Five Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Oh great.”

  It was really called the High Energy Physics Lab and was on top of a mountain that was also shared by an observatory. The university’s nuclear reactor was a large silo made of brick. It was surrounded by woods that were fenced in, and Marino was acting phobic again.

  “Come on. You’ll find this interesting.” I opened my door.

  “I got no interest in this at all.”

  “Okay. Then you stay here and I’ll go in.”

  “You won’t get an argument out of me,” he replied.

  I retrieved the sample from the trunk, and at the facility’s main entrance, I rang a bell and someone released a lock. Inside was a small lobby where I told a young man behind glass that I was looking for Dr. Matthews. A list was checked and I was informed that the head of the physics department, whom I knew only in a limited way, was this moment by the reactor’s pool. The young man then picked up an in-house phone while sliding out a visitor’s pass and a detector for radiation. I clipped them to my jacket, and he left his station to escort me through a heavy steel door beneath a red light sign that indicated the reactor was on.

  The room was windowless with high tile walls, and every object I saw was marked with a bright yellow radioactive tag. At one end of the lighted pool, Cerenkov radiation caused the water to glow a fantastic blue as unstable atoms spontaneously disintegrated in the fuel assembly twenty feet down. Dr. Matthews was conferring with a student who, I gathered as I heard them talk, was using cobalt instead of an autoclave to sterilize micropipettes used for in vitro fertilization.

  “I thought you were coming tomorrow,” the nuclear physicist said to me, a distressed expression on his face.

  “No, it was today. But thank you for seeing me at all. I have the sample with me.” I held up the envelope.

  “Okay, George,” he said to the young man. “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes, sir. Thanks.”

  “Come on,” Matthews said to me. “We’ll take it down there now and get started. Do you know how much you’ve got here?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “If we’ve got enough, we can do it while you wait.”

  Beyond a heavy door, we turned left and paused at a tall box that monitored the radiation of our hands and feet. We passed with bright green colors and went on to stairs that led to the neutron radiography lab, which was in a basement of machine shops and forklifts, and big black barrels containing low-level nuclear waste waiting to be shipped. There was emergency equipment at almost every turn, and a control room locked inside a cage. Most remote to all of this was the low background counting room. Built of thick windowless concrete, it was stocked with fifty-gallon canisters of liquid nitrogen, and germanium detectors and amplifiers, and bricks made of lead.

  The process for identifying my sample was surprisingly simple. Matthews, wearing no special protection other than lab coat and gloves, placed the piece of sticky tape into a tube, which he then set inside a two-foot-long aluminum container containing the germanium crystal. Finally, he stacked lead bricks on every side to shield the sample from background radiation.

  Activating the process required a simple computer command, and a counter on the canister began measuring radioactivity so it could tell us which isotope we had. This was all rather strange to see, for I was accustomed to arcane instruments like scanning electron microscopes and gas chromatographs. This detector, on the other hand, was a rather formless house of lead cooled by liquid nitrogen and did not seem capable of intelligent thought.

  “Now, if you’ll just sign this evidence receipt,” I said, “I’ll be on my way.”

  “It could take an hour or two. It’s hard to say,” he answered.

  He signed the form and I gave him a copy.

  “I’ll stop by after I check on Lucy.”

  “Come on, I’ll escort you up to make sure you don’t set anything off. How is she?” he asked as we passed detectors without a complaint. “Did she ever go on to MIT?”

  “She did do an internship there last fall,” I said. “In robotics. You know, she’s back here. For at least a month.”

  “I didn’t know. That’s wonderful. Studying what?”

  “Virtual reality, I think she said.”

  Matthews looked perplexed for a moment. “Didn’t she take that when she was here?”

  “I expect this is more advanced.”

  “I expect it would have to be.” He smiled. “I wish I had at least one of her in every class.”

  Lucy had probably been the only non–physics major at UVA to take a course in nuclear design for fun. I walked outside, and Marino was leaning against the car, smoking.

  “So what now?” he said, and he still looked glum.

  “I thought I’d surprise my niece and take her to lunch. You’re more than welcome to join us.”

  “I’m going to drop by the Exxon station down the street and use the pay phone,” he said. “I got some calls to make.”

  chapter

  12

  HE DROVE ME to the rotunda, brilliant white in sunlight and my favorite building Thomas Jefferson had designed. I followed old brick colonnaded walkways beneath ancient trees, where Federal pavilions formed two rows of privileged housing known as the Lawn.

  Living here was an award for academic achievement, yet it might have been considered a dubious honor by some. Showers and toilets were located in another building in back, the sparsely furnished rooms not necessarily intended for comfort. Yet I had never heard Lucy complain, for she had truly loved her life at UVA.

  She was staying on the West Lawn in Pavilion III, with its Corinthian capitals of Carrara marble that had been carved in Italy. Wooden shutters outside room 11 were drawn, the morning paper still on the mat, and I wondered, perplexed, if she had not gotten up yet. I rapped on the door several times and heard someone stirring.

  “Who is it?” my niece’s voice called out.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  There was a pause, then a surprised, “Aunt Kay?”

  “Are you going to open the door?” My good mood was fading fast for she did not sound pleased.

  “Uh, hold on a minute. I’m coming.”

  The door unlocked and opened.

  “Hi,” she said as she let me in.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you up.” I handed her the newspaper.

  “Oh, T. C. gets that,” she said, referring to the friend who really belonged to this room. “She forgot to cancel it before she left for Germany. I never get around to reading it.”

  I entered an apartment not so different from where I had visited my niece last year. The space was small with bed and sink, and crowded bookcases. Heart of pine floors were bare, with no art on whitewashed walls except a single poster of Anthony Hopkins in Shadowlands. Lucy’s technical preoccupations had taken over tables, desk and even several chairs. Other equipment, like the fax machine and what looked like a small robot, was out cold on the floor.

  Additional telephone lines had been installed, and these were connected to modems winking with green lights. But I did not get the impression that my niece was living here alone, for on the sink were two toothbrushes, and solution for contact lenses that she did not wear. Both sides of the twin bed were unmade, and on top of it was a briefcase I did not recognize, either.

  “Here.” She lifted a printer off a chair and put me close to the fire. “Sorry everything’s such a mess.” She wore a bright orange UVA sweatshirt and jeans, and her hair was wet. “I can heat up some water,” she said, and she was very distracted.

  “If you’re offering tea, I accept,” I said.

  I watched her closely as she filled a pot with water and plugged it in. Nearby, on a dresser top were FBI credentials, a pistol and car keys. I spotted file folders and pieces of paper scribbled with notes, and I spotted unfamiliar clothing hanging inside the closet.

  “Tell me about T. C.,” I said.

  Lucy opened a tea bag. “A German major. She’s spending th
e next six weeks in Munich. So she said I could stay here.”

  “That was very nice of her. Would you like me to help you pack up her things or at least make room for yours?”

  “You don’t need to do any work at all right now.”

  I glanced toward the window, hearing someone.

  “You still take your tea black?” Lucy said.

  The fire crackled, smoking wood shifted, and I wasn’t surprised when the door opened and another woman walked in. But I was not expecting Janet, and she was not expecting me.

  “Dr. Scarpetta,” she said in surprise as she glanced at Lucy. “How great of you to drop by.”

  She was carrying shower items, a baseball cap pulled over wet hair that was almost to her shoulders. Dressed in sweats and tennis shoes, she was lovely and healthy, and like Lucy, seemed even younger because she was on a university campus again.

  “Please join us,” Lucy said to her as she handed me a mug of tea.

  “We were out running.” Janet smiled. “Sorry about the hair. So what brings you here?” she asked as she sat on the floor.

  “I need some help with a case,” was all I said. “Are you taking this virtual reality course too?” I studied both of their faces.

  “Right,” Janet said. “Lucy and I are here together. As you may or may not know, I was transferred to the Washington Field Office late last year.”

  “Lucy mentioned it.”

  “I’ve been assigned to white-collar crime,” she went on. “Especially anything that might be related to a violation of the IOC.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  It was Lucy who replied as she sat next to me, “Interception of Communication statute. We’ve got the only group in the country with experts who can handle these cases.”

  “Then the Bureau has sent both of you here for training because of this group.” I tried to understand. “But I guess I don’t see what virtual reality might have to do with hackers breaking into major databases,” I added.

  Janet was silent as she took off her cap and combed her hair, staring into the fire. I could tell she was very uncomfortable, and I wondered how much of it had to do with what had happened in Aspen over the holidays. My niece moved to the hearth and sat facing me.

  “We’re not here for a class, Aunt Kay,” she said with quiet seriousness. “That’s how it’s supposed to look to everybody else. Now, I’m going to tell you this when I shouldn’t, but it’s too late for any more lies.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I understand.”

  “No.” Her eyes were intense. “I want you to understand what’s going on. And to give you a quick, dirty summary, last fall Commonwealth Power and Light began experiencing problems when what appeared to be a hacker started getting inside their computer system. The attempts were frequent—sometimes four or five times a day. But there was no success in identifying this individual until he left tracks in an audit log after accessing and printing customer billing information. We were called, and remotely we managed to trace the perpetrator to UVA.”

  “Then you haven’t caught whoever it is,” I said.

  “No.” It was Janet who spoke. “We interviewed the graduate student whose I.D. it was, but he definitely isn’t the hacker. We have reasons to be very sure of that.”

  “Point is,” said Lucy, “several other I.D.s have been stolen from students here since, and the perpetrator was also trying to access CP&L along with the university computer and one in Pittsburgh.”

  “Was?” I asked.

  “Actually, he’s been pretty quiet lately, which makes it harder for us,” Janet said. “Mostly, we’ve been chasing him through the university computer.”

  “Right,” Lucy said. “We haven’t tracked him in CP&L’s computer for almost a week. I figure because of the holidays.”

  “Why might someone be doing this?” I asked. “Do you have a theory?”

  “A power trip, no pun intended,” Janet simply said. “Maybe so he can turn lights on and off throughout Virginia and the Carolinas. Who knows?”

  “But what we believe is that whoever’s doing it is on campus, and is getting in via the Internet and another link called Telnet,” Lucy said, adding confidently, “We’ll get him.”

  “You mind if I ask why all the secrecy?” I said to my niece. “Could you not just tell me you were on a case you couldn’t discuss?”

  She hesitated before responding. “You’re on the faculty here, Aunt Kay.”

  This was true, and I had not even thought of that. Though I was only a visiting professor in pathology and legal medicine, I decided Lucy’s point was well taken, and I supposed I did not blame her for keeping this from me for yet another reason. She wanted her independence, especially in this place where for the duration of her undergraduate studies it had been well known that she was related to me.

  I looked at her. “Is this why you left Richmond so abruptly the other night?”

  “I got paged.”

  “By me,” Janet said. “I was flying in from Aspen, got delayed, et cetera. Lucy picked me up at the airport and we came back here.”

  “And were there any other attempted break-ins over the holidays?”

  “Some. The system is constantly being monitored,” Lucy said. “We’re not alone in this by any means. We’ve just been assigned an undercover post here so we can do some hands-on detective work.”

  “Why don’t you walk me to the Rotunda.” I got up, and so did they. “Marino should be back with the car.” I hugged Janet and her hair smelled like lemon. “You take care and come see me more often,” I said to her. “I consider you family. Lord knows it’s about time I had some help in taking care of this one.” I smiled as I put my arm around Lucy.

  Outside in the sun, the afternoon was warm enough for only sweaters, and I wished I could stay longer. Lucy did not linger during our brief walk, and I could tell she was anxious about anyone seeing us together.

  “It’s just like the old days,” I said lightly to hide my hurt.

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  “Your ambivalence about being seen with me.”

  “That’s not true. I used to be proud of it.”

  “And now you’re not,” I said with irony.

  “Maybe I’d like you to feel proud to be seen with me,” she said. “Instead of it always the other way. That’s what I meant.”

  “I am proud of you and always have been, even when you were such a mess that sometimes I wanted to lock you in the basement.”

  “I believe that’s called child abuse.”

  “No, the jury would vote for aunt abuse in your case. Trust me,” I said. “And I’m glad you and Janet seem to be getting along. I’m glad she’s back from Aspen and the two of you are together.”

  My niece stopped and looked at me, squinting in the sun. “Thanks for what you said to her. Right now, especially, that meant a lot.”

  “I spoke the truth, that’s all,” I said. “Maybe someday her family will speak it, too.”

  We were in sight of Marino’s car, and he was sitting in it, as usual, and puffing away.

  Lucy walked up to his door. “Hey Pete,” she said, “you need to wash your ride.”

  “No, I don’t,” he grumbled as he immediately tossed the cigarette and got out.

  He looked around, and the sight of him hitching up his pants and inspecting his car because he could not help himself was too much. Lucy and I both laughed, and then he tried not to smile. In truth, he secretly enjoyed it when we teased. We bantered a little bit more, and then Lucy left as a late-model gold Lexus with tinted glass drove past. It was the same one we had seen earlier on the road, the driver obliterated by glare.

  “This is beginning to get on my nerves.” Marino’s eyes followed the car.

  “Maybe you should run the plate number,” I stated the obvious.

  “Oh, I already done that.” He started the car and began backing out. “DMV’s down.”

  DMV was the Department of Mot
or Vehicles computer, and it was down a lot, it seemed. We headed back up to the reactor facility, and when we got there, Marino again refused to go inside. So I left him in the parking lot, and this time the young man in the control room behind glass told me I could enter unescorted.

  “He’s down in the basement,” he said with eyes on his computer screen.

  I found Matthews in the low background counting room again, sitting before a computer screen displaying a spectrum in black and white.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, when he realized I was beside him.

  “Looks like you’ve had some luck,” I said. “Although I’m not sure what I’m seeing. And I might be too early.”

  “No, no, you’re not too early. These vertical lines here indicate the energies of the significant gamma rays detected. One line equals one energy. But most of the lines we’re seeing here are for background radiation.” He showed me on the screen. “You know, even the lead bricks don’t get rid of all of that.”

  I sat next to him.

  “I guess what I’m trying to show you, Dr. Scarpetta, is that the sample you brought in isn’t giving off high-energy gamma rays when it decays. If you look here on this energy spectrum”—he was staring at the screen—“it looks like this characteristic gamma ray on the spectrum is for uranium two-thirty-five.” He tapped a spike on the glass.

  “Okay,” I said. “And what does that mean?”

  “That’s the good stuff.” He looked over at me.

  “Such as is used in nuclear reactors,” I said.

  “Exactly. That’s what we use to make fuel pellets or rods. But as you probably know, only point three percent of uranium is two-thirty-five. The rest is depleted.”

  “Right. The rest is uranium two-thirty-eight,” I said.

  “And that’s what we’ve got here.”

  “If it isn’t giving off high-energy gamma rays,” I said. “How can you tell that from this energy spectrum?”

  “Because what the germanium crystal is detecting is uranium two-thirty-five. And since the percentage of it is so low, this indicates that the sample we’re dealing with must be depleted uranium.”