Patricia Cornwell: The Scarpetta Factor

Opening a Web browser, she typed BioGraph into a search field. At the top of the screen was the query Did you mean: BioGraphy. No, she didn’t. Biograph Records . Not what she was looking for. American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, the oldest movie company in America, founded in 1895 by an inventor who worked for Thomas Edison, a distant ancestor of the chief medical examiner, not sure how many times removed. An interesting coincidence. Nothing for BioGraph with a capital B and a capital G, the way it was stamped on the back of the unusual watch Toni Darien was wearing on her left wrist when her body arrived at the morgue this morning.

It was snowing hard in Stowe, Vermont, big flakes falling heavy and wet, piled in the branches of balsam firs and Scotch pines. The ski lifts traversing the Green Mountains were faint spidery lines, almost invisible in the storm and at a standstill. Nobody skiing in this stuff, nobody doing anything except staying inside.

Lucy Farinelli’s helicopter was stuck in nearby Burlington. At least it was safely in a hangar, but she and New York County Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger weren’t going anywhere for five hours, maybe longer, not before nine p.m., when the storm was supposed to have cleared to the south. At that point, conditions should be VFR again, a ceiling greater than three thousand feet, visibility five miles or more, winds gusting up to thirty knots out of the northeast. They’d have a hell of a tailwind heading home to New York, should get there in time for what they needed to do, but Berger was in a mood, had been in the other room on the phone all day, not even trying to be nice. The way she looked at it, the weather had trapped them here longer than planned, and since Lucy was a pilot, it was her fault. Didn’t matter the forecasters had been wrong, that what began as two distinct small storms combined into one over Saskatchewan, Canada, and merged with an arctic air mass to create a bit of a monster.

Lucy turned down the volume of the YouTube video, Mick Fleetwood’s drum solo for “World Turning,” live in concert in 1987.

“Can you hear me now?” she said over the phone to her Aunt Kay. “The signal’s pretty bad here, and the weather isn’t helping.”

“Much better. How are we doing?” Scarpetta’s voice in Lucy’s jawbone.

“I’ve found nothing so far. Which is weird.”

Lucy had three MacBooks going, each screen split into quadrants, displaying Aviation Weather Center updates, data streams from neural network searches, links prompting her that they might lead to websites of interest, Hannah Starr’s e-mail, Lucy’s e-mail, and security camera footage of the actor Hap Judd wearing scrubs in the Park General Hospital morgue before he was famous.

“You sure of the name?” she asked as she scanned the screens, her mind jumping from one preoccupation to the next.

“All I know is what’s stamped on the steel back of it.” Scarpetta’s voice, serious and in a hurry. “BioGraph.” She spelled it again. “And a serial number. Maybe it’s not going to be picked up by the usual software that searches the Internet. Like viruses. If you don’t already know what you’re looking for, you won’t find it.”

“It’s not like antivirus software. The search engines I use aren’t software-driven. I do open-source searches. I’m not finding BioGraph because it’s not on the Net. Nothing published about it. Not on message boards or in blogs or in databases, not in anything.”

“Please don’t hack,” Scarpetta said.

“I simply exploit weaknesses in operating systems.”

“Yes, and if a back door is unlocked and you walk into somebody’s house, it’s not trespassing.”

“No mention of BioGraph or I’d find it.” Lucy wasn’t going to get into their usual debate about the end justifying the means.

“I don’t see how that’s possible. This is a very sophisticated-looking watch with a USB port. You have to charge it, likely on a docking station. I suspect it was rather expensive.”

“Not finding it if I search it as a watch or a device or anything.” Lucy watched results rolling by, her neural net search engines sorting through an infinity of keywords, anchor text, file types, URLs, title tags, e-mail and IP addresses. “I’m looking and not seeing anything even close to what you’ve described.”

“Got to be some way to know what it is.”

“It isn’t. That’s my point,” Lucy said. “There’s no such thing as a BioGraph watch or device, or anything that might remotely fit what Toni Darien was wearing. Her BioGraph watch doesn’t exist.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t?”

“I mean it doesn’t exist on the Internet, within the communication network, or metaphorically in cyberspace. In other words, a BioGraph watch doesn’t exist virtually,” Lucy said. “If I physically look at whatever this thing is, I’ll probably figure it out. Especially if you’re right and it’s some sort of data-collecting device.”

“Can’t do that until the labs are done with it.”

“Shit, don’t let them get out their screwdrivers and hammers,” Lucy said.

“Being swabbed for DNA, that’s all. The police already checked for prints. Nothing. Please tell Jaime she can call me when it’s convenient. I hope you’re having some fun. Sorry I don’t have time to chat right now.”

“If I see her, I’ll tell her.”

“She’s not with you?” Scarpetta probed.

“The Hannah Starr case and now this. Jaime’s a little tied up, has a lot on her mind. You of all people know how it is.” Lucy wasn’t interested in discussing her personal life.

“I hope she’s had a happy birthday.”

Lucy didn’t want to talk about it. “What’s the weather like there?”

“Windy and cold. Overcast.”

“You’re going to get more rain, possibly snow north of the city,” Lucy said. “It will be cleared out by midnight, because the system is weakening as it heads your way.”

“The two of you are staying put, I hope.”

“If I don’t get the chopper out, she’ll be looking for a dog-sled.”

“Call me before you leave, and please be careful,” Scarpetta said. “I’ve got to go, got to talk to Toni Darien’s mother. I miss you. We’ll have dinner, do something soon?”

“Sure,” Lucy said.

She got off the phone and turned the sound up again on YouTube, Mick Fleetwood still going at it on the drums. Both hands on MacBooks as if she was in her own rock concert playing a solo on keyboards, she clicked on another weather update, clicked on an e-mail that had just landed in Hannah Starr’s inbox. People were bizarre. If you know someone has disappeared and might even be dead, why do you continue to send e-mail? Lucy wondered if Hannah Starr’s husband, Bobby Fuller, was so stupid it didn’t occur to him that the NYPD and the district attorney’s office might be monitoring Hannah’s e-mail or getting a forensic computer expert like Lucy to do it. For the past three weeks Bobby had been sending daily messages to his missing wife. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing, wanted law enforcement to see what he was writing to his bien-aimée, his chouchou, his amore mio, the love of his life. If he’d murdered her, he wouldn’t be writing her love notes, right?

From: Bobby Fuller

Sent: Thursday, December 18, 3:24 P.M.

To: Hannah

Subject: Non posso vivere senza di te

My Little One,

I hope you are someplace safe and reading this. My heart is carried by the wings of my soul and finds you wherever you are. Don’t forget. I can’t eat or sleep. B.

Lucy checked his IP address, recognized it at a glance by now. Bobby and Hannah’s apartment in North Miami Beach, where he was pining away while hiding from the media in palatial surroundings that Lucy knew all too well-had been in that same apartment with his lovely thief of a wife not that long ago, as a matter of fact. Every time Lucy saw an e-mail from Bobby and tried to get into his head, she wondered how he would really feel if he believed Hannah was dead.