The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Mr. Fuller had a very long night and a very early morning, and we are so upset by what’s been on the news.” Nastya stopped on the steps and looked back at Berger. “Is it true?” The sound of her feet on stone as she continued, talking with her back to them and turning her head slightly to the side. “I always worry about who’s driving the taxis. You get in, and what do you know, and off you go with a stranger who could take you anywhere. Can I offer you something to drink? Coffee or tea or water or something stronger? It’s all right to drink in the library, as long as you don’t set something near the books.”

  “We’re fine,” Berger replied.

  On the third floor they followed a long hallway that was covered by an antique silk runner in different shades of deep red and rose, and they passed a series of shut doors leading to the library, which smelled mustier than Berger remembered from three weeks ago. The silver chandeliers were electric, the lights turned low, and the room was chilly and unlived-in, as if no one had been in it since Berger was at Thanksgiving. The Florentine leather-bound photo albums she had looked at were still stacked on the library table, and in front of them was the needlework side chair where she had been sitting when she’d found several photographs of Lucy. On a smaller table with a griffin base was an empty crystal glass that she remembered Bobby setting down after drinking several fingers of cognac to settle his nerves. The paneled longcase clock near the fireplace hadn’t been wound.

  “Remind me again about your situation here,” Berger said as she and Bonnell sat on a leather sofa. “You have an apartment on which floor?”

  “On the fourth floor in the back,” Nastya said, and her eye caught the same details Berger had. The unwound clock and the dirty glass. “I haven’t been staying here until today. With Mr. Fuller away . . .”

  “In Florida,” Berger said.

  “He told me you were coming, and I hurried over. I’ve been in a hotel. He was kind enough to put me in one not far from here so I’m available when needed but not sleeping alone in this place. You can understand why that would be uncomfortable right now.”

  “Which hotel?” Bonnell asked.

  “The Hotel Elysée. The Starr family has used it for years when they have out-of-town guests and business associates who they didn’t want staying in the house. It’s only a few minutes’ walk. You can appreciate why I wouldn’t want to stay here right now. Well, it’s been very stressful these past weeks. What happened to Hannah and then the media, the vans with their cameras. You never know when they will appear, and it’s worse because of that same woman who said those things on CNN last night. Every night, it’s all she talks about, and she’s constantly bothering Mr. Fuller for interviews. People have no respect. Mr. Fuller gave me time off because why would I want to stay here alone right now?”

  “Carley Crispin,” Berger said. “She bothers Bobby Fuller?”

  “I can’t stand her, but I watch because I want to know. But I don’t know what to believe,” Nastya said. “That was terrible what she said last night. I burst into tears, I was so upset.”

  “How does she bother Mr. Fuller?” Bonnell asked. “I would imagine he’s not easy to reach.”

  “All I know is she’s been here before.” Nastya pulled an armchair close and sat. “At a party or two in the past. When she was a White House person, what do you call it? A press secretary. I wasn’t here, it was before my time, but you know about Mr. Starr and his famous dinners and parties. That’s why there are all these picture books.” She indicated the photo albums on the library table. “And many, many more on the shelves. Over thirty years of them, and you probably didn’t go through all of them?” she asked, because she hadn’t been here the day Berger and Marino had been.

  Only Bobby had been home, and Berger hadn’t gone through all the albums, only a few. After she found the photographs from 1996, she’d stopped looking.

  “Not that it’s surprising about Carley Crispin having been to dinners here,” Nastya went on proudly. “At one time or another, probably half the famous people in the world have been through this house. But Hannah probably knew her or at least met her. I hate how quiet it’s been. Since Mr. Starr died, well, those days are past. And we used to have so many celebrations, so much excitement, so many people. Mr. Fuller is much more private, and he’s gone most of the time.”

  The housekeeper seemed perfectly at ease sitting in a library that she had neither tidied nor cleaned in the last three weeks. Were it not for her uniform, she could be the mistress of the mansion, and it was interesting that she called Hannah Starr by her first name and spoke of her in the past tense. Yet Bobby was Mr. Fuller, and he was late. It was four-twenty, and there was no sign of him. Berger wondered if it was possible he wasn’t home, had decided not to meet with them after all. The house was extremely quiet, not even the distant sounds of traffic penetrated the limestone walls, and there were no windows in here, the space like a mausoleum or a vault, perhaps to protect the rare books, art, and antiques from unwanted exposure to sunlight and moisture.

  “It’s all the more terrible she talks about Hannah the way she does,” Nastya went on about Carley Crispin. “Night after night. How do you do that when it’s someone you’ve met?”

  “Do you have any idea the last time Carley was here?” Berger asked, getting out her phone.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said she bothers Mr. Fuller.” Bonnell got back to that. “She knows him, maybe because of Hannah?”

  “I just know she’s called here.”

  “How does she have the number?” Bonnell asked.

  Berger wanted to try Bobby’s cell phone to see where he was, but she couldn’t get a signal in the library.

  “I don’t know. I don’t answer the phone anymore. I’m afraid it might be a reporter. You know, people can find out so much these days. You never know who might somehow get your number,” Nastya said as her eyes wandered to an enormous canvas of clipper ships, what looked like a Montague Dawson that filled a mahogany panel of wall between floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

  “Why would Hannah take a taxi?” Bonnell asked. “How did she usually get around when she went out to dinner?”

  “She drove herself.” Nastya’s eyes were fixed on the painting. “But if she was going to have a few drinks, she didn’t drive. Sometimes clients or friends gave her a ride or she would use a limo. But you know, you live in New York, no matter who you are, you take taxis if that’s what you need to do. And sometimes she would if it was last minute. All their cars, a lot of them very old and not driven on the street. Mr. Starr’s collection? You’ve seen it. Maybe when you were here, Mr. Fuller showed it to you?”

  Berger hadn’t seen it, and she didn’t answer.

  “In the basement garage,” Nastya added.

  When Bobby Fuller had shown Berger and Marino around, they hadn’t been given a tour of the basement. An antique car collection hadn’t seemed important at the time.

  “Sometimes one of them gets blocked in,” Nastya said.

  “Blocked in?” Berger said.

  “The Bentley, because Mr. Fuller had been moving things around down there.” Nastya’s attention returned to the maritime painting. “He’s very proud of his cars and spends a lot of time with them.”

  “Hannah couldn’t drive her Bentley to dinner because it was blocked in,” Berger repeated.

  “The weather was messy, too. And all those cars, and most you can’t take out. The Duesenberg. Bugati. Ferrai.” She didn’t pronounce them right.

  “Maybe I’m confused,” Berger said. “I thought Bobby wasn’t home that night.”

  Scarpetta sat at the work station, alone in the training lab, Lucy and Marino having left moments ago to find Berger and Benton.

  She continued to review what Geffner was sending and what was rolling by on the other two monitors, studying multilayered paint chips, one chrome-yellow, the other racecar-red, and data that moved Toni Darien’s life minute by minute closer to its end.

  �
�The debris you collected from Toni Darien’s head wound and particularly from her hair,” Geffner said over speakerphone. “I cross-sectioned the ones you’re looking at but haven’t had a chance to Melt Mount any of the samples yet, so this is rough, really quick and dirty. You got the images up?”

  “I’ve got them.” Scarpetta looked at the paint chips, and she looked at charts and maps and a multitude of graphs.

  Thousands of reports from the BioGraph, and she couldn’t pause the images or replay them or skip forward, had no choice but to look at data as Lucy’s programs sifted through and sorted it. The process wasn’t fast enough or facile, and it was confusing. The problem was Caligula. They didn’t have the proprietary software that had been developed for the express purpose of aggregating and manipulating the galaxy of data collected by the BioGraph devices.

  “The chrome-yellow chip is an oil-based paint, an acrylic melamine and alkyd resin, from an older vehicle,” Geffner was explaining. “And then the red chip. That’s much newer. You can tell because the pigments are organic-based dyes versus inorganic heavy metals.”

  Scarpetta had been following Toni Darien through Hannah Starr’s house for the past twenty-seven minutes, Toni Darien’s minutes, from three-twenty-six p.m. to three-fifty-three p.m. this past Tuesday. During that interval, the ambient temperature of the Park Avenue mansion had remained between sixty nine and seventy two as Toni had moved through different areas of it, her pace slow and sporadic, her heart rate not peaking above sixty-seven, as if she was relaxed, maybe walking around and talking to someone. Then the temperature suddenly began to drop. Sixty-nine to sixty-five to sixty-three and falling, while her mobility was constant, ten to twenty paces every fifteen seconds, a leisurely pace. She was walking somewhere in the Starr house where it was cooler.

  “Obviously, the paint wasn’t transferred from the weapon,” Scarpetta said to Geffner. “Unless it was painted with automotive paint.”

  “More likely a passive transfer.” Geffner’s voice. “Either from whatever she was struck with or possibly a vehicle that transported her body.”

  Sixty degrees, fifty-nine, fifty-eight, and falling as Toni continued to move, her pace slow. Eight steps. Three steps. Seventeen steps. No steps. One step. Four steps. Every fifteen seconds. Temperature fifty-five degrees. It was cool. Her mobility was consistent. She was walking and stopping, maybe talking, maybe looking at something.

  “Not from the same source unless it’s another passive transfer,” Scarpetta said. “A yellow paint chip is from an older vehicle, the red one from a vehicle that’s much newer.”

  “Exactly. The pigments in the chrome-yellow chips are inorganic and contain lead,” Geffner said. “I already know I’m going to find lead even though I haven’t used micro-FTIR, pryolysis GC-MS. The chips you’re looking at are easily distinguishable from each other in terms of age. The newer paint has a thick, clear protective top coat, a thin base coat with red organic pigment, and then three colored primer coats. The chrome-yellow chip has no clear topcoat and a thick base coat, then primer. A couple of black chips? They’re new, too. Just the yellow’s old.”

  More charts and maps slowly rolling by. Three-fifty-nine p.m. Toni Darien time. Four-oh-one p.m. Four-oh-three p.m. Her pulse oximetry ninety-nine percent, her heart rate sixty-six, her pace eight to sixteen steps, illumination a consistent three hundred lux. The temperature had dropped to fifty-five. She was walking around someplace cool and dimly lit. Her vital signs indicated she wasn’t in any sort of distress.

  “They haven’t used lead in paint for what?” Scarpetta said. “Twenty-something years?”

  “Heavy-metal pigments are the seventies and eighties and earlier because they’re not environmentally friendly,” he answered. “Consistent with fibers you collected from her wound, her hair, various areas of her body. Synthetic monoacrylic, overdyed black, at least fifteen different types I’ve seen so far, which I associate with waste fibers, low-end stuff typical of rugs and trunk liners in older vehicles.”

  “What about fibers from a newer vehicle?” Scarpetta asked.

  “So far all I’ve seen from what you submitted are a lot of the waste fibers.”

  “Consistent with her body being transported in a car,” Scarpetta said. “But not likely a yellow cab.”

  Four-ten p.m. Toni Darien time, and something happened. Something sudden and swift and devastatingly decisive. In the span of thirty seconds, her pace went from two steps to zero and her mobility stopped. She wasn’t moving her arms or legs, any part of her body, and her pulse oximetry had dropped: ninety-eight percent, then ninety-seven. Her heart rate slowed to sixty.

  “I anticipated you’d mention that because of what’s all over the news,” Geffner said. “The average age of a yellow cab in New York City is less than four years old. You can imagine the miles that are put on those things. Not likely, and in fact extremely improbable, the chrome-yellow paint chip came from a yellow cab. Some old vehicle, don’t ask me what.”

  Four-sixteen p.m. Toni Darien time. She became mobile again, but she wasn’t walking, her pace registering zero on the pedometer built into her watch. Mobile but taking no steps, probably not upright. Someone else was moving her. Pulse oximetry was ninety-five percent, heart rate fifty-seven. Same ambient temperature and illumination. She was in the same part of the mansion, and she was dying.

  “. . . Other trace is rust. And microscopic particulate like sand, rocks, clays, decayed organic matter, plus some insect pieces and parts. In other words, dirt.”

  Scarpetta imagined Toni Darien being struck from behind, a forceful single blow to the left back of her head. She would have collapsed instantly, fallen to the floor. She wasn’t conscious anymore. Four-twenty p.m., and the oxygen saturation of her blood was ninety-four percent and her heart rate was fifty-five. She was mobile again. There was a lot of motion, but her pace remained zero. She wasn’t walking. Someone was moving her.

  “. . . I can send you images of that,” Geffner was saying, and Scarpetta was scarcely listening. “Pollen, hair fragments that show insect damage, insect fecal matter, and of course dust mites. A lot of those all over her, and I doubt they came from Central Park. Maybe from whatever she was transported in. Or someplace with a lot of dust.”

  Charts rolling by. Peaks and bumps on actigraphy graphs. Consistent motion every fifteen seconds, minute after minute. Someone moving her repetitively, rhythmically.

  “. . . Which are microscopic arachnids, and I would expect an abundance of them in an old carpet or a room with a lot of dust. Dust mites die if there’s nothing to feed on anymore, such as sloughed-off skin cells, which is mainly what they’re after inside the house . . .”

  Four-twenty-nine p.m. Toni Darien time. Pulse oximetry ninety-three percent, heart rate forty-nine beats per minute. She was becoming hypoxic, the low oxygen saturation of her blood beginning to starve her brain as it swelled and bled from its catastrophic injury. Peaks and bumps on actigraphs, her body moving in a rhythm of waves and lines, a repeatable pattern over an extended time measured in seconds, in minutes.

  “. . . in other words, house dust . . .”

  “Thank you,” Scarpetta said. “I’ve got to go,” she said to Geffner, and she got off the phone.

  The training lab was silent. Graphs and charts and maps rolling by on two large flat screens. She sat mesmerized as the rhythm continued, but different now, in fits and starts and at some intervals extreme and then quiet, and then it would begin again. At five p.m. Toni Darien time, her pulse oximetry was seventy-nine, her heart rate thirty-three. She was in a coma. One minute later the actigraph flatlined because the motion had stopped. Four minutes later there was no further mobility and the ambient illumination suddenly diminished from three hundred lux to less than one. Someone had turned out the lights. At five fourteen p.m. Toni Darien died in the dark.

  Lucy opened the trunk of Marino’s car as Benton and a woman climbed out of a black SUV and walked swiftly across Park Avenue. It was past five o�
��clock, nighttime and cold, and a fitful wind whipped the flag over the Starr mansion entrance.

  “Anything?” Benton said, flipping up the collar of his coat.

  “We’ve walked around trying to see in the windows, detect any kind of activity inside. So far nothing,” Marino said. “Lucy thinks there’s a scrambler, and I think we should go in with a ram and a shotgun and not wait for ESU.”

  “Why?” the woman’s dark shape asked Lucy.

  “Do I know you?” Lucy was edgy and unfriendly, frantic inside.

  “Marty Lanier, FBI.”

  “I’ve been here before,” Lucy said, unzipping a bag and sliding open a drawer in the TruckVault Marino had installed in his trunk. “Rupe hated cell phones and didn’t allow them in his house.”

  “Industrial espionage—” Lanier started to suggest.

  Lucy cut her off. “He hated them, thought they were rude. If you were inside and tried to use your phone or log on to the Internet, you didn’t get a signal. He wasn’t committing espionage. He was worried about other people doing it.”

  “I would think there might be a lot of dead zones in there,” Benton said of the limestone building with its tall windows and wrought-iron balconies, reminiscent of hôtels particuliers, the grand private homes Lucy associated with the heart of Paris, with the Île Saint-Louis.

  She was familiar with the hôtel Chandonne inhabited by the corrupt nobility Jean-Baptiste had descended from. The Starr mansion was similar in its style and scale, and somewhere inside were Bonnell and Berger, and Lucy was going to do whatever it took to get in and find them. She surreptitiously tucked a Rabbit Tool inside the bag, then was obvious about packing the thermal imaging scope she had given to Marino for his last birthday, what was basically a handheld FLIR, the same technology she had on her helicopter.