The Scarpetta Factor

17

The lights of Manhattan cast a murky glow along the horizon, turning it a purplish blue like a bruise as Benton traveled south on the West Side Highway, following the Hudson, headed downtown in the dark.

Between warehouses and fences he caught glimpses of the Palm-olive Building, and the Colgate clock showed that the time was twenty of seven. The Statue of Liberty was in bas relief against the river and the sky, with her arm held high. Benton ’s driver cut over on Vestry Street, deeper into the financial district, where the symptoms of the languishing economy were palpable and depressing: restaurant windows covered with brown paper, notices of seized businesses taped to their doors, clearance sales, retail spaces and apartments for rent.

As people moved out, graffiti moved in, spray paint marring abandoned restaurants and stores and metal shutters and blank billboards. Crude, crass scrawls, most of it outrageous and nonsensical, and cartoons everywhere, some of them stunning. The stock market as Humpty Dumpty having his big fall. The U.S.S. Economy sinking like the Titanic. A mural of Freddie Mac as the Grinch in a sleigh piled high with debt, his eight subprime-lender reindeer galloping over the rooftops of foreclosed homes. Uncle Sam bending over so AIG could fuck him in the ass.

Warner Agee was dead. Scarpetta hadn’t informed Benton. Marino had. Just a few minutes ago he’d called, not because he knew or could even guess the role Agee had played in Benton ’s life. Marino simply thought Benton would want to know that the forensic psychiatrist had jumped off a bridge, and Scarpetta’s BlackBerry had been found in the hotel room where he had been staying since mid-October, in time for CNN’s fall season. Carley Crispin must have worked out an arrangement with Agee-or someone had. She’d bring him to New York and put him up, take care of him, in exchange for information and appearing on her show. For some reason she assumed he was worth it. Benton wondered how much she really believed or if she didn’t care about the veracity of Agee’s claims as long as she could get away with making a name for herself on prime-time TV. Or was Agee involved in something Benton couldn’t imagine? He didn’t know, didn’t know anything, really, and wondered if he could ever put Warner Agee behind him and why he didn’t feel relief or vindication, why he didn’t feel something, feel anything at all. He was numb. The way he’d felt when he’d finally emerged from deep cover, from being presumed dead.

The first time he’d walked along the harbor in Boston, the city of his youth, where he’d been hiding in various hovels on and off for six years, and he’d realized he no longer had to be the fictitious man Tom Haviland, he hadn’t felt euphoric. He hadn’t felt free. He simply hadn’t felt. He’d understood completely why some people get out of prison and rob the first convenience store they see so they can go right back. Benton had wanted to go back to being exiled from himself. It had gotten easy to no longer bear the burden of being Benton. He’d gotten good at feeling bad. He’d found meaning and solace in his meaningless existence and suffering even as he’d worked desperately to calculate his way out of it, plotting and planning with surgical precision to eliminate those who made his nonexistence necessary, the organized-crime cartel, the French family of Chandonne.

Spring 2003. Cool, almost cold, the wind blowing off the harbor and the sun out, and Benton was standing on Burroughs Wharf watching the Boston Fire Department’s Marine Unit escort a de stroyer flying a Norwegian flag, the red fireboats circling the huge shark-gray ship, the firemen in good spirits as they manned deck guns, aiming them up, a plumage of water spraying high in the air, a playful salute. Welcome to America. As if the welcome had been for him. Welcome back, Benton. But he hadn’t felt welcome. Hadn’t felt anything. He’d watched the spectacle and pretended it was just for him, the equivalent of pinching himself to see if he was still alive. Are you? he kept asking himself. Who am I? His mission finally executed in the dark heart of Louisiana, in the bayous and decaying mansions and the ports, where he’d used his brain and his gun to free himself from his oppressors, the Chandonnes and their henchmen, and he’d won. It’s over, he’d told himself. You won, he’d said. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this, he kept thinking as he’d walked along the wharf, watching the firemen having fun. His fantasies of the joy he would feel had turned phony and tasteless in the blink of an eye, like biting into a steak and realizing it was plastic, like driving along a sun-scorched highway and never getting one inch closer to a mirage.

He’d found himself terrified of returning to something that was no longer there, found himself just as afraid of having choices as he’d been of having none, just as afraid of having Kay Scarpetta as he’d been afraid of never having her again. Life and its complexities and contradictions. Nothing makes sense and everything does. Warner Agee got what he deserved and he did it to himself and it wasn’t his fault and he shouldn’t be blamed. A case of meningitis at the age of four had crashed his destiny as surely as if it had been rear-ended by a car and the chain reaction had continued, one collision after the next, not stopping until his body did on the pavement of a bridge. Agee was in the morgue and Benton was in a taxi, both of them sharing one thing in common at this precise point in time: They had a day of reckoning staring them in the eye, were about to meet their Maker.

The FBI occupied six floors inside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and Customs Courthouse in the heart of the government center, a complex of modernist glass-and-concrete architecture surrounded by the more traditional columned buildings of the U.S. Courthouse and state office buildings, and blocks away, City Hall, One Police Plaza, One Hogan Place, and the city jail. As was true of most federal centers, this one was cordoned off with yellow tape and fencing, and concrete blast barriers had been strategically placed to prevent vehicles from getting too close. The entire front plaza, a maze of curling green benches and dead grass mounds patched with snow, was inaccessible to the public. To enter the building, Benton had to get out of the taxi at Thomas Paine Park, trot across Lafayette, already busy with traffic. He turned right on Duane Street, also closed to cars, a pop-up barrier with a tire shredder and a guard booth in case you didn’t notice the Do Not Enter signs.

The forty-one-story glass-and-granite building wasn’t open yet, and he pressed a buzzer and identified himself to a uniformed FBI police officer on the other side of the side entrance’s glass door. Benton said he was here to see Special Agent Marty Lanier, and after a moment of checking, the officer let him in. Benton handed over a driver’s license, emptied his pockets, and walked through the x-ray scanner, having a status no more special than the immigrants who lined up along Worth Street every business day in quest of becoming U.S. citizens. Across a granite lobby was a second checkpoint, this one behind a heavy glass-and-steel door near the elevators, and he went through the same process again, only this time he was required to surrender his driver’s license and in exchange was given a key and an ID.

“Any electronic devices, including phones, go in there,” the officer said from his booth, pointing at a bank of small lockers above a table, as if Benton had never been here before. “Keep your ID displayed at all times, and you’ll get your license back when you return your key.”

“Thanks. I’ll see if I can remember all that.”

Benton pretended to lock up his BlackBerry, tucked it up his sleeve instead. As if there was some great threat he was going to take photographs or a video of a fucking field office. He slipped the locker key in his coat pocket, and inside the elevator he pushed the button for the twenty-eighth floor. The ID with its big V indicating he was a visitor was yet another insult, and he tucked it in his pocket, contemplating whether what he’d done was right when Marino had called about Agee’s suicide.

Marino had mentioned he was on his way to Rodman’s Neck and he’d see Benton later on at the meeting, whenever the FBI got around to deciding on a time. Benton, having just gotten in the cab, was on his way downtown to the very meeting Marino was talking about, and Benton had chosen to say nothing. He’d rationalized that the information wasn’t his to offer. Clearly, Marty Lanier hadn’t requested Marino’s presence. Benton didn’t know whose presence she had requested, but Marino wasn’t on the list or he would be here and not on his way to the Bronx. Benton considered that when Marino had talked to Lanier earlier, maybe he’d said something to piss her off.

The elevator doors opened in front of the Executive Management Section, behind glass doors etched with the Department of Justice seal. Benton didn’t see any sign of anyone, and he didn’t go inside to sit down, preferring to wait in the corridor. He wandered past the typical display cases every Bureau headquarters he’d ever been in boasted-trophies from the hunt, as he thought of them. He took off his coat, looking and listening for any sign of anyone as he idly perused remnants of the Cold War. Hollowed-out rocks and coins and cigarette packs for the clandestine transfer of microfilm. Antitank weapons from the Soviet bloc.

He wandered past FBI movie posters. “G” Men, The FBI Story, The House on 92nd Street, Thunderheart, Donnie Brasco. A wall of them that kept on going, and he was constantly amazed by the public’s insatiable interest in all things Bureau, not just here but abroad, nothing about FBI agents ever boring unless you were one. Then it was a job, except they owned you. Not just you, but they owned everyone connected to you. When the Bureau had owned him, it had owned Scarpetta, and it had allowed Warner Agee to pry them apart, to tear them from each other, to force them on separate trains bound for different death camps. Benton told himself he didn’t miss his old life, didn’t miss the fucking FBI. Fucking Agee had done him a fucking favor. Agee was dead. Benton felt a spike of emotion, was startled by it, as if he’d been shocked.

He turned around at the sound of quick footsteps on tile, and a woman he’d never seen before was walking toward him, brunette, compellingly pretty, nice body, mid-thirties, dressed in a soft tawny leather jacket, dark slacks, and boots. The Bureau had a habit of hiring more than its quota of good-looking, accomplished people. Not a stereotype but a fact. It was a wonder they didn’t fraternize more, men and women shoulder to shoulder, day in and day out, high-caliber, a little power-drunk, and with a hefty dose of narcissism. They restrained themselves for the most part. When Benton had been an agent, affairs on the job were the exception or so deep undercover they were rarely found out.

“ Benton?” She offered her hand and shook his firmly. “Marty Lanier. Security said you were on your way up and I didn’t mean to make you wait. You’ve been here before.”

It wasn’t a question. She wouldn’t ask if she didn’t already know the answer and everything else she could possibly find out about him. He had her instantly typed. Smart as hell, hypomanic, didn’t know failure. What he called an IPM. In perpetual motion. Benton had his BlackBerry in hand. Didn’t care if she saw it. Was blatant about checking his messages. Don’t tell him what to do. He wasn’t a goddamn visitor.

“We’re in the SAC conference room,” she said. “We’ll get coffee first.”

If she was using the special agent in charge’s conference room, the meeting wasn’t going to be just the two of them. Her accent was shades of Brooklyn or uptown white New Orleans, hard to tell apart. Whatever her dialect, she’d worked to flatten it out.

“Detective Marino’s not here,” Benton said, tucking the BlackBerry in his pocket.

“He’s not essential,” she replied, walking.

Benton found the remark annoying.

“I spoke to him earlier, as you know, and in light of the most recent developments, he’s more helpful to all involved if he’s where he is.” She glanced at her watch, a black rubber Luminox popular with Navy SEALs, was probably a member of the Dive Team, another Bureau Wonder Woman. “He should be there soon.” She was referring to Rodman’s Neck. “Sun rises at oh-seven-hundred plus fifteen or so. The package in question should be rendered safe shortly, and we’ll know what it is and how to proceed.”

Benton didn’t say anything. He was irritated. Feeling hostile.

“I should say if. If there’s a reason to proceed. Don’t know for sure it’s germane to other matters.” She continued answering questions that hadn’t been asked.

Classic FBI, as if new agents go to some Berlitz school of bureaucratic language to learn to double-talk like that. Tell people what you want them to know. Doesn’t matter what they need. Mislead or evade or, most commonly, tell them nothing.

“Hard to know what exactly is germane to what at this moment,” she added.

He felt as if a glass dome had dropped over him. No point in commenting. He wouldn’t be heard. His voice wouldn’t carry. He may not even have one.

“I called him originally because he was listed as the contact on a data request electronically sent by RTCC,” she was saying. “A tattoo on a subject who delivered the package to your building. That much I explained to you during our brief phone conversation, Benton, and I realize what you don’t know is anything else. I apologize for that but can assure you we wouldn’t have summoned you out at this early hour if it wasn’t a matter of extreme urgency.”

They walked down a long corridor, passing interview rooms, each bare with a table and two chairs and a steel handcuff rail, everything beige and blue, what Benton called “federal blue.” The blue background of every photo he’d ever seen taken of a director. The blue of Janet Reno’s dresses. The blue of George W. Bush’s ties. The blue of people who lie until they’re blue in the face. Republican blue. There were a hell of a lot of blue Republicans in the FBI. It had always been an ultraconservative organization. No fucking wonder Lucy had been driven out, fired. Benton was an Independent. He wasn’t anything anymore.

“Do you have any questions before we join the others?” Lanier stopped before a beige metal door. She entered a code on a keypad and the lock clicked.

Benton said, “I infer you’re expecting me to explain to Detective Marino why he was told he should be here. And how it came to pass that we’re here for your meeting and he knows nothing about it.” Anger simmered.

“You have a long-standing affiliation with Peter Rocco Marino.”

It sounded odd hearing someone call him by his full name. Lanier was walking briskly again. Another hallway, this one longer. Benton ’s anger. It was beginning to boil.

“You worked a number of cases with him in the nineties when you were the unit chief of BSU. What’s now BAU,” she said. “And then your career was interrupted. I assume you know the news.” Not looking at him as they walked. “About Warner Agee. Didn’t know him, never met him. Although he’s been of interest for a while.”

Benton stopped walking, the two of them alone in the middle of an endless empty corridor, a long monotony of dingy beige walls and scuffed gray tile. Depersonalized, institutionalized. Intended to be unprovocative and unimaginative and unrewarding and unforgiving. He placed his hand on her shoulder and was mildly surprised by its firmness. She was small but strong, and when she met his eyes, a question was in hers.

He said, “Don’t fuck with me.”

A glint in her eyes like metal, and she said, “Please take your hand off me.”

He dropped it to his side and repeated what he’d said quietly and with no inflection, “Don’t fuck with me, Marty.”

She crossed her arms, looking at him, her stance slightly defiant but unafraid.

“You may be the new generation and have briefed yourself up to your eyeballs, but I know more about how it works than you will if you live ten lives,” he said.

“No one questions your experience or your expertise, Benton.”

“You know exactly what I’m saying, Marty. Don’t whistle for me to come like some goddamn dog and then trot me off to a meeting so you can show everybody the tricks the Bureau trained me to perform in the dark ages. The Bureau didn’t train me to do a goddamn thing. I trained myself, and you’ll never begin to understand what I’ve been through and why. And who they are.”

“ ‘Who they are’?” She didn’t seem even slightly put off by him.

“The people Warner was involved with. Because that’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it? Like a moth, Warner took on the shadings of his environment. After a while, you can’t tell entities like him from the polluted edifices they cling to. He was a parasite. An antisocial personality disorder. A sociopath. A psychopath. Whatever the hell you people call monsters these days. And just when I was starting to feel sorry for the deaf son of a bitch.”

“Can’t imagine your feeling sorry for him,” she said. “After what he did.”

It knocked Benton off guard.

“Suffice it to say, if Warner Agee hadn’t lost everything, and I don’t just mean financially, and decompensated beyond his ability to control himself, become desperate, in other words?” she went on. “We’d have a hell of a lot more to worry about. As for his hotel room, Carley Crispin might have been paying, but that’s for a mundanely practical reason. Agee has no credit cards. They’re all expired. He was destitute, and likely was reimbursing Carley in cash, or at least contributing something. I sincerely doubt she has anything to do with this, by the way. For her it was all about the show going on.”

“Who did he get involved with.” It wasn’t a question.

“I have a feeling you know. Find the right pressure points and eventually you disable someone twice your size.”

“Pressure points. As in plural. More than one,” Benton said.

“We’ve been working on these people, not sure who they are, but we’re getting closer to bringing them down. That’s why you’re here,” she said.

“They’re not gone,” he said.

She resumed walking.

“I couldn’t get rid of all of them,” he said. “They’ve had years to be busy, to cause trouble, to figure out whatever they want.”

“Like terrorists,” she said.

“They are terrorists. Just a different sort.”

“I’ve read the dossier on what you did get rid of in Louisiana. Impressive. Welcome back. I wouldn’t have wanted to be you during all that. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Scarpetta. Warner Agee wasn’t completely wrong-you were in the most extreme danger imaginable. But his motives couldn’t have been more wrong. He wanted you to disappear. It was worse than killing you, really.” She said it as if she was describing which was more unpleasant, meningitis or the avian flu. “The rest of it was our fault, although I wasn’t around back then, was a fledgling Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Orleans. Signed on with the Bureau a year later, got my master’s in forensic psychology after that because I wanted to get involved with behavioral analysis, am the NCAVC coordinator for the New Orleans field office. I won’t say I wasn’t influenced by the situation down there or by you.”

“You were there when I was. When they were. Sam Lanier. The coroner of East Baton Rouge,” Benton said. “Related?”

“My uncle. I guess you could say that dealing with the darker side of life runs in the family. I know what happened down there, am actually assigned to the field office in New Orleans. Just got here a few weeks ago. I could get used to this, to New York, if I could ever find a parking place. You should never have been forced out of the Bureau, Benton. I didn’t think so at the time.”

“At the time?”

“Warner Agee was obvious. His evaluation of you ostensibly on behalf of the Undercover Safeguard Unit. The hotel room in Waltham, Mass. Summer of 2003 when he deemed you no longer fit for duty, suggested a desk job or teaching new agents. I’m quite aware. Again, the right thing for the wrong reason. His opinion had to be allowed, and maybe it was for the best. If you’d stayed, just what do you think you would have done?” She looked at him, stopping at the next shut door.

Benton didn’t answer. She entered her code and they walked into the Criminal Division, a rabbit warren of partitioned work spaces, all of them blue.

“Still, it was the Bureau’s loss, a very big loss,” she said. “I suggest we get coffee in the break room, such as it is.” She headed in that direction, a small room with a coffeemaker, a refrigerator, a table, and four chairs. “I won’t say what goes around comes around. About Agee,” she added, pouring coffee for both of them. “He sui cided your career, or tried to, and now he’s done the same to his.”

“He started self-destructing his career long before now.”

“Yes, he did.”

“The one who escaped death row in Texas,” Benton then said. “I didn’t get rid of all of them. I didn’t get rid of him, couldn’t find him. Is he still alive?”

“What do you take in it?” Opening a Tupperware container of creamer, rinsing a plastic spoon in the sink.

“I didn’t get rid of all of them. I didn’t get him,” Benton said it again.

“If we could ever get rid of all of them,” Lanier said, “I’d be out a job.”

The NYPD Firearms and Tactics Section on Rodman’s Neck was surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire. Were it not for that unfriendly obstruction and the heavy weapons going off and signs everywhere that said DANGER BLASTING and KEEP AWAY and DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE, the south ernmost tip of the Bronx, jutting out like a finger into the Long Island Sound, would be, in Marino’s opinion, the choicest real estate in the Northeast.

The early morning was gray and overcast, eelgrass and bare trees agitated by the wind as he rode with Lieutenant Al Lobo in a black SUV through what was to Marino a fifty-something-acre theme park of ordnance bunkers, tactical houses, maintenance shops, hangars of emergency response trucks and armored vehicles, and firing ranges indoors and out, including one for snipers. Police and FBI and officers from other agencies went through so many rounds of ammunition that metal drums of their spent brass were as common as trash barrels at a picnic. Nothing was wasted, not even police vehicles totaled in the line of duty or simply driven to death. They ended up out here, were shot and blown up, used in urban simulations, such as riots and suicide bombings.

For all its seriousness, the base had its touches of cop humor, a comic-book motif of brightly painted bombs and rockets and Howitzer rounds buried nose-first in the ground and sticking out of the strangest places. During downtime when the weather was nice, the techs and instructors cooked out in front of their Quonset huts and played cards or with the bomb dogs, or this time of year, sat around and talked while fixing anything electrical that was broken in toys donated to needy families who couldn’t afford Christmas. Marino loved the Neck, and as he and Lobo drove and talked about Dodie Hodge, it occurred to Marino that this was the first time he’d ever been here when he didn’t hear gunfire, semiautomatics and full auto MP5s, the noise so constant it was calming to him, like being at the movies and hearing popcorn popping.

Even the sea ducks got used to it and maybe came to expect it, eiders and old-squaws swimming by and waddling up on the shore. No wonder some of the best waterfowl shooting was in these parts. The ducks didn’t recognize danger in guns going off-pretty damn unsportsmanlike, if you asked Marino. They should call it “sitting duck season,” he thought, and he wondered what the constant discharging of weapons and detonations did to fishing, because he’d heard there were some pretty nice black sea bass, fluke, and winter flounder in the sound. One of these days he’d have his own boat and keep it at a marina on City Island. Maybe even live over there.

“I think we should get out here,” Lobo said, stopping the Tahoe midway in the explosive demolition range, about a hundred yards downwind of where Scarpetta’s package was locked up. “Keep my truck out of the way. They get upset when you accidentally blow up city property.”

Marino climbed out, careful where he stepped, the ground uneven with rocks and scrap metal and frag. He was surrounded by a terrain of pits and berms built of sandbags, and rough roadbeds leading to day boxes and observation points of concrete and ballistic glass, and beyond was the water. For as far as he could see, there was water, a few boats far off in the distance and the Yacht Club on City Island. He’d heard stories about vessels coming loose from their moorings and drifting with the tides, ending up on the shores of Rodman’s Neck and civilian tow services not fighting over the job of retrieving them, some saying you couldn’t pay them enough. Finders keepers, it ought to be. A World Cat 290 with twin Suzuki four-strokes high and dry in sand and cobble, and Marino would brave a hailstorm of bullets and shrapnel as long as he didn’t have to give it back.

Bomb tech Ann Droiden was up ahead, in a Tactical Duty Uniform, TDUs, dark-blue canvas seven-pocket pants, probably lined with flannel because of the weather, a parka, ATAC Storm Boots, and amber-tinted wraparound glasses. She didn’t wear a hat, and her hands were bare as she clamped the steel tube of a PAN disrupter to a folding stand. She was something to look at but probably too young for Marino. Early thirties, he guessed.

“Try and behave yourself,” Lobo said.

“I believe she should be reclassified to a weapon of mass destruction,” Marino said, and he always had a hard time not openly gawking at her.

Something about her strong-featured good looks and amazingly agile hands, and he realized she reminded him a little of the Doc, of what she was like when she was that age, when they’d just started working together in Richmond. Back then, for a woman to be the chief of a statewide medical examiner’s system as formidable as Virginia ’s was unheard of, and Scarpetta had been the first female medical examiner Marino had ever met, maybe even ever seen.

“The phone call made from the Hotel Elysée to CNN. It’s just a thought I had, and I’ll mention it even if it sounds far-fetched, because this lady’s, what, in her fifties?” Lobo got back to the conversation they’d started in the SUV.

“What’s Dodie Hodge’s age got to do with her making the call?” Marino said, and he wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing, leaving Lucy and Scarpetta alone at the Hotel Elysée.

He didn’t understand what was going on over there, except that Lucy sure as hell knew how to take care of herself, was probably better at it than Marino, if he was honest. She could shoot a lollipop off its stick at fifty yards. But he was tied in knots, trying to figure things out. According to Lobo, the phone call Dodie Hodge made to CNN last night traced back to the Hotel Elysée. That was the number captured by caller ID, yet Dodie Hodge wasn’t a guest at the hotel. The same manager Marino had dealt with earlier said there was no record of anybody by that name ever staying there, and when Marino had provided Dodie’s physical description, based on information he’d gotten when he was at RTCC, the manager had said absolutely not. He had no idea who Dodie Hodge was, and furthermore, no outgoing call had been made to The Crispin Report’s 1-800 number last night. In fact, no outgoing call had been made from the Hotel Elysée at the precise time-nine-forty-three-when Dodie had called CNN and was put on hold before she was put on the air.

“How much do you know about spoofing?” Lobo said, as he and Marino walked. “You heard of buying these Spoof Cards?”

“I’ve heard of it. Another pain-in-the-ass thing for us to fucking worry about,” Marino said.

He wasn’t allowed to use his cell phone on the range, nothing that emitted an electronic signal. He wanted to call Scarpetta and tell her about Dodie Hodge. Or maybe he should tell Lucy. Dodie Hodge might have some sort of connection to Warner Agee. He couldn’t call anyone, not on the demolition range, where there was at least one possible bomb locked up in a day box.

“Tell me about it,” Lobo was saying as they walked and icy wind blasted in from the Sound, through the fence and between berms. “You buy these perfectly legal Spoof Cards and can make any number you want appear in the caller ID screen of whoever you’re calling and trying to spoof.”

Marino contemplated that if Dodie Hodge had a connection to Warner Agee, who obviously had a connection to Carley Crispin, whose show Agee had been on multiple times this fall, and Dodie had called last night, maybe the three of them were connected. This was crazy. How could Agee, Dodie, and Carley be connected, and why? It was like all those offshoots on the data wall at RTCC. You search one name and find fifty others linked to it, reminding him of Saint Henry’s Catholic School, of the cluttered tree branches he’d draw on the chalkboard when he was forced to diagram compound sentences in English class.

“A couple months ago,” Lobo went on, “my phone rings and there’s this number on my caller ID. It’s the number for the fucking switchboard at the White House. I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ So I answer and it’s my ten-year-old daughter trying to disguise her voice, and she says, ‘Please hold for the president.’ I’m not amused. This is my cell phone I use for work, and it’s like my heart stopped for a minute.”

If there was one name all the offshoots had in common, Marino asked himself, what would it be?

“Turns out she got the Spoof Card and the idea from one of her friends, some boy who’s maybe eleven,” Lobo said. “You go on the Internet, the number for the White House is right there. It’s fucked up. Like every time we figure out how to stop this bullshit, there’s something else out there to defeat our efforts.”

Hannah Starr, Marino decided. Except now it seemed that the one thing everybody had in common was the Doc, he worried. That’s why he was walking through the explosives range in the freezing cold at dawn. He turned up the collar of his coat, his ears so cold they were about to fall off.

He said to Lobo, “Seems like if you buy a SpoofCard, you can get traced through the carrier.”

Ann Droiden was walking toward the white metal day box with an empty milk jug. She held it under a tank and started filling it with water.

“If the carrier’s served with a subpoena, maybe you’ll get lucky, but that’s assuming you’ve got a suspect. You got no suspect, how the hell do you know who the fake number traces back to, especially if they don’t use their own phone to make the call? It’s a fucking nightmare,” Lobo said. “So this Dodie Hodge lady, saying she’s clever, at least as clever as a ten-year-old, could have spoofed to get us off the scent. Maybe she spoofed when she called The Crispin Report last night, and it looks like she’s at the Hotel Elysée when, truth is, we don’t know where the hell she is. Or maybe she was setting up this Agee guy you were telling me about. Maybe she didn’t like him, like a really bad practical joke. But the other thought is what makes you so sure she sent the singing card, for example?”

“She’s singing on it.”

“Who says?”

“ Benton. He should know, since he spent time with her in the bin.”

“Doesn’t mean she’s the one who sent the card. We should be careful of assumptions, that’s all. Shit, it’s cold. And nothing we do out here lets me wear gloves that are worth a damn.”

Droiden set the jug of water on the ground near a big black hard case that held twelve-gauge shotgun cartridges and components of the PAN disrupter, the water cannon. Nearby was a portable metal magazine and several Roco gear and equipment bags, big ones that likely held more equipment and gear, including the bomb disposal suit and helmet she’d be putting on when she was set up and ready to retrieve the package from the day box. She squatted by the open case and picked up a black plastic plug, a screw-on breech, and one of the shotgun cartridges. A diesel engine sounded in the distance-an EMS ambulance showing up, parking on the dirt road, at the ready in case all didn’t go according to plan.

“Again,” Lobo said, removing a bag from his shoulder, “I’m not saying this Dodie lady used a SpoofCard. I’m just saying that caller ID doesn’t mean shit anymore.”

“Don’t talk to me about it,” Droiden said, plugging one end of the tubing. “My boyfriend got spoofed, some asshole he has a restraining order against. She calls him and the caller ID says it’s his mother.”

“That’s too bad,” Marino said. He didn’t know she had a boyfriend.

“It’s like these anonymizers people use so you can’t trace their IP, or you do and think they’re in another country when they’re your next-door neighbor.” She inserted the shotgun round into the breech, which she screwed to the plugged back end of the tube. “You can’t be sure anything’s what it appears to be when it’s got to do with phones, with computers. Perps wear cloaks of invisibility. You don’t know who’s doing what, and even if you do, it’s hard to prove. Nobody’s accountable anymore.”

Lobo had removed a laptop computer from his bag and was turning it on. Marino wondered why a computer was okay out here and not his phone. He didn’t ask. He was in overload, like his engine might overheat any minute.

“So I don’t need a suit on or anything,” he said. “You sure there’s nothing in there like anthrax or some chemical that’s going to give me cancer?”

“Before I put the package in the day box last night,” Droiden said, “I checked it out soup to nuts with the FH Forty, the Twenty-two-hundred R, and APD Two thousand, a high-range ion chamber, a gas monitor, every detector you can think of, in part because of the target.”

She meant Scarpetta.

“It was taken seriously, to say the least,” Droiden went on. “Not that we’re lax out here on any given day, but this is considered special circumstances. Negative for biological agents, at least any known ones like anthrax, ricin, botulism, SEB, and plague. Negative for alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron radiation. No CW agents or irritants. No nerve or blister agents-again, no known ones. No toxic gases, such as ammonia, chlorine, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide. No alarms went off, but whatever’s in the package is off-gassing something. I could smell it.”

“Probably what’s in the vial-shaped thing,” Marino said.

“Something with a foul smell, a fetid, tarry-type odor,” she answered. “Don’t know what it is. None of the detectors could identify it.”

“At least we know what it’s not,” Lobo said. “Which is somewhat reassuring. Hopefully it’s nothing to worry about.”

“Maybe picking up on a contaminant out here?” Marino was thinking about all the different devices that were rendered safe on the range. Decades of bombs and pyrotechnics being shot with water cannons and detonated.

“Like we’re saying, we didn’t get a reading,” Droiden said. “In addition, we account for potential interference vapors that can cause false positives. Devices we’ve rendered safe out here that might off-gas anything from gasoline to diesel fuel to household bleach? There wouldn’t be enough of an interferent vapor at this point for detectable levels. Nothing false-alarmed last night, although cold temperatures aren’t ideal, the LCDs sure as hell don’t like the weather out here, and we weren’t going to carry the frag bag inside any sort of shelter when we don’t know what type of device we might be dealing with.”

She tilted the PAN disrupter, pointing it almost straight up, and filled it with water, then plugged the front end with a red cap. She leveled the steel tube and tightened the clamps. Reaching back into the open case, she picked out a laser aiming device that slid over the tip of the barrel like a bore sight. Lobo set the laptop on a sandbag, an x-ray of Scarpetta’s package on the screen. Droiden would use the image to map a targeting grid that she would align with the laser sight so she could take out the power source-button batteries-with the water cannon.

“Maybe you could hand me the shock tube,” she said to Lobo.

He opened the portable magazine, a midsize Army green steel box, and lifted out a reel of what looked like bright yellow plastic-coated twelve-gauge wire, a low-strength det-cord that was safe to handle without fire-retardant clothing or an EOD bomb disposal suit. The inside of the tubing was coated with the explosive HMX, just enough to transmit the necessary shock waves to hit the firing pin inside the breech, which in turn would strike the primer of the cartridge, which would ignite the powder charge, only this shotgun cartridge was a blank. There were no projectiles. What got blasted out of the tube was about five ounces of water traveling at maybe eight hundred feet per second, enough to blow a good-size hole in Scarpetta’s FedEx box and take out the power source.

Droiden unrolled several yards of the tube and attached one end to a connector on the breech and the other end to a firing device, what looked like a small green remote control with two buttons, one red, one black. Unzipping two of the Roco bags, she pulled out the green jacket, trousers, and helmet of the bomb suit.

“Now, if you boys will excuse me,” she said. “I need to get dressed.”