The Scarpetta Factor

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Who’s on call?” Lucy said. “I’m not. Jaime’s not. I think Mac needs to potty.”

  “He off-gassing again?” Lobo asked.

  The brindle boxer was old and arthritic, as was Jet Ranger, both of them rescues, and Scarpetta found the package of treats she’d baked, a healthy cookie made with peanut butter and spelt flour. She whistled and the dogs hurried over to her, not spry but they hadn’t lost their enthusiasm, and she said “sit” and then rewarded them.

  “If only it were that easy with people,” she said, taking off her apron. “Come on,” she said to Benton. “Mac needs a little exercise.”

  Benton got the leash and they put on their coats, and Scarpetta stuffed several plastic bags in a pocket. They took Mac down the scuffed wooden stairs and through the huge garage filled with emergency trucks and gear, hardly any room to walk, and out a side door. Across Tenth Avenue was a small park next to Saint Mary’s Church, and she and Benton headed Mac over there because frozen balding grass was better than pavement.

  “Status check,” Benton said. “You’ve been cooking for two days.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to bring it up in there,” he said as Mac started sniffing, pulling him toward a bare tree, then toward a bush. “They’re going to talk about it all night, anyway. And I think we should let them and in a little while you and I should go home. We should be alone. We haven’t been alone all week.”

  They hadn’t slept much, either. It had taken several days to excavate the Starr mansion basement because the electronic nose, the LABRADOR, had gotten as industrious in its sniffing as Mac was right now, leading Scarpetta everywhere, alerting on traces of decomposed blood. For a while she’d feared that there were many bodies in the two levels below the house where Rupe Starr had maintained and kept his cars, but there hadn’t been. In the end, only Hannah was down there, beneath concrete in the grease pit, her cause of death not so different from Toni Darien’s, except Hannah’s injury was more massive and passionate. She’d been struck in the head and face sixteen times, possibly with the same weapon that had been used on Toni, a stick shift with a large steel knob the shape and size of a billiard ball.

  The shift assembly was from a hand-built car called a Spyker that Lucy said Rupe had restored and then sold some five years ago, and DNA recovered from it had been contributed by multiple people, three of them positively identified: Hannah, Toni, and the person who Scarpetta believed had beaten them to death, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, aka Bobby Fuller, an American businessman as fictitious as many of Chandonne’s other aliases. Scarpetta didn’t perform Chandonne’s autopsy, but she’d witnessed it, feeling it was as important to her future as it was to her past. Dr. Edison had taken the case, and the examination had been like any other performed at the NYC OCME, and Scarpetta couldn’t help but think how much that might have disappointed Chandonne.

  He wasn’t any more or less special than anyone, just one more body on a table, only he had more than the usual remnants of cosmetic reconstruction and improvements. His corrective surgeries would have taken years of visits to the OR and long convalescences that must have been torture. Scarpetta could only imagine the misery of full-body-hair laser removal and having every tooth crowned. But perhaps he had been pleased with the end result, because no matter how much she had studied him in the morgue, she’d found very little evidence of his deformities, just railroad tracks of surgical scars revealed when his head was shaved around the entrance and exit wounds caused by the nine-millimeter round Benton had fired through Jean-Baptiste’s upper forehead.

  Jean-Baptiste Chandonne was dead, and Scarpetta knew it was him. DNA wasn’t wrong, and she could rest assured he would never be on a park bench or in her morgue or in a mansion or anywhere ever again. Hap Judd was dead, and despite how well he had cho reographed his paraphilic predilections and ultimate crimes, he’d managed to leave quite a trail of DNA: on the BioGraph watch Toni had started wearing as part of a Chandonne-funded research study called Caligula that her gangster MIT-trained father had gotten her involved with; in her vagina, because latex gloves aren’t quite as foolproof as condoms; on the red scarf that had been around her neck; on wadded paper towels Marino had collected from her trash, probably used when Hap thought he was removing any evidence that he’d been inside her apartment; and on two true-crime paperbacks that were in a drawer by her bedside table. The theory was that it had been Hap in the security recordings, his final act.

  He put on Toni’s parka and a pair of running shoes similar to hers, but he’d gotten the gloves wrong because she’d begun wearing ski mittens, the olive-and-tan Hestras she’d left in the front seat of the Lamborghini, a wireless fingertip pulse oximeter still inside one of them. Hap had entered Toni’s building, using the keys he’d taken from her dead body and later returned, and although Scarpetta would never know exactly what he’d had in mind, she suspected it was a combination of purposes. He wanted to remove any evidence that he was connected with her, and there was plenty of it recovered from her cell phone and laptop, both found in his TriBeCa apartment along with her wallet and other items, including chargers that suggested she’d spent time with him there. She’d written him hundreds of text messages, and he’d e-mailed some of his disturbing screenplays to her, and she’d saved them on her hard drive. Text messages from him made it clear their relationship had to be a secret because of his celebrity, and Scarpetta doubted Toni had any idea that her famous boyfriend’s sexual fantasies about her were as grotesque as what he wrote and liked to read.

  Those individuals who could tell more about the Chandonnes and their network and everything that might have happened were still being rounded up by the FBI. Dodie Hodge and an AWOL Marine named Jerome Wild would soon be on the Top Ten Most Wanted List. Carley Crispin, who had left her fingerprints on Scarpetta’s BlackBerry, had retained a prominent lawyer and was no longer on the air and might never be again, certainly not on CNN. The housekeepers Rosie and Nastya were being questioned, and there were stories that Rupe Starr was going to be exhumed, but Scarpetta hoped not, because she didn’t think it would prove helpful, would be just another sensation in the news. Benton said that the cast of characters was long, these miscreants that Chandonne had recruited, and it would be quite some time before it was determined who was real, such as Freddie Maestro, and who was just another shape and form of Jean-Baptiste, such as the French philanthropist named Monsieur Lecoq.

  “What a good boy you are,” Scarpetta praised Mac, thanking him profusely for his deposit.

  She picked it up in a plastic bag, and she and Benton walked back across Tenth Avenue, the afternoon light almost gone. The snow was small flakes that didn’t stick, but at least it was white stuff, as Benton put it, and it was Christmas, and that was a sign, he said.

  “Of what?” she asked. “Scrubbing away our sins? And you can hold this hand. Just don’t reach for my other one.”

  She gave him the hand that didn’t have the plastic bag, and then he rang the buzzer outside the Two.

  “If our sins were scrubbed away,” Benton said, “what would be left?”

  “Nothing interesting,” she said as the door clicked free. “In fact, I intend to commit as many sins as possible when we get home tonight. Take that as a warning, Special Agent Wesley.”

  Upstairs in the small kitchen, everyone crowded in because Benton was opening wine and pouring it into plastic glasses, a nice Chianti for whoever could indulge. Marino opened the refrigerator and got out sodas for Lobo and Droiden and a nonalcoholic beer for himself, and by now Bonnell had showed up, and everyone decided it was a good time to have a toast. They wandered into the Memorial Room, and Scarpetta came in last, carrying a basket of fresh bread.

  “A family tradition I’d like to tell you about if you’ll indulge me,” she said. “Memory bread. My mother used to make it when I was a child, and it’s called that because when you have a piece, you’re supposed to remember something important. It can be from your childhood. It can
be from any time or anywhere. So I thought we’d drink a toast and eat some bread and remember what we’ve been through and who we were, because it’s also who we are.”

  “You sure it’s okay to be doing this in here?” Bonnell said. “I don’t want to be disrespectful.”

  “These guys?” Lobo meant his fallen comrades, whose effects didn’t look quite so forlorn in the glow of tiny white lights. “They’d be the first ones to want us in here doing this right now. I’m tempted to fix them a plate. I remember how John loved animals.” He looked at a photograph of D’Allara while Marino was petting Mac. “We still have his snake pole in his locker.”

  “Don’t think I’ve ever seen a snake in Manhattan,” Berger said.

  “Only every day,” Lucy said. “We make our living off snakes.”

  “People let them loose in the park,” Droiden said. “Pet pythons they don’t want anymore. One time it was an alligator. So, who gets called?”

  “We do,” everybody said.

  Scarpetta passed around the basket of bread and each person pinched off a piece and ate it, and she explained that the secret to memory bread was you could use anything in it you liked. Could be leftover grains coarsely ground or potatoes or cheese or herbs, because people would be better off if they paid attention to what they have and not waste it. Memories are like what you find in the kitchen, she said, all these dribs and drabs in drawers and dark cupboards, bits and pieces that seem extraneous or even bad but in fact might improve something you’re making.

  “To friends,” she said, raising her glass.

  Credits

  Very special thanks to the following technical advisers:

  Dr. Staci Gruber, director, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Core, McLean Hospital; assistant professor, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

  Barbara A. Butcher, chief of staff and director of forensic investigations, the City of New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

  Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, NYPD

  Nicholas Petraco, technical leader in criminalistics, NYPD Forensic Investigation Division

  Lieutenant-Commander Detective Squad Mark Torre, commanding officer, bomb squad, NYPD

  Dr. Louis Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

  Dr. Marcella Fierro, former chief medical examiner of Virginia

  Assistant District Attorney Lisa Friel, chief of the Sex Crimes Unit, New York County district attorney’s office

  The Reverend Lori Bruno, psychic and medium, of Hex: Old World Witchery, Salem, Massachusetts