Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

She was telling Bonnell to switch to the point-to-point frequency Tac I, instead of using the standard repeater radio service and going through a dispatcher. Bonnell unclipped her radio from her belt, switched channels, and pressed the transmit button.

“Smoker, do you copy?” she said, watching Lucy. “Smoker, are you on the air?”

“Yeah, I copy, Los Angeles.” Marino’s tense voice. “What’s your twenty?”

“We’re in the basement with Hot Shot.” Bonnell wasn’t answering Marino’s question.

He was asking if she was okay, and she was telling him where she was, using personal designations that the two of them must have assigned to each other, and to Lucy. Lucy was Hot Shot, and Bonnell didn’t trust her. Bonnell wasn’t reassuring Marino that she or anyone was safe. She was doing the opposite.

“Hot Shot’s with you?” Marino’s voice. “What about the Eagle?”

“Affirm to both.”

“Anyone else?”

Bonnell looked at Nastya and answered, “Hazel.” Another designation she just made up.

“Tell him I opened the garage door,” Lucy said.

Bonnell transmitted it over the air as Berger walked back, looking at her BlackBerry, looking at messages as they landed in a rapid succession of chimes. Earlier calls, some of them from Marino, from Scarpetta. And from Lucy, at least five when she’d realized Berger was on her way here and didn’t know what was happening, was missing critical information. Lucy had kept calling, had gotten terrified, had been as frightened as she’d ever been in her life.

“What’s your twenty?” Marino’s voice asking Bonnell if everyone was all right.

“Not sure who’s inside and been having radio problems,” Bonnell replied.

“When can we expect you out?”

Lucy said, “Tell him to come through the garage. It’s open and they need to come up the ramp to the upper basement level.”

Bonnell transmitted the message and said to Lucy, “We’re okay.” She meant she wasn’t going to draw her gun, wasn’t going to do something fucking stupid like shoot her.

Lucy lowered the Glock to her side, but she didn’t return it to the ankle holster. She and Berger began to walk around, and Lucy showed her the yellow Checker cab and the dirt on tires and the tile floor, but they didn’t touch anything. They didn’t open its doors but looked through the rear windows at the torn and rotted black carpet, at the tattered and stained black cloth upholstery and folded jump seat. There was a coat on the floor. Green. It looked like a parka. The witness, Harvey Fahley, said he’d seen a yellow taxi. If he wasn’t an aficionado of cars, he wouldn’t necessarily have noticed that this yellow taxi was about thirty years old with the signature checkerboard trim that contemporary models didn’t have. What the average person would notice when driving past in the dark was the chrome-yellow color, the boxy General Motors chassis, and the light on top, which Fahley recalled was turned off, signaling that the taxi wasn’t available.

Lucy offered snapshots of information that Scarpetta had relayed over the phone when Lucy and Marino had been on their way here, scared that something awful had happened. Berger and Bonnell weren’t answering the police radio or their phones and had no way of knowing that Toni Darien had jogged to this address late last Tuesday, that she likely had died in the basement and it was possible she wasn’t the only victim. Lucy and Berger talked and searched and watched for Marino, and Lucy said she was sorry until Berger told her to stop saying it. Both of them were guilty of keeping to themselves things that should have been discussed, neither of them honest, Berger said, as they got to workbenches, two of them plastic, with drawers and bins. Scattered on them were tools and miscellaneous parts, hood ornaments and valves, chrome collars, screws, head bolts. One stick-shift assembly had a large steel knob with blood on it, or maybe rust. They didn’t touch it or the spools of fine-gauge wire and what looked like tiny circuit boards that Lucy recognized as recording modules, and a notebook.

It had a black cloth cover with yellow stars on it, and Lucy flipped it open with the barrel of her pistol. A book of magical spells, of recipes and potions for hexing, for protection, winning, and good luck, all handwritten in a perfect script, in Gotham, as precise as a font, and also on the bench were small gold-silk pouches, some emptied of the fur that had been inside them, long black-and-white hairs and clumps of matted undercoat. What looked like wolf fur was scattered on work surfaces and on the floor, which had been cleaned in wide swaths, something recently wiped up or mopped near the orange metallic Lamborghini Diablo VT. The top was down and on the passenger’s seat was a pair of Hestra olive nylon mittens with tan cowhide palms, and Lucy imagined Toni Darien entering the mansion upstairs after jogging here.

She imagined Toni feeling comfortable with whoever had greeted her at the door, whoever walked her down to the basement, where it was at most fifty-five degrees. She may have had her coat on as she was given a tour, shown the cars, and she would have been especially impressed with the Lamborghini. She might have gotten behind the wheel and taken off her mittens so she could get the feel of carbon fiber and fantasize, and when she climbed back out, it might have happened then. A pause as she turned away, and someone grabbed an object, perhaps the stick shift, and had struck the back of her head.

“Then she was raped,” Berger said.

“She wasn’t walking and was being moved around,” Lucy told her. “Aunt Kay says it went on for more than an hour. And after she was dead, it started again. Like she was left down here, maybe on that mattress, and then he’d come back. It went on for a day and a half.”

“When he first started killing”-Berger meant Jean-Baptiste-“he did it with his brother, Jay. Jay was the handsome one, would have sex with the women, then Jean-Baptiste would beat them to death. He never had sex with them. His excitement was the kill.”

“Jay had sex with them. So maybe he found another Jay,” Lucy said.

“We need to find Hap Judd right away.”

“How did you set it up with Bobby?” Lucy asked, as Marino and four cops dressed like SWAT appeared at the top of the ramp and headed toward them, their hands near their weapons.

“After the meeting at the FBI field office, I called his cell phone,” Berger said.

“Then he wasn’t home, not in this house,” Lucy said. “Unless he’d turned off the frequency jammer and after talking to you turned it back on.”

“There’s a cognac glass upstairs in the library,” Berger said. “It might tell us if Bobby is him.” She meant Jean-Baptiste Chandonne again.

Lucy said to Marino as he reached them, “Where’s Benton?”

“He and Marty left to pick up the Doc.” His eyes were looking everywhere, taking in what was on the mobile benches and the floor, looking at the Checker cab. “Crime Scene’s on its way to see if we can figure out what the hell happened down here, and the Doc’s bringing the sniffer.”

Inside what the DNA Building’s staff had come to call the Blood Spatter Room, Scarpetta dipped a swab inside a bottle of hexane. She swiped a residue into a petri dish she’d set on the epoxy-tile floor, and pressed the power button on the Lightweight Analyzer for Buried Remains and Decomposition Odor, a LABRADOR.

The e-nose, or sniffer, brought to mind a robotic dog that a creator for the Jetsons might have designed, an S-rod with small speakers on either side of the handle that could pass for ears, and the nose a metal honeycomb of twelve sensors that detected different chemical signatures the same way a canine recognized scents. A battery pack was attached to a strap that Scarpetta slipped over her shoulder, and she tucked the S-rod close to her side and maneuvered the nose over her sample in the petri dish. The LABRADOR responded with an illuminated bar graph on the control console and an audio signal, what sounded like synthesized strums on a harp, a harmonic pattern of tones distinctive for hexane. The e-nose was happy. It had alerted on an alkane hydrocarbon, a simple solvent, and had passed its test. Now it was on to a much more somber assignment.