The Scarpetta Factor

20

On the eighth floor of the OCME’s DNA Building, Scarpetta, Lucy, and Marino were alone inside a lab used for scientific training. Criminal cases weren’t analyzed in here, but the regulations for working in a clean-room environment still applied.

The three of them were difficult to recognize in disposable protective gowns, hair and shoe covers, masks, gloves, and safety glasses they had donned in the bio vestibule before passing through an air lock into an uncontaminated work space equipped with the latest assay technology, what Marino called contraptions: genomic analyzers, gene amplifiers, centrifuges, vortex mixers, real-time rotary cyclers, and extraction robots for handling large volumes of liquids, such as blood. He moved about restlessly, rustling and making papery sounds, tugging at blue Tyvek and poking and prodding his safety glasses and mask and what he referred to as his “shower cap,” constantly readjusting this and that as he griped about his garb.

“You ever put paper shoes on a cat?” His face mask moved as he talked. “The thing runs around like hell trying to shake them off? That’s what I fucking feel like.”

“I didn’t torture animals, set fires, or wet my bed when I was a kid,” Lucy said, picking up a micro USB cable she had sterilized and wrapped.

In front of her on a brown paper-covered counter were two MacBooks that had been wiped off with isopropyl alcohol and enclosed in transparent polypropylene, and the BioGraph watchlike device, which had been swabbed for DNA late yesterday in the evidence exam room down the hall and was now safe for handling. Lucy plugged the cable into the BioGraph and connected it to one of the laptops.

“Like plugging in your iPod or iPhone,” she said. “It’s syncing with something. What have we got?”

The screen went black and prompted her for a username and password. In a banner at the top was a long string of zeros and ones that Scarpetta recognized as binary code.

“That’s odd,” she said.

“Very odd,” Lucy said. “It doesn’t want us to know its name. It’s encrypted in binary, which is meant to be a deterrent, to be off-putting. If you’re one of these people who surf the Net and somehow find this site, you have to go to some trouble to even have a hint what you’ve landed on. Even then, you can’t get into it unless you’re authorized or have a skeleton key.”

Skeleton key was one of her euphemisms for hack.

“I’m betting this binary-code address doesn’t convert into text that spells BioGraph, either.” Lucy typed on the other MacBook and opened a file. “If it did, my search engines would have found it, because they sure as hell know how to look for bit strings and their represented words or sequences.”

“Jesus,” Marino said. “Already I got no damn idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

He had been slightly nasty from the instant Scarpetta had met him downstairs in the lobby and escorted him to the eighth floor. He was upset about the bomb. He wasn’t going to tell her that, but after twenty years, he didn’t have to tell her. She knew him better than he knew himself. Marino was irritable because he was scared.

“I’ll start over and try to move my lips when I talk this time,” Lucy sniped back at him.

“Your mouth is covered. I can’t see your lips. I got to take off this cap at least. It’s not like I have any hair. I’m starting to sweat.”

“Your bald head will shed skin cells,” Lucy said. “Probably why you have such a dust problem in your apartment. This so-called watch was designed to sync with a laptop, is interfaceable with just about any kind of computer device because of the micro USB port. Probably because all kinds of people are wearing these so-called watches, collecting data just like Toni Darien was. Let’s convert binary to ASCII.”

She typed the string of ones and zeros into a field on the other MacBook and hit the return key. Instantly, the code was translated into text that gave Scarpetta pause-in fact, gave her the creeps.

It spelled Caligula.

“Wasn’t he the Roman emperor who burned down Rome?” Marino said.

“That was Nero,” Scarpetta said. “Caligula was probably worse. Probably the most demented, depraved, sadistic emperor in the history of the Roman Empire.”

“What I’m waiting for right now,” Lucy said, “is to bypass the username and password. To put it very simply, I’ve hijacked this site and what’s in the BioGraph so the programs on my server can help us out.”

“I think I saw a movie about him,” Marino said. “He had sex with his sisters and lived in the palace with his horse or something. Maybe he had sex with the horse, too. An ugly bastard. I think he was deformed.”

Scarpetta said, “A rather chilling name for a website.”

“Come on.” Lucy was impatient with the computer, with the programs working invisibly to grant her access to what she wanted.

“I told you about walking back and forth from there by yourself,” Marino said to Scarpetta, and he was thinking about the bomb, about what he’d just experienced at Rodman’s Neck. “When you’re on live TV, you should have security. Maybe you won’t argue about it anymore.”

He was assuming if he’d escorted her last night, he would have recognized that the FedEx package was suspicious and never would have let her touch it. Marino felt responsible for her safety, had a habit of going overboard about it, when the irony was, the most unsafe she’d ever been was with him not all that long ago.

“Caligula is probably the name of a proprietary project.” Lucy was busy on the other MacBook. “That’s my guess.”

“Thing is, what next?” Marino said to Scarpetta. “I feel like somebody’s warming up to something. That singing card Benton got yesterday at Bellevue. Then not even twelve hours later, the FedEx bomb with a voodoo doll. Jesus, it stunk. Can’t wait to hear what Geffner says.”

Geffner was a trace evidence examiner at the NYPD crime labs in Queens.

“I called him on my way over here and said he better start looking through the microscope the minute the bomb debris hits the door.” Marino glanced at his blue-paper sleeve, shoved it up with a latex-sheathed hand to check his watch. “He should be looking at it now. Hell, we should call him. Jesus. It’s almost noon. Like hot asphalt, rotten eggs, and dog shit, like a really filthy fire scene, like someone used an accelerant to burn up a friggin’ latrine. I almost gagged, and it takes a lot to make me puke. Plus dog fur. Benton ’s patient? The whack job who called you on CNN? Hard for me to wrap my mind around her making something like that. Lobo and Ann said it was really nicely done.”

As if making a bomb that might blow off a person’s hands or worse was to be commended.

Lucy said, “And we’re in.”

The black screen with the binary banner turned midnight-blue, and CALIGULA appeared across the center in what looked like three-dimensional silvery cast-metal letters. A typeface that was familiar. Scarpetta almost felt queasy.

“ Gotham,” Lucy said. “That’s interesting. The font is Gotham.”

Marino’s paper gown rustled as he moved closer to see what she meant, his eyes bloodshot behind his safety glasses as he said, “ Gotham? I don’t see Batman anywhere.”

The screen was prompting Lucy to press any key to continue. But she didn’t. She was intrigued by the Gotham font and what it might mean.

“Authoritative, practical, what’s known as the workman-like typeface of public places,” she said. “The sans-serif style you see in names and numbers on signs, walls, buildings, and the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site. But the reason the Gotham font has gotten so much attention of late is Obama.”

“First I’ve heard of a font called Gotham,” Marino replied. “But then again, I don’t get the font newsletter or monthly magazine or go to fucking font conventions.”

“Gotham’s the typeface the Obama people used during his campaign,” Lucy said. “And you should pay attention to fonts, like I’ve told you how many times? Fonts are part of twenty-first-century documents examination, and you ignore them at your own peril. What they are and why someone might pick them for a specific communication can be telling and significant.”

“Why Gotham for this website?” Scarpetta envisioned the FedEx airbill and the immaculate, almost perfect handwriting on it.

“I don’t know, except the typeface is supposed to suggest credibility,” Lucy said. “Inspire trust. Subliminally, we’re supposed to take this website seriously.”

“The name Caligula inspires anything but trust,” said Scarpetta.

“Gotham is popular,” Lucy said. “It’s cool. It’s supposed to suggest all the right things if you want to influence someone into taking you or your product or a political candidate or maybe some type of research project seriously.”

“Or take a dangerous package seriously,” Scarpetta said, suddenly angry. “This typeface looks very similar if not identical to the style of printing on the package I got last night. I don’t guess you were able to see the box before it was shot with the PAN disrupter,” she asked Marino.

“Like I told you, the batteries they targeted were right behind the address. You said it referenced you as the chief medical examiner of Gotham City. So there’s this Gotham reference again. It bother anybody besides me that Hap Judd was in a Batman movie and fucks dead bodies?”

“Why would Hap Judd send Aunt Kay what you’re calling a stink bomb?” Lucy said, busy on the other MacBook.

“If the sick prick killed Hannah, maybe? Or maybe he’s got to do with Toni Darien, since he’s been in High Roller Lanes and probably met her, at the very least. The Doc did Toni’s autopsy and might end up being the ME on Hannah’s case, too.”

“So Aunt Kay gets a bomb delivered? And that’s going to prevent Hap Judd from being caught if Hannah’s body turns up or for who knows what?” Lucy said, as if Scarpetta wasn’t inside the lab with them anymore. “I’m not saying the asshole didn’t do something to Hannah or doesn’t know where she is.”

“Yeah, him and dead bodies,” Marino said. “Kind of interesting now that we know Toni may have been dead a few days before she was dumped. Wonder where she was and what fun someone was having with her. He probably did do that dead girl in the hospital fridge. Why else would he be in there fifteen minutes and come out with only one glove on?”

“But I don’t think he left a bomb for Aunt Kay thinking that would scare her off the case or two cases or any cases. That’s retarded,” Lucy said. “And the Gotham font has nothing to do with Batman.”

“Maybe it does if the person’s into some sort of sicko game,” Marino argued.

The odor of fire and brimstone, and Scarpetta kept thinking about the bomb. A stink bomb, a different sort of dirty bomb, an emotionally destructive bomb. Someone who knew Scarpetta. Someone who knew Benton. Someone who knew their history almost as intimately as they did. Games, she thought. Sick games.

Lucy hit the return key and CALIGULA went away and was replaced by:

Welcome, Toni.

Then:

Do you want to sync data? Yes No

Lucy answered yes and the next message she got was:

Toni, your scales are three days overdue. Would you like to complete them now? Yes No

Lucy clicked on Yes, and the screen faded and was replaced by another one:

Please rate how well these adjectives describe how you felt today.

This was followed by choices such as elated, confused, content, happy, irritable, angry, enthusiastic, inspired, each list of questions followed by a five-point scale, ranging from 1 for very little or not at all to 5 for extreme.

“If Toni was doing this every day,” Marino said, “would it be on her laptop? And maybe that’s why it’s missing?”

“It wouldn’t have been on her laptop. What you’re seeing resides on this website’s server,” Lucy said.

“But she hooked up her watch to her laptop,” Marino said.

“Yes. To upload information and to charge it,” Lucy said. “The data collected by this watchlike device weren’t for her use and wouldn’t have lived on her laptop. She not only wouldn’t have any use for the data but she wouldn’t have the software needed to aggregate it, to sort it, to make it meaningful.”

Lucy was being prompted by more questions and was answering them on the screen because she wanted to see what would happen next. She rated her moods as very little or not at all. Were Scarpetta answering the questions, she might just rate her own moods as extreme right now.

“I don’t know,” Marino said. “I can’t stop thinking this Caligula project might explain why maybe someone went inside her apartment and took her laptop and her phone and who knows what else.” His safety glasses looked at Scarpetta and he said, “We don’t know it was Toni on the security recording, you’re right about that. Just because the person had on what looked like her coat. How hard would that be if you were close to her same size and maybe had on similar running shoes? She wasn’t a small person, thin but tall. About five-ten, right? I don’t see how it could have been her going into her building Wednesday night at around quarter to six and leaving at seven. You think she’s been dead since Tuesday. And now this Caligula thing’s saying maybe the same thing. She hasn’t done her questionnaire for three days.”

“If it’s true that someone impersonated her on the security recordings,” Lucy said, “then he had her coat or one very similar and the keys to her apartment.”

“She was dead at least thirty-six hours,” Scarpetta said. “If her apartment keys were in her pocket and her killer knew where she lived, it wouldn’t have been hard to take the keys, let himself in, remove what he wanted from the scene, then return her keys to her pocket when he dumped her body in the park. Maybe this person had her coat, too. Maybe she was wearing it when she went out last. It might explain why she didn’t seem to be dressed warmly when her body was found. Maybe some of her clothing was missing.”

“That’s a lot of trouble and a lot of risk,” Lucy said. “Somebody didn’t plan very well. Seems all the calculating is after the fact, not prior to the crime. Maybe more of an impulse crime and the killer was someone she knew.”

“If she’d been communicating with him, that might be the reason for her missing laptop and her phone.” Marino was stuck on that. “Text messages stored on her phone. Maybe when you finally get into her e-mail. Maybe she was e-mailing these Caligula people or there are documents on her computer that are incriminating.”

“Then why leave the BioGraph device on her body?” Lucy said. “Why take the chance someone might do what we’re doing right now?”

Scarpetta said, “It may be that her killer wanted her computer, her phone. But that doesn’t mean there was a single rational reason. Maybe the absence of a reason is why the BioGraph wasn’t removed from her body.”

“There’s always a reason,” Marino said.

“Not the kind of reason you’re talking about, because this may not be the type of crime you’re talking about,” Scarpetta said, and she thought about her BlackBerry.

She reconsidered the motive for the theft, had a feeling she might be wrong about why Carley Crispin wanted the BlackBerry, that it wasn’t simply about what Carley had said when they were walking past Columbus Circle after leaving CNN: “I bet you could talk anybody into it you wanted, with the connections you have.” As if to imply that Scarpetta wouldn’t have a problem enticing guests to appear on a TV show, assuming she had her own show, and from that Scarpetta had assigned a motive to her missing smartphone. Carley wanted information, wanted Scarpetta’s contacts, and maybe she did in fact help herself to scene photographs while she’d had the chance. But possibly the BlackBerry ultimately wasn’t intended for Carley or even Agee but for someone else. Someone cunning and evil. The last person to have the BlackBerry was Agee, and maybe he would have passed it on to a third party had he not killed himself.

“People commit murder and return to the scene of the crime, not always for the sole reason that they’re paranoid and trying to cover their tracks,” Scarpetta explained. “Sometimes it’s to relive a violent act that was gratifying. Maybe in Toni’s case it’s more than one motivation. Her phone, her laptop are souvenirs, and they also were a means of impersonating her before her body was found, to throw us off track about her time of death by pretending to be her and using her cell phone to send a text message to her mother at around eight p.m. Wednesday night. Manipulations, games, and fantasy, emotionally driven, sexually driven, sadistically driven. A blend of motivations that created a malignant discord. Like so much in life. It isn’t just one thing.”

Lucy finished answering the mood rating questions and a Submit box appeared on the screen. She clicked on it and got the confirmation that her completed scales had been successfully sent to the site for review. For review by whom? Scarpetta wondered. A study sponsor who was a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, a research assistant, a graduate student. Who the hell knew, but there would be more than one of them. Probably a large faculty of them. These invisible sponsors could be anyone and could exist anywhere and were engaged in a project that obviously was intended to make predictions about human behavior that would prove useful to someone.

“It’s an acronym,” Lucy said.

On the screen:

THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING IN THE CALCULATED INTEGRATION OF GPS UPLOADED LIGHT AND ACTIVITY STUDY.

“CALIGULA,” Scarpetta said. “I still don’t see why anyone would choose an acronym like that.”

“Suffered chronically from nightmares and insomnia.” Lucy was skimming through files on her other MacBook, Googles about Caligula. “Used to wander the palace all night long waiting for the sun to come up. The name might have to do with that. If, for example, the study’s related to sleep disorders and the effects of light and darkness on moods. His name was derived from the Latin word caliga, which means ‘little boot.’ ”

Marino said to Scarpetta, “Your name means ‘little shoe.’”

“Come on, guys,” Lucy said under her breath, talking to her neural networking programs and search engines. “Sure as hell would be easier if I could take this to my office.” She meant the BioGraph device.

“It’s all over the Internet about Scarpetta meaning ‘little shoe’ in Italian,” Marino went on, his eyes uneasy behind thick plastic. “The little shoe, the little gumshoe, the little lady with the big kick.”

“Now we’re cooking,” Lucy said.

Data were rolling down her screen, a stew of letters, symbols, numbers.

“I wonder if Toni knew exactly what was being collected by the thing she was wearing on her wrist morning, noon, and night,” Lucy said. “Or if whoever killed her did.”

“Unlikely she did,” Scarpetta said. “The details of whatever theory researchers hope to prove aren’t advertised or disseminated publicly. The subjects themselves don’t know the details, only generalities. Otherwise, they can skew the results.”

“Must have been something in it for her,” Marino said. “Wearing that watch all the time. Answering questions every day.”

“She may have had a personal interest in sleep disorders, seasonal affective disorder, who knows what, and saw an ad for a study or someone gave her information. Her mother said she was moody and affected by gloomy weather,” Scarpetta said. “Usually people involved in research studies get paid.”

She thought about the father, Lawrence Darien, and his aggressive attempts at claiming Toni’s personal effects and her dead body. A bioelectrical engineer from MIT. A gambler and a drunk with ties to organized crime. When he’d made a scene at the morgue, maybe what he’d really been after was the BioGraph watch.

“Unbelievable what’s stored inside this thing.” Lucy pulled a stool in front of her MacBooks and sat, looking at raw data that had been stored inside Toni’s BioGraph device. “Obviously a combination actigraphy data logger with a highly sensitive accelerometer or bimorph element in a two-layer piezoelectric sensor that basically measures gross motor activity. I’m not seeing anything that strikes me as military or government.”

“What would you expect?” Marino asked. “If this was CIA or something.”

“Not this. Nothing’s encrypted the way I’m used to seeing when it’s classified by the government as top secret. Not the usual standard three-block ciphers with the bits and block sizes I associate with algorithms used in symmetric key cryptography. You know, these really long keys, longer than forty bits, that are supposed to be exportable but make it really hard for hackers to break the code. That’s not what we’ve got here. This isn’t military or any intelligence-gathering agency. It’s private-sector.”

“I guess we shouldn’t ask why you’d know how the government encrypts its top secret information,” Marino commented.

“The purpose of this thing is to gather data for some type of research, not spying, not war, not even terrorists for once,” Lucy said as data rolled by. “Not intended for the end user but for researchers. Geeks out there crunching data, but for whom? Sleep schedule variability, sleep quantity, daytime activity patterns, correlated to light exposure. Come on, start aggregating it into some sort of order that’s easy to look at.” Talking to her programs again. “Give me charts. Give me maps. It’s sorting by types of data. A lot of data. A ton of it. Recording data every fifteen seconds. Five thousand seven hundred and sixty times a day this thing was capturing God knows how many different types of data. GPS and pedometer readings. Location data, speed, distance, altitude, and the user’s vital signs. Heart rate and SPO-two.”

“SPO-two? You must be mistaken,” Scarpetta said.

“I’m looking at SPO-two,” Lucy said. “Hundreds of thousands of them. SPO-two captured every fifteen seconds.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Scarpetta said. “Where’s the sensor? You can’t measure pulse oximetry, the oxygen saturation of blood, without a sensor of some type. Usually on a fingertip, sometimes a toe, sometimes an earlobe. Has to be a thin part of the person’s anatomy so a light can pass through the tissue. A light comprised of both red and infrared wavelengths that determines the oxygenation, the percentage of oxygen saturation, in your blood.”

“The BioGraph is Bluetooth-enabled,” Lucy said. “So maybe the pulse-oximetry device is Bluetooth-enabled.”

“Wireless or otherwise, there had to be one to take these measurements we’re seeing,” Scarpetta replied. “A sensor she wore virtually all of the time.”

A red laser dot moved over names and locations and the branches that connected them on the treelike graph filling the flat screen.

“Imagine Monsieur Chandonne, the father, no longer in power.” Benton held a laser pointer, illustrating what he meant as he talked. “And what family associations he has left are scattered. He and a number of his captains are in prison. The Chandonne heir apparent, the brother of Jean-Baptiste, is dead. And law enforcement for the most part has turned its attention to other international troubles. Al Qaida, Iran, North Korea, the global economic disaster. Jean-Baptiste, the surviving child, seizes the opportunity to take over, to start his life again and do it better this time.”

“I don’t see how,” O’Dell said. “He’s a lunatic.”

“He’s not a lunatic,” Benton said. “He is extremely intelligent, extremely intuitive, and for a while his intellect can overwhelm his compulsions, his obsessions. The question is how long can that last.”

“I totally disagree,” O’Dell said to Benton. “This guy a Mob boss? It’s not like he can wander around in public without putting a bag over his head. He’s an international fugitive, an Interpol Red Notice, and he’s deformed, a freak.”

“You can disagree all you want. You don’t know him,” Benton said.

“That genetic condition he has,” O’Dell went on. “I can’t remember what it’s called.”

“Congenital hypertrichosis universalis.” It was Marty Lanier talking. “Individuals suffering from this very rare condition have an overgrowth of lanugo hair, baby-fine hair, all over their bodies, including areas that usually aren’t hairy or excessively hairy. The forehead, the tops of the hands, the elbows. And there may be other deformities, gingival hyperplasia, small teeth widely spaced.”

“Like I said, a freak, he looks like a damn werewolf,” O’Dell said to everyone at the table. “People who had this condition, it’s probably where the legend came from.”

“He’s not a werewolf, and the condition isn’t something from a horror story. It isn’t a legend. It’s very real,” Benton said.

“We don’t know how many cases,” Lanier added. “Something like fifty, a hundred. Very few reported worldwide.”

“Reported is the key word,” Jaime Berger said, and she was subdued. “You can’t count cases if they’re not reported, and you can understand why hypertrichosis would have very negative associations and stigmas, implications the sufferer was a monster, was evil.”

“And then you treat him accordingly and maybe turn him into that,” Lanier added.

“Families hid family members who had this affliction, and Jean-Baptiste was no exception,” Benton continued. “He grew up in a basement, in what was essentially a subterranean windowless dungeon of the Chandonne family’s seventeenth-century home on Île Saint-Louis in Paris. It’s possible the gene Jean-Baptiste inherited traces back to a man in the mid-fifteen hundreds who was born covered with hair and as an infant was presented to King Henri the Second in Paris and raised in the royal palace as a curiosity, an amusement, a pet of sorts. This man married a French woman, and several of their children inherited the disorder. In the late eighteen hundreds, one of their descendants is believed to have married a Chandonne, and a hundred years later the recessive gene became dominant in the form of Jean-Baptiste.”

“What I’m trying to get across here,” O’Dell said, “is people run screaming from someone who looks like that. How could Jean-Baptiste take over and operate out of the family home in Paris?”

“We don’t know where Jean-Baptiste has been living,” Benton replied. “We don’t know what he’s been doing for the past five years. We don’t know what he looks like. Laser hair removal, prosthetic dentistry, plastic surgery, the medical technology available these days. We have no idea what he’s had done to himself since he escaped from death row. What we do know is you recovered his DNA from the backseat of a stolen Mercedes in Miami, and that unequivocally connects him to the bank robberies being committed by Jerome Wild and Dodie Hodge. Both of them are connected to Detroit, which makes it likely that Jean-Baptiste has connections to Detroit. And Miami. And here.”

“The gaming industry,” Lanier said. “And maybe the film industry.”

“The Chandonne family has had its hands in everything that might be lucrative,” Benton said. “The entertainment business, gambling, prostitution, drugs, illegal weapons, counterfeit designer labels, contraband of every sort. Whatever you historically associate with organized crime, Jean-Baptiste will be familiar with it, well versed. It’s in his family. It’s in his blood. He’s had five years to avail himself of a powerful network because of his family connections. He’s had access to money. He’s been working on whatever has been his plan, and any organized plan requires a recruitment. He needed troops. If he was going to attempt to reestablish the Chandonne crime family or build an empire for himself, to reinvent himself, re-create himself, he needed to enlist a lot of help, and he was going to pick badly. An individual with his history of abuse, his history of psychopathology and extraordinarily violent crimes, isn’t going to have what it takes to be a shrewd and successful leader, at least not for long. And he’s fueled by his sexually violent compulsions. And he’s fueled by vengeance.”

The root of the tree graph on the wall was Jean-Baptiste. His name was in the middle of the screen, and all other names branched out from it directly or indirectly.

“So we’ve got Dodie Hodge and Jerome Wild linked to him.” Benton pointed the laser, and the dot moved on names as he mentioned them.

“We should add Hap Judd,” Berger said, and she was different, extremely somber. “He’s linked to Dodie even though he claims to have nothing to do with her anymore.”

Berger wasn’t herself, and Benton didn’t know what had happened. When everyone had gotten coffee, she’d borrowed the desk of an agent who wasn’t in and had made a phone call on a landline. From that point on she’d gotten quiet. She’d stopped offering insights and arguments and had quit pushing back whenever Lanier opened her mouth. Benton had a feeling it didn’t have to do with jurisdiction, with a turf battle, with a squabble over who would prosecute what. Jaime Berger seemed defeated. She seemed used up.

“For a period Hap supposedly sought her spiritual advice,” Berger said in a flat tone, a monotone. “He stated this when I interviewed him early this morning. He says she’s a nuisance, calls his L.A. office frequently, and he avoids her.”

“How did he meet Dodie?” Lanier wanted to know.

“Apparently, she was giving spiritual advice, psychic readings, to Hannah Starr,” Berger answered. “This isn’t unusual. A rather remarkable number of celebrities and very wealthy prominent people, including politicians, seek the counsel of self-proclaimed psy chics, gypsies, witches, warlocks, prophets, most of them frauds.”

“I assume most of them don’t turn out to be bank robbers,” Stockman said.

“You’d be surprised what a lot of them turn out to be,” Berger said. “Stealing, extortion, financial scams come quite naturally to the profession.”

“Dodie Hodge ever been to the Starrs’ mansion on Park Avenue?” Lanier asked Berger.

“Hap says yes.”

“You consider Hap a suspect in the Hannah Starr case?” O’Dell asked. “He knows where she is or has something to do with it?”

“I consider him the most important suspect at this point,” she said, and she sounded worn down, almost detached or maybe broken.

It wasn’t about her being tired. It was about something else.

“Hap Judd should be on the wall because of Dodie and because of Hannah.” Berger was looking around the table but not really connecting to anyone, almost as if she was addressing a grand jury. “And also Toni Darien. His ties to High Roller Lanes and possibly Freddie Maestro, and we should add Park General Hospital in Harlem, which isn’t very far from where Toni’s body was found off One hundred and tenth Street.”

More branches on the flat screen: Hannah Starr connected to Hap Judd connected to Dodie, and indirectly to Jerome Wild. All the connections now linked to Toni Darien, High Roller Lanes, and Park General Hospital, and linked back to the root, to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. Berger explained Hap’s past at the Harlem hospital, and a young woman who died there named Farrah Lacy, and then Berger got back to Hap’s link to the Starrs, his visits to the Park Avenue mansion for at least one dinner and on other occasions for sex. O’Dell interrupted her to point out that Rupe Starr wouldn’t have courted a minor actor who had no more to invest than half a million dollars.

“These major players like Rupe,” O’Dell explained, “they won’t even talk to you unless you got a hell of a lot more than that to hand over.”

“This was about a year before Rupe Starr died,” Berger said. “By which point Hannah was married to Bobby Fuller.”

“Maybe one of those situations where the family starts crowding out the boss, starts running things the way they want,” Stockman suggested.

“I know you’ve looked into Hannah’s financials,” Berger said, and she meant that the FBI had. “Because of information I passed on that we discovered, that Lucy and I did.”

As if everyone would know who Lucy was and, significantly, who she was to Berger.

“A lot of activity in a lot of banks here and abroad,” Stockman said. “Starting about two years ago. Then after Rupe Starr died last May, most of the money’s been lost.”

“Hap claims he was in New York the night before Thanksgiving, when Hannah disappeared. The next day he flew to L.A. We’re going to want warrants to search his place in TriBeCa. We should do that without delay. He claims that Hannah and Bobby never had sex,” Berger went on, with none of the usual strength in her voice and not a glint of her wry humor. “In his words, not once.”

“Yeah, right,” O’Dell said sarcastically. “The oldest line in the book. No fire on the hearth so you go elsewhere to get warm.”

“Hannah Starr was a socialite, ran with a fast crowd, hobnobbed with the rich and the famous here and abroad but never at the mansion,” Berger went on. “She was much more public, would rather be on Page Six of the Post than in the family dining room, her style the antithesis of her father’s. Her priorities clearly very different. She’s the one who first connected to Hap, according to him. They met at the Monkey Bar. Soon after, he was a guest at one of Rupe’s dinners and became a client. Hannah personally handled his money. Hap claims Hannah was afraid of Bobby.”

“It wasn’t Bobby who was in town the night Hannah vanished and then on a plane the very next day,” Lanier pointedly said.

“Exactly right,” Berger said, looking at Benton. “I’m very concerned about Hap’s involvements with everyone. And his proclivities. Kay says Toni Darien was dead for a day and a half before her body was left in the park. She was kept in a cool environment, indoors somewhere. Maybe now that’s making sense.”

More names were being added to the graph on the wall.

“And Warner Agee and Carley Crispin,” Benton said to Stockman. “They should be up there.”

“We’ve got no reason to think Agee or Carley had any association with anybody we’ve got up here on the wall,” O’Dell said.

“We know Carley’s connected to Kay,” Benton said. “And I’m connected to Agee.”

The click of keys. Scarpetta’s and Benton’s names appeared on the flat screen. It was awful seeing them there. Connected to everyone. Connected to the root, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

Benton went on. “And based on what Lucy and Kay found inside Agee’s hotel room, I suspect he was involved in the casino business.”

Casinos was added to the wall.

“He was using his paranormal interests and influence to research something, manipulate something.”

Paranormal was another branch on the tree.

“Maybe doing so under the patronage of a wealthy Frenchman supposedly named Lecoq,” Benton continued, and that name appeared next. “Someone-possibly this Monsieur Lecoq-was paying Agee in cash. And possibly Freddie Maestro was, too. So Lecoq and Maestro might be connected, and that would link Detroit to France.”

“We don’t know who Lecoq is or if he really exists,” Lanier said to Benton.

“He exists. But we don’t know who he is.”

“You thinking this Lecoq guy’s the Wolfman?” O’Dell asked Benton.

“Let’s don’t call him that. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is no stereotype. He’s not a myth. He’s a man who could at this point in time be fully capable of looking normal. He could have a number of aliases. In fact, he would have to.”

“He speak with a French accent?” Stockman was on his laptop, adding offshoots that appeared on the tree on the wall.

“He can speak with a number of accents or no accent,” Benton said. “In addition to French, he’s fluent in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and English. Maybe other languages by now. I don’t know.”

“Why Carley Crispin?” Stockman asked as he worked on the graph. “And why was she paying for Agee’s room? Or was someone else funneling money through her?”

“Probably a type of petty money laundering.” Lanier was making notes. “Sounds like a lot of that going on here, even if in relatively small ways. People paying in cash. People paying other people to pay for other people. No credit cards or wire transfers or checks that leave a paper trail. At least not for business that might not be considered legitimate.”

“Carley was going to kick him out of his room this weekend.” Berger met Benton’s eyes, and hers were as impenetrable as stone. “Why?”

“I can offer a theory,” Benton said. “Agee e-mailed Carley information allegedly from a witness, and we know it was bogus. He impersonated Harvey Fahley by using a Web captioning service. Lucy found that transcript and a number of other ones on Agee’s computer. The producers of The Crispin Report are in a hell of a lot of hot water because of what she released on the air last night about Hannah Starr’s hair being recovered from a yellow cab. A detail Agee fabricated in a phony phone interview, and Carley fell for it. Or it suited her to fall for it. Either way, she didn’t bank on getting into more trouble with the network than she was already in.”

“So she fired him,” Lanier said to him.

“Why wouldn’t she? She also knew she was about to get fired. She wasn’t going to need Agee anymore, no matter who was paying for his room. There may be a personal element,” Benton said. “We don’t know what Carley told Agee when she called him from CNN at close to eleven p.m. last night. The last phone call he got, it seems.”

“We got to talk to Carley Crispin,” Stockman said. “Too bad Agee’s dead. It’s sounding to me like he might be the key to everything.”

“What he did was stupid as hell,” said O’Dell. “He was a forensic psychiatrist. He should have known better. This Harvey Fahley guy was going to deny talking to him.”

Berger said, “He has. I spoke to Detective Bonnell while we were getting coffee. She got hold of him after the show last night. He admits e-mailing Agee but claims he never talked to him and never said anything about Hannah’s hair being found.”

“Harvey Fahley’s phone records should show if he talked to him…” O’Dell began.

“A Tracfone made the call, and it’s missing,” Benton interrupted. “Agee had a drawer full of empty Tracfone boxes. I believe the interview with Fahley was bogus, and so does Lucy. But I doubt it was Agee’s conscious intention to get fired.”

“An unconscious intention,” Lanier offered.

“That’s my opinion.” Benton believed Warner Agee was ready to self-destruct. “I seriously doubt last night was the first time suicide ever entered his mind. His condo in D.C. is about to be foreclosed on. His credit cards are expired. He relies on others for infusions of cash, is a parasite with nothing but his infirmities and demons to look forward to, and it appears he got tangled up with something that was over his head. He probably knew he was going to get caught.”

“Another recruit that would have been a poor choice,” Lanier said to everyone as she looked at Benton. “You think Jean-Baptiste would know?”

“What?” Benton’s anger flared. “Know that Agee made sure I was exiled from my life and my reward was to be shunned by the FBI, and the reason he was able to do that was because of the Chandonnes?”

Silence inside the FBI conference room.

“Do I think he encountered Jean-Baptiste, that they were somehow acquainted? Yes, I do,” Benton said. “Agee the wannabe would have lusted to talk to a so-called monster like Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, and he would have been drawn to him even if he didn’t know who he was, saying it was an alias Agee met. He would have been drawn to Jean-Baptiste’s psychopathology, to the evil he emanates, and it would be the biggest fucking mistake Warner Agee would fucking ever make.”

“Obviously,” Lanier said after a pause. “Since he’s in the morgue as we speak.”

“The Hotel Elysée is very close to the Starr mansion on Park Avenue.” Berger’s demeanor was calm. Too calm. “Only three or four blocks. You walk out of the hotel and can be at their mansion in five, ten minutes.”

Stockman typed, and Hotel Elysée and Starr Mansion appeared on the flat screen, the newest branches on the tree.

“And you need to put Lucy Farinelli’s name up there,” Berger said. “Which means you have to add mine, too. Not just because I’ve been investigating Hannah’s disappearance and have interviewed her husband and Hap Judd, but because I’m connected to Lucy. She was a client of Rupe Starr’s. Had been for more than a decade. Hard to imagine she never met Hannah and possibly Bobby.”

Benton didn’t know what she was talking about or where she’d gotten her information. He met her eyes to ask the question because he didn’t want to ask it out loud, and the lingering look she gave him was her answer. No. Lucy hadn’t told her. Berger had found out some other way.

“Photographs,” Berger said to everyone. “Leather-bound volumes in Rupe Starr’s rare book room. Parties and dinners with clients over the years. She’s in one of the albums. Lucy is.”

“You found this out when,” Benton said.

“Three weeks ago.”

If she’d known that long, then her sudden change in demeanor was related to something else. Bonnell must have relayed other information over the phone that was even more unsettling.

“Nineteen ninety-six. She was twenty, still in college. I didn’t see photographs of her in any other albums, possibly because she became an FBI agent after college, would have been extremely careful about appearing at big parties and dinners, and certainly wouldn’t have allowed her picture to be taken,” Berger went on. “As you know, after Hannah’s disappearance was reported by her husband, Bobby, we asked permission to get personal effects, her DNA, from the house on Park Avenue, and I wanted to talk to him.”

“He was in Florida when she disappeared, right?” O’Dell said.

“The night she didn’t come home from the restaurant,” Berger said, “Bobby was in their apartment in North Miami Beach, and we have that confirmed by e-mails sent from the apartment’s IP address, and we have confirmation from phone records and the Florida housekeeper, Rosie. She was interviewed. I talked to her myself over the phone, and she confirmed Bobby was there the night of November twenty-sixth, the day before Thanksgiving.”

“You know for a fact it was Bobby sending the e-mails and making the phone calls?” Lanier asked. “How do you know Rosie the housekeeper hasn’t been doing it and lying to protect her boss?”

“I don’t have probable cause or even reasonable suspicion to place him under surveillance when there’s no evidence whatsoever of criminal activity on his part,” Berger said with no inflection in her voice. “Does that mean I trust him? I don’t trust anybody.”

“We know what’s in Hannah’s will?” Lanier asked.

“She’s Rupe Starr’s only child, and when he died last May he left everything to her,” Berger responded. “She revised her will soon after. If she dies, everything goes to a foundation.”

“So she cut Bobby out. That strike you as a little unusual?” Stockman said.

“The best prenuptial is to make sure your spouse can’t profit by betraying you or killing you,” Berger answered. “And now it’s moot. Hannah Starr has a few million left and a lot of debt. Supposedly lost almost everything in the market and to Ponzi scams and all the rest this past September.”

“She’s probably on a yacht in the Mediterranean, having her nails done in Cannes or Monte Carlo,” Lanier said. “So Bobby gets nothing. What was your impression of him? Besides your natural inclination not to trust anyone.”

“Extremely upset.” Berger didn’t direct anything to anyone. She continued addressing the table, as if it was a jury. “Extremely worried, stressed, when I talked to him in their home. He’s convinced she’s the victim of foul play, claims she never would have run off and never would have left him. I was inclined to take that possibility very seriously until Lucy discovered the financial information all of you know about.”

“Let’s go back to the night Hannah disappeared,” O’Dell said. “How did Bobby know she was gone?”

“He tried to call her, and that’s reflected in phone records he’s made available to us,” Berger said. “The following day, Thanksgiving Day, Hannah was to board a private jet for Miami to spend the long weekend with him, and from there go to Saint Barts.”

“Alone?” Stockman asked. “Or both of them?”

“She was going to Saint Barts alone,” Berger answered.

“So, maybe she was about to skip the country,” Lanier said.

“That’s what I’ve wondered,” Berger said. “If she did, it wasn’t on her private jet, the Gulfstream. She never showed up at the FBO in White Plains.”

“This is what Bobby told you?” Benton asked. “We know it’s true?”

“He said it, and there’s a manifest for the flight. She didn’t show up at the FBO. She didn’t board the jet, and Bobby wasn’t on the manifest for the flight to Saint Barts,” Berger answered. “She also wasn’t answering the phone. Their New York housekeeper-”

“And her name is?” Lanier asked.

“Nastya.” She spelled it, and the name appeared on the wall. “She lives in the mansion and, according to her, Hannah never came home after having dinner in the Village on November twenty-sixth. But apparently this wasn’t reason enough to call the police. Sometimes she didn’t come home. She’d been at a birthday dinner. One if by Land, Two if by Sea on Barrow Street. She was with a group of friends and supposedly was seen getting into a yellow cab as everyone left the restaurant. That’s what we know so far.”

“Bobby know she screwed around on him?” O’Dell said.

“ ‘A lot of space in their togetherness’ is the way he described it. I don’t know what he knows,” Berger said. “Maybe what Hap said is true. Bobby and Hannah were business partners more than anything else. He claims he loves her, but we certainly hear that all the time.”

“In other words, they have an arrangement. Maybe both of them screw around. He’s from money, right?” O’Dell said.

“Not her kind of money. But from a well-off family in California, went to Stanford, got his MBA from Yale, was a successful alternative asset manager, involved in a couple of funds, one U.K. based, one Monaco-based.”

“These hedge fund guys. I mean, some of them were making hundreds of millions,” said O’Dell.

“A lot of them aren’t now, and some are in jail. What about Bobby?” Stockman said to Berger. “He lose his shirt?”

“Like a lot of these investors, he was counting on energy prices and mining stocks continuing to soar while financials continued to fall. This is what he told me,” she replied.

“And then the trend reversed in July,” Stockman said.

“He described it as a bloodbath,” Berger said. “He can’t afford the lifestyle he’s grown accustomed to without the Starr fortune, that’s for sure.”

“So the two of them are more of a merger than a marriage,” O’Dell said.

“I can’t attest to his real feelings. Who the hell ever knows the truth about what people feel,” she said without a trace of emotion. “He seemed distraught when I talked to him, when I met with him. When she didn’t show up for her flight on Thanksgiving, he claims he began to panic, called the police, and the police contacted me. Bobby claims he was afraid his wife was the victim of violence and stated that she’d had trouble in the past with being stalked. He flew to New York, met us at the house, walked us through it, at which time we collected a toothbrush of Hannah’s to get her DNA in case it turned out to be needed. In the event a body turns up somewhere.”

“The photo albums.” Benton was still thinking about Lucy and wondering what other secrets she kept. “Why would he show them to you?”

“I inquired about Hannah’s clients, if one of them might have targeted her. He said he didn’t know who most of her late father’s clients, Rupe Starr’s clients, were. Bobby suggested we-”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Marino was with me. Bobby suggested we look through the photo albums because it was Rupe’s habit to entertain a new client at the mansion, an initiation more than an invitation. If you didn’t come to dinner, he didn’t take you on. He wanted to have relationships with his clients, and apparently did.”

“You saw Lucy’s picture from 1996,” Benton said, and he could only imagine how Berger felt. “Did Marino see it, too?”

“I recognized her in the photograph. Marino wasn’t in the library with me when I found it. He didn’t see it.”

“Did you ask Bobby about it?” Benton wasn’t going to ask her why she’d withheld the information from Marino.

He suspected he knew. Berger was hoping Lucy would tell her the truth, that Berger wouldn’t have to confront her. Obviously, Lucy hadn’t.

“I didn’t show the picture to Bobby or mention it,” Berger said. “He wouldn’t have known Lucy back then. Hannah and Bobby have been together less than two years.”

“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t know about Lucy,” Benton said. “Hannah could have mentioned Lucy to him. I’d be surprised if she didn’t. When you were in the library, Jaime, did you pick that particular album off a shelf? Rupe Starr must have dozens of them.”

“Scores of them,” she said. “Bobby put a stack of them on the table for me.”

“Any possibility he wanted you to find the photograph of Lucy?” Benton had one of his feelings again. Something in his gut that was sending him a message.

“He put them on the table and walked out of the library,” Berger replied.

A game. And a cruel one, if Bobby had done it deliberately, Benton thought. If he knew about Berger’s private life, he would know it would upset her to discover her partner, her forensic computer expert, had been in the Starr mansion, had been mixed up with those people and had said nothing about it.

“You don’t mind my asking,” Lanier said to Berger, “why would you allow Lucy to handle the forensic computer part of this investigation if she had ties with the alleged victim? In fact, with the entire Starr family?”

Berger didn’t answer at first. Then she said, “I was waiting for her to explain it.”

“What is the explanation?” Lanier asked.

“I’m still waiting for it.”

“Okay. Well, it could be a problem down the road,” Stockman said. “If this goes to court.”

“I consider it a problem now.” Berger’s face was grim. “A much bigger problem than I care to describe.”

“Where’s Bobby now?” Lanier asked her in a milder tone than she’d used so far.

“It appears back here in the city,” Berger said. “He e-mails Hannah. E-mails her daily.”

“That’s fucked up,” O’Dell said.

“Whether it is or it isn’t, he’s been doing it. We know because obviously we’re accessing her e-mail. He e-mailed her late last night and said he’d heard about some development in the case and was returning to New York early this morning. I would expect he’s here by now.”

“Unless the guy’s an imbecile, he must suspect somebody’s looking at her e-mails. Makes me suspicious he’s doing it for our benefit,” O’Dell said.

“My first thought, too,” Lanier said.

Games, Benton thought, and the uneasy feeling was stronger.

“I don’t know what he suspects. Ostensibly, he’s hoping Hannah is alive somewhere and is reading his e-mails to her,” Berger said. “I’m assuming he’s aware of what was on The Crispin Report last night, about Hannah’s head hair supposedly being found in a cab. And that’s why he’s suddenly returning to the city.”

“Same thing as hearing she’s dead. Damn reporters,” Stockman said. “Anything for ratings and don’t give a flying flip about what it does to people whose lives they wreck.” He said to Benton, “She really say that about us? You know, about the FBI, about profiling being antiquated?”

Stockman meant Scarpetta and what was on the CNN marquee and all over the Internet last night.

“I believe she was misquoted,” Benton said blandly. “I think she meant the good ole days were gone and were never all that good.”