Four Scarpetta Novels (62 page)

“And they want what?” Berger asks him. “Tell me again, because I'm having a very hard time understanding, much less believing, this part.”

“They want my father!” he says with the first emotion I have seen. “To get Papa! To find a reason to go after him and bring him down, destroy him. To make it look like my father has a son who is a killer so they can get to my family. All this for years! And I am Chandonne and look at me!
Look at me!!”

He stretches out his arms in a pose of crucifixion, hair floating out from his body. I watch in shock as he rips off his dark glasses and light pierces his tender, burned eyes. I stare into those bright red, chemically burned eyes. They don't seem to focus and tears stream down his face.

“I am ruined!” he cries out. “I am ugly and blind and accused of crimes I didn't do! You Americans want to execute a Frenchman! Isn't that it! To make an example!” Chairs scrape loudly and Marino and Talley are all over him, holding him in his chair. “I killed no one! She tried to kill me!
Look what she did to me!”

And Berger is calmly saying to him, “We've been at this an hour. We're going to stop now. That's enough. Calm down, calm down.”

Frames flicker and bars fill the screen before it turns the bright blue of a perfect afternoon. Berger turns off the VCR. I sit in stunned silence.

“Hate to tell you.” She breaks the appalling spell Chandonne has cast over my small, private conference room. “There are some antigovernment, paranoid idiots in the world who are going to find this guy believable. Let's hope none of them end up on the jury. It only takes one.”

J
AY TALLEY
,”
BERGER
startles me by saying. Now that Chandonne has vanished from our midst with a simple pointing of a remote control, this New York prosecutor wastes no time shifting her intense focus to me. We are returned to a small, bland reality—a conference room with a round wooden table and wooden built-in bookcases and a vacant television screen. Case files and gory photographs are spread out before us, forgotten, ignored, because Chandonne has preempted everything and everyone for the past two hours.

“Do you want to volunteer, or should I start with telling you what I know?” Berger confronts me.

“I'm not sure what you want me to volunteer.” I am taken aback, then offended, then furious all over again as I think of Talley's presence at Chandonne's interview. I imagine Berger talking to Talley before and after her interrogation of Chandonne and during his break for rest and fast food. Berger had hours with Talley and Marino. “And more to the point,” I add, “what does this have to do with your New York case?”

“Dr. Scarpetta.” She leans back in her chair. I feel as if I have been inside this room with her for half my life, and I am late. I am hopelessly late for meeting the governor. “As hard as it's going to be for you,” Berger says, “I'm asking you to trust me. Can you do that?”

“I don't know who to trust anymore,” I reply truthfully.

She smiles a little and sighs. “That's honest. Fair enough. You have no reason to trust me. Maybe you have no reason to trust anyone. But you really have no factual reason not to trust me as a professional whose
singular intent is to make Chandonne pay for his crimes—if he murdered these women.”

“If?” I ask her.

“We have to prove it. And absolutely anything I can learn from what has happened here in these Richmond cases is invaluable to me. I promise you, I'm not trying to be a voyeur or to violate your privacy. But I must have the full context. Frankly, I need to know what the hell I'm dealing with, and my difficulty lies in that I don't know who all the characters are or what they are or if any of them might in any way overlap my case in New York. For example, could Diane Bray's prescription drug habit in fact be a marker for other illegal activity possibly connected to organized crime, to the Chandonne family? Or possibly even connected to why brother Thomas's body ended up in Richmond?”

“By the way.” I am stuck on another matter, namely, my credibility. “How does Chandonne explain that there were two chipping hammers at my house? Yes, I bought one at the hardware store, as I have told you. So where did the other one come from if he didn't bring it with him? And if I wanted to kill him, why didn't I use the pistol? My Glock was right there on the dining-room table.”

Berger hesitates and completely dodges my questions. “If I don't know the whole truth, then it makes it very difficult to sort out what's relevant to my case and what isn't.”

“I understand that much.”

“Can we start with the status of your relationship with Jay now?”

“He drove me to the hospital.” I give up. I am clearly not the one who is going to be asking the questions in this situation. “When I broke my arm. He showed up with the police, with ATF, and I spoke briefly to him Saturday afternoon while the police were still at my home.”

“Do you have any idea why he thought it necessary to fly here from France to assist in the manhunt for Chandonne?”

“I can only assume it's because he's so familiar with the case.”

“Or an excuse to see you?”

“He'd have to answer that.”

“Are you seeing him?”

“Not since Saturday afternoon, as I've said.”

“Why not? Do you consider the relationship over?”

“I don't consider it ever began.”

“But you slept with him.” She raises an eyebrow.

“So I'm guilty of poor judgment.”

“He's handsome, bright. And young. Some might be more likely to convict you of good taste. He's single. So are you. It's not as if you committed adultery.” She drags out a pause. Is she alluding to Benton, to the fact that I have been guilty of adultery in the past? “Jay Talley has a lot of money, doesn't he?” She taps her felt-tip pen on the legal pad, a metronome measuring what a bad time I am having. “From his family, supposedly. I'll check into that. And by the way, you should know I've talked to him, to Jay. At length.”

“I just assume you've talked to the entire world. What I haven't yet figured out is how you've had time.”

“There was a little downtime at MCV, the medical college hospital.”

I imagine her drinking coffee with Talley. I can picture the look on his face, his demeanor. I wonder if she is attracted to him.

“I talked to both Talley and Marino while Chandonne had his various rest periods and whatnot.” Her hands are folded on top of a notepad that has the letterhead of her office on it. She has not taken a single note, not one word the entire time we have been inside this room. Already, she is planning for the defense to huff and puff about Rosario this and that. Whatever is in writing, the defense is entitled to see it. So don't write anything down. Now and then she doodles. She has filled two pages with doodles since she entered my conference room. A red flag is raised in the back of my mind. She is treating me like a witness. I shouldn't be a witness, not in her New York case.

“I'm getting the impression that you're wondering if Jay is somehow involved. . . .” I start to say.

Berger interrupts me with a shrug. “No stone unturned,” she says. “Is it possible? By this point, I'm about to believe anything is possible. What a wonderful position Talley would be in if he were in collusion with the Chandonnes, true? Interpol, ah, that's handy for a crime cartel. He
calls you and brings you to France, perhaps for the purpose of seeing what you know about the loose cannon Jean-Baptiste. Suddenly, Talley's in Richmond for the manhunt.” She crosses her arms and penetrates me with that gaze again. “I don't like him. I'm surprised you did.”

“Look,” I say with a hint of defeat in my voice, “Jay and I were intimate in Paris over a twenty-four-hour period, at most.”

“You initiated sex. Quarreled in a restaurant that evening and you stormed out, jealous because he was looking at another woman. . . .”

“What?” I blurt out. “He said
that
?”

She regards me silently. Her tone is no different from the one she was using with Chandonne, a terrible monster. Now she is interviewing me, a terrible person. That is how I feel. “It had nothing to do with another woman,” I answer her. “What other woman? I certainly wasn't jealous. He was coming on too strong and acting petulant and I'd had enough.”

“The Café Runtz on rue Favard. You made quite a scene.” She continues my story, or at least Talley's version of it.

“I didn't make a scene. I got up from the table and walked out, period.”

“From there you returned to the hotel, got into a cab and went to Île Saint-Louis, where the Chandonne family lives. You walked around after dark, staring up at the Chandonne home, then got a water sample from the Seine.”

What she has just said sends electrical shocks through my every cell. Sweat rolls in cold tickles beneath my blouse. I never told Jay what I did after I left him in the restaurant. How does Berger know all this? How did Jay know if he is the one who told her? Marino. How much has Marino volunteered to her?

“What was your real purpose in finding the Chandonne house? What did you think that might tell you?” Berger asks.

“If I knew what something would tell me, I wouldn't need to investigate,” I reply. “As for the water sample, as you must know from the lab reports, we found diatoms, or microscopic algae, on the clothing of the unidentified body from the Richmond port—from Thomas's body. I
wanted a water sample from near the Chandonne home to see if there was any chance the same type of diatom might be present in that area of the Seine. And it was. Freshwater diatoms were consistent with those I found on the inside of the clothing on the body, Thomas's body, and none of this matters. You aren't trying Jean-Baptiste for the murder of his alleged brother, since that probably happened in Belgium. You've already made that clear.”

“But the water sample is important.”

“Why?”

“Anything that happened reveals more to me about the defendant and possibly leads to motive. More importantly, to identity and intent.”

Identity
and
intent
. Those words roar through my mind like a train. I am a lawyer. I know what those words mean.

“Why did you take the water sample? Do you routinely go around collecting evidence that isn't directly associated with a body? Collecting water samples really isn't your jurisdiction, in other words, especially in a foreign country. Why did you go to France to begin with? Isn't that a little out of the ordinary for a medical examiner?”

“Interpol summoned me. You just pointed that out yourself.”

“Jay Talley summoned you, more specifically.”

“He represents Interpol. He's the ATF liaison.”

“I'm wondering why he really orchestrated your going there.” She pauses to allow that chilly fear to touch my brain. It occurs to me that Jay may have manipulated me for reasons I am not sure I can bear to entertain. “Talley has many layers,” Berger adds cryptically. “If Jean-Baptiste was tried here, I fear Talley would more likely be used by the defense than by the prosecution. Possibly to discredit you as a witness.”

Heat crawls up my neck. My face burns. Fear rips through me like shrapnel, tearing apart any hope I have had that something like this would not happen. “Let me ask you something.” My outrage is complete. It is all I can do to steady my voice. “Is there anything you don't know about my life?”

“Quite a bit.”

“Why is it I feel that I'm the one about to get indicted, Ms. Berger?”

“I don't know. Why do you feel that way?”

“I'm trying not to take any of this personally. But it's getting harder by the minute.”

Berger doesn't smile. Resolve turns her eyes to flint and hardens her tone. “It's going to get very personal. I highly recommend you don't take it that way. You of all people know how it works. The actual commission of a crime is incidental to the real damage its ripples do. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne didn't inflict a single blow on you at the time he broke into your house. It's now he begins to hurt you. He
has
hurt you. He
will
hurt you. Even though he's locked up, he will inflict blows on you daily. He has started a deadly, cruel process, the violation of Kay Scarpetta. It's begun. I'm sorry. It's a fact of life that you know all too well.”

I silently return her stare. My mouth is dry. My heart seems to beat out of rhythm.

“It isn't fair, is it?” she says with the sharp edge of a prosecutor who knows how to dismantle human beings as completely as I do. “But then, I'm sure your patients wouldn't enjoy being naked on your table and under your knife, to have their pockets and orifices explored, if they knew. And yes, there's a hell of a lot I don't know about your life. And yes, you aren't going to like my probing. And yes, you will cooperate if you're the person I've heard you are. And yes, goddamn it, I desperately need your help or this case is fucked to the moon.”

“Because you're going to try to drag in his other bad acts, aren't you?” I am out with it. “A Molineux application.”

She hesitates. Her eyes linger on me and light up for an instant, as if I have just said something that fills her with happiness or maybe a new respect. Then just as quickly, those eyes shut me out again, and she says, “I'm not sure what I'll do yet.”

I don't believe her. I am the only living witness. The only one. She fully intends to suck me into it—to put every one of Chandonne's crimes on trial, all magnificently showcased within the small context of one poor woman he murdered in Manhattan two years ago. Chandonne is smart. But he may have made a fatal mistake on videotape. He gave Berger the two weapons she needs to shoot for a Molineux: identity and intent. I
can identify Chandonne. I know goddamn well what his intent was when he forced his way into my house. I am the only living person who can counter his lies.

“So now we hammer at my credibility.” The tasteless pun is deliberate. She is swinging at me just as Chandonne did, but for a very different reason, of course. She doesn't want to destroy me. She wants to make sure I am not destroyed.

“Why did you sleep with Jay Talley?” She is at it again.

“Because he was there, damn it,” I retort.

She erupts in a sudden salvo of laughter, deep throaty laughs that push her back in her chair.

I am not trying to be funny. I am disgusted, if anything. “That's the banal truth, Ms. Berger,” I add.

“Please call me Jaime.” She sighs.

“I don't always know the answers even to things I should. Such as why I had my moment with Jay. But I'm ashamed of it. Up until a few minutes ago, I felt guilty about it, so afraid I used him, hurt him. But at least I didn't kiss and tell.”

To this she has no response.

“I should have known he's still in the locker room,” I go on as my indignation unfurls brightly before our eyes. “No better than those teenaged boys gawking at my niece in the mall the other night. Walking hormones. So Jay has bragged about it, I'm sure, told everyone, including you. And let me add . . .” I pause. I swallow. Anger is a lump in my throat. “Let me add that some details aren't your business and will never be your business. I ask you, Ms. Berger, as a matter of professional courtesy, not to go places where you don't belong.”

“If only others would abide by that.”

I make a point of looking at my watch again. But I can't leave, not before I ask her the most important question. “You believe he attacked me?” She knows I am referring to Chandonne this time.