The Scarpetta Factor

12

Searchlights swept a crisscross of steel bracing at the top of the George Washington Bridge, where a jumper was holding on to cables. He was a big man, maybe in his sixties, the wind whipping his pants legs, his bare ankles fish-belly white in the blazing light, his face dazed. Marino couldn’t stop his attention from wandering to the live feed on the flat-screen TV across the room from him.

He wished the cameras would hold steady on the jumper’s face. He wanted to see what was there and what was missing. Didn’t matter how many times he’d witnessed situations like this. For each desperate person it was different. Marino had watched people die, watched them realize they were going to live, watched people kill and be killed, had looked them in the face and witnessed the moment of recognition that it was over or it wasn’t. The look was never exactly the same. Rage, hate, shock, grief, anguish, terror, scorn, amusement, combinations of them, and nothing. As different as people are different.

The windowless blue room where Marino went data mining fairly often these days reminded him of Times Square, of Niketown. He was surrounded by a dizzying array of images, some dynamic, others static, all bigger than life on flat screens and the two-story data wall comprised of huge Mitsubishi cubes tiled together. An hourglass spun in one of the cubes as the Real Time Crime Center’s software searched the more-than-three-terabyte data warehouse for anyone who might match the description of the man in the FedEx cap, a security camera image of him ten feet tall on the wall, and next to it a satellite picture of Scarpetta’s granite apartment building on Central Park West.

“He goes, he’ll never make it to the water,” Marino said from his ergonomic chair at a work station where he was being helped by an analyst named Petrowski. “Jesus. He’ll hit the fucking bridge. What was he thinking when he started climbing out on the cables? He was going to land on a car? Take out some poor bastard minding his own business in his MINI Cooper.”

“People in his state of mind don’t think.” Petrowski, a detective in his thirties, in a preppie suit and tie, wasn’t particularly interested in what was happening on the GW Bridge at almost two o’clock in the morning.

He was busy entering keywords on a Tattoo Report. In vino and veritas, and In vino veritas, and bones, skulls, and now coffin. The hourglass twirled like a baton in its quadrant of the data wall near the video image of the man in the FedEx cap and the satellite view of Scarpetta’s building. On the flat screen, the jumper was thinking about it, caught in cables like a deranged trapeze artist. Any second, the wind was going to rip him loose. The end.

“We’ve got nothing very helpful in terms of searching,” Petrowski said.

“Yeah, you already told me,” Marino said.

He couldn’t get a good look at the jumper’s face, but maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe he knew the feeling. The guy had finally said Fuck it. The question was what he’d meant by it. This early morning he either died or stayed in his living hell, so what did he mean when he climbed up on top of the bridge’s north tower and ventured out on the cables? Was his intention to exterminate himself or to make a point because he was pissed? Marino tried to determine his socioeconomic status from his grooming, his clothing, his jewelry. Hard to tell. Baggy khakis, no socks, some kind of running shoe, a dark jacket, no gloves. A metal watch, maybe. Kind of slovenly-looking and bald. Probably lost his money, his job, his wife, maybe all three. Marino knew what he felt like. He was pretty sure he did. About a year and a half ago he felt the same way, had thought about going off a bridge, came within an inch of driving his truck through the guardrail, plunging hundreds of feet into Charleston ’s Cooper River.

“No address except where the victim lives,” Petrowski added.

He meant Scarpetta. She was the victim, and it rattled Marino to hear her referred to as a victim.

“The tattoo’s unique. It’s the best thing we got going.” Marino watched the jumper cling to cables high above the upper span of the bridge, high above the black abyss of the Hudson. “Jesus, don’t shine the friggin’ light in his eyes. How many million candlepower? His hands got to be numb. You imagine how cold those steel cables are? Do yourself a favor, eat your gun next time, buddy. Take a bottle of pills.”

Marino couldn’t help thinking about himself, reminded of South Carolina, the blackest period of his life. He’d wanted to die. He’d deserved to die. He still wasn’t a hundred percent sure why he hadn’t, why he hadn’t ended up on TV same as this poor bastard on the GW. Marino imagined cops and firefighters, a scuba team, hoisting his pickup truck out of the Cooper River, him inside, how ugly that would have been, how unfair to everyone, but when you’re that desperate, that whacked, you don’t think about what’s fair. Bloated by decomposition, floaters the worst, the gases blowing him up and turning him green, eyes bulging like a frog, lips and ears and maybe his dick nibbled off by crabs and fish.

The ultimate punishment would have been to look disgusting like that, to stink so bad he made people gag, a freakin’ horror on the Doc’s table. He would have been her case, her office in Charleston the only show in town. She would have done him. No way she would have had him transported hundreds of miles away, no way she would have brought in another forensic pathologist. She would have taken care of him. Marino was positive of that. He had seen her do people she knew in the past, would drape a towel over their faces, keep their naked dead bodies covered by a sheet as much as possible, out of respect. Because she was the best one to take care of them, and she knew it.

“… It’s not necessarily unique, and it probably isn’t in a database,” Petrowski was saying.

“What isn’t?”

“The tattoo. As for the guy’s physical description, that would include about half the city,” Petrowski said. The jumper on the flat screen may as well have been a movie he’d already seen. Barely made Petrowski turn his head. “Black male between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, height between five-eight and six-two. No phone number, no address, no license tag, nothing to search on. I can’t do much else at this point.” As if Marino really shouldn’t have come to the eighth floor of One Police Plaza and bothered an RTCC analyst with minutiae like this.

It was true. Marino could have called and asked first. But better to show up with a disk in hand. Like his mother used to say, “Foot in the door, Pete. Foot in the door.”

The jumper’s foot slipped on a cable and he caught himself.

“Whoa,” Marino said to the flat screen, halfway wondering if his thinking the word foot had caused the jumper’s foot to move.

Petrowski looked where Marino was looking and commented, “They get up there and change their minds. Happens all the time.”

“If you really want to end it, why put yourself through it? Why change your mind?” Marino started feeling contempt for the jumper, started feeling pissed. “You ask me, it’s bullshit. Nutcakes like this one? They just want attention, want to be on TV, want payback, want something besides death, in other words.”

Traffic on the upper level of the bridge was backing up, even at this hour, and on the span directly below the jumper, police were setting up a staging area, laying down an air bag. A negotiator was trying to talk the jumper out of it, and other cops were climbing the tower, trying to get close. Everybody risking his life for someone who didn’t give a shit, someone who had said Fuck it, whatever that meant. The volume was turned off, and Marino couldn’t hear what was being said and didn’t need to because it wasn’t his case, had nothing to do with him, and he shouldn’t be caught up in it. But he was always distracted in the RTCC, where there was too much sensory input and yet not enough. All sorts of images thrown up on the walls but no windows, just blue acoustical panels, curved rows of work stations with dual screens, and gray carpet.

Only when the adjoining conference room’s window shades were open, and they weren’t right now, was he given a reference point, a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, Downtown Presbyterian, Pace Union, the old Woolworth Building. The New York he remembered from when he was just getting started with the NYPD, was a nothing from Bayonne who gave up boxing, gave up beating the shit out of people, decided to help them instead. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t sure how it happened that he’d ever left New York and ended up in Richmond, Virginia, in the early eighties. At this stage of things it seemed he just woke up one day to discover he was the star detective in the former capital of the Confederacy. The cost of living, a good place to raise a family. What Doris wanted. That was probably the explanation.

What a crock of shit. Their only child, Rocco, left home, got involved in organized crime, and was dead, and Doris ran off with a car salesman and might as well be dead, and during Marino’s time in Richmond, it had one of the highest homicide rates per capita in the United States. The drug dealers’ rest stop along the I-95 corridor between New York and Miami, where dirtbags did business en route because Richmond had the customer base, seven federal housing projects. Plantations and slavery. What goes around comes around. Richmond was a good place to deal drugs and kill people, because the cops were stupid, that was the word on the street and along the Corridor, up and down the East Coast. Used to offend the hell out of Marino. Not anymore. It was so long ago, and what good did it do to take things personally when they weren’t personal. Most things were random.

The older he got, the less he could connect one event in his life to another in a way that showed evidence of something intelligent and caring behind his choices and messes and the messes of those crossing his borders, especially women. How many had he loved and lost or simply fucked? He remembered the first time, clear as day. Bear Mountain State Park on the dock overlooking the Hudson when he was sixteen. But overall, he had no clue, all those times he was drunk, how could he remember? Computers didn’t get drunk or forget, had no regrets, didn’t care. They connected everything, created logical trees on the data wall. Marino was afraid of his own data wall. He was afraid it didn’t make sense, was afraid that almost every decision he’d ever made was a bad one with no rhyme or reason to it, no Master Plan. He didn’t want to see how many offshoots went nowhere or were linked to Scarpetta. In a way, she had become the icon in the center of his connections and disconnections. In a way, she made the most sense and the least.

“I keep thinking you can match up images and photographs,” Marino said to Petrowski while looking at the jumper on the flat screen. “Like if this FedEx guy’s mug shot is in some database and you got his facial features and the tattoo to connect with what we got here from the security camera.”

“I see what you’re saying. Except I think we’ve established he’s not really FedEx.”

“So, you get the computer to do its data-mining thing and match the images.”

“We search by keyword or category. Not by image. Maybe someday,” Petrowski said.

“Then how come you can Google images like photographs you want and download them?” Marino asked.

He couldn’t take his eyes off the jumper. It was true. He must have changed his mind. What had changed it? Fear of heights? Or was it all the fucking attention. Jesus. Choppers, cops, and live TV. Maybe he decided to hang around, be on the cover of People magazine.

“Because you’re searching by keywords, not by the actual image,” Petrowski patiently explained. “An image-search application requires a keyword or several keywords, such as, well, see our logo on the wall over there? You search on the keywords RTCC logo or moniker and the software finds an image or images that includes those same keywords-actually finds the hosting location.”

“The wall?” Marino was confused as he looked at the wall with the logo, an eagle and American flags.

“No, the hosting location isn’t the wall. It’s a database-in our case, a data warehouse because of the massive size and complexity since we started centralizing. Every warrant; offense and incident report; weapon; map; arrest; complaint; C-summons; stop, question, and frisk; juvenile crime; you name it. Same type of link analysis we’re doing in counterterrorism,” Petrowski said.

“Right. And if you could connect images,” Marino said, “you could identify terrorists, different names but the same person, so why aren’t we? Okay. They’ve almost got him. Jesus. Like we should rappel off the bridge for some squirrel like that.”

ESU cops in harnesses were suspended by ropes, closing in on three sides.

“We can’t. Maybe someday,” Petrowski answered, oblivious to the jumper and whether he made it or not. “What we link is public records, like addresses, locations, objects, other large collections of data, but not actual photographs of faces. What you’re really getting a hit on is the keywords, not the images of tattoos. Am I making sense? Because I don’t feel you’re clear on what I’ve been saying. Maybe if your attention was here in the room with me instead of on the GW Bridge.”

“I wish I could see his face better,” Marino said to the flat screen with the jumper on it. “Something about him. Like I know him from somewhere.”

“From everywhere. A dime a dozen these days. It’s selfish as hell. If you want to do yourself in, don’t take out other people with you, don’t put them at risk, don’t cost the taxpayers. They’ll slap him in Bellevue tonight. Tomorrow we’ll find out he was involved in a Ponzi scam. We’ve just had a hundred million cut out of our budget, and here we are snatching his ass off a bridge. A week from now, he’ll kill himself some other way.”

“Naw. He’ll be on Letterman,” Marino said.

“Don’t push my button.”

“Go back to that Mount Rushmore wino tattoo you had up a minute ago,” Marino said, reaching for his coffee as the ESU cops risked their lives to rescue someone who wasn’t worth it, was a dime a dozen and probably should have splashed down by now, been picked up by the Coast Guard and escorted to the morgue.

Petrowski clicked on a record he had opened earlier and, using the mouse, dragged an image into a big empty square on a laptop screen. A mug shot appeared on the data wall, a black man with a tattoo covering the right side of his neck: four skulls in an outcropping of rocks, what looked like Mount Rushmore to Marino, and the Latin phrase In vino veritas.

“Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine,” Marino said, and two ESU cops almost had the jumper. Marino couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see what he was feeling or if he was talking.

“In wine is truth,” Petrowski said. “Think it goes back to ancient Roman times. What the hell’s his name. Pliny Something. Maybe Tacitus.”

“Mateus and Lancers rosé. Remember those days?”

Petrowski smiled but didn’t answer. He was too young, probably had never heard of Mad Dog or Boone’s Farm, either.

“Drink a bottle of Lancers in the car, and if you got lucky, you give your date the bottle for a souvenir,” Marino went on. “The girls would put candles in them, let all the wax run down, lots of different color candles. What I called a candle fuck. Well, guess you had to be there.”

Petrowski and his smile. Marino was never sure what it meant except he figured the guy was wrapped pretty tight. Most computer jockeys were, except Lucy. She wasn’t even wrapped, not these days. He glanced at his watch, wondered how she and Berger were making out with Hap Judd as Petrowski arranged images side by side on the data wall. The tattoo on the neck of the man in the FedEx cap was juxtaposed with the tattoo of four skulls and the phrase In vino veritas.

“Nope.” Marino took another swallow of coffee, black and cold. “Not even close when you really look.”

“I tried to tell you.”

“I was thinking of patterns, like maybe where he got the tattoo. If we found something that was the same design, I could track down the tattoo artist, show him a picture of this FedEx guy,” Marino said.

“It’s not in the database,” Petrowski said. “Not with those keywords. Not with coffin, either, or fallen comrade or Iraq or anything we’ve tried. We need a name, an incident, a location, a map, something.”

“What about the FBI, their database?” Marino suggested. “That new billion-dollar computer system they got, forget what it’s called.”

“NGI. Next Generation Identification. Still in development.”

“But up and running, I hear.” The person Marino had heard it from was Lucy.

“We’re talking extremely advanced technology that’s spread over a multiyear time frame. I know the early phases have been implemented, which includes IAFIS, CODIS, I think the Interstate Photo System, IPS. Not really sure what else, you know, with the economy being what it is. A lot of stuff’s been cut back.”

“Well, I hear they got a tattoo database,” Marino said.

“Oh, sure.”

“So I say we cast a bigger net in our hunt and do a national, maybe even international, search on this FedEx shitbag,” Marino suggested. “That’s assuming you can’t search the FBI database, their NGI, from here.”

“No way. We don’t share. But I’ll shoot them your tattoo. No problem. Well, he’s not on the bridge anymore.” Petrowski meant the jumper. Was finally curious but only in a bored way.

“That can’t be good.” Marino looked at the flat screen, realizing he’d missed the big moment. “Shit. I see the ESU guys but not him.”

“There he is.”

Helicopter searchlights moving over the jumper on the ground, a distant image of his body on the pavement. He’d missed the air bag.

“The ESU guys are going to be pissed” was Petrowski’s summary of the situation. “They hate it when that happens.”

“What about you send the FBI this photo with the tattoo”-looking at the alleged FedEx guy on the data wall-“while we try a couple other searches. FedEx. Maybe FedEx uniform, FedEx cap. Anything FedEx,” Marino said.

“We can do that.” Petrowski started typing.

The hourglass returned to the data wall, twirling. Marino noticed the wall-mounted flat screen had gone black, the police helicopter video feed terminated because the jumper was terminated. He suddenly had an idea why the jumper looked familiar, an actor he’d seen, what was the movie? The police chief who got in trouble with a hooker? What the hell was the movie? Marino couldn’t think of the name. Seemed to happen a lot these days.

“You ever seen that movie with Danny DeVito and Bette Midler? What the hell was it called?” Marino said.

“I got no idea.” Petrowski watched the hourglass and the reassuring message, Your report is running. “What’s a movie got to do with anything?”

“Everything’s got to do with something. I thought that was the point of this joint.” Marino indicated the big blue room.

Eleven records found.

“Now we’re cooking,” Marino said. “Can’t believe I ever used to hate computers. Or the dipshits who work with them.”

In the old days, he did hate them and enjoyed ridiculing the people who worked with them. No longer. He was becoming quite accustomed to uncovering critical information through what was called “link analysis,” and transmitting it electronically almost instantly. He’d grown quite fond of rolling up on a scene to investigate an incident or interview a complainant and already knowing what a person of interest had done in the past and to whom and what he looked like, who he associated with or was related to, and if he was dangerous to himself or to others. It was a brave new world, Marino liked to say, referencing a book he’d never read but maybe would one of these days.

Petrowski was displaying records on the data wall. Reports on assaults, robberies, a rape, and two shootings in which FedEx was either a reference to packages stolen, words uttered, occupations, or in one case, a fatal pit bull attack. None of the data associated with any of the reports were useful until Marino was looking at a Transit Adjudication Bureau summons, a TAB summons from this past August first, big as life on the data wall. Marino read the last name, the first name, the Edgewater, New Jersey, address, the sex, race, height, and weight.

“Well, what do you know. Look who popped up. I was going to have you run her next,” he said as he read the details of the violation:

Subject was observed boarding a NY Transit bus at Southern Boulevard and East 149th Street at 1130 hours and became argumentative with another passenger the subject claimed had taken her seat. Subject began to yell at the passenger. When this officer approached the subject and told her to stop yelling and sit down, she stated, “You can just FedEx your ass to hell because it’s not me who did anything. That man over there is a rude son of a bitch.”

“Doubt she’s got a skull tattoo,” Petrowski said ironically. “Don’t think she’s your man with the package.”

“Fucking unbelievable,” Marino said. “You print that out for me?”

“You should count how many times per hour you say ‘fuck.’ In my house, would cost you a lot of quarters.”

“Dodie Hodge,” Marino said. “The fucking loony tune who called CNN.”