Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  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.”

  SCARPETTA 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.”

  BUYING 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 t
oo 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.”

  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 watc
hed 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. The 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.”