Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“The whole precinct’s going to come over here,” he said, checking on the bread. “Or maybe all of Harlem. This might be ready.”

“It should sound hollow when you tap it,” Scarpetta said, wiping her hands on her apron and taking a look, a wave of fragrant heat rising from the oven.

“Sounds hollow to me.” Lobo licked the finger he’d used to tap the bread.

“Same way he checks bombs.” Marino walked into the kitchen, Mac the boxer and Lucy’s bulldog, Jet Ranger, right behind him, toenails clicking on tile. “He thumps it and if it doesn’t blow up, he gets to go home early, all in a day’s work. Can they have anything?” Marino was talking about the dogs.

“No,” Lucy answered loudly from the Memorial Room. “No people food.”

On the other side of an open doorway, she and Berger were arranging strands of white lights on top of the display case containing the personal effects of Joe Vigiano, John D’Allara, and Mike Curtin, the responders from the Two who had died on 9/11. Their gear recovered from the ruins was arranged on shelves, an assortment of handcuffs, keys, holsters, wire cutters, flashlights, D rings and clips from Roco harnesses, melted and bent, and on the floor was a section of steel beam from the World Trade Center. Photos of the three men and other members of the Two who had died on duty were arranged on maple-paneled walls, and over Mac’s dog bed was an American flag quilt made by a grammar school. Christmas music accompanied the chatter of police radios, and Scarpetta heard footsteps on the stairs.

Benton had gone out with Bonnell to pick up the last of the food, a frozen chocolate pistachio mousse, a butterless sponge cake, and dry-cured sausages and cheeses. Scarpetta had been heavy on the antipasto because it would keep, and there was nothing better than leftovers when cops are sitting around in their quarters and working in the garage, waiting for emergencies. It was mid-afternoon, Christmas day, cold with snow flurries, and Lobo and Ann Droiden had dropped by from 6th Precinct, everyone gathering at the Two because Scarpetta had decided the holiday dinner should be spent with the people who had done the most for her lately.

Benton appeared in the doorway with a box, his face ruddy from the cold.

“L.A.’s still parking the car. Even cops have no place to park around here. Where would you like it?” He walked in, looking around, not an empty space on a countertop or the kitchen table.

“Here.” Scarpetta moved several bowls. “The mousse goes in the freezer for now. And I see you brought wine. Well, I guess you won’t be helping out in any emergencies. Is it legal to have wine up here?” she called out to whoever wanted to answer from the Memorial Room, where Lobo and Droiden were with Berger and Lucy.

“Only if it’s got a screw cap or comes out of a box,” Lobo answered back.

“Anything that costs more than five bucks is contraband,” Droiden added.

“Who’s on call?” Lucy said. “I’m not. Jaime’s not. I think Mac needs to potty.”

“He off-gassing again?” Lobo asked.

The brindle boxer was old and arthritic, as was Jet Ranger, both of them rescues, and Scarpetta found the package of treats she’d baked, a healthy cookie made with peanut butter and spelt flour. She whistled and the dogs hurried over to her, not spry but they hadn’t lost their enthusiasm, and she said “sit” and then rewarded them.

“If only it were that easy with people,” she said, taking off her apron. “Come on,” she said to Benton. “Mac needs a little exercise.”

Benton got the leash and they put on their coats, and Scarpetta stuffed several plastic bags in a pocket. They took Mac down the scuffed wooden stairs and through the huge garage filled with emergency trucks and gear, hardly any room to walk, and out a side door. Across Tenth Avenue was a small park next to Saint Mary’s Church, and she and Benton headed Mac over there because frozen balding grass was better than pavement.

“Status check,” Benton said. “You’ve been cooking for two days.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to bring it up in there,” he said as Mac started sniffing, pulling him toward a bare tree, then toward a bush. “They’re going to talk about it all night, anyway. And I think we should let them and in a little while you and I should go home. We should be alone. We haven’t been alone all week.”

They hadn’t slept much, either. It had taken several days to excavate the Starr mansion basement because the electronic nose, the LABRADOR, had gotten as industrious in its sniffing as Mac was right now, leading Scarpetta everywhere, alerting on traces of decomposed blood. For a while she’d feared that there were many bodies in the two levels below the house where Rupe Starr had maintained and kept his cars, but there hadn’t been. In the end, only Hannah was down there, beneath concrete in the grease pit, her cause of death not so different from Toni Darien’s, except Hannah’s injury was more massive and passionate. She’d been struck in the head and face sixteen times, possibly with the same weapon that had been used on Toni, a stick shift with a large steel knob the shape and size of a billiard ball.

The shift assembly was from a hand-built car called a Spyker that Lucy said Rupe had restored and then sold some five years ago, and DNA recovered from it had been contributed by multiple people, three of them positively identified: Hannah, Toni, and the person who Scarpetta believed had beaten them to death, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, aka Bobby Fuller, an American businessman as fictitious as many of Chandonne’s other aliases. Scarpetta didn’t perform Chandonne’s autopsy, but she’d witnessed it, feeling it was as important to her future as it was to her past. Dr. Edison had taken the case, and the examination had been like any other performed at the NYC OCME, and Scarpetta couldn’t help but think how much that might have disappointed Chandonne.

He wasn’t any more or less special than anyone, just one more body on a table, only he had more than the usual remnants of cosmetic reconstruction and improvements. His corrective surgeries would have taken years of visits to the OR and long convalescences that must have been torture. Scarpetta could only imagine the misery of full-body-hair laser removal and having every tooth crowned. But perhaps he had been pleased with the end result, because no matter how much she had studied him in the morgue, she’d found very little evidence of his deformities, just railroad tracks of surgical scars revealed when his head was shaved around the entrance and exit wounds caused by the nine-millimeter round Benton had fired through Jean-Baptiste’s upper forehead.

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne was dead, and Scarpetta knew it was him. DNA wasn’t wrong, and she could rest assured he would never be on a park bench or in her morgue or in a mansion or anywhere ever again. Hap Judd was dead, and despite how well he had cho reographed his paraphilic predilections and ultimate crimes, he’d managed to leave quite a trail of DNA: on the BioGraph watch Toni had started wearing as part of a Chandonne-funded research study called Caligula that her gangster MIT-trained father had gotten her involved with; in her vagina, because latex gloves aren’t quite as foolproof as condoms; on the red scarf that had been around her neck; on wadded paper towels Marino had collected from her trash, probably used when Hap thought he was removing any evidence that he’d been inside her apartment; and on two true-crime paperbacks that were in a drawer by her bedside table. The theory was that it had been Hap in the security recordings, his final act.

He put on Toni’s parka and a pair of running shoes similar to hers, but he’d gotten the gloves wrong because she’d begun wearing ski mittens, the olive-and-tan Hestras she’d left in the front seat of the Lamborghini, a wireless fingertip pulse oximeter still inside one of them. Hap had entered Toni’s building, using the keys he’d taken from her dead body and later returned, and although Scarpetta would never know exactly what he’d had in mind, she suspected it was a combination of purposes. He wanted to remove any evidence that he was connected with her, and there was plenty of it recovered from her cell phone and laptop, both found in his TriBeCa apartment along with her wallet and other items, including chargers that suggested she’d spent time with him there. She’d written him hundreds of text messages, and he’d e-mailed some of his disturbing screenplays to her, and she’d saved them on her hard drive. Text messages from him made it clear their relationship had to be a secret because of his celebrity, and Scarpetta doubted Toni had any idea that her famous boyfriend’s sexual fantasies about her were as grotesque as what he wrote and liked to read.