Four Scarpetta Novels (98 page)

Benton stops writing, a fleeting emotion passing through his eyes at the mention of Jay Talley's name. “You're assuming he's still alive. Do you know that?”

“Got no reason to think otherwise. My guess is his family's protecting him and he's living the good life somewhere while he carries on with the family business.”

It occurs to Marino as he says all this that Benton probably knows Talley is a Chandonne who passed himself off as an American, became an ATF agent and managed to get himself assigned as a liaison to Interpol's headquarters in France. Marino mentally scans everything that has been made public about the Jean-Baptiste case. He's not sure if there was any mention of Scarpetta's relationship with Talley when she and half the world believed he was the handsome big-shot agent who spoke dozens of languages and had gone to Harvard. Benton doesn't need to know what went on between Scarpetta and Talley. Marino hopes like hell Benton never finds out.

“I've read about Jay Talley,” Benton says. “He's very smart, very smooth, extremely sadistic and dangerous. I seriously doubt he's dead.”

“Uhhhh . . .” Marino's thoughts scatter like startled birds. “Like what have you read?”

“It's no secret that he's Jean-Baptiste's twin brother. Fraternal twin.” Benton's face is impassive.

“Weirdest thing I ever heard of.” Marino shakes his head. “Imagine.
He and Wolfman born a few minutes apart. Talk about one brother getting the bad luck of the draw, while the other, Talley, gets dealt all aces.”

“He is a violent psychopath,” Benton replies. “I wouldn't exactly call that
aces.
”

“Their DNA's so much alike,” Marino goes on, “you've got to use a lot of probes to figure out you're looking at the DNA of two different people.” Marino pauses, slightly exasperated, as he continues picking at his beer label. “Don't ask me to explain probes and DNA shit. The Doc figured it all . . .”

“Who else is on the list?” Benton interrupts him.

Marino's face goes blank.

“The visitors list.”

“The list is garbage. I'm sure no one on it has ever come to see John the Baptist except his lawyer.”

“Your son, Rocco Caggiano.” He won't let Marino evade that fact. “Anyone else?” Benton persists, taking notes.

“Turns out I am. Isn't that sweet? And then my new pen pal Wolfman sends me mail. A letter for me, and the one for the Doc that I didn't give to her.”

Marino gets up to help himself to another beer.

“Need one?”

Benton tells him, “No.”

Retrieving his jacket, Marino digs in one pocket, then another, finding folded pieces of paper.

“I just happen to have them with me. Photocopies, including the envelopes.”

“The list.” Benton won't stray from that subject. “Certainly you brought a copy of the list with you.”

“I don't need a copy of that goddamn list.” Marino's annoyance shows. “What is it about you and that fucking list? I can tell you exactly who's on it. The people I've already mentioned, plus two reporters. Carlos Guarino and Emmanuelle La Fleur.”

His pronunciation is unintelligible and Benton asks him to spell the names.

“Supposedly, they live in Sicily and Paris.”

“Real people?”

“No sign of their bylines on the Internet, and Lucy's looked.”

“If Lucy can't find them, they don't exist,” Benton decides.

“Also on Wolfman's guest list,” Marino adds, “is none other than Jaime Berger, who would have prosecuted his ass had he gone to trial in New York for the newslady he mauled up there. Berger's a piece of work, has a history with the Doc. They're friends.”

Benton knows all this and doesn't react. He takes notes.

“And last and probably least, some guy named Robert Lee.”

“His name sounds real enough. By chance is his middle initial E?” Benton wryly comments. “Any correspondence between Jean-Baptiste and this Robert Lee, on the outside chance Mr. Lee didn't die a hundred-some years ago?”

“All I can tell you is he's on the visitors list. Any mail that's privileged, the prison won't talk about, so I got no idea who else Wolfman writes to or gets love notes from.”

M
ARINO SMOOTHS OPEN
his letter from Jean-Baptiste and begins to read:
“ ‘Bonjour, mon cher ami,
Pete . . .' ”

He interrupts himself and looks up, scowling. “Can you believe he calls me Pete? Now that really pisses me off.”

“More than being called
mon cher ami
?” Benton asks dryly.

“I don't like dirtbags calling me by my first name. It's just one of my things.”

“Please read,” Benton says with a touch of impatience, “and I hope there is nothing more in French for you to mangle. What's the date of this letter?”

“Not even a week ago. I arranged things to get here as quick as I could. To see you . . . oh, for shit's sake, I'm gonna call you
Benton.
”

“Actually, you're not. Please read.”

Marino lights another cigarette, inhales deeply and continues:

Just a note to tell you I am growing my hair. Why? But of course it is because they have given me my date to die. It is May seventh at ten p.m. Not a minute later, so I hope you will be there as my special guest. Before then, mon ami, I have business to conclude, so I make you an offer you can't refuse (as they say in the movies).

You will never catch them without me, Jean-Baptiste. It would be like catching a thousand fish without a very big net. I am the net. There are two conditions. They are simple.

I will admit nothing except to Madame Scarpetta, who has asked my permission to see her and tell her what I know.

No one else can be present.

I have yet another condition that she does not know. She must be the doctor who administers my lethal cocktail, as they say. Madame Scarpetta must kill me. I fully trust if she agrees, she will not break her promise to me. You see how well I know her.

 

Á bientôt,
Jean-Baptiste Chandonne

“And the letter to her?” Benton abruptly asks, unwilling to say Scarpetta's name.

“The same thing. More or less.” Marino does not want to read it to him.

“You have it in your hand. Read it.”

Marino taps an ash into the water glass, squinting an eye as he blows out smoke. “I'll give you the upshot.”

“Don't protect me, Pete,” Benton softly says.

“Sure. If you want to hear it, I'll read it. But I don't think it's necessary, and maybe you ought . . .”

“Please read it.” Now Benton sounds weary. His eyes are not as intense, and he leans back in the chair.

Marino clears his throat as he unfolds another plain white sheet of paper. He begins:

Mon chéri amour, Kay . . .

He glances up at Benton's expressionless face. The color has drained from it, his complexion sallow beneath his tan.

My heart is in great pain because you have not made an appointment to come to see me yet. I do not understand. Of course, you feel as I do. I am your thief in the night, the great lover who came to steal you away, yet you refused. You shunned me and wounded me. Now you must be empty, so bored, languishing for me, Madame Scarpetta.

As for me? I am not bored. You are here with me in my cell, without a will, completely under my spell. You must know it. You must feel it. Let me see, can I count? Is it four, five or fifteen times a day I rip open those very nice suits you wear—the haute couture of Madame Scarpetta, the doctor, the lawyer, the Chief. I tear off everything with my bare hands and bite into those big tits while you shiver and die with delight . . .

“Is there a point to this?” Benton's voice snaps like a pistol slide racking back. “I'm not interested in his pornographic drivel. What does he want?”

Marino looks hard at him, pauses, then turns over the letter. Sweat beads on his balding head and rolls down his temples. He reads what is on the back of the plain white sheet of paper:

I must see you! You cannot escape unless you do not care if more innocent people die. Not that anyone is innocent. I will tell you all that is necessary. But I must look at you in the flesh as I speak the truth. And then you will kill me.

Marino stops reading. “More shit you don't need to hear . . .”

“And she knows nothing about this?”

“Well,” Marino equivocates, “not really. Like I said, I didn't show it to her. All I told her is I got a letter and Wolfman wants to see her and will exchange information for her visit. And he wants her to be the one who gives him the needle.”

“Typically, penitentiaries use free-world doctors, regular physicians from the outside to administer the lethal cocktail,” Benton oddly
comments, as if what Marino just said has no impact on him. “Did you use ninhydrin on the letters?” Now he changes the subject. “Obviously I can't tell, since these are photocopies.”

The chemical ninhydrin would have reacted to the amino acid in fingerprints, turning portions of the original letters a deep violet.

“Didn't want to damage them,” Marino replies.

“What about an alternate light source? Something nondestructive, such as a crime scope?”

When Marino doesn't respond, Benton pierces him with the obvious point.

“You did nothing to prove these letters are from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? You just assume? Jesus.” Benton rubs his face with his hands. “Jesus Christ. You come here
—here—
take a risk like that and don't even know for a fact that these letters came from him? And let me guess. You didn't have the backs of the stamps and envelope flaps swabbed for DNA, either. What about postmarks? What about return addresses?”

“There's no return address—not for him, I mean—and no postmark that might tell us where he sent it from,” Marino admits, and he is sweating profusely now.

Benton leans forward. “What? He hand-delivered the letters? The return address isn't his? What the hell are you talking about? How could he mail something to you and there's no postmark?”

Marino unfolds another piece of paper and hands it to him. The photocopy is of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch white envelope, preprinted, U.S. postage paid for the nonprofit organization the National Academy of Justice.

“Well, I guess we've both seen this before,” Benton says, looking at the photocopy, “since we've been members of the NAJ for most of our lives. Or at least I used to be. Sorry to say, but I'm not on their mailing list anymore.” He pauses, noting that
First-class mail
has been x-ed through just below the preprinted postage-paid stamp.

“For once, I'm blanking out on any possible explanation,” he says.

“This is what came in the mail to me,” Marino explains. “The NAJ envelope, and when I opened it, the two letters were inside. One to me, one to the Doc. Sealed, marked
Legal Mail,
I guess in case someone at the prison was curious about the NAJ envelope and decided to tear into it. Only other thing written on the envelopes was our names.”

Both men are silent for a moment. Marino smokes and drinks beer.

“Well, I do have a possibility, the only thing I can think of,” Marino then says. “I checked with the NAJ, and from the warden on down, there are fifty-six officers who are members. It wouldn't be unusual to see one of these envelopes lying around somewhere.”

Benton is shaking his head. “But your address is printed,
machine-printed.
How could Chandonne manage to do that?”

“How the hell do you stand this joint? Don't you even got air-conditioning? And we did swab the envelopes the letters came in, but it's that self-stick adhesive. So he didn't have to lick nothing.”

This is evasion and Marino knows it. Sloughed-off skin cells can adhere to self-sticking adhesives. He doesn't want to answer Benton's question.

“How did Chandonne pull off sending you letters inside an envelope like this?” Benton shakes the photocopy at Marino. “And don't you find it just a little odd that
first-class mail
is x-ed out? Why might that be?”

“I guess we'll just have to get Wolfman to explain,” Marino rudely replies. “I got no fucking idea.”

“Yet you seem to know for a fact that the letters are from Jean-Baptiste.” Benton measures each word.
“Pete. You're better than this.”

Marino wipes his forehead on his sleeve. “Look, so the fact is, we don't got scientific evidence to prove nothing. But it's not because we didn't take a shot at it. We did use the Luma-Lite, and we did try for DNA, and everything's whistle-clean as of this moment.”

“Mitochondrial DNA? You trying for that?”

“Why bother? It would take months, and by then he'll be dead. And
there's no way in hell we're going to get a goddamn thing anyway. For crying out loud, don't you think the asshole gets off on somehow using a National Academy of Justice envelope? How's that for a fuck-you? Don't you think he gets off on making us do all these tests when he knows we'll come up with zip? All he had to do was cover his hands with toilet paper or whatever when he touched anything.”

“Maybe,” Benton says.

Marino is about to erupt. He is exasperated beyond his limit.

“Easy, Pete,” Benton says. “You would think less of me if I didn't ask.”

Marino stares off without blinking.

“My opinion?” Benton goes on. “He wrote the letters and was deliberate about not leaving evidence. I don't know how he managed to use a National Academy of Justice envelope, and yes, that is a huge fuck-you. Frankly, I'm surprised you haven't heard from him before now. The letters sound authentic. They do not have the off-key ring of a crank. We know Jean-Baptiste has a breast fetish.” He says this clinically. “We know it is very likely he has information that could destroy his criminal family and the cartel. It fits with his insatiable need to dominate and control that he presents the conditions he has.”

“And what about him saying the Doc wants to see him?”

“You tell me.”

“She never wrote him. I asked her point-blank. Why the hell would she write that piece of shit? I told her about the National Academy of Justice envelopes, that the letter to her and me came in one. I showed her a photocopy . . .”

“Of what?” Benton interrupts.

“A photocopy of the National Academy of Justice envelope.”
Marino is getting exasperated. “The one her and my letters from Wolfman came in. I told her if she gets one of these goddamn National Academy of Justice letters herself, not to open it, not to even touch it. Do you really believe he wants her to be his executioner?”

“If he intends to die . . .”

“Intends?” Marino interrupts him. “I don't believe ol' Wolfie Boy's got much to say about that.”

“A lot can happen between now and then, Pete. Remember who his connections are. I wouldn't be too sure of anything. And by the way, when Lucy got her letter, was it also sent in a postage-paid National Academy of Justice envelope?”

“Yup.”

“The fantasy of a woman doctor administering the lethal injection and watching him die would be erotic to him,” Benton muses.

“Not just any doctor. We're talking about Scarpetta!”

“He victimizes to the end, dominates and controls another human being to the end, forces a person to commit an act that will scar forever.” Benton pauses before he adds, “You kill someone, you never forget him, now do you? We have to take the letters seriously. I do believe they are from him—fingerprints, DNA or not.”

“Yeah, well I believe they're from him, too, and that he means what he says, and that's why I'm here, if you ain't figured it out yet. If we can get Wolfman to sing, we move in on all his daddy's lieutenants and put the Chandonne cartel out of business. And you got nothing to worry about anymore.”

“Who is
we
?”

“I wish you'd quit saying that!” Marino gets up to help himself to another beer. Anger and frustration flare again. “Don't you get it?” he calls out, rummaging inside the refrigerator. “After May seventh, after we got the goods and Wolfman's dead, there ain't no reason for you to be Tom what's-his-name anymore!”

“Who is we?”

Marino snorts like a bull as he pops open a bottle of Dos Equis this time. “
We
is me.
We
is Lucy.”

“Does Lucy know you came to see me today?”

“No. I didn't tell no one and won't.”

“Good.” Benton doesn't move in his chair.

“Wolfman gives us pawns to knock off the board,” Marino plans on without him. “Maybe he's already given us our first pawn by ratting out Rocco. I can only figure that somebody must have ratted him out if he's suddenly a fugitive.”

“I see. How honorable of Chandonne, if your son is his first pawn. Will you visit Rocco in prison, Pete?”

Marino suddenly smashes the beer bottle in the sink. Glass shatters. He strides over to Benton and gets in his face.