Four Scarpetta Novels (115 page)

L
UCY ISN'T SHOWERED,
her usual demeanor in the office fractured by exhaustion and by post-traumatic stress that she will not acknowledge.

Her clothes look slept in because they were—twice. Once in Berlin, when the flight was cancelled, and the next time in Heathrow, when she and Rudy had to wait three hours to board an eight-hour flight that landed them at Kennedy Airport not even an hour ago. At least they had no baggage to lose, their few belongings stuffed into one small carry-on duffel bag. Before leaving Germany, they showered and disposed of the clothing they had worn in room 511 of the Szczecin Radisson Hotel.

Lucy wiped all prints off her tactical baton, and without a pause in her step, tossed it through the slightly open window of a dented Mercedes on the side of a quiet, narrow street crowded with parked cars. Certainly the Mercedes's owner would puzzle over the baton and wonder who deposited it inside his or her front seat and why.

“Merry Christmas,” Lucy muttered, and she and Rudy briskly walked off into the dawn.

The morning was too dark and cool for blow flies, but with the afternoon, when Rudy and Lucy were long gone, the flies would awaken
in Poland. More of the filthy winged insects would find Rocco Caggiano's slightly open window and heavily drone inside to feed on his cold, stiff body. The flies should be busy depositing hundreds—maybe thousands—of eggs.

Lucy's chief of staff, Zach Manham, needs but one piece of evidence to deduce that his boss is not herself and that something very bad happened wherever she's just been. She reeks of body odor. Even when Manham has spent hours in the gym or run miles with Lucy, she doesn't stink, not like this. Hers is the strong odor of fear and stress. Its secretion requires little perspiration, which is clammy and concentrated in the armpits and strongly permeates clothing, becoming more unpleasant and noticeable with time. Accompanying this acute reaction is an elevated heartbeat, shallow breathing, pallor and constricted pupils. Manham doesn't know the physiology of a response he learned to recognize early in his former career as a detective for the New York District Attorney's Office, but he doesn't need to know.

“Go home and get some rest,” he repeatedly says to Lucy.

“Cut it out,” she finally barks at him, interested in the large digital recorder on Manham's desk.

She slips on headphones and presses the
Play
button again, manipulating the volume.

For the third time, she listens to the cryptic message that their highly technical caller-identification system has narrowed down to the Polunsky Unit, while a satellite tracking system indicates the call was made from virtually the front door of Lucy's office building, or perhaps even inside it. Hitting the
Off
button, she sits down, worn-out and beside herself.

“Goddamn, goddamn it!” she exclaims. “I don't get it! You screw up something, Zach?”

She rubs her face, a residue of mascara sticky on her eyelashes and driving her crazy. When she played the role of pretty young thing who seemed perfectly in place at the Radisson in Szczecin, she somehow grabbed a tube of waterproof mascara, and she hates mascara, and she had no
makeup remover because she's rather much a stranger to cosmetics. So she scrubbed her face hard, succeeding only in getting soap in her eyes, which are bloodshot and puffy, as if she had been drinking all night. With rare exception, alcohol on the job is forbidden, and the first words out of her mouth when she appeared in her office not even an hour ago, leaving a jet stream of stench whenever she moved, was that she had not been on a bender, as if Manham or anybody else would have suspected, for even two seconds, that she had been.

“I didn't screw up anything, Lucy,” Manham patiently replies, looking at her with concern.

He is moving closer to fifty years old, fit, six feet tall, with thick brown hair and a brush of gray at the temples, his former thick Bronx accent neutralized or altered when necessary. Manham is a natural mimic. Amazingly, he can fit into virtually any environment. Women find him irresistibly attractive and entertaining, and he uses this to his professional advantage. Moral judgments do not exist at The Last Precinct, unless an investigator is foolish and selfish enough to violate an unbending code of impeccable behavior. One's personal choices must never, absolutely never, come within miles of the boundaries of missions that place lives at risk daily.

“I honestly have no idea what happened here, why the satellite tracking system pinpoints the immediate area of this building,” Manham tells her. “I contacted Polunsky, and Jean-Baptiste is there. They say he's there. He could not have been here. That would be impossible, unless he can levitate, for Christ's sake.”

“I think what you mean is travel out of body,” Lucy retorts, and her unfairness and arrogance are uncontrollable right now, and she feels terrible about it. “Levitate means to hover off the ground.”

She feels powerless because her usually brilliant and logical mind cannot decipher what has happened, and she wasn't here when it happened.

Manham politely looks at her. “It's him. You're sure?”

Lucy knows Jean-Baptiste's voice, soft, almost sweet, with a heavy French accent. His is a voice she will never forget.

“It's him, all right,” she says. “Go ahead and run voice analysis, but I already know what it's going to show. And I think Polunsky needs to prove that the asshole they've got on death row is really Chandonne—as in proving it with DNA. Maybe his fucking family's pulled something. If need be, I'll go there and look at his ugly face myself.”

She hates that she hates him. No competent investigator can give in to emotions, or judgment is obscured, even deadly. But Jean-Baptiste tried to kill Lucy's aunt. For that, she despises him. For that, he should die. Painfully, Lucy wishes. For what he intended and attempted, he should feel the abject terror he inflicted on others and lusted to inflict on Scarpetta.

“Demand a new DNA test? Lucy, we need a court order.” Manham is aware of jurisdictional and legal limitations and has lived by their standards for so long that he is programmed to at least worry when Lucy suggests a plan that in the past would have been unthinkable and impossible and, if nothing else, would have resulted in a suppression of evidence that would destroy a case in court.

“Berger can request it.” Lucy refers to Assistant DA Jaime Berger. “Give her a call and ask her to come over here as soon as she can. Like right now.”

Manham has to smile. “I'm sure she has nothing to do and will welcome the diversion.”

S
CARPETTA SPREADS OUT
dozens of eight-by-ten color photographs she made by placing each sheet of the Polunsky commissary paper on a lightbox and photographing all of them under ultraviolet light, and then again at a magnification of 50X.

She compares them to photographs of the Chandonne letter she received. The paper has no watermarks and is composed of closely matted wood fibers, common in cheap paper as opposed to fine papers that include rag.

Visually, the paper has a smooth, shiny surface, typical in typing paper, and she sees no irregularities that might suggest it came from the same manufacturer's batch, which doesn't matter, really. Even if the paper did come from the same batch, that scientific evidence would be weak in court because the defense would instantly insist that because of the enormous size of a manufacturer's batch, inexpensive grades of paper such as this are produced with
untold millions and millions of sheets to a batch.

The eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, twenty-pound paper is no different from what Scarpetta uses in her printer. Ironically, the defense might make a case that
she
wrote the Chandonne letter and mailed it to herself.

She has been subjected to more ridiculously bizarre accusations than
that. She doesn't fool herself. Once accused, always accused, and she has been accused of too many professional, legal and moral breaches to survive the intense scrutiny of anyone who might wish to destroy her again.

Rose peeks her head into Scarpetta's office. “If you don't leave right this minute, you're going to miss another flight.”

B
UYING COFFEE ON THE STREET
is an old routine that gives Jaime Berger a temporary escape from mayhem.

She takes her change from Raul, thanks him, and he nods, busy, aware of the long line behind her, and asks if she wants butter, even though she has refused butter for all the years she has patronized his kiosk across Centre Street from the District Attorney's office. She walks off with her coffee and usual high-carbohydrate lunch of a bagel—this one poppy-seed—and two packets of Philadelphia cream cheese in a white paper bag with a napkin and a plastic knife. The cell phone on her belt vibrates like a stinging insect.

“Yes,” she answers, pausing on the sidewalk across from her granite building downtown, close to Ground Zero, where on September 11, 2001, she was looking out her office window when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center.

That empty hole along the Hudson has left an empty hole in her, too. Staring at blank air, at what is no longer there, makes her feel older than her forty-eight years, and with every passing era in her life, she has lost a part of herself that can never be resurrected.

“What are you doing?” Lucy asks. “I hear street chaos, so you're in the
midst of cops, lawyers and thugs swarming around the courthouse. How quickly can you get to the Upper East Side, where things are more civilized?”

Typically, Lucy doesn't give Berger an opportunity to get in a word until it is too late for her to say no.

“You're not scheduled for court, are you?”

Berger says that she's not. “I suppose you want me
now
.”

Realistically speaking,
now
is more like forty-five minutes, due to sluggish traffic. It is close to one p.m. when Berger is keyed up to the twenty-first floor of Lucy's building. The elevator doors open to a mahogany reception area with
Infosearch Solutions
in brass letters on the wall behind the curved glass desk. There is no area for clients to wait, and the desk is flanked by two opaque glass doors. The left one electronically unlocks as the elevator doors shut, an invisible camera in the chandelier broadcasting Berger and every sound she makes on platinum-screen TVs in every interior office.

“You look like holy hell. But what matters is how I look,” she dryly says as Lucy greets her.

“You're very photogenic,” Lucy replies with a quip she's used before. “You could have had a brilliant acting career in Hollywood.”

Berger is a dark-haired woman with sharp features and pretty teeth. She is always dressed impeccably in power suits accented by expensive accessories, and although she might not think of herself as an actor, any good prosecutor is theatrical during interviews and certainly in the courtroom. Berger looks around at a wall of closed mahogany doors. One opens, and Zach Manham walks out, holding a stack of CDs.

“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.”