The Scarpetta Factor

14

Lucy had finally stopped typing. She’d quit looking at maps and writing e-mails. She was going to say something she shouldn’t. Berger could feel it coming and couldn’t stop her.

“I’ve been sitting here wondering what your fans would think,” Lucy said to Hap Judd. “I’m trying to get into the mind-set of one of your fans. This movie star I’ve got a crush on-and now I’m in a fan’s mind. And I’m imaging my idol Hap Judd with a latex glove on for a condom, fucking the dead body of a nineteen-year-old girl in a hospital morgue refrigerator.”

Hap Judd was stunned, as if he’d been slapped, his mouth open, his face bright red. He was going to erupt.

“Lucy, it’s occurred to me, Jet Ranger may need to go out,” Berger said, after a pause.

The old bulldog was upstairs in Lucy’s apartment and had been out to potty not even two hours ago.

“Not quite yet.” Lucy’s green eyes met Berger’s. Boldness, stubbornness. If Lucy wasn’t Lucy, Berger would fire her.

“What about another water, Hap?” Berger said. “Actually, I could use a Diet Pepsi.” Berger held Lucy’s eyes. Not a suggestion. An order.

She needed a moment alone with her witness, and she needed Lucy to back off and cut it out. This was a criminal investigation, not road rage. What the hell was wrong with her?

Berger resumed with Judd. “We were talking about what you told Eric. He claims you made sexual references about a girl who had just died in the hospital.”

“I never said I did something as disgusting as that!”

“You talked about Farrah Lacy to Eric. You told him you suspected inappropriate behavior at the hospital. Staff, funeral home employees engaging in inappropriate behavior with her dead body, perhaps with other dead bodies,” Berger said to Judd as Lucy got up from the table and left the room. “Why did you mention all this to someone you didn’t know? Maybe because you were desperate to confess, needed to assuage your guilt. When you were talking about what was going on at Park General, you were really talking about yourself. About what you did.”

“This is bullshit! Who the hell is setting me up?” Judd was yelling. “Is this about money? Is the little fucker trying to blackmail me or something? Is this some sick lie that insane bitch Dodie Hodge has cooked up?”

“No one is trying to blackmail you. This isn’t about money or someone allegedly stalking you. It’s about what you did at Park General before you had money, possibly before you had stalkers.”

A tone sounded on Berger’s BlackBerry next to her on the table. Someone had just sent her an e-mail.

“Dead bodies. Makes me want to puke just thinking about it,” Judd said.

“But you’ve more than thought about it, haven’t you,” Berger stated.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re going to see,” she said.

“You’re looking for a scapegoat or want to make a name for yourself at my fucking expense.”

Berger didn’t offer that she’d already made a name for herself and didn’t need the help of a second-rate actor.

She said, “I’ll repeat myself, what I want is the truth. The truth is therapeutic. You’ll feel better. People make mistakes.”

He wiped his eyes, his leg bouncing so hard he might fly out of the chair. Berger didn’t like him, but she was liking herself less. She was reminded that he had brought this on, could have avoided it had he been helpful when she’d placed that first call three weeks ago. If he’d talked to her, she wouldn’t have found it necessary to come up with a plan that rather much had taken on a life of its own. Lucy had made sure it had taken on a life of its own. It had never been Berger’s intention to prosecute Hap Judd for what allegedly had happened at Park General Hospital, and she had little or no faith in some handyman pot-smoking snitch named Eric whom she’d never interviewed or met. Marino had talked to Eric. Marino said Eric had told him about Park General, and yes, the information was disconcerting, possibly incriminating. But Berger was interested in a much bigger case.

Hap Judd was a client of Hannah Starr’s highly respected and successful money-management company, but he didn’t lose his fortune, not a penny of it, to what Berger was calling a Ponzi-by-proxy scam. He was saved when Hannah purportedly pulled his investments out of the stock market this past August 4. That same day exactly two million dollars was wired into his bank account. His original investment of one-fourth that amount made a year earlier had never been in the stock market, but in the pockets of a real-estate investment banking firm, Bay Bridge Finance, whose CEO was recently arrested by the FBI for felony fraud. Hannah would claim ignorance, would say she no more knew about Bay Bridge Finance’s Ponzi scheme than did the reputable financial institutions, charities, and banks that were victims of Bernard Madoff and his kind. No doubt Hannah would claim that she was duped like so many others.

But Berger didn’t buy it. The timing of the transaction Hannah Starr had instigated on behalf of Hap Judd, apparently without any prompting from him or anyone else, was evidence that she knew exactly what she was involved in and was a conspirator. An investigation into her financial records that had been ongoing since her disappearance the day before Thanksgiving hinted that Hannah, the sole beneficiary of her late father Rupe Starr’s fortune and his company, had creative business practices, especially when it came to billing clients. But that didn’t make her a criminal. Nothing stood out until Lucy’s discovery of that two-million-dollar wire to Hap Judd. Then, suddenly, Hannah’s disappearance, which had been assumed to be a predatory crime and therefore Berger’s turf, had begun to take on different shadings. Berger had joined forces with other attorneys and analysts in her office’s Investigative Division, primarily its Frauds Bureau, and she also had consulted with the FBI.

Hers was a highly classified investigation that the public knew nothing about, because the last thing she wanted transmitted all over the universe was her belief that contrary to popular theories, Hannah Starr wasn’t the victim of some sexual psychopath, and if a yellow cab was involved, most likely it was one that had carried her to an FBO where she’d boarded a private plane, which was exactly what was scheduled. She was supposed to have boarded her Gulfstream on Thanksgiving day, bound for Miami, and after that, Saint Barts. She never showed up because she had other plans, more secretive ones. Hannah Starr was a con artist, and very possibly alive and on the lam, and she wouldn’t have spared Hap Judd a terrible financial fate unless she’d had more than a professional interest in him. She’d fallen for her celebrity client, and he might just have a clue as to where she was.

“What you never imagined is Eric would call my office Tuesday morning and get my investigator on the phone and repeat everything you told him,” Berger said to Judd.

If Marino had shown up for this interview, he could help her at this point. He could repeat what Eric had said to him. Berger was feeling isolated and trivialized. Lucy wasn’t respectful and kept things from her, and Marino was too damn busy.

“Ironically,” Berger continued, “I’m not sure Eric was suspicious of you as much as he wanted to show off. Wanted to brag about hanging out with a movie star, brag that he had information about a huge scandal, be the next American Idol by ending up all over the news, which seems to be everybody’s motivation these days. Unfortunately for you, when we started looking into Eric’s story, the Park General scandal? Turns out there’s something to it.”

“He’s just a punk shooting off his mouth.” Judd was calmer now that Lucy was out of the room.

“We checked it out, Hap.”

“It was four years ago. Something like that, a long time ago, when I worked there.”

“Four years, fifty years,” Berger said. “There’s no statute of limitations. Although I’ll admit you’ve presented the people of New York with an unusual legal challenge. Generally, when we run into a case where human remains have been desecrated, we’re talking about archaeology, not necrophilia.”

“You wish it was true, but it’s not,” he said. “I swear. I would never hurt anyone.”

“Believe me. Nobody wants something like this to be true,” Berger said.

“I came here to help you out.” Hands shaking as he wiped his eyes. Maybe he was acting, wanted her to feel sorry for him. “This other thing? It’s wrong, fucking wrong, whatever that guy said.”

“Eric was quite convincing.” If Marino were here, goddamn it, he could help her out. She was furious with him.

“Fucking piece of shit, fuck him. I was joking around after we left the bar. We lit up a blunt. I was joking around about the hospital thing. Just talking big. Jesus Christ, I don’t need to do something like that. Why would I do something like that? It was talk, it was weed and talk and maybe some tequila thrown in for good measure. So I’m strung out and in the bar and this guy… Fucking nobody piece of shit. Fuck him. I’ll sue his ass, fucking ruin him. That’s what I get for being nice to some nothing piece-of-shit groupie.”

“What makes you think Eric’s a groupie?” Berger asked.

“He comes up to me at the bar. You know, I’m minding my own business, having a drink, and he asks me for my autograph. I make the mistake of being nice, and next thing we’re walking and he’s asking me all this shit about myself, obviously hoping I’m gay, which I’m not, never been even once.”

“Is Eric gay?”

“He hangs out at the Stonewall Inn.”

“So do you,” Berger said.

“I told you, I’m not gay and never have been.”

“An unusual venue for you,” Berger observed. “The Stonewall Inn is one of the most famous gay establishments in the country, a symbol of the gay rights movement, in fact. Not exactly a hangout for straights.”

“If you’re an actor, you hang out in all kinds of places so you can play all types of characters. I’m a method actor, you know, I do research. That’s my thing, where I get my ideas and figure it out. I’m known for rolling up my sleeves and doing whatever it takes.”

“Going to a gay bar is research?”

“I got no problem with where I hang out, because I’m secure with myself.”

“What other types of research, Hap? You familiar with the Body Farm in Tennessee?”

Judd looked confused, then incredulous. “What? You’re breaking into my e-mail now?”

She didn’t answer.

“So I ordered something from them. For research. I’m playing an archaeologist in a movie and we excavate this plague pit, you know, with skeletal remains. Hundreds and thousands of skeletons. It’s just research, and I was even going to see if I could go down there to Knoxville so I have an idea what it’s like to be around something like that.”

“Be around bodies that are decomposing?”

“If you want to get it right, you’ve got to see it, smell it, so you can play it. I’m curious what happens, you know, when a body’s been in the ground or lying around somewhere. What it looks like after a lot of time passes. I don’t have to explain this to you, explain acting to you, my damn career to you. I haven’t done anything. You’ve violated my rights, going into my e-mail.”

“I don’t recall my saying we’d gone into your e-mail.”

“You must have.”

“Data searches,” she replied, and he was looking her in the eye or looking around but not looking her up and down anymore. He did that only when Lucy was here. “You borrow computers that are connected to a server, you order something online, it’s amazing the trail people leave. Let’s talk some more about Eric,” Berger said.

“The fucking fag.”

“He told you he was gay?”

“He was hitting on me, okay? It was obvious, you know, him asking me about myself, my past, and I mentioned I’d had a lot of different jobs, including being a tech at a hospital part-time. Fags hit on me all the time,” he added.

“Did you bring up your former hospital job, or did he?”

“I don’t remember how it came up. He started asking me about my career, how I’d started out, and I told him about the hospital. I talked about what kinds of things I’d done while I tried to get my acting going good enough to support me. Stuff like helping out as a phlebotomist, collecting specimens, even helping out in the morgue, mopping the floors, rolling bodies in and out of the fridge, whatever they needed.”

“Why?” Lucy said as she returned with a Diet Pepsi and a bottle of water.

“What do you mean ‘Why’?” Judd craned his head around, and his demeanor changed. He hated her. He made no effort to hide it.

“Why take shit jobs like that?” She popped open the Diet Pepsi can, set it in front of Berger, and sat down.

“All I’ve got is a high-school diploma,” he said, not looking at her.

“Why not be a model or something while you were trying to make it as an actor?” Lucy picked up where she left off, insulting him, taunting him.

A part of Berger paid attention while another part of her was distracted by a second message tone sounding on her BlackBerry. Goddamn it, who was trying to reach her at four o’clock in the morning? Maybe Marino again. Too busy to show up, and now he was interrupting her again. Someone was. Might not be him. She slid the BlackBerry closer as Hap Judd continued to talk, directing his answers to her. Better check her messages, and she subtly entered her password.

“I did some modeling. I did whatever I could to make money and get real-life experience,” he said. “I’m not afraid to work. I’m not afraid of anything except people fucking lying about me.”

The first e-mail, sent a few minutes ago, was from Marino:

Going to need a search warrant asap re incident involves the doc im emailing facts of the case in a few

“I’m not grossed out by anything,” Judd went on. “I’m one of these people who does what it takes. I didn’t grow up with anything handed to me.”

Marino was saying he was drafting a search warrant that he would be e-mailing to Berger shortly. Then it would be her job to check the accuracy and language and get hold of a judge she could call at any hour, and go to his residence to get the warrant signed. What search warrant, and what was so urgent? What was going on with Scarpetta? Berger wondered if this was related to the suspicious package left at her building last night.

“That’s why I can play the roles I do and be convincing. Because I’m not scared, not of snakes or insects,” Judd was saying to Berger, who was listening carefully and dealing with e-mails at the same time. “I mean, I could do like Gene Simmons and put a bat in my mouth and breathe fire. I do a lot of my own stunts. I don’t want to talk to her. I’m going to leave if I have to talk to her.” He glared at Lucy.

The second e-mail, which had just landed, was from Scarpetta:

Re: Search Warrant. Based on my training and experience, I think the search for the stolen data storage device will require a forensic expert.

Clearly Marino and Scarpetta had been in touch with each other, although Berger had no idea what stolen device was involved or what needed to be searched. She couldn’t imagine why Scarpetta hadn’t given this same instruction to Marino so he could include a forensic expert in the addendum of the warrant he was drafting. Instead, Scarpetta was telling Berger directly that she wanted a civilian to help with the search, someone who knew about data storage devices, such as computers. Then Berger figured it out. Scarpetta needed Lucy to be present at the scene and was asking Berger to make sure that happened. For some reason, it was very important.

“That was quite a stunt you pulled in the hospital morgue,” Lucy said to Judd.

“I didn’t pull a stunt.” Directing everything to Berger. “I was just talking, saying I thought it might be going on, maybe when the funeral homes showed up and because she was really pretty and not all that banged up for someone hurt that bad. I was halfway kidding, although I have wondered what some of these funeral home people are into, and that’s the truth. I was suspicious about some of the ones I came across. I think people do all kinds of stuff if they can get away with it.”

“I’ll quote you on that,” Lucy said. “Hap Judd says people do whatever they can get away with. An instant Yahoo! headline.”

Berger said to her, “Maybe now’s a good time to show him what we’ve found.” She said to Judd, “You’ve heard of artificial intelligence. This is more advanced than that. I don’t suppose you were curious about why we asked you to meet us here.”

“Here?” He looked around the room, a blank expression on his Captain America face.

“You mandated the time. I mandated the place. This high-tech minimalist space,” Berger said. “See all the computers everywhere? This is a forensic computer investigative firm. ”

He didn’t react.

“That’s why I picked this location. And let me clarify. Lucy is an investigative consultant retained by the district attorney’s office, but she’s quite a lot more than that. Former FBI, ATF, I won’t bother with her résumé, would take too long, but your describing her as not a real cop isn’t quite accurate.”

He didn’t seem to understand.

“Let’s go back to when you worked at Park General,” Berger said.

“I really don’t remember-well, almost nothing, not much about that situation.”

“What situation?” Berger asked, with what Lucy liked to describe as her “millpond calm.” Only when Lucy said it, she didn’t mean it as a compliment.

“The girl,” he said.

“Farrah Lacy,” Berger said.

“Yes, I mean, no. I’m trying to, what I’m saying is it was a long time ago.”

“That’s the beauty of computers,” Berger said. “They don’t care if it was a long time ago. Especially Lucy’s computers, her neural networking applications, programming constructs that mimic the brain. Let me refresh your memory about your long-ago days at Park General. When you entered the hospital morgue, you had to use your security card. Sound familiar?”

“I guess. I mean, that would be the routine.”

“So, every time you used your security card, your security code was entered into the hospital computer system.”

“Along with recordings made by the security cameras,” Lucy added. “Along with your e-mails, because they resided on the hospital server, which routinely backs up its data, meaning they still have electronic records from when you were there. Including whatever you wrote on-whatever desktop computer you happened to borrow at the hospital. And if you logged in to private e-mail accounts from there, oh, well, those too. Everything’s connected. It’s just a matter of knowing how. I won’t tax you with a lot of computer jargon, but that’s what I do in this place. I make connections the same way the neurons in your brain are making them right this minute. Inputs, outputs, from sensory and motor nerves in your eyes, your hands, signal flows that the brain pieces together to accomplish tasks and solve problems. Images, ideas, written messages, conversations. Even screenwriting. All of it interconnected and forming patterns, making it possible to detect, decide, and predict.”

“What screenwriting?” Hap Judd’s mouth was dry, sounded sticky when he talked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lucy started typing. She pointed a remote at a flat screen mounted on a wall. Judd reached for his bottle of water, fumbled with the cap, took a long swallow.

The flat screen divided into windows, each filled by an image: a younger Hap Judd in scrubs walking into the hospital morgue, grabbing latex gloves out of a box, opening the stainless-steel walk-in refrigerator; a newspaper photograph of nineteen-year-old Farrah Lacy, a very pretty, light-skinned African American in a cheerleading outfit, holding pompoms and grinning; an e-mail; a page from a script.

Lucy clicked on the page from the script and it filled the entire screen:

CUT TO:

INT. BEDROOM, NIGHT

A beautiful woman in the bed, covers pulled back, bunched around her bare feet. She looks dead, hands folded over her chest in a religious pose. She’s completely nude. An INTRUDER we can’t make out moves closer, closer, closer! He grips her ankles and slides her limp body down to the foot of the bed, parting her legs. We hear the clinks of his belt being unbuckled.

INTRUDER

Good news. You’re about to go to heaven. As his pants drop to the floor.

“Where did you get that? Who the hell gave it to you? You have no right going into my e-mail,” Hap Judd said loudly. “And it’s not what you think. You’re setting me up!”

Lucy clicked the mouse and the flat screen filled with an e mail:

Hey too bad about whats her ass. Fuck her. I dont mean littereally. Call if U want a stiff one.

Hap

“I meant a drink.” Words sticking. His voice shook. “I don’t remember who… Look, it had to be a stiff drink. I was asking someone if they wanted to meet me for a drink.”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said to Berger. “Sounds like he assumed we interpreted ‘stiff one’ as something else. Maybe a dead body? You should try spell-check sometime,” Lucy said to him. “And you should be careful what you do, what you e-mail, what you text-message on computers that are connected to a server. Like a hospital server. We can sit here all week with you if you want. I’ve got computer applications that can connect every piece of your entire screwed-up make-believe life.”

It was a bluff. At this point, they had very little, not much more than writing he’d done on hospital computers, his e-mails, whatever had resided on the server back then, and some images from security cameras and morgue log entries from the two-week period Farrah Lacy had been hospitalized. There hadn’t been time to sift through anything else. Berger had been afraid if she delayed talking to Hap Judd, she’d never get the chance. This was what she called a “blitz attack.” If she didn’t like the way she felt about it before, now she was really out of her comfort zone. She felt doubt. Serious doubt. The same doubts she’d been feeling all along, only much worse now. Lucy was driving this. She had a destination in mind. She didn’t seem to care how she got there.

“I don’t want to see anything else,” Judd said.

“Just tons of stuff to go through. My eyes are crossed.” Lucy tapped the MacBook with an index finger. “All downloaded. Things I doubt you remember, got no idea about. Not sure what the cops would do with this. Ms. Berger? What would the cops do with this?”

“What worries me is what happened while the victim was still alive,” Berger said, because she had to play it out. She couldn’t stop now. “Farrah was in the hospital two weeks before she died.”

“Twelve days, exactly,” Lucy said. “On life support, never regained consciousness. Five of those days, Hap was on duty, working at the hospital. You ever go into her room, Hap? Maybe help yourself to her while she was in a coma?”

“You’re the one who’s sick!”

“Did you?”

“I told you,” he said to Berger. “I don’t even know who she is.”

“Farrah Lacy,” Berger repeated the name. “The nineteen-year-old cheerleader whose picture you saw in the news, the Harlem News. That same picture we just showed you.”

“The same picture you e-mailed to yourself,” Lucy said. “Let me guess. You don’t remember. I’ll remind you. You e-mailed it to yourself the same day it appeared in the news online. You sent the article about the car accident to yourself. I find that very interesting.”

She clicked the photograph back on the wall-mounted flat screen. The photograph of Farrah Lacy in her cheerleading uniform. Hap Judd averted his eyes.

He said, “I don’t know anything about a car accident.”

“Family’s coming home from Marcus Garvey Memorial Park in Harlem,” Berger said. “A pretty Saturday afternoon in July 2004, some guy talking on his cell phone runs a red light on Lenox Avenue, T bones them.”

“I don’t remember,” Judd said.

“Farrah had what’s called a closed head injury, which is basically an injury to the brain caused by a nonpenetrating wound,” Berger said.

“I don’t remember. I just sort of remember her being there at the hospital.”

“Right. You remember Farrah being a patient in the hospital where you worked. On life support in the ICU. Sometimes you went into the ICU to draw blood, you remember that?” Berger asked him.

He didn’t reply.

“Isn’t it true that you had a reputation for being a skilled phlebotomist?” Berger asked.

“He could get blood from a stone,” Lucy said. “According to what one of the nurses said to Marino.”

“Who the hell’s Marino?”

Lucy shouldn’t have brought him up. Referencing Berger’s investigators or anyone she used in a case was her prerogative, not Lucy’s. Marino had talked to a few people at the hospital, over the phone and very carefully. It was a delicate situation. Berger felt a heightened sense of responsibility because of who the potential defendant was. Lucy clearly didn’t share her concerns, seemed to want Hap Judd ruined, maybe the same way she’d felt about the air traffic controller a few hours earlier and the linesman she reprimanded in the FBO. Berger had overheard every word through the bathroom door. Lucy was after blood, maybe not just Hap Judd’s blood, maybe a lot of people’s blood. Berger didn’t know why. She didn’t know what to think anymore.

“We have a lot of people looking into your situation,” Berger said to Judd. “Lucy’s been running you and all kinds of data through her computers for days.”

Not entirely true. Lucy had spent maybe one day on it remotely from Stowe. Once Marino had begun the process, the hospital was cooperative, e-mailing certain information without protest because it was a personnel issue, a matter pertaining to a former employee, and Marino had suggested as only he could that the more helpful Park General was, the more likely the matter could be resolved diplomatically, discreetly. Warrants and court orders and a former employee who was now famous, and the situation would be all over the news. Unnecessary when maybe nobody was going to be charged with anything in the end, and what a shame to put Farrah Lacy’s family through so much pain again, and wasn’t it pitiful the way everybody sued these days, Marino had said, or words to that effect.

“Let me refresh your memory,” Berger said to Hap Judd. “You went into the ICU, into the room next to Farrah’s on the night of July sixth, 2004, to draw blood from a different patient, this one quite elderly. She had terrible veins, so you volunteered to take care of her, since you could get blood from a stone.”

“I can show you her chart,” Lucy said.

Another bluff. Lucy could show no such thing. The hospital absolutely hadn’t given Berger’s office access to other patients’ confidential information.

“I can pull up the video of you going in there with your gloves on, with your cart, going into her room.” Lucy was unrelenting. “I can pull up video of every room you ever went into at Park General, including Farrah’s.”

“I never did. This is lies, all lies.” Judd was slumped down in his chair.

“You sure you didn’t go into her room that night while you were up there on the ICU?” Berger said. “You told Eric you did. You said you were curious about Farrah, that she was really pretty, that you wanted to see her naked.”

“Fucking lies. He’s a fucking liar.”

“He’ll say the same thing under oath on the witness stand,” Berger added.

“It was just talk. Even if I did, it was just to look. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t hurt anyone.”

“Sex crimes are about power,” Berger said. “Maybe it made you feel powerful to rape a helpless teenage girl who was unconscious and never going to tell, made you feel big and powerful, especially if you were a struggling actor who could barely get minor roles in soap operas back then. I imagine you were feeling pretty bad about yourself, sticking needles in the arms of sick, cranky people, mopping floors, getting ordered around by nurses, by anybody, really, you were so low on the food chain.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head side to side. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything.”

“Well, it seems you did, Hap,” Berger said. “I’ll continue to refresh your memory with a few facts. July seventh, it was in the news that Farrah Lacy was going to be disconnected from life support. At the very time she was disconnected, you came to work even though the hospital hadn’t summoned you. You were a per-diem employee, only on duty when you were called. But the hospital didn’t call you on the afternoon of July seventh, 2004. You showed up anyway and took it upon yourself to clean the morgue. Mopping the floor, wiping down stainless steel, and this is according to a security guard who’s still there and happens to be in a video clip we’re about to show you. Farrah died and you headed straight up to the tenth floor, to the ICU, to wheel her body down to the morgue. Sound familiar?”

He stared at the brushed steel tabletop and didn’t reply. She couldn’t read his affect. Maybe he was in shock. Maybe he was calculating what he was going to say next.

“Farrah Lacy’s body was transported by you down to the morgue,” Berger repeated. “It was captured on camera. Would you like to see it?”

“This is fucked up. It’s not what you’re saying.” He rubbed his face in his hands.

“We’re going to show you that clip right now.”

A click of the mouse, and then another click and the video began: Hap Judd in scrubs and a lab coat, wheeling a gurney into the hospital morgue, stopping at the shut stainless-steel refrigerator door. A security guard entering, opening the refrigerator door, looking at the tag on top of the shroud covering the body, and saying, “What are they posting her for? She was brain-dead and had the plug pulled.” Hap Judd saying, “Family wants it. Don’t ask me. She was fucking beautiful, a cheerleader. Like the dream girl you’d take to the prom.” Guard saying, “Oh, yeah?” Hap Judd pulling the sheet down, exposing the dead girl’s body, saying, “What a waste.” The guard shaking his head, saying, “Get her on in there, I got things to do.” Judd wheeling the gurney inside the refrigerator, his reply indistinguishable.

Hap Judd scraped back his chair and got up. “I want a lawyer,” he said.

“I can’t help you,” Berger said. “You haven’t been arrested. We don’t Mirandize people who haven’t been arrested. If you want a lawyer, up to you. No one is stopping you. Help yourself.”

“This is so you can arrest me. I assume you’re going to, which is why I’m here.” He looked uncertain, and he wouldn’t look at Lucy.

“Not now,” Berger said.

“Why am I here?”

“You’re not being arrested. Not now. Maybe you will be, maybe you won’t. I don’t know,” Berger said. “That’s not why I asked to talk to you three weeks ago.”

“Then what? What do you want?”

“Sit down,” Berger said.

He sat back down. “You can’t charge me with something like this. You understand? You can’t. You got a gun somewhere in here? Why don’t you just fucking shoot me.”

“Two separate issues,” Berger said. “First, we could keep investigating and maybe you’d be charged. Maybe you’d be indicted. What happens after that? You take your chances with a jury. Second, nobody’s going to shoot you.”

“I’m telling you, I didn’t do anything to that girl,” Judd said. “I didn’t hurt her.”

“What about the glove?” Lucy asked pointedly.

“Tell you what. I’m going to ask him about it,” Berger said to her.

She’d had enough. Lucy was going to stop it right now.

“I’m going to ask the questions,” Berger said, holding Lucy’s eyes until she was satisfied she was going to listen this time.

“The guard says he left the morgue, left you alone in there with Farrah Lacy’s body.” Berger continued her questioning, repeating information Marino had gathered, trying not to think about how unhappy she was with him right now. “He said he checked maybe twenty minutes later and you were just leaving. He asked you what you’d been doing in the morgue all that time and you didn’t have an answer. He remembered you had only one surgical glove on and seemed out of breath. Where was the other glove, Hap? In the video we just showed you, you had on two gloves. We can show you other video footage of you going inside the refrigerator and staying in it for almost fifteen minutes with the door open wide. What were you doing in there? Why’d you take off one of your gloves? Did you use it for something, maybe put it over some other part of your body? Maybe put it on your penis?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

“You want to tell it to a jury? You want a jury of your peers to hear all this?”

He stared down at the table, moving his finger over metal, like a little kid finger-painting. Breathing hard, his face bright red.

“What I’m hearing is you’d like this behind you,” Berger said.

“Tell me how.” He didn’t look up.

Berger had no DNA. She had no eyewitness or any other evidence, and Judd wasn’t going to confess. She would never have anything beyond circumstances that weren’t much better than innuendo. But that was as much as she needed to destroy Hap Judd. With his degree of celebrity, the accusation was a conviction. If she charged him with desecrating human remains, which was the only charge on the books for necrophilia, his life would be destroyed, and Berger didn’t take that lightly. She wasn’t known for malicious prosecution, for constructing cases out of a flawed process or from evidence extracted improperly. She’d never resorted to unjustifiable and unreasonable litigation and wasn’t about to start now, and she wasn’t going to let Lucy push her into it.

“Let’s back up three weeks, to when I called your agent. You do remember getting my messages,” Berger said. “Your agent said he passed them on to you.”

“How do I put this behind me?” Judd looked at her. He wanted a deal.

“Cooperation is a good thing. Collaboration-just like you have to do to make a movie. People working together.” Berger placed her pen on top of her legal pad and folded her hands. “You weren’t cooperative or collaborative three weeks ago when I called your agent. I wanted to talk to you, and you couldn’t be bothered. I could have sent the cops by your apartment in TriBeCa or tracked you down in L.A. or wherever you were and had you brought in, but I spared you the trauma. I was sensitive because of who you are. Now we’re in a different situation. I need your help, and you need mine. Because you’ve got a problem you didn’t have three weeks ago. You hadn’t met Eric in the bar three weeks ago. I didn’t know about Park General Hospital and Farrah Lacy three weeks ago. Maybe we can help each other.”

“Tell me.” Fear in his eyes.

“Let’s talk about your relationship with Hannah Starr.”

He didn’t react. He didn’t respond.

“You’re not going to deny you know Hannah Starr,” Berger then said.

“Why would I deny it?” He shrugged.

“And you didn’t suspect for even a second that I might be calling about her?” Berger said. “You know she’s disappeared, correct?”

“Of course.”

“And it didn’t occur-”

“Okay. Yeah. But I didn’t want to talk about her for privacy reasons,” Judd said. “It would have been unfair to her, and I don’t see what it has to do with what happened to her.”

“You know what happened to her,” Berger said, as if he did.

“Not really.”

“Sounds to me like you do know.”

“I don’t want to be involved. It has nothing to do with me,” Judd said. “My relationship with her was nobody’s business. But she’d tell you I’m not into anything sick. If she were around, she’d tell you that Park General stuff is bullshit. I mean, people who do things like that, it’s because they can’t have living people, right? She’d tell you I got no problems in that department. I got no problem having sex.”

“You were having an affair with Hannah Starr.”

“I put a stop to it early on. I tried.”

Lucy was staring hard at him.

“You signed on with her investment firm a little over a year ago,” Berger said. “I can give you the exact date if you want. You realize, of course, we have an abundance of information because of what’s happened.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s all anybody hears on the news,” he said. “And now the other girl. The marathon runner. I can’t think of her name. And maybe some serial killer driving a yellow cab. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“What makes you think Toni Darien was a marathon runner?”

“I must have heard it on TV, seen it on the Internet or something.”

Berger tried to think about any reference to Toni Darien as a marathon runner. She didn’t recall that being released to the media, only that she jogged.

“How did you first meet Hannah?” she asked.

“The Monkey Bar, where a lot of Hollywood people hang out,” he said. “She was in there one night and we started talking. She was really smart about money, told me all kinds of stuff I didn’t know shit about.”

“And you know what happened to her three weeks ago,” Berger said, and Lucy listened intensely.

“I have a pretty good idea. I think somebody did something. You know, she pissed people off.”

“Who did she piss off?” Berger asked.

“You got a phone book? Let me go through it.”

“A lot of people,” Berger said. “You’re saying she pissed off almost everybody she met?”

“Including me. I admit. She always wanted her way about everything. She had to have her own way about absolutely everything.”

“You’re talking about her as if she’s dead.”

“I’m not naïve. Most people think something bad happened to her.”

“You don’t seem upset about the possibility she might be dead,” Berger said.

“Sure it’s upsetting. I didn’t hate her. I just got tired of her pushing me and pushing me. Chasing me and chasing me, if you want me to be honest. She didn’t like to be told no.”

“Why did she give you your money back-actually, four times your original investment? Two million dollars. That’s quite a return on your investment in only a year.”

Another shrug. “The market was volatile. Lehman Brothers was going belly-up. She called me and said she was recommending I pull out, and I said whatever you think. Then I got the wire. And later on? Damn if she wasn’t right. I would have lost everything, and I’m not making millions and millions yet. I’m not A list yet. Whatever I have left over after expenses, I sure as hell don’t want to lose.”

“When was the last time you had sex with Hannah?” Berger was taking notes on the legal pad again, conscious of Lucy, of her stoni ness, of the way she was staring at Hap Judd.

He had to think. “Uh, okay. I remember. After that call. She told me she was pulling my money out, and could I drop by and she’d explain what was going on. It was just an excuse.”

“Drop by where?”

“Her house. I dropped by, and one thing led to another. That was the last time. July, I think. I was heading off to London, and anyway, she has a husband. Bobby. I wasn’t all that comfortable at her house when he was there.”

“He was there on that occasion? When she asked you to drop by before you headed to London?”

“Uh, I don’t remember if he was that time. It’s a huge house.”

“Their house on Park Avenue.”

“He was hardly ever home.” Judd didn’t answer the question. “Travels all the time in their private jets, back and forth to Europe, all over the place. I got the impression he spends a lot of time in South Florida, that he’s into the Miami scene, and they’ve got this place there on the ocean. He’s got an Enzo down there. One of those Ferraris that costs more than a million bucks. I don’t really know him. I’ve met him a few times.”

“Where did you meet him and when?”

“When I started investing with their company a little over a year ago. They invited me to their house. I’ve seen him at their house.”

Berger thought about the timing, and she thought about Dodie Hodge again.

“Is Hannah the person who referred you to the fortune-teller, to Dodie Hodge?”

“Okay, yeah. She’d do readings for Hannah and Bobby at the house. Hannah suggested I talk to Dodie, and it was a mistake. The lady’s crazy as shit. She got obsessed with me, said I was the reincarnation of a son she’d had in a former life in Egypt. That I was a pharaoh and she was my mother.”

“Let me make sure I understand which house you’re talking about. The same one you said you visited this past July, when you had sex with Hannah for the last time,” Berger said.

“The old man’s house, worth, like, eighty million, this huge car collection, unbelievable antiques, statues, Michelangelo paintings on the walls and ceilings, frescoes, whatever you call them.”

“I doubt they’re Michelangelos,” Berger said wryly.

“Like a hundred years old, un-freakin’-believable, practically takes up a city block. Bobby’s from money, too. So he and Hannah had a business partnership. She used to tell me they never had sex. Like, not even once.”

Berger made a note that Hap Judd continued to refer to Hannah in the past tense. He continued talking about her as if she was dead.

“But the old man got tired of her being this rich little playgirl and said she needed to settle down with someone so he’d know the business was going to be handled right,” Judd continued. “Rupe didn’t want to leave everything to her if she was still running around, you know, single and partying, and then ended up marrying some schmuck who got his hands on everything. So you can see why she’d screw around on Bobby-even though she used to tell me that sometimes she was afraid of him. It wasn’t really screwing around because they didn’t have that kind of deal.”

“When did you begin having a sexual relationship with Hannah?”

“That first time at the mansion? Let me put it to you this way. She was real friendly. They have an indoor pool, an entire spa like something in Europe. It was me and some other VIP clients, new clients, there for a swim, for drinks and dinner, all these servants everywhere, Dom Pérignon and Cristal flowing like Kool-Aid. So I’m in the pool and she was paying a lot of attention. She started it.”

“She started it on your first visit to her father’s house a year ago this past August?”

Lucy sat with her arms crossed, staring. She was silent and wouldn’t look at Berger.

“It was obvious,” Judd said.

“Where was Bobby while she was being obvious?”

“I don’t know. Maybe showing off his new Porsche. I do remember that. He’d gotten one of those Carrera GTs, a red one. That picture of him all over the news? That’s the car. He was giving people rides up and down Park Avenue. You ask me, you ought to be checking Bobby out. Like, where was he when Hannah disappeared, huh?”

Bobby Fuller was in their North Miami Beach apartment when Hannah disappeared, and Berger wasn’t going to offer that.

She said, “Where were you the night before Thanksgiving?”

“Me?” He almost laughed. “Now you’re thinking I did something to her? No way. I don’t hurt people. That’s not my thing.”

Berger made a note. Judd was assuming Hannah had been “hurt.”

“I asked a simple question,” Berger said. “Where were you the night before Thanksgiving, Wednesday, November twenty-sixth?”

“Let me think.” His leg was jumping up and down again. “I honestly don’t remember.”

“Three weeks ago, the Thanksgiving holiday, and you don’t remember.”

“Wait a minute. I was in the city. Then the next day I flew to L.A. I like to fly on holidays, because the airports aren’t crowded. I flew to L.A. Thanksgiving morning.”

Berger wrote it down on her legal pad and said to Lucy, “We’ll check that out.” To Judd, “You remember what airline, what flight you were on?”

“American. Around noon, I don’t remember the flight number. I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, don’t give a damn about turkey and stuffing and all that. It’s nothing to me, which is why I had to think for a minute.” His leg bounced rapidly. “I know you probably think it’s suspicious.”

“What do I think is suspicious?”

“She disappears and the next day I’m on a plane out of here,” he said.