The Scarpetta Factor Page 2

  “Tell Mrs. Darien I’m on my way,” Scarpetta said. “I need about fifteen minutes to check a few things and look at the paperwork. Let’s hold the tunes until she’s gone, okay?”

  Off the lobby to the left was the administrative wing she shared with Dr. Edison, two executive assistants, and the chief of staff, who was on her honeymoon until after the New Year. In a building half a century old with no space to spare, there was no place to put Scarpetta on the third floor, where the full-time forensic pathologists had their offices. When she was in the city, she parked herself in what was formerly the chief’s conference room on the ground level, with a view of the OCME’s turquoise-blue brick entrance on First Avenue. She unlocked her door and stepped inside. She hung her coat, set her boxed lunch on her desk, and sat in front of her computer.

  Opening a Web browser, she typed BioGraph into a search field. At the top of the screen was the query Did you mean: BioGraphy. No, she didn’t. Biograph Records. Not what she was looking for. American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, the oldest movie company in America, founded in 1895 by an inventor who worked for Thomas Edison, a distant ancestor of the chief medical examiner, not sure how many times removed. An interesting coincidence. Nothing for BioGraph with a capital B and a capital G, the way it was stamped on the back of the unusual watch Toni Darien was wearing on her left wrist when her body arrived at the morgue this morning.

  It was snowing hard in Stowe, Vermont, big flakes falling heavy and wet, piled in the branches of balsam firs and Scotch pines. The ski lifts traversing the Green Mountains were faint spidery lines, almost invisible in the storm and at a standstill. Nobody skiing in this stuff, nobody doing anything except staying inside.

  Lucy Farinelli’s helicopter was stuck in nearby Burlington. At least it was safely in a hangar, but she and New York County Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger weren’t going anywhere for five hours, maybe longer, not before nine p.m., when the storm was supposed to have cleared to the south. At that point, conditions should be VFR again, a ceiling greater than three thousand feet, visibility five miles or more, winds gusting up to thirty knots out of the northeast. They’d have a hell of a tailwind heading home to New York, should get there in time for what they needed to do, but Berger was in a mood, had been in the other room on the phone all day, not even trying to be nice. The way she looked at it, the weather had trapped them here longer than planned, and since Lucy was a pilot, it was her fault. Didn’t matter the forecasters had been wrong, that what began as two distinct small storms combined into one over Saskatchewan, Canada, and merged with an arctic air mass to create a bit of a monster.

  Lucy turned down the volume of the YouTube video, Mick Fleetwood’s drum solo for “World Turning,” live in concert in 1987.

  “Can you hear me now?” she said over the phone to her Aunt Kay. “The signal’s pretty bad here, and the weather isn’t helping.”

  “Much better. How are we doing?” Scarpetta’s voice in Lucy’s jawbone.

  “I’ve found nothing so far. Which is weird.”

  Lucy had three MacBooks going, each screen split into quadrants, displaying Aviation Weather Center updates, data streams from neural network searches, links prompting her that they might lead to websites of interest, Hannah Starr’s e-mail, Lucy’s e-mail, and security camera footage of the actor Hap Judd wearing scrubs in the Park General Hospital morgue before he was famous.

  “You sure of the name?” she asked as she scanned the screens, her mind jumping from one preoccupation to the next.

  “All I know is what’s stamped on the steel back of it.” Scarpetta’s voice, serious and in a hurry. “BioGraph.” She spelled it again. “And a serial number. Maybe it’s not going to be picked up by the usual software that searches the Internet. Like viruses. If you don’t already know what you’re looking for, you won’t find it.”

  “It’s not like antivirus software. The search engines I use aren’t software-driven. I do open-source searches. I’m not finding BioGraph because it’s not on the Net. Nothing published about it. Not on message boards or in blogs or in databases, not in anything.”

  “Please don’t hack,” Scarpetta said.

  “I simply exploit weaknesses in operating systems.”

  “Yes, and if a back door is unlocked and you walk into somebody’s house, it’s not trespassing.”

  “No mention of BioGraph or I’d find it.” Lucy wasn’t going to get into their usual debate about the end justifying the means.

  “I don’t see how that’s possible. This is a very sophisticated-looking watch with a USB port. You have to charge it, likely on a docking station. I suspect it was rather expensive.”

  “Not finding it if I search it as a watch or a device or anything.” Lucy watched results rolling by, her neural net search engines sorting through an infinity of keywords, anchor text, file types, URLs, title tags, e-mail and IP addresses. “I’m looking and not seeing anything even close to what you’ve described.”

  “Got to be some way to know what it is.”

  “It isn’t. That’s my point,” Lucy said. “There’s no such thing as a BioGraph watch or device, or anything that might remotely fit what Toni Darien was wearing. Her BioGraph watch doesn’t exist.”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t?”

  “I mean it doesn’t exist on the Internet, within the communication network, or metaphorically in cyberspace. In other words, a BioGraph watch doesn’t exist virtually,” Lucy said. “If I physically look at whatever this thing is, I’ll probably figure it out. Especially if you’re right and it’s some sort of data-collecting device.”

  “Can’t do that until the labs are done with it.”

  “Shit, don’t let them get out their screwdrivers and hammers,” Lucy said.

  “Being swabbed for DNA, that’s all. The police already checked for prints. Nothing. Please tell Jaime she can call me when it’s convenient. I hope you’re having some fun. Sorry I don’t have time to chat right now.”

  “If I see her, I’ll tell her.”

  “She’s not with you?” Scarpetta probed.

  “The Hannah Starr case and now this. Jaime’s a little tied up, has a lot on her mind. You of all people know how it is.” Lucy wasn’t interested in discussing her personal life.

  “I hope she’s had a happy birthday.”

  Lucy didn’t want to talk about it. “What’s the weather like there?”

  “Windy and cold. Overcast.”

  “You’re going to get more rain, possibly snow north of the city,” Lucy said. “It will be cleared out by midnight, because the system is weakening as it heads your way.”

  “The two of you are staying put, I hope.”

  “If I don’t get the chopper out, she’ll be looking for a dog-sled.”

  “Call me before you leave, and please be careful,” Scarpetta said. “I’ve got to go, got to talk to Toni Darien’s mother. I miss you. We’ll have dinner, do something soon?”

  “Sure,” Lucy said.

  She got off the phone and turned the sound up again on YouTube, Mick Fleetwood still going at it on the drums. Both hands on MacBooks as if she was in her own rock concert playing a solo on keyboards, she clicked on another weather update, clicked on an e-mail that had just landed in Hannah Starr’s inbox. People were bizarre. If you know someone has disappeared and might even be dead, why do you continue to send e-mail? Lucy wondered if Hannah Starr’s husband, Bobby Fuller, was so stupid it didn’t occur to him that the NYPD and the district attorney’s office might be monitoring Hannah’s e-mail or getting a forensic computer expert like Lucy to do it. For the past three weeks Bobby had been sending daily messages to his missing wife. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing, wanted law enforcement to see what he was writing to his bien-aimée, his chouchou, his amore mio, the love of his life. If he’d murdered her, he wouldn’t be writing her love notes, right?

  From: Bobby Fuller

  Sent: Thursday, December 18, 3:24 P.M.

  To
: Hannah

  Subject: Non posso vivere senza di te

  My Little One,

  I hope you are someplace safe and reading this. My heart is carried by the wings of my soul and finds you wherever you are. Don’t forget. I can’t eat or sleep. B.

  Lucy checked his IP address, recognized it at a glance by now. Bobby and Hannah’s apartment in North Miami Beach, where he was pining away while hiding from the media in palatial surroundings that Lucy knew all too well—had been in that same apartment with his lovely thief of a wife not that long ago, as a matter of fact. Every time Lucy saw an e-mail from Bobby and tried to get into his head, she wondered how he would really feel if he believed Hannah was dead.

  Or maybe he knew she was dead or knew she wasn’t. Maybe he knew exactly what had happened to her because he really did have something to do with it. Lucy had no idea, but when she tried to put herself in Bobby’s place and care, she couldn’t. All that mattered to her was that Hannah reaped what she sowed or eventually did, sooner rather than later. She deserved any bad fate she might get, had wasted Lucy’s time and money and now was stealing something far more precious. Three weeks of Hannah. Nothing with Berger. Even when she and Lucy were together, they were apart. Lucy was scared. She was seething. At times she felt she could do something terrible.

  She forwarded Bobby’s latest e-mail to Berger, who was in the other room, walking around. The sound of her feet on hardwood. Lucy got interested in a website address that had begun to flash in a quadrant of one of the MacBooks.

  “Now what are we up to?” she said to the empty living room of the town house she’d rented for Berger’s surprise birthday getaway, a five-star resort with high-speed wireless, fireplaces, feather beds, and linens with an eight-hundred thread count. The retreat had everything except what it was intended for—intimacy, romance, fun—and Lucy blamed Hannah, she blamed Hap Judd, she blamed Bobby, blamed everyone. Lucy felt haunted by them and unwanted by Berger.

  “This is ridiculous,” Berger said as she walked in, referring to the world beyond their windows, everything white, just the shapes of trees and rooflines through snow coming down in veils. “Are we ever going to get out of here?”

  “Now, what is this?” Lucy muttered, clicking on a link.

  A search by IP address had gotten a hit on a website hosted by the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center.

  “Who were you just talking to?” Berger asked.

  “My aunt. Now I’m talking to myself. Got to talk to somebody.”

  Berger ignored the dig, wasn’t about to apologize for what she’d say she couldn’t help. It wasn’t her fault Hannah Starr had disappeared and Hap Judd was a pervert who might have information, and if that hadn’t been enough of a distraction, now a jogger had been raped and murdered in Central Park last night. Berger would tell Lucy she needed to be more understanding. She shouldn’t be so selfish. She needed to grow up and stop being insecure and demanding.

  “Can we do without the drums?” Berger’s migraines were back. She was getting them often.

  Lucy exited YouTube and the living room was silent, no sound but the gas fire on the hearth, and she said, “More of the same sicko stuff.”

  Berger put her glasses on and leaned close to look, and she smelled like Amorvero bath oil, and had no makeup on and she didn’t need it. Her short, dark hair was messy and she was sexy as hell in a black warm-up suit, nothing under it, the jacket unzipped, exposing plenty of cleavage, not that she meant anything by it. Lucy wasn’t sure what Berger meant or where she was much of the time these days, but she wasn’t present—not emotionally. Lucy wanted to put her arms around her, to show her what they used to have, what it used to be like.

  “He’s looking at the Body Farm’s website, and I doubt it’s because he’s thinking of killing himself and donating his body to science,” Lucy said.

  “Who are you talking about?” Berger was reading what was on a MacBook screen, a form with the heading:

  Forensic Anthropology Center

  University of Tennessee, Knoxville

  Body Donation Questionnaire

  “Hap Judd,” Lucy said. “He’s gotten linked by his IP address to this website because he just used a fake name to order . . . Hold on, let’s see what the sleaze is up to. Let’s follow the trail.” Opening Web pages. “To this screen here. FORDISC Software Sales. An interactive computer program that runs under Windows. Classifying and identifying skeletal remains. The guy’s really morbid. It’s not normal. I’m telling you, we’re onto something with him.”

  “Let’s be honest. You’re onto something because you’re looking for something,” Berger said, as if to imply that Lucy wasn’t honest. “You’re trying to find evidence of what you perceive is the crime.”

  “I’m finding evidence because he’s leaving it,” Lucy said. They had been arguing about Hap Judd for weeks. “I don’t know why you’re so reticent. Do you think I’m making this stuff up?”

  “I want to talk to him about Hannah Starr, and you want to crucify him.”

  “You need to scare the hell out of him if you want him to talk. Especially without a damn lawyer present. And I’ve managed to make that happen, to get you what you want.”

  “If we ever get out of here and he shows up.” Berger moved away from the computer screen and decided, “Maybe he’s playing an anthropologist, an archaeologist, an explorer in his next film. Some Raiders of the Lost Ark or another one of those mummy movies with tombs and ancient curses.”

  “Right,” Lucy said. “Method acting, total immersion in his next twisted character, writing another one of his piss-poor screenplays. That will be his alibi when we go after him about Park General and his unusual interests.”

  “We won’t be going after him. I will. You’re not going to do anything but show him what you’ve found in your computer searches. Marino and I will do the talking.”

  Lucy would check with Pete Marino later, when there was no threat that Berger could overhear their conversation. He didn’t have any respect for Hap Judd and sure as hell wasn’t afraid of him. Marino had no qualms about investigating someone famous or locking him up. Berger seemed intimidated by Judd, and Lucy didn’t understand it. She had never known Berger to be intimidated by anyone.

  “Come here.” Lucy pulled her close, sat her on her lap. “What’s going on with you?” Nuzzling her back, sliding her hands inside the jacket of the warm-up suit. “What’s got you so spooked? It’s going to be a late night. We should take a nap.”

  Grace Darien had long, dark hair and the same turned-up nose and full lips as her murdered daughter. Wearing a red wool coat buttoned up to her chin, she looked small and pitiful as she stood before a window overlooking the black iron fence and dead vine-covered brick of Bellevue. The sky was the color of lead.

  “Mrs. Darien? I’m Dr. Scarpetta.” She walked into the family room and closed the door.

  “It’s possible this is a mistake.” Mrs. Darien moved away from the window, her hands shaking badly. “I keep thinking this can’t be right. It can’t be. It’s somebody else. How do you know for sure?” She sat down at the small wooden table near the watercooler, her face stunned and expressionless, a gleam of terror in her eyes.

  “We’ve made a preliminary identification of your daughter based on personal effects recovered by the police.” Scarpetta pulled out a chair and sat across from her. “Your former husband also looked at a photograph.”

  “The one taken here.”

  “Yes. Please let me tell you how sorry I am.”

  “Did he get around to mentioning he only sees her once or twice a year?”

  “We will compare dental records and will do DNA if need be,” Scarpetta said.

  “I can write down her dentist’s information. She still uses my dentist.” Grace Darien dug into her handbag, and a lipstick and a compact clattered to the table. “The detective I talked to finally when I got home and got the message. I can’t remember the name, a woman. Then another
detective called. A man. Mario, Marinaro.” Her voice trembled and she blinked back tears, pulling out a small notepad, a pen.

  “Pete Marino?”

  She scribbled something and tore out the page, her hands fumbling, almost palsied. “I don’t know our dentist’s number off the top of my head. Here’s his name and address.” Sliding the piece of paper to Scarpetta. “Marino. I believe so.”

  “He’s a detective with NYPD and assigned to Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger’s office. Her office will be in charge of the criminal investigation.” Scarpetta tucked the note into the file folder Rene had left for her.

  “He said they were going into Toni’s apartment to get her hair-brush, her toothbrush. They probably already have, I don’t know, I haven’t heard anything else,” Mrs. Darien continued, her voice quavering and catching. “The police talked to Larry first because I wasn’t home. I was taking the cat to the vet. I had to put my cat to sleep, can you imagine the timing. That’s what I was doing when they were trying to find me. The detective from the DA’s office said you could get her DNA from things in her apartment. I don’t understand how you can be sure it’s her when you haven’t done those tests yet.”

  Scarpetta had no doubt about Toni Darien’s identity. Her driver’s license and apartment keys were in a pocket of the fleece that came in with the body. Postmortem x-rays showed healed fractures of the collarbone and right arm, and the old injuries were consistent with ones sustained five years ago when Toni was riding her bicycle and was struck by a car, according to information from NYPD.

  “I told her about jogging in the city,” Mrs. Darien was saying. “I can’t tell you how many times, but she never did it after dark. I don’t know why she would in the rain. She hates running in the rain, especially when it’s cold. I think there’s been a mistake.”