Blow Fly

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Step into my parlor,” Lucy says to Berger. “A spider’s turned up.”

  “A tarantula,” Manham gravely adds. “How’ya doin, Boss?” He shakes Berger’s hand.

  “Still miss the good ol’ days?” Berger smiles at him, but her eyes belie her light demeanor.

  Losing Manham from the DA’s detective squad, or from her A Team, as she calls it, still hurts, even though it is for the best and she continues to work with him at times such as this one.

  Another era passed.

  “Step this way,” Manham says.

  Berger follows him and Lucy inside what is simply referred to as the lab. The room is large and soundproof, like a professional recording studio. Overhead shelves are stacked with sophisticated audio, video and global-positioning and various tracking systems that defy Berger’s expertise and never cease to amaze her when she comes to Lucy’s office. Everywhere, lights blink and video screens flash from one image to another, some of them the interior of the building, others monitoring locations that make no sense to Berger.

  She notices what looks like a bundle of tiny microphones on top of a desk crowded with modems and monitors.

  “What’s this latest contraption?” she asks.

  “Your latest piece of jewelry. An ultramicro transmitter,” Lucy replies, picking up the bundle and pulling loose one of the transmitters, no bigger than a quarter and attached to a long, thin cord. “It goes with this.” She taps what looks like a black box with jacks and an LCD. “We can disappear this baby in the hem of one of your Armani jackets, and if you get snatched, the quasi-Doppler direction finder can locate your exact position by VHF and UHF signals.

  “Frequency range, twenty-seven to five hundred megahertz. Channels selected on a simple keyboard, and this other thing you’re looking at”—she pats the black box—“is a tracking system we can use to monitor wherever the hell you are in your car, on your motorcycle, your bicycle. Nothing more than a crystal oscillator powered by a nicad battery. Can monitor up to ten targets at a time, supposing your husband’s screwing around on you with multiple women.”

  Berger doesn’t react to a subtlety that is anything but subtle.

  “Water-resistant,” Lucy goes on. “A nice carrying case with a shoulder strap; could probably get Gurkha or Hermès to design a special one—perhaps in ostrich or kangaroo—just for you. Aircraft antenna available if you want to feel secure when you fly on a Learjet, a Gulf Stream, however you get about, woman-on-the-go that you are.”

  “Another time,” Berger says. “I hope you didn’t bring me uptown to show me what happens if I get lost or kidnaped.”

  “Actually, I didn’t.”

  Lucy sits before a large monitor. Her fingers rapidly tap on the keyboard as she flies through windows, moving deeper into a forensic scientific software application that Berger doesn’t recognize.

  “You get this from NASA?” she asks.

  “Maybe,” Lucy replies, pointing the cursor at a folder labeled with a number that, again, is meaningless to Berger. “NASA does a lot more than bring home moon rocks. Put it this way”—Lucy pauses, hovering over a key, staring intensely at the screen—“I’ve got rocket-scientist buddies at the Langley Research Center.” She rolls the mouse around. “Lot of nice people there who don’t get the credit they deserve”—tap-tap-tap. “We’ve got some pretty amazing projects going on. Okay.” She clicks on a file labeled with an accession number and today’s date.

  “Here we go.” She looks up at Berger. “Listen.”

  “Good afternoon. May I ask who’s calling?” The male voice on the tape is Zach Manham’s.

  “When Mademoiselle Farinelli returns, tell her Baton Rouge.”

  BERGER PULLS UP A CHAIR and sits down, riveted to the computer screen.

  Frozen on it are two voiceprints or spectrograms—2.5-second digital cuts—of a taped human voice converted into electrical frequencies. The resulting patterns are black and white vertical and horizontal bands that, like Rorschach inkblots, evoke different imaginative associations, depending on who is looking at them. In this case, the voiceprints remind Lucy of a black-and-white abstract painting of tornadoes.

  She mentions this to Berger and adds, “That figures, doesn’t it? What I’ve done here—or, should I say, what the computer’s done here—is find Chandonne’s speech sounds from another source. In this case, your videotaped interview of him after his arrest in Richmond. The computer looked for matching words.

  “Of course, the bastard didn’t make that easy when you look at the words used in the call we got. Nowhere in his interview with you,” Lucy goes on, “does he say Baton Rouge, for example. Nor does he ever mention me—Lucy Farinelli—by name. That leaves when, returns and tell her. Nowhere near as many sounds as I’d like for comparison. We’d like at least twenty matching speech sounds for a positive match. However, what we’ve got is a significant similarity. The darkest areas on the known and questioned voiceprints correspond to the intensity of the frequencies.” She points out black areas of the voiceprints on the computer screen.

  “Looks the same to me,” Berger remarks.

  “Definitely. In the four words when, returns and tell her, yes, I agree.”

  “Hey, I’m convinced,” Manham says. “But in court, we’d have a hard time, for the reason Lucy said. We don’t have enough matching sounds to convince a jury.”

  “Forget court for the moment,” says New York’s most respected prosecutor.

  Lucy strikes other keys and activates a second file.

  “I begin to touch her breasts and unhook her bra,” says Jean-Baptiste’s voice—that soft, polite voice.

  Then Lucy says, “Here we go, three other fragments of an interview that contains words for comparison.”

  “I was a bit confused at first when I tried to touch her and couldn’t pull out her top.”

  Next is, “But I can tell you are pretty,” Jean-Baptiste Chandonne says.

  “More,” says Lucy: “It was a return ticket, coach, to New York.”

  Lucy explains: “Our four words, Jaime, close enough. As I indicated, these phrases are from your videotaped interview with him prior to his arraignment, when you were brought in as a special prosecutor.”

  It is difficult for Lucy to hear segments of this interview. Vaguely, she resents Berger for forcing Scarpetta to watch the videotape, although it was necessary, completely necessary, to subject her to hours of what was nothing more than manipulative, violent pornography after he had almost murdered her. Jean-Baptiste lied and enjoyed it. No doubt, he was sexually aroused by the thought that Scarpetta, a victim and key witness, was his audience. For hours, she watched and listened to him fabricate in detail not only what he did in Richmond but his 1997 so-called romantic encounter with Susan Pless, a television meteorologist for CNBC whose savaged dead body was found inside her apartment in New York’s Upper East Side.

  She was twenty-eight years old, a beautiful African-American beaten and bitten in the same grotesque fashion as Chandonne’s other victims. Only in her murder, seminal fluid was recovered. In Jean-Baptiste’s more recent slayings, the ones in Richmond, the victims were nude only from the waist up, and no seminal fluid was recovered, only saliva. That fact led to conclusions, based in part on DNA analysis, that the Chandonne web is a tight weave of organized crime for profit and violent aberrance committed for sadistic sport. Jean-Baptiste and Jay Talley enjoy their nonprofit sport. In the sexual slaying of Susan Pless, the two brothers tag-teamed, the debonair Jay seducing and raping Susan, then handing her off to his hideous, impotent twin.

  Lucy, Berger and Manham look at the sound spectrograms on the computer screen. Although voice analysis is not an exact science, the three of them are convinced that the man who left the message and Jean-Baptiste Chandonne are one and the same.

  “As if I needed this.” Berger swipes her finger across the video screen, leaving a faint trail. “I’d know the fucker’s voice anywhere. Tornado. You got it. That’s the damn truth. Th
e way he tears through lives, and damn if it doesn’t look like he’s doing it again.”

  Lucy explained the satellite tracking that pointed to the immediate area around her building while caller ID showed that the call was made from across the country, at the Polunsky Unit in Texas. “How do we make sense of this?”

  Berger shakes her head. “Unless there’s some sort of technical glitch or some other explanation that eludes me, at least, at the moment.”

  “Most important, I want to know for a fact that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is still on death row in Texas and is scheduled to get the needle on May seventh,” Lucy says.

  “No kidding,” Manham mutters, repeatedly clicking a pen, a nervous habit that annoys all who know him.

  “Zach?” Berger cocks an eyebrow, staring at the pen.

  “Sorry.” He slides it into the breast pocket of his starched white shirt. “Unless you two need me, I’ve got some calls to make.” He looks at both of them.

  “We’re fine. Will fill you in later,” Lucy says. “And if anybody calls looking for me, the word is that nobody knows where I am.”

  “Not ready to come up for air?” Manham smiles.

  “No.”

  He leaves, the muffled sound of the heavily padded door barely audible.

  “And Rudy?” Berger asks. “Hopefully in his apartment, taking a shower or a nap? Looks like you should be doing the same.”

  “Nope. We’re both working. He’s in his office down the hall, lost in cyberspace. Rudy the Internet junkie, which is a good thing. He has more search engines running all over the universe than England has tubes.”

  “For me to get a search warrant to have Chandonne swabbed for DNA,” Berger says, “I have to show probable cause, Lucy. And a taped phone call not only isn’t going to do it, but I’m not sure how much you want leaked outside this office. Especially since we really don’t know what the phone call means . . .”

  “Nothing,” Lucy interrupts. “You know that’s all I ever want leaking outside this office. Absolutely nothing.”

  “The unforgivable sin.” Berger smiles, her eyes touched by a gentle sadness as she looks at Lucy’s stern, determined face, a face still smooth and bright with youth, a face with sensuously full lips the hue of dark red earth.

  If it is true that people begin to die the day they are born, then Lucy seems an exception. She is an exception to all things human, it often seems to Berger, and for this reason alone, she fears that Lucy will not live long. She envisions her compelling young face and strong body on top of a stainless-steel autopsy table, a bullet through her brain, and no matter how she struggles to strike that image from her imagination, she can’t.

  “Disloyalty, even born of weakness, is the unforgivable sin,” Lucy agrees, puzzled and unsettled by the way Berger is looking at her. “What’s the matter, Jaime? You think we’ve got a leak? Jesus, it’s what I have nightmares about. The nightmare I live with. I fear it more than death.” She is getting riled up. “I catch anybody betraying . . . well, one Judas in this organization, and we’re all cooked. And so I have to be hard.”

  “Yes, you’re hard, Lucy.” Berger gets up, barely glancing at Chandonne’s captured voice patterns on the monitor. “We have an active unsolved case here in New York: Susan Pless.”

  Lucy gets up, too, her eyes intense on Berger’s, anticipating what she’s about to say next.

  “Chandonne is charged with her murder, and you know all the reasons why I gave in, folded up my tent, decided not to prosecute and let Texas have him instead.”

  “Because of the death penalty,” Lucy says.

  THE TWO OF THEM PAUSE by the soundproof door, monitors glowing, images from closed-circuit cameras flashing from one to the next, and small, bright lights winking white, green and red, as if Lucy and Berger are in the cockpit of a spacecraft.

  “I knew he’d be sentenced to death in Texas, and he was. May seventh,” Berger mutters. “But no death penalty for him here, never in New York.”

  She stuffs her legal pad inside her briefcase and snaps it shut. “One of these days the DA might allow the needle, but probably not during my tenure. But I suppose the question now, Lucy, is do we want Chandonne to die? And more to the point, do we want whoever’s in his cell in Polunsky to be executed when we can’t be certain who that person is, now that we’ve gotten these communications from the infamous Loup-Garou?”

  Berger says we, although she has gotten no communication from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. As far as Lucy knows, only she, Marino and Scarpetta have: letters, and now a phone call that seems to have been made from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, unless technology has failed or human programmers have.

  “No judge is going to grant me a court order to get his DNA,” Berger says again in her usual, calm, self-assured tone. “Not without probable cause for a search warrant. I get it, and I’ll try to extradite him to New York and put him on trial for the murder of Susan Pless. Based on the DNA from his saliva, we’ll get a conviction even if we know that the seminal fluid in her vagina wasn’t his, was in fact Jay Talley’s, his twin brother’s. Chandonne’s attorney, Rocco Caggiano, is going to throw in every dirty trick he can think of if we bring this case back to life—so to speak.”

  Lucy avoids the subject of Rocco Caggiano. Her expression registers nothing. Waves of nausea roll through her again. She wills them to pass. I will not get sick, she silently orders herself.

  “I certainly would introduce Talley’s seminal fluid into evidence, and there the case gets dicey. The defense will argue that Jay Talley, now a fugitive, raped and murdered Susan, and all I can prove without a doubt is that Chandonne sank his teeth into her. In summary,” she is in courtroom mode, “hopefully, the donor of the seminal fluid will be of no consequence to jurors, who will be horrified that saliva found in bite marks virtually all over Susan’s upper body will prove that Chandonne tortured her. But I can’t prove he murdered her or that she was even alive when he started biting her.”

  “Shit,” Lucy says.

  “Maybe he gets convicted. Maybe the jurors believe she suffered extreme physical pain, that the murder was vicious and wanton. It’s possible he would get the death penalty, but it’s never carried out in New York. So, if convicted, he’d probably get life without possibility of parole, and then we have to live with him until he dies in prison.”

  Lucy places her hand on the doorknob and leans against thick acoustic foam rubber padding. “I’ve always wanted him dead.”

  “And I was glad he ended up in Texas,” Berger replies. “But I also want his DNA so we know for a fact that he isn’t roaming the streets somewhere, his eyes on his next victim . . .”

  “Which could be one of us,” Lucy says.

  “Let me make some calls. The first step is for me to tell a judge I intend to reopen Susan Pless’s murder and want a court order for Chandonne’s DNA. Then I’ll contact the governor of Texas. Without his sanction, Chandonne’s not going anywhere. I know enough about Governor Corley to expect serious obstinance on his part, but at least I think he’ll listen to me. It does his state proud to free the Earth of murderers. I’ll have to make a deal with him.”

  “Nothing like justice to help them out at election time,” Lucy says cynically as she opens the door.

  MID-MORNING IN POLAND, a maintenance worker named George Skrzypek is sent to room 513 of the Radisson Hotel to fix a stuck drain in a bathtub that is causing an unpleasant odor.

  He knocks on the door and calls out “maintenance” several times. When no one answers, he lets himself in, noticing right away that the guests have checked out, leaving a bed of tangled sheets spotted with seminal fluid and numerous empty wine bottles and ashtrays filthy with cigarette butts on the bedside tables.

  The closet door is open, coat hangers on the floor, and when he walks into the bathroom with his box of tools, he discovers the usual mess of toothpaste crusted on the sink and splattered on the mirror. The toilet isn’t flushed, the tub filled with scummy water, and large
flies crawl on a plate of partially eaten chocolates set on the counter next to the sink. Flies drone and butt against the light over the mirror and dive-bomb Skrzypek’s head.

  Pigs.

  So many people are pigs.

  He pulls on large rubber gloves and dips his hands into the cold, greasy bathwater, feeling for the drain. It is clogged with clumps of long black hair.

  Pigs.

  Water begins to drain from the tub. He tosses the wet, matted hair into the toilet and waves flies away from his face, disgusted as he watches them moil over the plate of chocolates. Taking off his rubber gloves, he flaps them at the fat, black, filthy pests.

  Of course, flies are not exotic insects to him, and he sees them on the job, but never this many in a room and not this time of year when the weather is cool. He moves past the bed and notes the open window, a typical sight, even in the winter, because so many guests smoke. As he reaches to shut it, he notices another fly crawling on the sill. It lifts up like a dirigible and buzzes past him into the room. An odor seeps in with the outside air, a very faint odor that reminds him of sour milk or rotten meat. He sticks his head out the window. The stench is coming from the room directly to the right. Room 511.

  THE CAR IS PARKED AT a meter on East 114th Street in Harlem, within a block of Rao’s.

  In Benton’s former life, he could get a coveted table at Rao’s because he was FBI and had special status with the family who has owned the famous, if not notorious, Italian restaurant for a hundred years. It was a hangout for the mob, and there is no telling who dines there now. Celebrities frequent its few checked cloth–covered tables. Cops love the place. The mayor of New York stays away. Parked on East 114th, in a beat-up black Cadillac that Benton bought for $2,500 cash, is probably as close to Rao’s as he will ever get again.