The Scarpetta Factor Page 5

  “What’d you say your first name is? And don’t give me your initials.”

  “L.A. Bonnell.”

  Marino wondered what she looked like and how old she was. “Nice to meet you. I’m P.R. Marino. As in Public Relations, a special talent of mine. I’m just confirming you guys didn’t take in Toni Darien’s laptop and cell phone. That they weren’t here when you showed up.”

  “They weren’t. Just the chargers.”

  “Toni had a pocketbook or billfold? Other than a couple empty purses in her closet, I’m not seeing anything that she might have routinely carried. And I doubt she would have taken a purse or billfold with her when she was out jogging.”

  A pause, then, “No. Didn’t see anything like that.”

  “Well, that’s important. It would seem if she had a pocketbook, a billfold, they’re missing. You collect anything in here for the labs?”

  “At present we’re not considering the apartment a crime scene.”

  “Curious why you would absolutely rule it out, categorically decide it’s not connected in any shape or form. How do you know the person who killed her isn’t someone she knew? Someone who’s been inside her place?”

  “She wasn’t killed inside it, and there’s no evidence it was broken into or anything’s been stolen or tampered with.” Bonnell said it like a press release.

  “Hey. You’re talking to another cop, not the fucking media,” Marino said.

  “The only thing unusual is her missing laptop and cell phone.

  And maybe her pocketbook and billfold. Okay, I agree we need to figure that out,” Bonnell said in a less wooden tone. “We should get into details later, when Jaime Berger’s back and we can sit down.”

  “Seems to me like maybe you should be more worried about Toni’s apartment, maybe worried someone might have gone into it and taken these things that are missing.” Marino wasn’t going to let it go.

  “There’s nothing to say she didn’t take these items somewhere herself.” Bonnell definitely knew something she wasn’t going to tell him over the phone. “For example, she could have had her cell phone with her when she was running in the park last night and the perpetrator took it. Maybe when she went out running, she left from some other location, a friend’s house, a boyfriend’s house. Hard to know when she was home last. Hard to know a lot of things.”

  “You’ve talked to witnesses?”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing? Hanging out at the mall?” She was getting pissed off, too.

  “Like here in the building,” Marino said, and after a pause that he interpreted as her unwillingness to answer, he added, “I’m going to be passing all this to Berger the minute I get off the phone from talking to you. I suggest you give me the details so I don’t have to tell her I had a problem with cooperation.”

  “She and I don’t have a problem with cooperation.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way. I asked you a question. Who have you talked to?”

  “A couple of witnesses,” Bonnell said. “A man who lives on her floor says he saw her come in late yesterday afternoon. Said he’d just gotten home from work and was on his way out to the gym and saw Toni come up the stairs. She unlocked her apartment door while he was walking in the hallway.”

  “Walking in her direction?”

  “There are stairs at either end of her hallway. He was taking the stairs near his apartment, not the stairs near hers.”

  “So he didn’t get close, didn’t get a good look, is what you’re saying.”

  “We should get into the details later. Maybe when you talk to Jaime again you can tell her all of us should sit down,” Bonnell answered.

  “You need to be telling me the details now, and that’s indirectly a directive from her,” Marino said. “I’m trying to picture what you just described. The guy saw Toni from his end of the hallway, from about a hundred feet away. You talked to this witness yourself?”

  “An indirect directive. That’s a new one. Yes, I talked to him myself.”

  “His apartment number?”

  “Two ten, three doors down from the victim’s, on the left. The other end of the hall.”

  “So I’ll stop by on my way out,” Marino said, pulling out his folded report from RTCC, looking to see who lived in apartment 210.

  “Don’t think he’s going to be there. Told me he was on his way out of town for a long weekend. He had a couple of overnight bags and a plane ticket. I’m a little concerned you’re off track.”

  “What do you mean ‘off track’?” Goddamn it. What hadn’t he been told?

  “I mean your info and mine might be different,” Bonnell replied. “I’m trying to tell you something, one of your indirect directives, and you’re not paying attention.”

  “Let me share. I’ll tell you my info and maybe you’ll tell me yours. Graham Tourette,” Marino read from the RTCC data report. “Forty-one years old, an architect. My info is what I find out by taking the time to look. I got no idea where you’re getting your info, but it doesn’t appear to me you’re bothering to look.”

  “Graham Tourette is who I talked to.” Bonnell wasn’t as prickly now. What she sounded was cautious.

  “This Graham Tourette guy friendly with Toni?” Marino asked.

  “Said he wasn’t. Said he didn’t even know her name, but he’s sure he saw her go into her apartment yesterday around six o’clock. He said she was carrying her mail. What looked like letters, magazines, and a flyer. I don’t like getting into all this over the phone, and my call waiting’s going crazy. I should go. When Jaime gets back, we’ll sit down.”

  Marino hadn’t said anything about Berger being out of town. It was occurring to him that Bonnell had talked to her and wasn’t going to tell him what had been said. Berger and Bonnell knew something that Marino didn’t.

  “What flyer?” he then asked.

  “A flyer on bright pink paper. He said he recognized it from a distance because everyone got one that day—yesterday.”

  “You check Toni’s mailbox when you were here?” Marino asked.

  “The super opened it for me,” Bonnell said. “You’ve got to have a key. Her keys were in her pocket when she was found in the park. I’ll put it to you this way. We’ve got a sensitive situation on our hands.”

  “Yeah, I know. Sexual homicides in Central Park tend to be sensitive situations. I saw the scene photographs, no thanks to you. Had to get them from the OCME, their death investigators. Three keys on a lucky-dice keychain that turned out not to be so lucky.”

  “The mailbox was empty when I checked it this morning, when I was there with CSU,” Bonnell said.

  “I got a home phone for this Tourette guy but no cell. Maybe e-mail me what you got on him in case I want to talk to him.” Marino gave her his e-mail address. “We need to take a look at what the security camera recorded. I’m assuming the building’s got one in front, or maybe there’s one nearby and we can take a look at who was coming and going. I think it would be a good idea for me to talk to some of my contacts at RTCC, ask them to link to that camera live.”

  “What for?” Bonnell was sounding frustrated now. “We got a cop sitting in there twenty-four-seven. You think someone’s going to come back for more, saying where she lived is somehow connected to her murder?”

  “Never know who decides to walk past,” Marino said. “Killers are curious, paranoid people. Sometimes they live across the friggin’ street or are the boy next door. Who the hell knows? Point being, if RTCC can link up live with whatever security camera network is involved, we can make sure we capture the video ourselves, make sure it doesn’t get accidentally recorded over. Berger will want the video, which is the bigger point. She’ll want the WAV file of the nine-one-one call made by whoever discovered the body this morning.”

  “It wasn’t just one,” Bonnell replied. “Several people called as they drove past, thought they saw something. Since this has hit the news, the phones are ringing off the hook. We should talk. Let’s you a
nd me talk. You’re not going to shut up, so we may as well have a face-to-face.”

  “We’ll also be getting Toni’s phone records, getting into her e-mail,” Marino went on. “Hopefully there’ll be some logical explanation about the cell phone, the laptop, like maybe she left them at a friend’s house. Same thing with her pocketbook and billfold.”

  “Like I said, let’s talk.”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing.” Marino wasn’t going to let Bonnell call the shots. “Maybe someone will come forward, say Toni was visiting and went out for a run and never came back. We find her laptop and phone, we find her pocketbook and billfold, maybe I’ll feel a little better. Because I’m not feeling so good right this minute. You happen to notice the framed picture of her on the little table when you first come through her door?” Marino stepped into the entranceway, picked up the photograph again. “She’s running in a race, wearing bib number three forty-three. There are a couple others in the bathroom.”

  “What about them?” Bonnell said.

  “She’s not wearing headphones or an iPod in any of the pictures. And I’m not seeing anything like an iPod or Walkman in her apartment, either.”

  “And?”

  “And this is what I’m talking about. The danger of having your friggin’ mind made up,” Marino said. “Marathon runners, people into running races, aren’t allowed to listen to music. It’s prohibited. When I was living in Charleston, it was front-page news when they had the Marine Corps Marathon. They threatened to disqualify the runners if they showed up with headphones.”

  “And this is leading to what point you’re trying to make?”

  “If someone came up behind you and hit you in the back of the head, maybe you’d have a better chance of hearing it coming if you weren’t listening to music full blast. And it would appear that Toni Darien didn’t listen to music when she ran. Yet someone managed to come up behind her and whack her in the back of the head without her even turning around. That bother you at all?”

  “You don’t know that the killer didn’t confront her and she turned away, ducked, or whatever to protect her face,” Bonnell said. “And she wasn’t hit exactly in the back of the head, sort of on the left side, behind her left ear. So maybe she’d started turning around, was reacting, but it was too late. Maybe you’re making some assumptions because you’re missing information.”

  “Usually when people react and try to protect themselves, their reflex is to raise their arms, their hands, and then they get defense injuries,” Marino said. “She doesn’t have any in the scene photos I’ve looked at, but I’ve not talked to Scarpetta yet, and when I do I’ll confirm. It’s like Toni Darien had no idea and suddenly was on the ground. That seems a little unusual for someone running after dark, someone who maybe is used to being aware of her surroundings because she runs a lot and doesn’t wear headphones.”

  “She was running in a race last night? What makes you think she never wore headphones? Maybe she had them on last night and the killer took her iPod, her Walkman.”

  “Everything I know about serious runners is they don’t wear headphones whether they’re in a race or not, especially in the city. Just look around. Tell me any serious runners you see in New York who are wearing headphones so they can drift in the bike lane or get run over by drivers not paying attention or get mugged from behind.”

  “You a runner?”

  “Look. I don’t know what information you have that you’re obviously not sharing, but my information from eyeballing what’s under my nose is we should be careful about jumping to conclusions when we don’t know jack shit,” Marino said.

  “I agree. The same thing I’m trying to convey to you, P.R. Marino.”

  “What’s L.A. stand for?”

  “Other than a city in California, nothing. You want to call me by something other than Bonnell or asshole, you can call me L.A.”

  Marino smiled. Maybe she wasn’t hopeless. “Tell you what, L.A.,” he said. “I was going to head to High Roller Lanes in a few minutes. Why don’t you meet me there. You bowl?”

  “I think you have to have an IQ less than sixty or they won’t rent you shoes.”

  “More like seventy. I’m pretty good,” Marino said. “And I got my own shoes.”

  Scarpetta wasn’t surprised that Marino had been trying to get hold of her today. She had two voicemails from him, and a few minutes ago he’d sent an instant message riddled with its typical typos and almost indecipherable abbreviations and complete lack of punctuation or capitalization unless it was done automatically by his BlackBerry. He’d yet to figure out how to insert symbols or spaces or more likely couldn’t be bothered:

  Berger OOT as you no but bak this pm will want dets re Darien and I have some to ad and a lot of quests so dall

  Marino was reminding Scarpetta that Jaime Berger was out of town. Yes, Scarpetta was well aware. When Berger was back in New York tonight, Marino’s hieroglyphics went on, she would expect to know autopsy results and any details about evidence Scarpetta might be aware of, since it would be Berger’s Sex Crimes Unit that was in charge of the case. Fine. Scarpetta certainly didn’t need to be told that, either. Marino was also indicating he had information and questions, and when she got a chance to call him. Also fine, because she had a lot to tell him, too.

  She attempted to message him back as she walked into her office, annoyed all over again with the BlackBerry Lucy had bought for her two weeks ago. It was a thoughtful and generous surprise that Scarpetta considered a Trojan horse, something wheeled into the backyard that held nothing but trouble. Her niece had decided that Berger, Marino, Benton, and Scarpetta should have the same latest, greatest personal digital assistant that Lucy did and had taken it upon herself to set up an enterprise server, or what she described as a two-way authenticated environment with triple data encryption and firewall protection.

  The new handheld device had a touch screen, a camera, a video recorder, a GPS, a media player, wireless e-mail, instant messaging—in other words, more multimedia capabilities than Scarpetta had time or interest to figure out. She wasn’t on good diplomatic relations with her smartphone so far and was quite certain it was smarter than she was. She paused to type on the LCD display with her thumbs, every other keystroke needing to be deleted and retyped because, unlike Marino, she didn’t send messages replete with errors:

  Will call later. Have to meet with the chief. We have problems—have things on hold.

  That was as specific as she intended to get, having a huge distrust of instant messaging but increasingly unable to avoid doing it because everybody else did these days.

  Inside her office, the stale aroma of her cheeseburger and fries was revolting, her lunch well on its way to being of archaeological interest. Tossing the box, she set the trash can outside the door and began to close the blinds in the windows overlooking the OCME’s granite front steps, where family and friends of the patients who ended up here often sat when they couldn’t bear to wait in the lobby. She paused, watching Grace Darien get into the back of a dirty white Dodge Charger, a little less shaky but still disoriented and shocked.

  At the viewing, she had almost passed out, and Scarpetta had returned her to the family room, where she’d sat with her for quite a while, making her a cup of hot tea, taking care of her as best she could until she felt it was safe for the distraught woman to leave. Scarpetta wondered what Mrs. Darien would do. She hoped the friend who had driven her would stay close, that Mrs. Darien wouldn’t be left alone. Perhaps colleagues at her hospital would take care of her and her sons would get to Islip quickly. Maybe she and her ex-husband would put an end to their battle over the disposition of their murdered daughter’s remains and belongings, decide life was too short for bitterness and strife.

  Scarpetta sat at her desk, really an improvised work station surrounding her on three sides, and nearby were two metal file cabinets that served as a stand for her printer and a fax machine. Behind her was a table for her Olympus BX41 microsc
ope, attached to a fiber-optic illuminator and a video camera so she could view slides and evidence on a monitor while capturing the images electronically or printing them on photographic paper. Within easy reach was an assortment of old friends: Cecil Textbook of Medicine, Robbins Pathology, The Merck Manual, Saferstein, Schlesinger, Petraco, and a few other things she’d carried in from home to keep her company. A dissecting kit from her medical-school days at Johns Hopkins and other collectibles reminded her of the long tradition in forensic medicine that preceded her. Brass scales and a mortar and pestle. Apothecary bottles and jars. A Civil War field surgical kit. A compound microscope from the late eighteen-hundreds. An assortment of police caps and pins.

  She tried Benton’s cell phone. It went straight to voicemail, which usually meant he had it turned off, was someplace he couldn’t use it, in this instance, the men’s prison ward at Bellevue, where he was a consulting forensic psychologist. She tried his office, and her heart felt lighter when he answered.

  “You’re still there,” she said. “Want to share a cab?”

  “You trying to pick me up?”

  “Rumor has it you’re pretty easy. I need about an hour, need to talk to Dr. Edison first. What’s it look like for you?”

  “An hour should work.” He sounded subdued. “I need to have a conference with my chief, too.”

  “You okay?” She wedged the phone between her shoulder and chin, and logged in to her e-mail.

  “There may be a dragon I need to slay.” His familiar voice, baritone and soothing, but she detected the flinty edge of anxiety and anger. She’d detected it a lot of late.

  “I thought you were supposed to be helping dragons, not slaying them,” she said. “You probably won’t tell me about it.”

  “You’re right. I won’t,” he replied.

  He was saying he couldn’t. Benton must be having problems with a patient, and it seemed to be a trend. For the past month, Scarpetta had gotten the impression he was avoiding McLean, the Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he was on staff and where they had their home. He’d been acting more stressed and distracted than usual, as if something was really eating at him, something he didn’t want to say, suggesting that legally he couldn’t. Scarpetta knew when to inquire and when to leave it alone, having grown accustomed long ago to how little Benton could share.