From Potter's Field Read online

  'I'm sure he is.'

  'Did he ever take Italian in high school or college?'

  'I don't know,' I said. 'But he didn't finish college.'

  'Where did he go?'

  'A private college in North Carolina called Davidson.'

  'It's very expensive and difficult to get into,' she said.

  'Yes. His family has money and Gault is extremely intelligent. From what I understand, he lasted about a year.'

  'Kicked out?' I could tell she was fascinated by him.

  'As I understand it.'

  'Why?'

  'I believe he violated the honor code.'

  'I know it's hard to believe,' Marino said sarcastically.

  'And then what? Another college?' Commander Penn inquired.

  'I don't think so,' I said.

  'Has anyone gone down to Davidson to ask about him?' She looked skeptical, as if those who had been working this case had not done enough.

  'I don't know if anyone has, but I doubt it, to be frank.'

  'He's only in his early thirties. We're not talking that long ago. People there should remember him.'

  Marino had begun picking apart his Styrofoam coffee cup. He looked up at the commander. 'You checked out this Benelli guy to see if he really exists?'

  'We're in the process. So far we have no confirmation,' she replied. 'These things can be slow, especially this time of year.'

  'The Bureau has a legal attache at the American Embassy in Rome,' I said. 'That might expedite the matter.'

  We talked a while longer, and then Commander Penn walked us to the door.

  'Dr. Scarpetta,' she said, 'I wonder if I could have a quick word with you before you go.'

  Marino glanced at both of us and said, as if the question had been posed to him, 'Sure. Go ahead, I'll be out here.'

  Commander Penn shut her door.

  'I'm wondering if we could get together later,' she said to me.

  I hesitated. 'I suppose that would be possible. What did you have in mind?'

  'Might you be free for dinner tonight, say around seven? I thought we could talk some more and relax.' She smiled.

  I had hoped Wesley and I could have dinner together. I told her, 'That is very gracious of you. Of course I will come.'

  She slipped a card from a pocket and handed it to me. 'My address,' she said. 'I'll see you then.'

  Marino did not ask what Commander Penn had said to me, but it was clear he wondered and was bothered that he had been excluded from the communication.

  'Everything all right?' he asked as we were shown to the elevator.

  'No,' I said. 'Everything is not all right. If it were, we would not be in New York right now.'

  'Hell,' he said sourly, 'I quit having holidays when I became a cop. Holidays aren't for people like us.'

  'Well, they should be,' I said, waving at a cab that was already engaged.

  'That's bullshit. How many times have you been called out on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Thanksgiving, Labor Day weekend?'

  Another cab flew by.

  'Holidays is when squirrels like Gault got no place to go and no one to see, so they entertain themselves the way he did the other night. And half the rest of the world gets depressed and leaves their husband, wife, blows their brains out or gets drunk and dies in a car wreck.'

  'Darn,' I muttered, searching up and down the busy street. 'If you'd like to assist in this endeavor, it would be appreciated. Unless you'd like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.'

  He stepped out into the street and waved his arms. Instantly, a cab veered toward us and halted. We got in. The driver was Iranian and Marino was not nice to him. When I returned to my room, I took a long hot bath and tried to call Lucy again. Dorothy, unfortunately, answered the phone.

  'How is Mother?' I said right off.

  'Lucy and I spent the morning with her at the hospital. She's very depressed and looks horrible. I think of all those years I told her not to smoke, and look at her. A machine breathes for her. She has a hole cut in her neck. And yesterday I caught Lucy smoking a cigarette in the backyard.'

  'When did she start smoking?' I said, dismayed.

  'I have no idea. You see her more than I do.'

  'Is she there?'

  'Hold on.'

  The receiver bumped loudly against whatever Dorothy set it on.

  'Merry Christmas, Aunt Kay,' Lucy's voice came over the line, and she did not sound merry.

  'It hasn't been a very merry one for me, either,' I said. 'How was your visit with Grans?'

  'She started crying and we couldn't understand what she was trying to tell us. Then Mother was in a hurry to leave because she had a tennis match.'

  'Tennis?' I said. 'Since when?'

  'She's on another one of her fitness kicks.'

  'She says you're smoking.'

  'I don't do it much.' Lucy dismissed my remark as if it were nothing.

  'Lucy, we need to talk about this. You don't need another addiction.'

  'I'm not going to get addicted.'

  'That's what I thought when I started at your age. Quitting was the hardest thing I've ever done. It was absolute hell.'

  'I know all about how hard it is to quit things. I have no intention of putting myself in a situation that I can't control.'

  'Good.'

  She added, 'I'm flying back to Washington tomorrow.'

  'I thought you were going to stay in Miami at least a week.'

  'I've got to get back to Quantico. Something's going on with CAIN. ERF paged me early this afternoon.'

  The Engineering Research Facility was where the FBI worked on researching and designing highly classified technology ranging from surveillance devices to robots. It was here that Lucy had been developing the Crime Artificial Intelligence Network.

  CAIN was a centralized computer system linking police departments and other investigative agencies to one massive database maintained by the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or VICAP. The point was to alert police that they might be dealing with a violent offender who has raped or murdered elsewhere before. Then, if requested, Wesley's unit could be called in, as we had been by New York City.

  'Is there a problem?' I asked uneasily, for there had been a serious problem in the recent past.

  'Not according to the audit log. There's no record of anyone being in the system who isn't supposed to be. But CAIN seems to be sending messages that he hasn't been instructed to send. Something strange has been going on for a while, but so far I've been unable to track it. It's as if he's thinking for himself.'

  'I thought that was the point of artificial intelligence,' I said.

  'Not quite,' said my niece, who had a genius IQ. 'These are not normal messages.'

  'Can you give me an example?'

  'Okay. Yesterday, the British Transport Police entered a case in their VICAP terminal. It was a rape that occurred in Central London in one of the subways. CAIN processed the information, ran details against its database and called back the terminal where the case had been entered. The investigating officer in London got the message that further information was requested on the description of the assailant. Specifically, CAIN wanted to know the color of the assailant's pubic hair and if the victim had had an orgasm.'

  'You aren't serious,' I said.

  'CAIN has never been programmed to ask anything remotely similar to that. Obviously, it's not part of VICAP's protocol. The officer in London was upset and reported what had happened to an assistant chief constable, who called the director at Quantico, who then called Benton Wesley.'

  'Benton called you?' I asked.

  'Well, he actually had someone from ERF call me. He's heading back to Quantico tomorrow, too.'

  'I see.' My voice was steady and I did not show I cared that Wesley was leaving tomorrow or anytime without having told me first. 'Are we certain that the officer in London was telling the truth - that maybe he didn't make up something like this as a joke?'

  'A printout was fa
xed, and according to ERF the message looks authentic. Only a programmer intimately familiar with CAIN could have gotten in and faked a transmission like that. And again, from what I've been told, there is no evidence in the audit log that anyone has tampered with anything.'

  Lucy went on to explain again that CAIN was run on a UNIX platform with Local Area Networks connected to Greater Area Networks. She talked about gateways and ports and passwords that automatically changed every sixty days. Only the three superusers, of which she was one, could really tamper with the brains of the system. Users at remote sites, like the officer in London, could do nothing beyond entering their data on a dumb terminal or PC connected to the twenty-gigabyte server that resided at Quantico.

  'CAIN is probably the most secure system I've ever heard of,' Lucy added. 'Keeping it airtight is our top priority.' But it wasn't always airtight. Last fall ERF had been broken into, and we had reason to believe Gault was involved. I did not need to remind Lucy of this. She had been interning there at the time and now was responsible for undoing the damage.

  'Look, Aunt Kay,' she said, reading my mind. 'I have turned CAIN inside out. I've been through every program and rewritten major portions of some to ensure there's no threat.'

  'No threat from whom?' I asked. 'CAIN or Gault?' 'No one will get in,' she said flatly. 'No one will.

  No one can.' Then I told her about my American Express card, and her silence was chilling. 'Oh no,' she said. 'It never even entered my mind.' 'You remember I gave it to you last fall when you started your internship at ERF,' I reminded her. 'I said you could use it for train and plane tickets.'

  'But I never needed it because you ended up letting me use your car. Then the wreck happened and I didn't go anywhere for a while.'

  'Where did you keep the card? In your billfold?' 'No.' She confirmed my fears. 'At ERF, in my desk drawer in a letter from you. I figured that was as safe as any place.'

  'And that's where it was when the break-in occurred?' 'Yes. It's gone, Aunt Kay. The more I think about it, the more I'm sure. I would have seen it since then,' she stammered. 'I would have come across it while digging in the drawer. I'll check when I get back, but I know it's not going to be there.'

  'That's what I thought,' I said.

  'I'm really sorry. Has someone rung up a lot of charges on it?'

  'I don't think so.' I did not tell her who that someone was.

  'You've canceled it by now, right?'

  'It's being taken care of,' I said. 'Tell your mother I will be down to see Grans as soon as I can.'

  'As soon as you can is never soon,' my niece said.

  'I know. I'm a terrible daughter and a rotten aunt.'

  'You're not always a rotten aunt.'

  'Thank you very much,' I said.

  7

  Commander Frances Penn's private residence was on the west side of Manhattan where I could see the lights of New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson River. She lived fifteen floors up in a dingy building in a dirty part of the city that was instantly forgotten when she opened her white front door.

  Her apartment was filled with light and art and the fragrances of fine foods. Walls were whitewashed and arranged with pen-and-ink drawings and abstracts in watercolor and pastel. A scan of books on shelves and tables told me that she loved Ayn Rand and Annie Leibovitz and read numerous biographies and histories, including Shelby Foote's magnificent volumes on that terrible, tragic war.

  'Let me take your coat,' she said.

  I relinquished it, gloves and a black cashmere scarf I was fond of because it had been a gift from Lucy.

  'You know, I didn't think to ask if there's anything you can't eat,' she said from the hall closet near the front door. 'Can you eat shellfish? Because if you can't, I have chicken.'

  'Shellfish would be wonderful,' I said.

  'Good.' She showed me into the living room, which offered a magnificent view of the George Washington Bridge spanning the river like a necklace of bright jewels caught in space. 'I understand you drink Scotch.'

  'Something lighter would be better,' I said, sitting on a soft leather couch the color of honey.

  'Wine?'

  I said that would be fine, and she disappeared into the kitchen long enough to pour two glasses of a crisp chardonnay. Commander Penn was dressed in black jeans and a gray wool sweater with sleeves shoved up. I saw for the first time that her forearms were horribly scarred.

  'From my younger, more reckless days.' She caught me looking. 'I was on the back of a motorcycle and ended up leaving quite a lot of my hide on the road.'

  'Donorcycles, as we call them,' I said.

  'It was my boyfriend's. I was seventeen and he was twenty.'

  'What happened to him?'

  'He slid into oncoming traffic and was killed,' she said with the matter-of-factness of someone who has freely talked about a loss for a long time. 'That was when I got interested in police work.' She sipped her wine. 'Don't ask me the connection because I'm not sure I know.'

  'Sometimes when one is touched by tragedy he becomes its student.'

  'Is that your explanation?' She watched me closely with eyes that missed little and revealed less.

  'My father died when I was twelve,' I simply said.

  'Where was this?'

  'Miami. He owned a small grocery store, which my mother eventually ran because he was sick many years before he died.'

  'If your mother ran the store, so to speak, then who ran your household while your father lingered?'

  'I suppose I did.'

  'I thought as much. I probably could have told you that before you said a word. And my guess is you are the oldest child, have no brothers, and have always been an overachiever who cannot accept failure.'

  I listened.

  'Therefore, personal relationships are your nemesis because you can't have a good one by overachieving. You can't earn a happy love affair or be promoted into a happy marriage. And if someone you care about has a problem, you think you should have prevented it and most certainly should fix it.'

  'Why are you dissecting me?' I asked directly but without defensiveness. Mostly, I was fascinated.

  'Your story is my story. There are many women like us. Yet we never seem to get together, have you ever noticed that?'

  'I notice it all the time,' I said.

  'Well' - she set down her wine - 'I really didn't invite you over to interview you. But I would be less than honest if I told you that I didn't want an opportunity for us to get better acquainted.'

  'Thank you, Frances,' I said. 'I am pleased you feel that way.'

  'Excuse me a minute.'

  She got up and returned to the kitchen. I heard a refrigerator door shut, water run and pots and pans quietly bang. Momentarily, she was back with the bottle of chardonnay inside an ice bucket, which she set on the glass coffee table.

  'The bread is in the oven, asparagus is in the steamer, and all that's left is to saute the shrimp,' she announced, reseating herself.

  'Frances,' I said, 'your police department has been on-line with CAIN for how long now?'

  'Only for several months,' she replied. 'We were one of the first departments in the country to hook up with it.'

  'What about NYPD?'

  'They're getting around to it. The Transit Police have a more sophisticated computer system and a great team of programmers and analysts. So we got on-line very early.'

  'Thanks to you.'

  She smiled.

  I went on, 'I know the Richmond Police Department is on-line. So are Chicago, Dallas, Charlotte, the Virginia State Police, the British Transport Police. And quite a number of other departments both here and abroad are in the process.'

  'What's on your mind?' she asked me.

  'Tell me what happened when the body of the unidentified woman we believe Gault killed was found Christmas Eve. How was CAIN a factor?'

  'The body was found in Central Park early in the morning, and of course I heard about it immediately. As I've already menti
oned, the MO sounded familiar, so I entered details into CAIN to see what came back. This would have been by late afternoon.'

  'And what came back?'

  'Very quickly CAIN called our VICAP terminal with a request for more information.'

  'Can you recall exactly what sort of information?'