Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“In my opinion, that’s not possible,” Scarpetta said.

“Detective Bonnell,” Berger said. “Do you have that WAV file? Perhaps you can play it on Marino’s computer. Hopefully we’ll be able to hear it over speakerphone. A recording of a nine-one-one call that came in at around two p.m. today.”

“Doing it now,” Bonnell said. “Let me know if you can’t hear it.”

Benton turned up the volume on the VoiceStation as the recording began:

“Police operator five-one-nine, what is the emergency?”

“Um, my emergency is about the lady they found in the park this morning, the north side of the park off One hundred and tenth Street?” The voice was nervous, scared. A man who sounded young.

“What lady are you referring to?”

“The lady, um, the jogger who was murdered. I heard about it on the news…”

“Sir, is this an emergency?”

“I think so because I saw, I think I saw, who did it. I was driving by that area around five this morning and saw a yellow cab pulled over and a guy was helping what looked like a drunk woman out of the back. The first thing I thought was it was her boyfriend, like they’d been out all night. I didn’t get a good look. It was pretty dark and foggy.”

“It was a yellow cab?”

“And she was, like, drunk or passed out. It was real quick and, like I said, dark and a lot of mist and fog, really hard to see. I was driving toward Fifth Avenue and caught a glimpse. I had no reason to slow down, but I know what I saw, and it was definitely a yellow cab. The light on the roof was turned off, like when cabs are in use.”

“Do you have a tag number or the identification number painted on the door?”

“No, no. I didn’t see a reason, um, but I saw on the news, they said it’s a jogger and I do remember this lady looked like she had on some type of running clothes. A red bandana or something? I thought I saw something red around her neck, and she had on a light-colored sweatshirt or something like that instead of a coat, because I noticed right away she didn’t look all that warmly dressed. According to the time they said she was found, well, it wasn’t long at all after I drove past that spot…”

The WAV file stopped.

“I was contacted by dispatch, and I did speak to this gentleman over the phone and will follow up in person, and we’ve run a background on him,” Bonnell said.

Scarpetta envisioned the yellow paint chip she had recovered from Toni Darien’s hair, in the area of her head wound. She remembered thinking in the morgue when she was looking at the paint under a lens that the color reminded her of French’s mustard and yellow cabs.

“Harvey Fahley, a twenty-nine-year-old project manager at Kline Pharmaceuticals in Brooklyn, has an apartment in Brooklyn,” Bonnell continued. “And his girlfriend does have an apartment in Manhattan, in Morningside Heights.”

Scarpetta certainly didn’t know if the paint was automotive. It could be architectural, aerosol, from a tool, a bicycle, a street sign, from almost anything.

“What he told me is consistent with what he said on the nine-one-one recording,” Bonnell said. “He’d spent the night with his girlfriend and was driving home, was headed to Fifth Avenue, planning to cut over on Fifty-ninth to the Queensboro Bridge so he could get ready for work.”

It made sense why Berger was resistant to what Scarpetta believed was Toni’s time of death. If a cabdriver was the killer, it seemed more plausible that he was cruising and spotted Toni while she was out, possibly walking or jogging late last night. It seemed implausible that a cabdriver would have picked her up at some point on Tuesday, perhaps in the afternoon, and then kept her body until almost five o’clock this morning.

As Bonnell continued to explain, “There was nothing suspicious about anything he said to me, nothing about his background. Most important, the description about the way the woman was dressed, his description of her as she was being helped out of the taxi? How could he possibly know those details? They haven’t been made public.”

The body doesn’t lie. Scarpetta reminded herself of what she’d learned during her earliest days of training: Don’t try to force the evidence to fit the crime. Toni Darien wasn’t murdered last night. She wasn’t murdered yesterday. No matter what Berger wanted to believe or any witness said.

“Did Harvey Fahley offer a more detailed description of the man who was allegedly helping the drunk-looking woman out of the taxi?” Benton asked, looking up at the ceiling, hands together, impatiently tapping his fingertips together.

“A man in dark clothing, a baseball cap, maybe glasses. He got the impression the man was slender, maybe an average-size person,” Bonnell said. “But he didn’t get a good look, because he didn’t slow down and also because of the weather conditions. He said the taxi itself was blocking his view because the man and the woman were between it and the sidewalk, which would be true if you were driving east on One hundred and tenth, heading to Fifth Avenue.”

“What about the taxi driver?” Benton asked.

“He didn’t get a look but assumed there was one,” Bonnell answered.

“Why would he assume that?” Benton asked.

“The only door open was the back door on the right side, as if the driver was still up front and the man and woman had been in the back. Harvey said if it had been the driver helping her out at a location like that, he probably would have stopped. He would have assumed the lady was in trouble. You don’t just leave a drunk passed-out person on the roadside.”

“Sounds like he’s making excuses about why he didn’t stop,” Marino said. “He wouldn’t want to think what he actually saw was a taxi driver dumping an injured or dead woman on the roadside. Easier to think it was a couple out drinking all night.”

“The area he described in the nine-one-one recording,” Scarpetta said. “How far would that be from where the body was found?”

“About thirty feet,” Bonnell said.

Scarpetta told them about the bright-yellow paint chip she’d recovered from Toni’s hair. She encouraged them not to place too much stock in the detail, because none of the trace evidence had been examined yet and she’d also found red and black microscopic chips on Toni’s body. The paint could have been transferred from the weapon that fractured Toni’s skull. The paint could be from something else.

“So if she was in a yellow cab, how could she have been dead thirty-six hours?” Marino voiced the obvious question.

“It would have to be a cabdriver who killed her,” Bonnell replied with more confidence than any of them had a right to feel at the moment. “Either way you look at it, if what Harvey said is true, it had to be a cabdriver who picked her up last night, killed her, and dumped her body in the park early this morning. Or he had her for a while and then dumped her, if Dr. Scarpetta’s right about time of death. And the yellow cab could connect Toni Darien to Hannah Starr.”

Scarpetta had been waiting for that assumption next.

“Hannah Starr was last seen getting into a yellow cab,” Bonnell added.

“I’m not at all prepared to connect Toni’s case to Hannah Starr,” Berger said.

“Thing is, if we don’t say something and it happens again,” Bonnell said, “then we’re talking three.”

“I have no intention of making any such connection at this time.” Berger said it as a warning: Nobody else had better think of making that connection publicly, either.

“It’s not necessarily what I think, not about Hannah Starr,” Berger continued. “There are other factors about her disappearance. A lot of things I’ve been looking into point at her possibly being a very different type of case. And we don’t know that she’s dead.”