Blow Fly

66

BERGER PULLS UP A CHAIR and sirs 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 computers done here-is find Chandonnes 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."

"Iwas 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 watched 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-Baptistes 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."

"Most important, I want to know for a fact that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is still on death row in Texas and is scheduled to get the needle on May seventh," Lucy says.

"No kidding," Manham mutters, repeatedly clicking a pen, a nervous habit that annoys all who know him.

"Zach?" Berger cocks an eyebrow, staring at the pen.

"Sorry." He slides it into the breast pocket of his starched white shirt. "Unless you two need me, I've got some calls to make." He looks at both of them.

"We're fine. Will fill you in later," Lucy says. "And if anybody calls looking for me, the word is that nobody knows where I am."

"Not ready to come up for air?" Manham smiles.

"No."

He leaves, the muffled sound of the heavily padded door barely audible.

"And Rudy?" Berger asks. "Hopefully in his apartment, taking a shower or a nap? Looks like you should be doing the same."

"Nope. We're both working. He's in his office down the hall, lost in cyberspace. Rudy the Internet junkie, which is a good thing. He has more search engines running all over the universe than England has tubes."

"For me to get a search warrant to have Chandonne swabbed for DNA," Berger says, "I have to show probable cause, Lucy. And a taped phone call not only isn't going to do it, but I'm not sure how much you want leaked outside this office. Especially since we really don't know what the phone call means…"

"Nothing," Lucy interrupts. "You know that's all I ever want leaking outside this office. Absolutely nothing."

"The unforgivable sin." Berger smiles, her eyes touched by a gentle sadness as she looks at Lucy's stern, determined face, a face still smooth and bright with youth, a face with sensuously full lips the hue of dark red earth.

If it is true that people begin to die the day they are born, then Lucy seems an exception. She is an exception to all things human, it often seems to Berger, and for this reason alone, she fears that Lucy will not live long. She envisions her compelling young face and strong body on top of a stainless-steel autopsy table, a bullet through her brain, and no matter how she struggles to strike that image from her imagination, she can't.

"Disloyalty, even born of weakness, is the unforgivable sin," Lucy agrees, puzzled and unsettled by the way Berger is looking at her. "What's the matter, Jaime? You think we've got a leak? Jesus, it's what I have nightmares about. The nightmare I live with. I fear it more than death." She is getting riled up. "I catch anybody betraying… well, one Judas in this organization, and we're all cooked. And so I have to be hard."

"Yes, you're hard, Lucy." Berger gets up, barely glancing at Chandonne's captured voice patterns on the monitor. "We have an active unsolved case here in New York: Susan Pless."

Lucy gets up, too, her eyes intense on Berger s, anticipating what she's about to say next.

"Chandonne is charged with her murder, and you know all the reasons why I gave in, folded up my tent, decided not to prosecute and let Texas have him instead."

"Because of the death penalty," Lucy says.