The Scarpetta Factor

19

Scarpetta dragged the open suitcase across the floor. The twenty-nine accordion file folders inside it, bound by elastic bands and labeled with white stickers that had handwritten dates on them, covered a span of twenty-six years. Most of Warner Agee’s career.

“If I talked to Jaime, what do you think she’d tell me about you?” she continued to probe.

“That’s easy. I’m pathological.” Lucy’s anger flashed.

Sometimes her anger was so sudden and intense that Scarpetta could see it like lightning.

“I’m pissed all the time. Want to hurt someone,” Lucy said.

Agee must have moved a lot of his personal belongings to the Hotel Elysée, certainly ones that were important to him. Scarpetta picked out the most recent folders and sat on the carpet at her niece’s feet.

“Why do you want to hurt someone?” Scarpetta asked her.

“To get back what was fucking taken from me. To redeem myself somehow and get a second chance so I never let anybody do something like that to me again. Do you know what’s terrible?” Lucy’s eyes blazed. “It’s terrible to decide there are some people it’s okay to destroy, to kill. And to imagine it, to work it out in your mind, and not feel even a twitch or a twinge. To feel nothing. Like he probably felt.” Waving her arm as if Warner Agee was in the room. “That’s when the worst happens. When you feel nothing anymore. That’s when you do it-you do something you can’t take back. It’s terrible to know you’re really no different from the assholes you’re chasing and trying to protect people from.”

Scarpetta slipped off the elastic band of the accordion file that appeared to be the most recent one, beginning January first of this year, the end date left blank.

“You are different from them,” she said.

“I can’t take it back,” Lucy said.

“What is it you can’t take back?”

The file’s six compartments were crammed with papers, receipts, a checkbook, and a brown leather wallet that was worn smooth and curved from years of being carried in a back pocket.

“I can’t take back that I did it.” Lucy took a deep breath, refusing to cry. “I’m a bad person.”

“No, you’re not,” Scarpetta replied.

Agee’s driver’s license had expired three years ago. His Master-Card was expired. His Visa and American Express cards were expired.

“I am,” Lucy said. “You know what I’ve done.”

“You’re not a bad person, and I say that knowing what you’ve done. Maybe not everything, but plenty,” Scarpetta said. “You were FBI, ATF, and like Benton, involved in so much that you really couldn’t help and you certainly couldn’t talk about and likely still can’t. Of course I’m aware, and I’m also aware it’s been in the line of duty or for a very sound reason. Like a soldier on the front line. That’s what cops are, they’re soldiers who go beyond the limits of what’s normal so they can somehow keep life normal for the rest of us.”

She counted fourteen hundred and forty dollars cash, all twenties, as if they had come from an ATM.

Lucy then said, “Really? What about Rocco Caggiano?”

“What about his father, Pete Marino, if you hadn’t?” Scarpetta didn’t know the details of what had happened in Poland, and she didn’t want to, but she understood the reason. “Marino would be dead,” she said. “Rocco was involved in organized crime and would have killed him. It was already set in motion, and you stopped it.”

She began looking at receipts for food, toiletries, and transportation, a lot of them from hotels, stores, restaurants, and taxicabs in Detroit, Michigan. Paid in cash.

“I wish I hadn’t, that somebody else had. I killed his son. I’ve done a lot of things I can’t take back,” Lucy said.

“What can any of us take back? Foolish words, a phrase. People say it all the time, but in fact, we can’t take anything back,” Scarpetta said. “All we can do is step around the messes we’ve made and take responsibility and apologize and try to move on.”

She was making piles on the floor, digging in the accordion files to see what Agee had thought was important enough about his life to save. She found an envelope of canceled checks. Last January he spent more than six thousand dollars on two Siemens Motion 700 hearing aids and accessories. He’d donated his old ones to Goodwill and gotten a receipt. Soon after, he’d become a subscriber to a Web-based captioning telephone service. No pay stubs or bank records that might indicate where he was getting his money. She pulled out a manila envelope labeled IAP. It was thick with newsletters, conference programs, journal articles, all in French, and more receipts and plane tickets. In July 2006 Agee had traveled to Paris to attend a conference at the Institut Anomalous Psychologie.

Scarpetta’s conversational French wasn’t good, but she could read it fairly well. She scanned a letter from a committee member of the Global Consciousness Project, thanking Agee for agreeing to participate in a discussion on the use of scientific tools in looking for structure in random data during major global events, such as 9/11. The committee member was pleased that he would be seeing Agee again and wondered if his research in psychokinesis was still encountering difficulties in replicating its findings. The problem, of course, is the raw material of human subjects and the legal and ethical constraints, she translated.

“Why are you thinking about killing and dying?” she asked Lucy. “Who do you want to kill, and do you wish you were dead?” she said, and again was answered by silence. “You’d better tell me, Lucy. I intend to stay in this room with you for as long as it takes.”

“Hannah,” Lucy answered.

“You want to kill Hannah Starr?” Scarpetta glanced up at her. “Or you did kill her or you wish she was dead?”

“I didn’t kill her. I don’t know if she’s dead and don’t care. I just want her punished. I want to do it personally.”

Agee had written the committee member back in French: While it is true that human subjects are biased and as a result tend to be unreliable, this obstacle can be sidestepped if the subjects in a study are monitored in a way that obviates self-consciousness.

“Punished for what? What did she do to you that merits your personally taking care of it?” Scarpetta asked.

She opened another accordion file. More on parapsychology. Journal articles. Agee was fluent in French and prominent in the field of paranormal psychology, the study of the “seventh sense,” the science of the supernatural. The Paris-based Institute of Anomalous Psychology paid his expenses when he traveled and may have been supplying him with stipends and other fees, including grant monies. The Lecoq Foundation that funded the IAP was keenly interested in Agee’s work. There were repeated mentions of Monsieur Lecoq’s eagerness to meet with Agee and discuss their “mutual passions and interests.”

“She did something to you,” Scarpetta continued, and it wasn’t a question. Lucy must know Hannah. “What happened? Did you have an affair with her? Did you have sex with her? What?”

“I didn’t have sex with her. But…”

“But what? You either did or you didn’t. Where did you meet her?”

An abstract. Dans cet article, publié en 2007, Warner Agee, l’un des pionniers de la recherche en parapsychologie, en particulier l’expérience de mort imminente et de sortie hors du corps…

“She wanted me to try something, to start something, to make an overture,” Lucy said.

“A physical one.”

“She assumed everybody wanted to try something with her, to hit on her,” Lucy said. “I didn’t. She flirted. She flaunted it. We were alone. I thought Bobby was going to be there, but he wasn’t. It was just her, and she teased me. But I didn’t. The fucking bitch.”

Near-death and out-of-body experiences. People who die and come back to life with paranormal gifts and abilities: healing and mind over matter. The belief that thoughts can control our own bodies and influence physical systems and objects, Scarpetta kept reading… such as electronic devices, noise, and dice, in the same way that lunar phases can influence casino payout rates.

She asked Lucy, “So, what exactly did Hannah do that was so terrible?”

“I used to tell you about my financial planner.”

“The one you called the Money Man.”

Agee’s tax return for 2007. Income from a retirement fund but no other fees, yet it was clear from correspondence and other paperwork that he was getting money from somewhere or someone. Possibly from the Lecoq Foundation in Paris.

“Her father. Rupe Starr. He was the Money Man,” Lucy said. “From the beginning, when I wasn’t even twenty yet and started doing so well, he managed me. If it hadn’t been for him? Well, I might have given everything away, you know, I was just so happy inventing, dreaming, coming up with ideas I could execute. Creating something out of nothing and making people want it.”

2008. No trips to France. Agee was back and forth to Detroit. Where was he getting his cash?

“At one point I was doing some cool digital stuff that I thought might have promise for animation,” Lucy was saying, “and this person I’d gotten to know who worked for Apple gave me Rupe’s name. You probably know that he was one of the most well-respected and successful money managers on Wall Street.”

“I’m wondering why you felt you could never talk to me about him or your money,” Scarpetta said.

“You didn’t ask.”

What was in Detroit besides the failing auto industry? Scarpetta picked up Lucy’s MacBook.

“I must have asked.” But she couldn’t think of an occasion when she had.

“You didn’t,” Lucy said.

Googling the Lecoq Foundation and finding nothing. Googling Monsieur Lecoq and finding only the expected multiple references to the nineteenth-century French detective novel by Émile Gabo riau. Scarpetta couldn’t find any reference to a real person named Monsieur Lecoq who was a wealthy philanthropist invested in paranormal psychology.

“And you certainly don’t hesitate to interrogate me about anything else that comes to your mind,” Lucy continued. “But you never asked me any specifics about my finances, and if I mentioned the Money Man, you didn’t even ask about him.”

“Maybe I was afraid.” Scarpetta reflected on that sad probability. “So I shied away from the subject by rationalizing that I shouldn’t pry.”

Googling Motor City Casino Hotel and the Grand Palais in Detroit. Receipts from both hotels over the past few years but no evidence Agee had ever stayed in either of them. Doing what? Gambling? Was he a gambler and got rooms comped, perhaps? How could he afford to be a gambler? A piece of paper from a personalized memo pad: From the Desk of Freddie Maestro and what looked like a PIN and City Bank of Detroit and an address written with a felt-tip pen. Why was the name Freddie Maestro familiar? Was the PIN for an ATM?

“Right,” Lucy said. “You can talk about dead bodies and sex but not about someone’s net worth. You can dig through some dead person’s pockets and dresser drawers and personal files and receipts but not ask me very basic questions about how I make my living and who I’m in business with. You never asked me,” Lucy emphasized. “I figured you didn’t want to know because you believed I was doing something illegal. Stealing or cheating the government, so I let it go because I sure as hell wasn’t going to defend myself to you or anyone.”

“I didn’t know because I didn’t want to know.” Scarpetta’s own insecurity because she’d grown up poor. “Because I wanted a level playing field.” Her own inadequacy because she was powerless when she was a child and her family had no money and her father was dying. “And I can’t compete with you when it comes to making money. I’m pretty good at holding on to what I’ve got, but I’ve never had the Midas touch or been in the business of business for the sake of business. I’m not particularly good at it.”

“Why would you want to compete with me?”

“That’s my point. I didn’t. I wouldn’t because I can’t. Maybe I was afraid of losing your respect. And why would you respect my business acumen? If I’d been a brilliant businesswoman, I wouldn’t have gone to law school, to med school, spent twelve years of postgraduate education so I could earn less than a lot of Realtors or car salesmen.”

“If I was such a brilliant businesswoman we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Lucy said.

Googling Michigan on the Internet. The new Las Vegas, and a lot of movies were being filmed there, the state doing what it could to pump money into its hemorrhaging economy. A forty percent tax incentive. And casinos. Michigan had a vocational school for casino dealer training, and some of the organizations supplying tuition assistance included the Veterans Administration, the United Steelworkers, and the United Auto Workers. Come home from Iraq or lose your job at GM and become a blackjack dealer.

“I fucked up. Rupe died last May, and Hannah inherited everything and completely took over. An MBA from Wharton, I’m not saying she isn’t smart,” Lucy said.

“She took over your account?”

“She tried.”

People had to survive any way they could these days, and vices and entertainment were doing well. Movies, the food and beverage industry. Especially liquor. When people feel bad they actively seek feeling good. What did this have to do with Warner Agee? What had he gotten involved in? Scarpetta thought about Toni Darien’s dice keychain and High Roller Lanes being like Vegas, as Bonnell had put it. Mrs. Darien said Toni hoped to end up in Paris or Monte Carlo someday, and her MIT-trained father, Lawrence Darien, was a gambler who might have ties to organized crime, according to Marino. Freddie Maestro, Scarpetta remembered. The name of the man who owned High Roller Lanes. He had game arcades and other businesses in Detroit, Louisiana, South Florida, and she couldn’t remember where else. Ultimately, he had been Toni Darien’s boss. Maybe he knew her father.

“I’d met her a few times, then we had a discussion at her place in Florida and I told her no,” Lucy said. “But I let my guard down and acted on a tip she gave me. I dodged a bullet and got a knife in my back. I didn’t follow my instincts, and she fucked me. She fucked me good.”

“Are you bankrupt?” Scarpetta asked.

Googling Dr. Warner Agee with a combination of keywords. Gambling, casinos, the gaming industry, and Michigan.

“No,” Lucy said. “What I have isn’t the point. It’s not even what I lost. She wanted to hurt me. It gave her pleasure.”

“If Jaime’s doing such a thorough investigation, how can she not know?”

“Who’s doing the thorough investigation, Aunt Kay? It isn’t her. Not the electronic information. All of that’s from me.”

“She has no idea you knew Hannah, that you have this conflict of interest. Because that’s exactly what it is.” Scarpetta talked as she went through more accordion files.

“She’d boot me out of the process, and that would be completely self-defeating and ridiculous,” Lucy answered. “If anybody should be helping, it’s me. And I wasn’t Hannah’s client. I was Rupe’s. You know what’s in his records? Put it this way: Nothing relevant to what Hannah did to me is going to show up. I’ve made sure.”

Scarpetta said, “That’s not right.”

“What’s not right is what she did.”

An article Agee had published in a British journal, Quantum Mechanics, two years earlier. Quantum epistemology and measurement. Planck, Bohr, de Broglie, Einstein. The role of human consciousness in the collapse of the wave function. Single photon interference and causality violations in thermodynamics. The elusiveness of human consciousness.

“What the hell are you looking at?” Lucy asked.

“I’m not sure.”

Scarpetta flipped pages, skimming, reading, stopping at certain sections.

She said, “Students recruited for studies. The relationship between creative and artistic ability and psi. A study done at Juilliard here in New York. Research at Duke University, Cornell, Princeton. The Ganzfeld experiments.”

“Psychic phenomena? ESP?” Lucy had a blank expression on her face.

Scarpetta looked up at her and said, “Sensory deprivation. Why do we want to achieve a state of sensory deprivation?”

“It’s inversely proportional to perception, to acquiring information,” Lucy answered. “The more I deprive my senses, the more I perceive and create. That’s why people meditate.”

“Then why would we want the opposite for anyone? Overstimulation, in other words?” Scarpetta asked.

“We wouldn’t.”

“Unless you’re in the casino business,” Scarpetta said. “Then you would want to seek the most efficient means to overstimulate, to prevent a state of sensory deprivation. You want people to be impulse-driven, to lose their way, so you bombard the visual and auditory environment, the total field, the Ganzfeld, and your clients become a confused quarry without the slightest inkling of what’s safe and what’s not. You blind and deafen them with bright lights and noise so you can take what they’ve got. So you can steal.”

Scarpetta couldn’t stop thinking about Toni Darien and her job in a glitzy place of flashing lights and fast-moving images on huge video displays, where people were encouraged to spend money on food, liquor, and games. Bowl badly and play some more. Bowl badly and drink some more. Hap Judd’s photograph was hanging in High Roller Lanes. He might have known Toni. He might know a former patient of Benton’s, Dodie Hodge. Marino had said something about it to Berger during the conference call last night. Warner Agee might have known Toni Darien’s boss, Freddie Maestro. These people might all know one another or be connected somehow. It was almost nine a.m., and Scarpetta was surrounded by the receipts, spent tickets, schedules, publications-the detritus of Agee’s self-serving, ill-purposed life. The soulless bastard. She got up from the floor.

“We need to go,” she said to Lucy. “The DNA Building. Now.”

Security camera images of a woman and a man filled multiple flat screens inside the SAC conference room. Since last June, at least nineteen different banks had been robbed by the same pair of brazen bandits the FBI had dubbed Granny and Clyde.

“You getting all this?” Jaime Berger tilted her MacBook so Benton could see what she was looking at, another e-mail just sent.

He nodded. He knew. He was opening messages as they landed on his BlackBerry, the same messages Lucy and Marino were sending Berger, the four of them communicating almost in real time. The package bomb had been viable and the bare voice module recovered from it was the same type used in Dodie Hodge’s singing card, only Benton no longer believed the card was from Dodie. She had recorded it and may have penned the address on the airbill, but Benton doubted the hostile holiday ditty was her idea. She wasn’t the mastermind who’d scripted anything that had happened thus far, including her call to CNN, the point of that to upset Benton, give him a warning before the next bomb dropped. Literally.

Dodie thrived on drama, but this wasn’t her drama, wasn’t her show, wasn’t even her modus operandi. Benton knew whose it was, he was sure he did, and he should have figured it out before, but he hadn’t been looking. He had quit looking because he’d wanted to believe he didn’t need to look. Unbelievable to simply say he forgot, but he had. He’d forgotten to keep his scan going, and now the monster was back, had taken on a different shape, a different form, but his personal stamp was as recognizable as a stench. Sadism. Inevitably there had to be sadism, and once it started it wasn’t going to stop. Toy with the mouse and torture it within an inch of its life before mauling it to death. Dodie wasn’t creative enough, wasn’t experienced enough, wasn’t deranged or brilliant enough to come up with such a massive and intricate plot on her own. But she was histrionic and borderline, and she’d been willing and able to audition.

At some point, Dodie Hodge had climbed into bed with organized crime. So had Warner Agee, who appeared to be responsible for unethical research projects that were connected to the international gaming industry, to casinos in the United States and abroad, particularly in France. Benton believed that Agee and Dodie were foot soldiers for the family of Chandonne, had gotten entangled with the worst one of them, the perversely violent surviving son, Jean-Baptiste, who had left his DNA in the backseat of a 1991 black Mercedes used in the commission of a bank robbery in Miami last month. What he was doing in the car was unknown. Maybe for the thrill of it, had gone along for the ride, or perhaps was as mundane as his being chauffeured in the stolen Mercedes for some reason prior to its being used as a getaway car. Jean-Baptiste certainly would know his DNA was in the FBI’s CODIS database. He was a convicted murderer and a fugitive. He was getting careless, his compulsions taking over. If his past history was any indication, he might be abusing alcohol and drugs.

Three days after the Miami hit, there was another one, the last of the known nineteen, this time in Detroit. It just so happened to have occurred on the same day Dodie was arrested in that city for shoplifting and disturbing the peace, for making a scene after stuffing three Hap Judd DVDs down the front of her pants. She was out of control. With someone like her, it was only a matter of time and she would have an episode, would lose it, act out, and she did in Betty’s Bookstore Café. It was bad timing, a bad accident, and certain people had to figure out what to do with her before she created more of an exposure for those who couldn’t afford it. Someone got her a lawyer in Detroit, Sebastian Lafourche, originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the Chandonnes once had very strong ties.

Lafourche had suggested that Dodie should be evaluated by Warner Agee. It wasn’t Agee’s newfound celebrity status that was appealing, it was his involvement with organized crime, with the Chandonne network, even if peripherally. It was like putting a gangster into the hands of a warden who was on the take from the Mob. But the plan didn’t work. The DA and McLean wouldn’t go for it. The network had to rethink, regroup, and take advantage of an opportunity for mischief and mayhem. Dodie goes to Belmont, and it signals the next act: The enemy has moved into a target’s camp, Benton’s camp, maybe indirectly Scarpetta’s camp. Dodie checked into the hospital and was breathing down Benton’s neck, and the toying and torturing continued while laughter rose to the rafters inside the medieval house of Chandonne.

Benton looked across the table at Marty Lanier and said, “This new computer system of yours? Is it able to link data the way RTCC can? Give us something like a decision tree, so we see conditional probabilities? So we can visualize what we’re talking about? Because I’m thinking it would help clarify. The roots are deep and the branches are dense and have quite a reach, and it’s important to figure out as best we can what’s relevant and what isn’t. For example? The bank robbery this past August first in the Bronx. That Friday morning at ten-twenty, when American Union was hit.” He was looking at his notes. “Not even an hour later, Dodie Hodge was issued a TAB summons on a transit bus at Southern Boulevard and East One-forty-ninth. In other words, she was in the area, a few blocks from the bank that was robbed. Was agitated, hyped up, got into an argument.”

“I don’t know anything about a TAB summons,” said NYPD Detective Jim O’Dell, early forties, thinning red hair, a bit of a paunch.

He sat next to his Joint Bank Robbery Task Force partner, FBI Special Agent Andy Stockman, late thirties, black hair, plenty of it, and no paunch.

“Came up during data mining when we were looking for anything that had to do with FedEx,” Benton said to O’Dell. “When Dodie was confronted by the officer because she was creating a disturbance on the bus, she told him he could FedEx his ass straight to hell, priority overnight. A link RTCC made.”

“A weird thing to say. Haven’t heard that one before,” Stockton said.

“She likes to FedEx things. She’s always in a hurry and wants the results of her dramas instantly. I don’t know,” Benton said impatiently, because Dodie’s clichés and hyperbole weren’t important and the thought of her irritated the hell out of him. “What matters is a pattern you’re going to see repeatedly as we get deeper into this discussion. Impulsiveness. A leader, a Mob boss, who is compulsive and impulsive and is driven by inner forces he ultimately can’t control, and the people around him aren’t much better. Opposites don’t always attract. Sometimes sameness does.”

“Birds of a feather,” Lanier said.

“Jean-Baptiste and his birds,” Benton said. “Yes.”

“We need a data wall like they got,” O’Dell said to Berger, as if she could do something about it.

“Good luck.” Stockton reached for his coffee. “We’re paying for our own bottled water up here.”

“Seeing the links, the connections would be helpful,” Berger agreed.

“You don’t know what’s there until you do,” Benton said. “Especially in something this complex. Because these crimes didn’t just start this past June. They go back before Nine-Eleven, more than a decade, at least my involvement in them does. Not specifically the bank robberies, but the Chandonne family, the massive crime network that used to be theirs.”

“What do you mean ‘used to be’?” O’Dell said. “Seems they’re alive and kicking, if everything I’m hearing is true.”

“They’re not what they were. You can’t begin to understand. Suffice it to say it’s different,” Benton said. “It’s the bad seed taking over the family store and running it into the ground or over a cliff.”

“Sounds like the last eight years in the White House,” O’Dell quipped.

“The Chandonne family isn’t the organized-crime family it was, not even close.” Benton had no sense of humor this morning. “In the end, it’s disorganized, on its way to complete chaos, with Jean-Baptiste in the driver’s seat. His story can end only one way, no matter how many times he tells it or how many different characters he plays. He can keep focused for a while, and maybe he has while his intrusive and obsessional thoughts have continued, because they don’t quit. Not with him, and the outcome is predictable. His intrusive thoughts win. He strays a little. He strays a lot. He strays way out of bounds. There is no limit to his destructiveness. Except it always ends in death. Somebody dies. Then multiple people do.”

“Sure, we can do a predictive model, put a graph on the wall,” Lanier said to O’Dell and Stockman.

“It will take a minute.” Stockman started hitting keys on his laptop. “Not just the bank robberies but everything?” He glanced up at Lanier.

“It isn’t just bank robberies we’re talking about,” she said with a hint of impatience. “I believe that’s the point Benton’s making and the point of this meeting. The bank robberies are incidental. The tip of the iceberg. Or in keeping with the time of year, the angel on top of the Christmas tree. I want the whole tree.”

The reference reminded Benton again of Dodie’s stupid song, her breathy off-key voice wishing Scarpetta and him a Ho-Dee, Do-Dee Christmas, a greeting rife with sexually violent innuendo and a hint of what was to come. Scarpetta was going to be lynched, and Benton could shove it up his ass, or something like that, and he imagined Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s delight. Likely the card was his idea, the first taunt that soon would be followed by the next: a FedEx box containing a bomb. Not just an ordinary bomb. Marino’s e-mails referred to it as “a stink bomb that might have blown the Doc’s fingers off or maybe made her blind.”

“Yeah, it’s ridiculous the Feds can’t put in something like that,” O’Dell was griping. “A damn data wall like RTCC. We need something ten times bigger than a conference room, because this isn’t a decision tree, it’s a damn decision forest.”

Stockman told him, “I’ll throw it up on a screen. Sixty inches is as big as one of RTCC’s Mitsubishi cubes.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Close enough.”

“Nope. It’s going to take an IMAX theater.”

“Quit complaining and let’s get it on the wall so we can see it.”

“I’m just saying as complex as this is, we need a two-story wall, at least. All this on one flat screen? You’ll have to shrink it as small as newspaper print.”

O’Dell and Stockman had spent so much time together, they tended to bicker and bitch like an old married couple. For the past six months, they’d been working the so-called Granny and Clyde pattern bank robberies in conjunction with other task forces in other FBI field offices, mostly Miami, New York, and Detroit. The Bureau had managed to keep the spree of robberies and their theories about them out of the news, and had done so deliberately and for good reason. They suspected the bandits were pawns in something much bigger and more dangerous. They were pilot fish, small carnivores that swam with sharks.

It was the sharks the Bureau wanted, and Benton was sure he knew what type and family of sharks. French sharks. Chandonne sharks. But the question was what names they were calling themselves now and how to find them. Where was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? He would be the great white shark, the boss, the debauched head of what was left of the prominent crime family. The father, Monsieur Chandonne, was enjoying his retirement years at La Santé maximum-security prison outside Paris. Jean-Baptiste’s brother, the heir apparent, was dead. Jean-Baptiste wasn’t wired for a leadership role, but he was motivated, was fueled by violent fantasies and sexually obsessive thoughts, and he lusted for revenge. He could control himself for a while, keep his true inclinations contained for a discrete period of time before the fragile packaging ruptured, exposing neurons and nerves, a bundle of throbbing impulses capable of murderous lust and rages and cruel games more explosive than anything the bomb techs had ever rendered safe on their range. Jean-Baptiste had to be rendered safe. It had to happen right now.

Benton believed Jean-Baptiste had sent the package bomb. He was behind it. He likely had made it. He may have watched it being delivered last night. Maim Scarpetta physically and mentally. Benton imagined Jean-Baptiste outside their building, somewhere in the dark, watching, waiting for Scarpetta to return home from CNN. Benton imagined her reluctantly walking with Carley Crispin, walking past a homeless man bundled in layers of clothing and a quilt on a bench near Columbus Circle. The mention of the homeless man had bothered Benton the first time Scarpetta had brought it up when they were talking to Lobo inside Marino’s car. A feeling in Benton’s gut, something unsettling. It had continued to disturb him as he’d thought about it more. Whoever was behind the bomb intended it for Scarpetta or for Benton or for both of them and would have found it difficult to resist watching her last night.

Maiming her or maiming Benton. Whoever had been maimed, it may as well have been both of them wounded, ruined, maybe not dead, maybe worse than dead. Jean-Baptiste would have known Benton was in New York, was home last night, waiting for his wife to return from her live appearance on CNN. Jean-Baptiste knew whatever he wanted to know, and he knew what Scarpetta and Benton had together. Jean-Baptiste knew what they had, because he knew what he didn’t have and had never had. No one understood apartness better than Jean-Baptiste, and understanding hellish isolation made him understand its antithesis. Darkness and light. Love and hate. Creation and uncreation. The opposites of all things are intimately related. Benton had to find him. Benton had to stop him.

The surest method was to attack vulnerabilities. Benton’s credo: You’re only as good as the people around you. He kept telling himself, reassuring himself, that Jean-Baptiste had made a mistake. He’d recruited badly, had enlisted small carnivores that were neither strong-minded nor properly programmed and certainly weren’t experienced, and he was going to pay for his snap decisions and sick desires and subjective choices. He would be undone by his unsound mind. Granny and Clyde would bring him down. Jean-Baptiste should never have stooped to what by Chandonne standards was petty crime. He should have avoided people unfit for service, people unstable and driven by their own weaknesses and dysfunctions. Jean-Baptiste should have stayed the hell away from small-time character-disordered criminals and banks.

The pattern was the same in each heist, textbook, as if someone had read the manual. The bank branch had been robbed at least once in the past, in some instances more than once, and had no bulletproof partition, known as a “bandit barrier,” separating the tellers from the public. The robberies always occurred on a Friday between the hours of nine and eleven a.m., when the branch was likely to have the fewest number of customers and the greatest amount of cash. A benign-looking older woman, who until this morning the FBI had known only as Granny, would walk in, looking like a Sunday-school teacher in a frumpy dress and tennis shoes, her head covered by a scarf or a hat. She always wore tinted glasses in old-style frames. Depending on the weather, she might have on a coat and wool gloves. If the robbery occurred when it was warm, she wore a pair of transparent plastic disposable gloves, the type used by people who work in food service, to obviate leaving her fingerprints or DNA.

Granny always carried a tote deposit bag that she would begin to unzip as she approached a teller. She would reach inside the bag and pull out a weapon that forensic image enhancement indicated was the same type used each time, a nine-millimeter short-barrel pistol, a toy. The orange tip required by federal law on the barrels of realistic play guns had been removed. She would slide a note to the teller, the same type of note every time, that read: Empty the drawers in the bag! No dye packs! Or you’re dead! It was written precisely, boldly, on a small piece of paper from a plain white notepad. She’d hold open the deposit bag, and the teller would stuff it full of cash. Granny would zip it up as she hurried outside and got into a car driven by her accomplice, the man the FBI called Clyde. In each instance, the car had been stolen and was found abandoned a short time later in a shopping mall parking lot.

When Benton had first walked into the conference room several hours earlier, he’d instantly recognized Granny and the notes she passed. The handwriting was so perfect it looked like a font. The FBI said it was virtually identical to a typeface called Gotham, the unassuming basic lettering of urban landscapes, the straightforward design commonly seen in signage, the same writing used by whoever had addressed the FedEx envelope that had contained Dodie Hodge’s singing card, and possibly the same writing on the address of the FedEx package that contained the bomb. It was hard to know with exactitude about the latter. According to the flurry of e-mails from Marino, the airbill on the bomb had not survived the water cannon. But maybe it didn’t matter.

Images of Dodie Hodge in various disguises and her handwriting were all over the SAC conference room’s walls, video stills of her in “Aunt Bee” attire, as innocent as Mayberry, walking in and out of banks. Benton would have recognized her anywhere, regardless of her efforts at disguise. She wasn’t going to get rid of her big jowly face and thin lips and bulbous nose and the way her ears stuck out. There was only so much she could do about her matronly body and disproportionately thin legs. In the majority of the robberies she was white. In a few she was black. In a recent one this past October, she was brown. A harmless neighbor, a grandmother, innocent and sweet-looking. In some of the stills she was smiling as she hurried out with at most ten thousand dollars inside her fire-resistant tote deposit bag, a different-colored one each time: red, blue, green, black, all offering adequate protection if her written instructions were ignored and a dye pack exploded, spraying an aerosol of red smoke and dye and possibly tear gas.

It was possible Dodie Hodge never would have come to the attention of anyone and would be robbing banks again, maybe robbing them for a long time, had her partner in crime, whose real name was Jerome Wild, not decided to get a distinctive tattoo on his neck when he was at Camp Pendleton last May right before he went AWOL. The tattoo was one he never successfully covered, didn’t even make an effort, not with a high collar or a bandana or the professional-quality makeup Dodie used, trace residues of it recovered from the getaway cars. Mineral makeup, Marty Lanier had explained. The FBI labs in Quantico had identified boron nitride, zinc oxide, calcium carbonate, kaolin, magnesium, iron oxides, silica, and mica-the additives and pigments used in technically sophisticated eye shadows, lipsticks, foundations, and powders popular with actors and models.

Jerome Wild’s tattoo was large and elaborate, and began just above his left collarbone and ended behind his left ear, and maybe he didn’t think it was a problem. He was the getaway driver and never stepped inside the banks, and likely assumed he would never be captured on camera. He assumed wrong. In one of the robberies, a security camera at the corner of another bank across the street captured him clearly behind the wheel of a stolen white Ford Taurus, a hand out the window adjusting the side mirror. He was wearing black gloves lined with rabbit fur.

That photo, which was his downfall, was on a video screen inside the SAC conference room, and it was a face Benton had seen before, just last night, in security stills from Benton and Scarpetta’s own building. Jerome Wild in dark glasses and a cap and black-leather rabbit fur-lined gloves. Skeletons climbing out of a coffin covering the left side of his neck. The still from a bank robbery and the still from last night, next to each other in windows on a big flat screen. They were the same man, a pilot fish, a small predator, a recruit who was too unsophisticated and reckless to believe he’d ever get caught or to give it a thought. Wild didn’t know or care about tattoo databases, and Jean-Baptiste didn’t either, it seemed.

Wild was only twenty-three, was bright and craved excitement and loved taking risks, but he had no values or beliefs. He had no conscience. He certainly wasn’t patriotic and didn’t give a damn about his country or those who fought for it. When he’d enlisted in the Marines, it was for money, and when he was sent to Camp Pendleton he hadn’t served in the Corps long enough to suffer the loss of fallen comrades yet. He hadn’t boarded the C-17 yet that was to take him to Kuwait, hadn’t done a damn thing except have a good time in California, all expenses paid. The only inspiration required for what was a deeply symbolic and serious tattoo had been the idea of getting a tattoo, any tattoo, as long as it was “cool,” according to another soldier who had been interviewed several times now by the FBI.

Wild got his cool tattoo and soon after returned to his birthplace of Detroit for a weekend furlough before he was to be deployed. He never went back to the Marine Corps base. The last reported sighting was by someone who’d gone to high school with him and was fairly certain he recognized Wild in the Grand Palais hotel casino playing the slot machines, and hotel security recordings had confirmed it was him. Playing slots, at the roulette table, at one point walking the floor with a well-dressed elderly man the FBI had identified as Freddie Maestro, believed to have ties to organized crime and the owner of, among other establishments, High Roller Lanes here in New York. Two weeks later in early June, a bank branch near Detroit’s Tower Center Mall was robbed by a frumpy white woman in a linen suit who was driven away by a black man in a stolen Chevy Malibu.

Benton was stunned, and he felt foolish. He needed to reexamine his life, and now wasn’t a good time to do it, not during a discussion like this with people like this inside an SAC conference room. For all practical purposes, he had gone from being an enforcement agent of the law, an officer of the court, to becoming a fucking academic. A bank robber had been his goddamn patient, and he’d had no idea because he wasn’t allowed to do a background check on Dodie Hodge, wasn’t allowed to look into anything about who or what she was beyond a loathsome woman with a severe personality disorder who claimed to be the aunt of Hap Judd.

Benton could tell himself all he wanted that even if he’d done a thorough background check on her, what was there to know? Logically, the answer was nothing. He felt angry and humiliated, wishing he was FBI again, wishing he was carrying a gun and a badge and had the imprimatur to find out whatever the hell he wanted. But you wouldn’t have found anything, he kept telling himself as he sat at the conference table inside a room that was, of course, blue, from the carpet to the walls to the upholstery of the chairs. Nobody found out anything until you saw her pictures on the wall, he said to himself. She wasn’t recognized. She wasn’t searchable by computers.

Dodie had no identifying feature, such as a tattoo, that might end up in a database. She’d never been charged with anything more serious than being disorderly on a bus in the Bronx, and shoplifting and disturbing the peace in Detroit last month, and on neither occasion was there any reason under the sun for anyone to link this fifty-six-year-old bombastic and unpleasant woman to a series of cleverly executed heists that not so coincidentally completely stopped while she was a patient at McLean. Benton reminded himself repeatedly he could have checked her all he wanted and never linked her to Jerome Wild or the Chandonnes. The link was dumb luck. Jean-Baptiste’s bad dumb luck, because nothing was ever enough for him. He’d carelessly left his DNA in a stolen Mercedes, had done a number of things of late that went too far. He was decompensating, and now he was before them, before Benton again. Not just a link or a branch but the root.

His mug shot was on a flat screen across the table from Benton, the last known photograph, taken by the Texas Department of Justice almost ten years ago. What did the bastard look like now? Benton couldn’t stop staring at the image on the wall-mounted screen. It seemed the two of them were looking at each other, squared off, confrontational. The shaved head, the asymmetrical face, one eye lower than the other and the flesh around them an inflamed, angry red from a chemical burn that Jean-Baptiste claimed had made him blind. It hadn’t. Two guards on the Polun sky Unit had found that out the hard way when Jean-Baptiste slammed them against a concrete wall and crushed their throats. In the spring of 2003, Jean-Baptiste walked out of his death-row cell wearing a uniform and a name tag, a murdered guard’s car keys conveniently in a pocket.

“Not an offshoot but a segue,” Lanier was saying to Berger, and the two tended to argue a lot and Benton really hadn’t been listening.

Another e-mail from Marino just landed:

On my way to the DNA bldg to meet lucy and the doc

“It will be more obvious when we get a visual. I agree with Benton. But Jerome’s nonviolent,” Lanier was saying. “He’s always been nonviolent. So nonviolent he went AWOL. Went into the military because he couldn’t get a job, and then bailed out because he happened upon an illegal opportunity.”

Benton e mailed Marino:

Why?

Lanier kept talking. “The Chandonnes’ tentacles are in Detroit. Just as they’re in Louisiana, Las Vegas, Miami, Paris, Monte Carlo. Port cities. Casino cities. Maybe even Hollywood. Anything that attracts organized crime.”

Benton reminded everyone at the table, “But not the father anymore. And not Jean-Baptiste’s brother. We carved up the rotten apple in 2003. We didn’t get the core, but he’s not the same breed.”

Marino’s e mailed reply:

Toni dariens watch

Benton continued, “You’re talking about a lust murderer, someone much too compulsive, much too impulse driven, to successfully run a cartel, to run anything as complex as his family business has been for the better part of a century. We can’t work this like an organized-crime case. We have to work it like a repetitive sexual murder case.”

“It was a viable bomb,” Berger said to Lanier, as if Benton hadn’t said anything. “It could have severely injured or even killed Kay. How can you possibly construe that as falling within the rubric of nonviolent?”

“You’re missing my point,” Lanier told her. “Depends on his intent, and if, in fact, Wild is just the messenger, then he may not have even known what was in the FedEx box.”

“That and the guy’s MO? In all these bank robberies? There’s been nothing violent. He’s a coward, stays in the car. Even the gun is fake.” Stockman spoke up as he worked on getting the decision tree-the decision forest, as he’d called it-on a flat screen. “I have to agree with Marty that he and Granny… this Dodie woman. Sorry. I’ve been calling her Granny for the past six months. Anyway, Jerome and Dodie, they’re minions.”

“Dodie Hodge isn’t anybody’s minion,” Benton said. “She goes along with something if she receives gratification from it. If she’s having fun. But she’s not a drone. She’s cooperative and supervis able only up to a point, which is why Jean-Baptiste made a mistake picking her, picking Jerome, picking anybody he’s likely picked. They’re all going to be flawed, because he is.”

“Then why steal the DVDs, for God’s sake?” Berger said to Lanier. “A few Hap Judd movies were worth getting arrested?”

“That wasn’t why,” Benton said. “She couldn’t help herself. And now the network has a problem. One of their bank robbers has just been arrested. They get a lawyer who’s in bed with them, and he in turn tries to get a forensic expert who’s in bed with them. Instead they ended up with me because of Dodie’s histrionics, her narcissism. She wanted to go to the same hospital where the rich and famous go. Again, she’s not a minion. She’s a bad recruit.”

“A bad move stealing those DVDs,” Stockman agreed with Berger. “They’d still be robbing banks if she hadn’t stuck those damn movies down her pants.”

“A bad move shooting off her mouth about Hap Judd,” Benton added. “Not that she could help herself, but she’s causing problems, creating exposures. We don’t know exactly what Hap Judd’s involvement in all this is, but he’s linked to Dodie, and he’s linked to Hannah Starr, and a photograph of him and Freddie Maestro is in High Roller Lanes, which could link Hap to Toni Darien as well. We need to get the tree on the wall, have a visual. I’m going to show you how all this is connected.”

“Let’s get back to the bomb,” Berger said to Lanier. “Just so I’m clear. You’re thinking someone else is behind the delivery of this package, Jean-Baptiste is, and that theory is based on?”

“I don’t mean to say common sense…” Lanier said.

“You mean to say it, and you just did,” Berger answered. “And condescension isn’t helpful.”

“Let me finish. I don’t mean to imply anything even remotely condescending toward you, Jaime. Or toward anyone at this table. From an analytical perspective”-and what Lanier really meant was, From the perspective of an FBI criminal investigative analyst, a profiler-“what was done to Dr. Scarpetta, or attempted, is personal.” Lanier looked at Benton. “I would say intimately personal.” Almost as if to imply that Benton might have been the one who left a bomb for his wife.

“I’m not getting the commonsense part.” Berger looked Lanier in the eye.

Berger didn’t like her. It probably wasn’t about jealousy or insecurity or any of the usual reasons powerful women went after each other. There was a practical problem to be faced. If the FBI took over the entire investigation, including whatever involvement Dodie Hodge or Hap Judd or anyone else being discussed in this room might have with Hannah Starr, it would be the U.S. attorney’s office that prosecuted the cases and not the New York County DA, not Berger. Get over it, Benton thought. This was fucking bigger than five boroughs. This was federal. It was international. It was dirty and extremely dangerous. If Berger thought about it for a minute, she shouldn’t even want to get within a mile of this case.

“The type of bomb, as it’s been described,” Lanier was saying to Berger. “An implicit threat. Intimidation. Mockery. And a prior knowledge of the victim and her habits and what was important to her. Dodie Hodge might have served as chief consort, but the bang for the buck, if you’ll forgive the pun, would have been Chandonne’s.”

“I’d like to get over there.” Stockman was looking at something on his computer. “Dodie Hodge’s place in Edgewater.” He started typing an e-mail. “She got a drinking problem? Wine bottles everywhere.”

“We need to get in.” O’Dell looked at what was on Stockman’s computer screen. “See if we find notes, other things linking her to the robberies and who knows what. I mean, it’s fine for these guys to look, but they don’t know what we know.”

“A more pressing concern is Jean-Baptiste,” Benton said, because police, the FBI were looking for Dodie, but no one was looking for Chandonne.

“No notes so far but a couple toy guns,” O’Dell said to Stockman as agents and cops from the Joint Bank Robbery Task Force searched Dodie’s house and sent electronic information in real time. “Bingo,” Stockman then said as he read. “Drugs. Looks like Granny does coke. Plus, she’s a smoker. Hey, Benton. To your knowledge, does Dodie smoke French cigarettes? Gauloises? I know I didn’t pronounce that right.”

“She may have had someone staying with her,” Stockman said, as he replied to his colleagues in the field.

Benton said, “I’m going to stop listening for a minute.”

It was a line that worked almost without exception. When people were arguing and distracted and their agendas were breaking the surface and blowing like whales, if Benton announced he was going to stop listening, everybody stopped talking.

“I’m going to say what I think, and you need to hear this because it will help you understand what you’re about to see when these links are made, are on the wall,” Benton said. “How are we doing with our tree diagram?” he pointedly asked.

“Anybody besides me need some coffee?” O’Dell said in frustration. “Too damn much going on at once, and I need to visit the little boys’ room.”