The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Hot Shot’s with you?” Marino’s voice. “What about the Eagle?”

  “Affirm to both.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Bonnell looked at Nastya and answered, “Hazel.” Another designation she just made up.

  “Tell him I opened the garage door,” Lucy said.

  Bonnell transmitted it over the air as Berger walked back, looking at her BlackBerry, looking at messages as they landed in a rapid succession of chimes. Earlier calls, some of them from Marino, from Scarpetta. And from Lucy, at least five when she’d realized Berger was on her way here and didn’t know what was happening, was missing critical information. Lucy had kept calling, had gotten terrified, had been as frightened as she’d ever been in her life.

  “What’s your twenty?” Marino’s voice asking Bonnell if everyone was all right.

  “Not sure who’s inside and been having radio problems,” Bonnell replied.

  “When can we expect you out?”

  Lucy said, “Tell him to come through the garage. It’s open and they need to come up the ramp to the upper basement level.”

  Bonnell transmitted the message and said to Lucy, “We’re okay.” She meant she wasn’t going to draw her gun, wasn’t going to do something fucking stupid like shoot her.

  Lucy lowered the Glock to her side, but she didn’t return it to the ankle holster. She and Berger began to walk around, and Lucy showed her the yellow Checker cab and the dirt on tires and the tile floor, but they didn’t touch anything. They didn’t open its doors but looked through the rear windows at the torn and rotted black carpet, at the tattered and stained black cloth upholstery and folded jump seat. There was a coat on the floor. Green. It looked like a parka. The witness, Harvey Fahley, said he’d seen a yellow taxi. If he wasn’t an aficionado of cars, he wouldn’t necessarily have noticed that this yellow taxi was about thirty years old with the signature checkerboard trim that contemporary models didn’t have. What the average person would notice when driving past in the dark was the chrome-yellow color, the boxy General Motors chassis, and the light on top, which Fahley recalled was turned off, signaling that the taxi wasn’t available.

  Lucy offered snapshots of information that Scarpetta had relayed over the phone when Lucy and Marino had been on their way here, scared that something awful had happened. Berger and Bonnell weren’t answering the police radio or their phones and had no way of knowing that Toni Darien had jogged to this address late last Tuesday, that she likely had died in the basement and it was possible she wasn’t the only victim. Lucy and Berger talked and searched and watched for Marino, and Lucy said she was sorry until Berger told her to stop saying it. Both of them were guilty of keeping to themselves things that should have been discussed, neither of them honest, Berger said, as they got to workbenches, two of them plastic, with drawers and bins. Scattered on them were tools and miscellaneous parts, hood ornaments and valves, chrome collars, screws, head bolts. One stick-shift assembly had a large steel knob with blood on it, or maybe rust. They didn’t touch it or the spools of fine-gauge wire and what looked like tiny circuit boards that Lucy recognized as recording modules, and a notebook.

  It had a black cloth cover with yellow stars on it, and Lucy flipped it open with the barrel of her pistol. A book of magical spells, of recipes and potions for hexing, for protection, winning, and good luck, all handwritten in a perfect script, in Gotham, as precise as a font, and also on the bench were small gold-silk pouches, some emptied of the fur that had been inside them, long black-and-white hairs and clumps of matted undercoat. What looked like wolf fur was scattered on work surfaces and on the floor, which had been cleaned in wide swaths, something recently wiped up or mopped near the orange metallic Lamborghini Diablo VT. The top was down and on the passenger’s seat was a pair of Hestra olive nylon mittens with tan cowhide palms, and Lucy imagined Toni Darien entering the mansion upstairs after jogging here.

  She imagined Toni feeling comfortable with whoever had greeted her at the door, whoever walked her down to the basement, where it was at most fifty-five degrees. She may have had her coat on as she was given a tour, shown the cars, and she would have been especially impressed with the Lamborghini. She might have gotten behind the wheel and taken off her mittens so she could get the feel of carbon fiber and fantasize, and when she climbed back out, it might have happened then. A pause as she turned away, and someone grabbed an object, perhaps the stick shift, and had struck the back of her head.

  “Then she was raped,” Berger said.

  “She wasn’t walking and was being moved around,” Lucy told her. “Aunt Kay says it went on for more than an hour. And after she was dead, it started again. Like she was left down here, maybe on that mattress, and then he’d come back. It went on for a day and a half.”

  “When he first started killing”—Berger meant Jean-Baptiste—“he did it with his brother, Jay. Jay was the handsome one, would have sex with the women, then Jean-Baptiste would beat them to death. He never had sex with them. His excitement was the kill.”

  “Jay had sex with them. So maybe he found another Jay,” Lucy said.

  “We need to find Hap Judd right away.”

  “How did you set it up with Bobby?” Lucy asked, as Marino and four cops dressed like SWAT appeared at the top of the ramp and headed toward them, their hands near their weapons.

  “After the meeting at the FBI field office, I called his cell phone,” Berger said.

  “Then he wasn’t home, not in this house,” Lucy said. “Unless he’d turned off the frequency jammer and after talking to you turned it back on.”

  “There’s a cognac glass upstairs in the library,” Berger said. “It might tell us if Bobby is him.” She meant Jean-Baptiste Chandonne again.

  Lucy said to Marino as he reached them, “Where’s Benton?”

  “He and Marty left to pick up the Doc.” His eyes were looking everywhere, taking in what was on the mobile benches and the floor, looking at the Checker cab. “Crime Scene’s on its way to see if we can figure out what the hell happened down here, and the Doc’s bringing the sniffer.”

  Inside what the DNA Building’s staff had come to call the Blood Spatter Room, Scarpetta dipped a swab inside a bottle of hexane. She swiped a residue into a petri dish she’d set on the epoxy-tile floor, and pressed the power button on the Lightweight Analyzer for Buried Remains and Decomposition Odor, a LABRADOR.

  The e-nose, or sniffer, brought to mind a robotic dog that a creator for the Jetsons might have designed, an S-rod with small speakers on either side of the handle that could pass for ears, and the nose a metal honeycomb of twelve sensors that detected different chemical signatures the same way a canine recognized scents. A battery pack was attached to a strap that Scarpetta slipped over her shoulder, and she tucked the S-rod close to her side and maneuvered the nose over her sample in the petri dish. The LABRADOR responded with an illuminated bar graph on the control console and an audio signal, what sounded like synthesized strums on a harp, a harmonic pattern of tones distinctive for hexane. The e-nose was happy. It had alerted on an alkane hydrocarbon, a simple solvent, and had passed its test. Now it was on to a much more somber assignment.

  Scarpetta’s premise was simple. It appeared that Toni Darien had been murdered inside the Starr mansion, and the question was where and if other victims had been lured there in the past, or was Toni the only one? She had been in one of the basements, Scarpetta presumed, based on the temperatures registered by the BioGraph device and Scarpetta’s own findings, which indicated that the body had been preserved someplace cool and out of the elements. Wherever her body had been, it had left molecules of chemicals and compounds. It had left odors that the human nose wasn’t going to pick up but the LABRADOR might, and Scarpetta turned it off and packed it inside a black nylon case. She flipped off ceiling rigs of movable lights that for an instant reminded her of a television set, reminded her of Carley Crispin. Scarpetta put on her coat. She walked out and took a glass staircase down to
the lobby and left the building. It was getting close to eight p.m., and the garden in front and its granite benches were empty, windswept, and dark.

  She turned right on First Avenue and followed the sidewalk past the Bellevue Hospital Center, heading back to her office, where she was supposed to meet Benton. Her building’s front door would be locked, and she took another right at 30th and noticed light spilling onto the street from one of the bays because the metal door was rolled up. Inside was a white van, the engine on and the tailgate open but no one in sight. Using her swipe card, she opened the interior door at the top of the ramp, and inside the familiar merging of white and teal tile, she heard music. Soft rock. Filene must be on duty. It wasn’t like her to leave the bay door up.

  Scarpetta walked past the floor scale to the mortuary office, not seeing anyone. The chair in front of the Plexiglas window was swiveled to one side, Filene’s radio on the floor, her OCME SECURITY jacket hanging on the back of the door. She heard footsteps, and a guard in his dark-blue fatigues appeared from the area of the locker rooms, probably had been in the men’s room.

  “The bay door’s open,” she said to him, and she didn’t know his name and had never seen him before.

  “A delivery,” he said, and something about him was familiar.

  “From where?”

  “Some woman hit by a bus in Harlem.”

  He was slender but strong, his hands pale and ropy with veins, and wisps of black baby-fine hair strayed from his cap, his eyes masked by gray-tinted glasses. His face was smoothly shaven, his teeth too white and straight, possibly dentures, but he was young for that, and he seemed agitated, excited or nervous, and it occurred to her he might be uneasy working in a morgue after dark. Maybe a temp. As the economy had worsened, so had staffing, and when budgets are severely cut it becomes practical to use more part-time people, more outside vendors, and a lot of staff were out with the flu. Fragmented thoughts raced through her mind at the same time she felt her scalp prickle and her pulse pick up. Her mouth went dry, and she turned to run as he grabbed her arm. The nylon bags she was carrying slipped from her shoulder as she struggled, as he pulled her with shocking force toward the bay where the white van with the open tailgate was parked with the engine on.

  The sounds she made weren’t intelligible, were too primitive to be words or thoughts, but explosions of panic as she tried to get away, tried to untangle herself from the bags and their shoulder straps, kicking at him and pulling as he yanked open the door that she had just come through moments earlier, and it banged against the wall with such force it sounded like a sledgehammer against cinder block, banging more than once. The long bag with the LABRADOR inside it somehow was caught horizontally in the door frame, and she thought that was why he let go of her, collapsing at her feet, and blood pooled on the ramp and flowed down it. Benton stepped out from behind the white van, holding a carbine, and he ran to her, training the rifle on the man as she backed away from his motionless body.

  Blood was pouring out of a wound in his forehead that had exited through the back of his skull, and a spray of blood was on the door frame just inches from where she’d just been. Her face and neck felt cool where they were wet, and she wiped blood and bits of brain tissue off her skin, and she dropped her bags to the white tile floor as a woman walked inside the bay, holding a pistol in both hands, the barrel pointed up. She lowered the gun as she got closer.

  “He’s down,” she said, and it occurred to Scarpetta there might be someone else just shot. “Backups are on the way.”

  “Make sure we’re clear out here,” Benton said to the woman as he stepped over the body and the blood on the ramp. “I’ll make sure we’re clear inside.” He said to Scarpetta as his eyes darted around, “Is there anybody else? Do you know if anybody else is inside?”

  She said, “How could this happen?”

  “Stay with me,” he told her.

  Benton walked in front of her, checking corridors, checking the mortuary office, kicking open the doors to the men’s locker room and the women’s. He kept asking Scarpetta if she was all right. He said there were items at the Starrs’ house, clothing, caps, similar to what OCME security wore, in a room in the basement, that it was part of the plan. He repeated it was part of the plan to come here for her, and maybe Berger’s coming for him had pushed him into it. He always had a way of knowing where everyone was and everyone wasn’t, Benton kept saying that, kept talking about him, and he kept asking her if she was hurt, if she was okay.

  Marino had called Benton about the clothes, about what he feared they were for, and when Lanier and Benton got here and saw the open bay door, they immediately mobilized. They were on 30th Street when Hap Judd materialized from the dark and walked into the bay to climb into the van. When he saw them, he ran, and Lanier went after him at the same time Jean-Baptiste Chandonne came out the interior door with Scarpetta.

  Benton followed the white-tile corridor, checking the anteroom, checking the main autopsy room. Hap Judd was armed and he was dead, Benton said. Bobby Fuller, who Benton believed was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, was dead. At the end of the corridor, past the lift that carried bodies up for viewings, there were blood drips on the floor, and then smears, and a door leading to a stairwell, and on the landing was Filene, and next to her a bloody hammer, the kind of hammer used to assemble pine boxes. It appeared the security guard had been dragged back here, and Scarpetta got next to her and pressed her fingers against the side of her neck.

  “Get an ambulance,” she said to Benton.

  She felt the injury at the back of Filene’s head, on the right side, an area of swelling that was boggy and bloody. She opened Filene’s eyelids to check the pupils, and the right one was dilated and fixed. Her breathing was erratic, her pulse rapid and irregular, and Scarpetta worried the lower brain stem was getting compressed.

  “I need to stay here,” she told Benton as he called for help. “She may start vomiting or have a seizure. I need to keep her airway clear. I’m right here,” she told Filene. “You’re going to be okay,” Scarpetta told her. “Help is on the way,” Scarpetta said.

  Six Days Later

  Inside the Memorial Room at Two Truck, chairs and benches had been set up near the Coke machine and gun safe because there wasn’t enough room in the kitchen for everyone to sit. Scarpetta had brought too much food.

  Spinach and egg pappardelle, maccheroni, penne, and spaghetti filled big bowls on the table, and pots of sauces were warming on the stove, a ragù with porcini mushrooms and one with Bolognese and another with prosciutto di Parma. A simple winter tomato sauce was for Marino because he liked it on his lasagna, and that had been his request, with extra meat and extra ricotta. Benton wanted pan-fried veal chops with marsala sauce, and Lucy had asked for her favorite salad with fennel, while Berger was happy with lemon chicken. The air was sharp and pungent with Parmigiano-Reggiano, mushrooms, and garlic, and Lieutenant Al Lobo was worried about crowd control.

  “The whole precinct’s going to come over here,” he said, checking on the bread. “Or maybe all of Harlem. This might be ready.”

  “It should sound hollow when you tap it,” Scarpetta said, wiping her hands on her apron and taking a look, a wave of fragrant heat rising from the oven.

  “Sounds hollow to me.” Lobo licked the finger he’d used to tap the bread.

  “Same way he checks bombs.” Marino walked into the kitchen, Mac the boxer and Lucy’s bulldog, Jet Ranger, right behind him, toenails clicking on tile. “He thumps it and if it doesn’t blow up, he gets to go home early, all in a day’s work. Can they have anything?” Marino was talking about the dogs.

  “No,” Lucy answered loudly from the Memorial Room. “No people food.”

  On the other side of an open doorway, she and Berger were arranging strands of white lights on top of the display case containing the personal effects of Joe Vigiano, John D’Allara, and Mike Curtin, the responders from the Two who had died on 9/11. Their gear recovered from the ruins was arranged
on shelves, an assortment of handcuffs, keys, holsters, wire cutters, flashlights, D rings and clips from Roco harnesses, melted and bent, and on the floor was a section of steel beam from the World Trade Center. Photos of the three men and other members of the Two who had died on duty were arranged on maple-paneled walls, and over Mac’s dog bed was an American flag quilt made by a grammar school. Christmas music accompanied the chatter of police radios, and Scarpetta heard footsteps on the stairs.

  Benton had gone out with Bonnell to pick up the last of the food, a frozen chocolate pistachio mousse, a butterless sponge cake, and dry-cured sausages and cheeses. Scarpetta had been heavy on the antipasto because it would keep, and there was nothing better than leftovers when cops are sitting around in their quarters and working in the garage, waiting for emergencies. It was mid-afternoon, Christmas day, cold with snow flurries, and Lobo and Ann Droiden had dropped by from 6th Precinct, everyone gathering at the Two because Scarpetta had decided the holiday dinner should be spent with the people who had done the most for her lately.

  Benton appeared in the doorway with a box, his face ruddy from the cold.

  “L.A.’s still parking the car. Even cops have no place to park around here. Where would you like it?” He walked in, looking around, not an empty space on a countertop or the kitchen table.

  “Here.” Scarpetta moved several bowls. “The mousse goes in the freezer for now. And I see you brought wine. Well, I guess you won’t be helping out in any emergencies. Is it legal to have wine up here?” she called out to whoever wanted to answer from the Memorial Room, where Lobo and Droiden were with Berger and Lucy.

  “Only if it’s got a screw cap or comes out of a box,” Lobo answered back.

  “Anything that costs more than five bucks is contraband,” Droiden added.