to the Starr mansion on Park Avenue.” Berger’s demeanor was calm. Too calm. “Only three or four blocks. You walk out of the hotel and can be at their mansion in five, ten minutes.”

  Stockman typed, and Hotel Elysée and Starr Mansion appeared on the flat screen, the newest branches on the tree.

  “And you need to put Lucy Farinelli’s name up there,” Berger said. “Which means you have to add mine, too. Not just because I’ve been investigating Hannah’s disappearance and have interviewed her husband and Hap Judd, but because I’m connected to Lucy. She was a client of Rupe Starr’s. Had been for more than a decade. Hard to imagine she never met Hannah and possibly Bobby.”

  Benton didn’t know what she was talking about or where she’d gotten her information. He met her eyes to ask the question because he didn’t want to ask it out loud, and the lingering look she gave him was her answer. No. Lucy hadn’t told her. Berger had found out some other way.

  “Photographs,” Berger said to everyone. “Leather-bound volumes in Rupe Starr’s rare book room. Parties and dinners with clients over the years. She’s in one of the albums. Lucy is.”

  “You found this out when,” Benton said.

  “Three weeks ago.”

  If she’d known that long, then her sudden change in demeanor was related to something else. Bonnell must have relayed other information over the phone that was even more unsettling.

  “Nineteen ninety-six. She was twenty, still in college. I didn’t see photographs of her in any other albums, possibly because she became an FBI agent after college, would have been extremely careful about appearing at big parties and dinners, and certainly wouldn’t have allowed her picture to be taken,” Berger went on. “As you know, after Hannah’s disappearance was reported by her husband, Bobby, we asked permission to get personal effects, her DNA, from the house on Park Avenue, and I wanted to talk to him.”

  “He was in Florida when she disappeared, right?” O’Dell said.

  “The night she didn’t come home from the restaurant,” Berger said, “Bobby was in their apartment in North Miami Beach, and we have that confirmed by e-mails sent from the apartment’s IP address, and we have confirmation from phone records and the Florida housekeeper, Rosie. She was interviewed. I talked to her myself over the phone, and she confirmed Bobby was there the night of November twenty-sixth, the day before Thanksgiving.”

  “You know for a fact it was Bobby sending the e-mails and making the phone calls?” Lanier asked. “How do you know Rosie the housekeeper hasn’t been doing it and lying to protect her boss?”

  “I don’t have probable cause or even reasonable suspicion to place him under surveillance when there’s no evidence whatsoever of criminal activity on his part,” Berger said with no inflection in her voice. “Does that mean I trust him? I don’t trust anybody.”

  “We know what’s in Hannah’s will?” Lanier asked.

  “She’s Rupe Starr’s only child, and when he died last May he left everything to her,” Berger responded. “She revised her will soon after. If she dies, everything goes to a foundation.”

  “So she cut Bobby out. That strike you as a little unusual?” Stockman said.

  “The best prenuptial is to make sure your spouse can’t profit by betraying you or killing you,” Berger answered. “And now it’s moot. Hannah Starr has a few million left and a lot of debt. Supposedly lost almost everything in the market and to Ponzi scams and all the rest this past September.”

  “She’s probably on a yacht in the Mediterranean, having her nails done in Cannes or Monte Carlo,” Lanier said. “So Bobby gets nothing. What was your impression of him? Besides your natural inclination not to trust anyone.”

  “Extremely upset.” Berger didn’t direct anything to anyone. She continued addressing the table, as if it was a jury. “Extremely worried, stressed, when I talked to him in their home. He’s convinced she’s the victim of foul play, claims she never would have run off and never would have left him. I was inclined to take that possibility very seriously until Lucy discovered the financial information all of you know about.”

  “Let’s go back to the night Hannah disappeared,” O’Dell said. “How did Bobby know she was gone?”

  “He tried to call her, and that’s reflected in phone records he’s made available to us,” Berger said. “The following day, Thanksgiving Day, Hannah was to board a private jet for Miami to spend the long weekend with him, and from there go to Saint Barts.”

  “Alone?” Stockman asked. “Or both of them?”

  “She was going to Saint Barts alone,” Berger answered.

  “So, maybe she was about to skip the country,” Lanier said.

  “That’s what I’ve wondered,” Berger said. “If she did, it wasn’t on her private jet, the Gulfstream. She never showed up at the FBO in White Plains.”

  “This is what Bobby told you?” Benton asked. “We know it’s true?”

  “He said it, and there’s a manifest for the flight. She didn’t show up at the FBO. She didn’t board the jet, and Bobby wasn’t on the manifest for the flight to Saint Barts,” Berger answered. “She also wasn’t answering the phone. Their New York housekeeper—”

  “And her name is?” Lanier asked.

  “Nastya.” She spelled it, and the name appeared on the wall. “She lives in the mansion and, according to her, Hannah never came home after having dinner in the Village on November twenty-sixth. But apparently this wasn’t reason enough to call the police. Sometimes she didn’t come home. She’d been at a birthday dinner. One if by Land, Two if by Sea on Barrow Street. She was with a group of friends and supposedly was seen getting into a yellow cab as everyone left the restaurant. That’s what we know so far.”

  “Bobby know she screwed around on him?” O’Dell said.

  “ ‘A lot of space in their togetherness’ is the way he described it. I don’t know what he knows,” Berger said. “Maybe what Hap said is true. Bobby and Hannah were business partners more than anything else. He claims he loves her, but we certainly hear that all the time.”

  “In other words, they have an arrangement. Maybe both of them screw around. He’s from money, right?” O’Dell said.

  “Not her kind of money. But from a well-off family in California, went to Stanford, got his MBA from Yale, was a successful alternative asset manager, involved in a couple of funds, one U.K. based, one Monaco-based.”

  “These hedge fund guys. I mean, some of them were making hundreds of millions,” said O’Dell.

  “A lot of them aren’t now, and some are in jail. What about Bobby?” Stockman said to Berger. “He lose his shirt?”

  “Like a lot of these investors, he was counting on energy prices and mining stocks continuing to soar while financials continued to fall. This is what he told me,” she replied.

  “And then the trend reversed in July,” Stockman said.

  “He described it as a bloodbath,” Berger said. “He can’t afford the lifestyle he’s grown accustomed to without the Starr fortun
e, that’s for sure.”

  “So the two of them are more of a merger than a marriage,” O’Dell said.

  “I can’t attest to his real feelings. Who the hell ever knows the truth about what people feel,” she said without a trace of emotion. “He seemed distraught when I talked to him, when I met with him. When she didn’t show up for her flight on Thanksgiving, he claims he began to panic, called the police, and the police contacted me. Bobby claims he was afraid his wife was the victim of violence and stated that she’d had trouble in the past with being stalked. He flew to New York, met us at the house, walked us through it, at which time we collected a toothbrush of Hannah’s to get her DNA in case it turned out to be needed. In the event a body turns up somewhere.”

  “The photo albums.” Benton was still thinking about Lucy and wondering what other secrets she kept. “Why would he show them to you?”

  “I inquired about Hannah’s clients, if one of them might have targeted her. He said he didn’t know who most of her late father’s clients, Rupe Starr’s clients, were. Bobby suggested we—”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Marino was with me. Bobby suggested we look through the photo albums because it was Rupe’s habit to entertain a new client at the mansion, an initiation more than an invitation. If you didn’t come to dinner, he didn’t take you on. He wanted to have relationships with his clients, and apparently did.”

  “You saw Lucy’s picture from 1996,” Benton said, and he could only imagine how Berger felt. “Did Marino see it, too?”

  “I recognized her in the photograph. Marino wasn’t in the library with me when I found it. He didn’t see it.”

  “Did you ask Bobby about it?” Benton wasn’t going to ask her why she’d withheld the information from Marino.

  He suspected he knew. Berger was hoping Lucy would tell her the truth, that Berger wouldn’t have to confront her. Obviously, Lucy hadn’t.

  “I didn’t show the picture to Bobby or mention it,” Berger said. “He wouldn’t have known Lucy back then. Hannah and Bobby have been together less than two years.”

  “Doesn’t mean he doesn’t know about Lucy,” Benton said. “Hannah could have mentioned Lucy to him. I’d be surprised if she didn’t. When you were in the library, Jaime, did you pick that particular album off a shelf? Rupe Starr must have dozens of them.”

  “Scores of them,” she said. “Bobby put a stack of them on the table for me.”

  “Any possibility he wanted you to find the photograph of Lucy?” Benton had one of his feelings again. Something in his gut that was sending him a message.

  “He put them on the table and walked out of the library,” Berger replied.

  A game. And a cruel one, if Bobby had done it deliberately, Benton thought. If he knew about Berger’s private life, he would know it would upset her to discover her partner, her forensic computer expert, had been in the Starr mansion, had been mixed up with those people and had said nothing about it.

  “You don’t mind my asking,” Lanier said to Berger, “why would you allow Lucy to handle the forensic computer part of this investigation if she had ties with the alleged victim? In fact, with the entire Starr family?”

  Berger didn’t answer at first. Then she said, “I was waiting for her to explain it.”

  “What is the explanation?” Lanier asked.

  “I’m still waiting for it.”

  “Okay. Well, it could be a problem down the road,” Stockman said. “If this goes to court.”

  “I consider it a problem now.” Berger’s face was grim. “A much bigger problem than I care to describe.”

  “Where’s Bobby now?” Lanier asked her in a milder tone than she’d used so far.

  “It appears back here in the city,” Berger said. “He e-mails Hannah. E-mails her daily.”

  “That’s fucked up,” O’Dell said.

  “Whether it is or it isn’t, he’s been doing it. We know because obviously we’re accessing her e-mail. He e-mailed her late last night and said he’d heard about some development in the case and was returning to New York early this morning. I would expect he’s here by now.”

  “Unless the guy’s an imbecile, he must suspect somebody’s looking at her e-mails. Makes me suspicious he’s doing it for our benefit,” O’Dell said.

  “My first thought, too,” Lanier said.

  Games, Benton thought, and the uneasy feeling was stronger.

  “I don’t know what he suspects. Ostensibly, he’s hoping Hannah is alive somewhere and is reading his e-mails to her,” Berger said. “I’m assuming he’s aware of what was on The Crispin Report last night, about Hannah’s head hair supposedly being found in a cab. And that’s why he’s suddenly returning to the city.”

  “Same thing as hearing she’s dead. Damn reporters,” Stockman said. “Anything for ratings and don’t give a flying flip about what it does to people whose lives they wreck.” He said to Benton, “She really say that about us? You know, about the FBI, about profiling being antiquated?”

  Stockman meant Scarpetta and what was on the CNN marquee and all over the Internet last night.

  “I believe she was misquoted,” Benton said blandly. “I think she meant the good ole days were gone and were never all that good.”

  The guard hairs were long and coarse, with four bands of white and black along a shaft that tapered to a point.

  “You can do DNA if you want to confirm the species,” Geffner was saying over speakerphone. “I know a lab in Pennsylvania, Mito typing Technologies, that specializes in species determination of animals. But I can tell you already from what I’m looking at. Classic wolf. Great Plains wolf, a subspecies of gray wolf.”

  “It’s not dog, all right, if you say so. I admit it looks like German shepherd fur to me,” Scarpetta said from a work station where she could view images Geffner was uploading to her.

  Across the lab, Lucy and Marino were monitoring what was going on with the MacBooks, and from where Scarpetta sat, she could see data rapidly aggregating into charts and maps.

  “You won’t find these banded guard hairs on a German shepherd.” Geffner’s voice.

  “And the finer grayish hairs I’m seeing?” Scarpetta asked.

  “Mixed in with the guard hairs. That’s just some inner fur. The voodoo-like doll that was glued to the front of the card? It was stuffed with fur, both inner and guard, and some debris mixed in, maybe a little poop and dead leaves and such. An indication the fur hasn’t been processed, likely is from their natural habitat, maybe their lair. I’ve not looked at all of the fur submitted, obviously. But my guess is it’s all wolf fur. Guard hairs and hairs from the inner coat.”

  “Where would someone get it?”

  “I did some searching and came up with a few possible sources,” Geffner said. “Wildlife preserves, wolf sanctuaries, zoos. Wolf fur is also sold in a well-known witchery in Salem, Massachusetts, called the Hex.”

  “On Essex Street, in the historic area,” Scarpetta said. “I’ve been in there. A lot of nice oils and candles. Nothing black magic or evil.”

  “Doesn’t have to be evil to be used for evil, I guess,” Geffner said. “The Hex sells amulets, potions, and you can buy wolf fur in little gold silk bags. It’s supposed to be protective and have healing powers. I doubt anything sold like that would have been processed, so maybe the wolf fur in the doll came from a magic shop.”

  Lucy was looking at Scarpetta from across the room, as if she was finding something significant that Scarpetta was going to want to see.

  As Geffner explained, “Wolves have two layers of fur. The inner, which is the softer sort of wool-like fur that insulates, what I call filler hair. And then this outer coat, the guard layer, coarse hairs that shed water and have the pigmentation you’re seeing on the image I sent. The difference in the species is the color. The Great Plains wolf isn’t native to this area. Mostly the Midwest. And you usually don’t get wolf fur in criminal cases. Not here in New York.”

  “I do
n’t believe I ever have,” Scarpetta said. “Here or anywhere.”

  Lucy and Marino in their protective garb were standing and talking tensely. Scarpetta couldn’t hear what they were saying. Something was happening.

  “I’ve seen it for one reason or another.” Geffner’s easygoing tenor voice. Not much excited him. He’d been tracking criminals with a microscope for quite a number of years. “The crap in people’s house. You ever looked at dust bunnies under the scope? More interesting than astronomy, a whole universe of information about who and what goes in and out of a person’s residence. All kinds of hair and fur.”

  Marino and Lucy were looking at charts rolling by on the MacBook screens.

  “Shit,” Marino said loudly, and his safety glasses looked at Scarpetta. “Doc? You better see this.”

  And Geffner’s voice continued. “Some people raise wolves or mostly hybrids, a mixture of wolf and canine. But pure unprocessed wolf fur in a voodoo doll or puppet? More likely this is connected with the ritualistic motif of the bomb. Everything I’m researching indicates this is a black-magic type of thing, although the symbolism is conflicted and sort of contradictory. Wolves aren’t bad. It’s just everything else is, including the explosives, the firecrackers, which would have hurt you or someone, done some real damage.”

  “I don’t know what you’ve found.” Scarpetta was reminding him that all she knew so far was that what Marino had assumed was dog fur and now was identified as wolf fur had been recovered from the bomb debris.

  Across the lab, maps were rolling by on one of the MacBooks. Street maps. Photo, elevation, and topographic maps.

  “Preliminarily, this is as much as I can tell you.” Geffner’s voice. “The terrible odor, and there is one. Sort of tarry and sort of like shit, if you’ll excuse my French. You familiar with asafoetida?”

  “I don’t cook Indian food, but I’m familiar enough. An herb rather notorious for its disgusting odor.”