Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

The card’s red envelope was blank, nothing on it, not Benton’s name or Scarpetta’s or Dodie Hodge’s. That much was consistent with what he knew about her, at least. While she was at McLean she’d refused to write. She’d refused to draw. At first she’d claimed she was shy. Then she decided the medication she was taking during her hospitalization had caused tremors and impaired her coordination, making it impossible for her to copy the simplest sequence of geometric designs or connect numbers in a certain order or sort cards or manipulate blocks. For almost a month, all she had done was act out, stir up trouble, complain, lecture, advise, pry, lie, and talk to anyone who would listen, sometimes at the top of her lungs. She couldn’t get enough of her self-aggrandizing dramas and magical thinking, was the star in her own movie and her own biggest fan.

There was no personality disorder Benton dreaded more than the histrionic, and from the moment of Dodie’s arrest in Detroit, Michigan, for misdemeanor petty theft and disorderly conduct, it had been the goal of all involved to get her psychiatric care and as far away from them as possible. No one wanted anything to do with this bombastic woman who was shrieking and wailing in Betty’s Bookstore Café that she was the aunt of movie star Hap Judd, that she was on his “free list” and therefore it wasn’t stealing to stuff four of his action movie DVDs into the front of her pants. Even Betty herself was happy to drop the charges as long as Dodie never stepped foot in her store again or in Detroit or the state of Michigan. The deal was that Dodie had to be hospitalized for a minimum of three weeks, and if she complied, the case would go away.

She had cooperated with the stipulation that she was to be admitted to McLean because it was where VIPs, the rich and famous, go and was convenient to her estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, and also to Salem, where she liked to shop in various witcheries and do readings and rituals for hire and offer for a price the gifts of The Craft. She insisted that for the amount of money her private hospitalization would cost her, she was to be paired with the most established and prominent forensic expert available, a male with at minimum a Ph.D. and a background with the FBI, in addition to an open mind about the supernatural and a tolerance of other faiths, including the Old Religion.

Dodie’s first choice was the forensic psychiatrist Dr. Warner Agee because he was a former FBI profiler, according to her, and on TV. The request was denied. For one thing, Agee had no affiliation with McLean, and for another, the Detroit DA’s office wanted no association with the Dr. Phil of forensics, as they referred to him. Agee’s name being introduced into the mix was enough to send Benton the other way, no matter who the patient was-he despised the man that much. But Benton had a professional obligation to McLean, and it was his bad luck to be the obvious candidate for the onerous assignment of evaluating this woman who claimed to be a witch with ties to celebrity. The goal was to keep her out of court and out of jail-not that any jail on the planet would want her.

During the four weeks she had been a patient, Benton had spent as much time as possible in New York, not only to be with Scarpetta but to be away from Dodie. He’d been so relieved when she was discharged this past Sunday afternoon, he’d checked several times to make sure she’d actually been picked up and driven home, not to an estate in Greenwich, because that was another lie. She’d been deposited at a small house in Edgewater, New Jersey, where she apparently lived alone, having gone through four husbands, all dead or having fled years ago. Poor bastards.

Benton picked up the phone and dialed the extension of Bellevue’s chief of forensic psychiatry, Dr. Nathan Clark, and asked if he had a minute. While Benton waited, he looked at the FedEx envelope again, certain details continuing to perplex and concern him and prompt him to act in ways he knew he shouldn’t. There was no return address on the airbill, and his address here at Bellevue was handwritten in a functional calligraphy that was so precise it looked like a printed typeface. Not at all what he would have expected from someone like Dodie, whose only writing while she’d been at McLean was a large, looping scrawl when she’d had to sign her name on various forms. He slid the thick glossy card out of its envelope, a big fat Santa on the front of it being chased by a furious rolling pin-wielding Mrs. Claus, and the caption “Who Are You Calling a Ho!” He opened the card and Dodie Hodge’s recorded off-key voice began to sing, to the tune of “A Holly, Jolly Christmas”:

Have a Ho-Dee, Do-Dee Christmas

And When You Think of Me

Stick Some Mistletoe Where It Ought to Go

And Hang an Angel from Your Tree

Merry, Merry Christmas, Benton and Kay!

Over and over, the same maddening lyrics and greeting in her childish, breathy voice.

“Not exactly Burl Ives,” Dr. Clark said as he walked in with his coat, his hat, his beat-up leather satchel with its long strap that reminded Benton of a mailbag from the days of the pony express and covered wagons.

“If you can stand it, it will keep going until the recording time runs out,” Benton said. “Exactly four minutes.”

Dr. Clark placed his belongings in a chair and came over to where Benton sat, leaning close to get a look at the card, steadying himself by placing both hands on the edge of the desk. In his early seventies, he’d recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a cruel punishment for a gifted man whose body had always been as agile as his mind. Tennis, skiing, mountain climbing, piloting his own plane-there wasn’t much he hadn’t tried and succeeded at, his love of life boundless. He’d been cheated by biology, by genetics, by the environment, maybe something as mundane as exposure to lead paint or old plumbing that had caused free-radical damage to the basal ganglia of his remarkable brain. Who the hell knew how he’d ended up with such a scourge. But it was advancing rapidly. Already he was stooped, his movements retarded and clumsy.

Benton closed the card, and Dodie’s voice abruptly stopped mid-lyric. “Homemade, obviously,” he said. “The typical talking card has a recording time of as little as ten seconds, maybe as long as forty-five, but not four minutes. From what I understand, the way you create a longer recording is to buy a bare voice module that has more memory. You can order them on the Internet, then basically build your own greeting card. Which is what this particular former patient of mine did. Or someone did it for her.”

He picked up the card in his white cotton-gloved hands and turned it at different angles so Dr. Clark could see the edges, see how it had been pieced together with exactness and care.

“She found this greeting card, or someone did,” Benton continued to explain, “and made her recording on a module, which was glued to the inside, then a square of paper was glued over it, possibly the blank side of another greeting card that was cut out. Which is why the inside of her card is completely blank. She didn’t write anything on it. She didn’t write anything the entire time she was at McLean. She says she doesn’t write.”

“Graphophobic?”

“That and medication, so she says.”

“A perfectionist who can’t cope with criticism.” Dr. Clark went around to the other side of the desk.

“A malingerer.”

“Ah. A factitious disorder. For what motive?” Already Dr. Clark wasn’t trusting what Benton was saying.

“Money and attention are her two strongest motivating forces. But maybe there’s something else,” Benton said. “I’m beginning to wonder who and what we had at McLean for a month. And why.”