Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

Lucy remembered thinking Hannah could have stepped out of an ad for a five-star resort in her ready-to-wear silk Ungaro, beautiful and blond, with just enough weight to be sexy and just enough years to be credible as a high-level financier. Forty and perfect, one of those precious people untouched by commonness, by hardship, by anything ugly, someone Lucy always avoided at the lavish dinners and parties hosted by Rupe Starr, her father. Hannah had seemed incapable of crime, if for no other reason than she didn’t need to bother with anything as untidy as living a lie and stealing people blind. Lucy had misread Hannah’s open book, all right, misread it enough to incur incalculable damage. She’d taken a nine-figure hit because of Hannah’s little favor. One lie leads to another, and now Lucy was living one, although she had her own definition of lying. It wasn’t literally a lie if the end result was truth.

She paused halfway across the ramp, tried Marino on her BlackBerry. Right about now he should be doing surveillance, checking on Hap Judd’s whereabouts, making sure he hadn’t decided to boogie after his bullshit tap dance about meeting during the wee hours of the morning because he didn’t want to be recognized. Didn’t want anything ending up on Page Six of the Post or all over the Internet. Maybe he should have thought about that before he’d blown off the likes of Jaime Berger the first time she tried to reach him three weeks ago. Maybe he should have thought, period, before running his mouth to a stranger who, what do you know, happened to be a friend of Lucy’s, a snitch.

“That you?” Marino’s voice in her wireless jawbone. “Was getting worried you’d decided to visit John Denver.”

Lucy didn’t laugh, not even a smile. She never joked about people who’d been killed in crashes. Planes, helicopters, motorcycles, cars, the space shuttle. Not funny.

“I e-mailed you a MapQuest,” Marino said as she resumed walking across the tarmac, hauling luggage over her shoulders. “I know that race car of yours ain’t got a GPS.”

“Why the hell would I need a GPS to find my way home?”

“Roads being shut down, traffic diverted, because of a little situation that I didn’t want to get into while you were flying that death trap of yours. Plus, you got the package with you.” He meant Berger, his boss. “You get lost or hung up and are late for your two a.m., guess who gets blamed? She’s already going to be pissed when I’m a no-show.”

“A no-show? Even better,” Lucy said.

All she’d asked was for him to take his time, be maybe thirty or forty minutes late so she could have her chance with Hap Judd. If Marino was sitting there from the get-go, she wouldn’t be able to maneuver the interview the way she wanted, and what she wanted was a deconstruction. Lucy had a special talent for interrogation, and she intended to find out what she needed to know so she could take care of things.

“You been keeping up with the news?” Marino said.

“At fuel stops. We know what’s all over the Internet about the yellow-cab connection, the stuff about Hannah and the jogger.” She assumed that was what he was referencing.

“Guess you haven’t been monitoring OEM.”

“No way. No time. I got diverted twice. One airport was out of Jet-A, another hadn’t been plowed. What’s going on?”

“A FedEx box left at your aunt’s building. She’s fine, but you should call her.”

“A FedEx box? What are you talking about?” Lucy stopped walking.

“We don’t know what’s in it. May have something to do with a patient of Benton ’s. Some whack job who left the Doc a Christmas present. Santa’s sleigh had to transport it to Rodman’s Neck. Not even an hour ago, headed right at you, to the Cross Bronx Express-way, which you’d be crossing out of White Plains, and why I sent you a map. I routed you way east of the Bronx just in case.”

“Shit. Who’d you deal with from the bomb squad? I’ll talk to whoever it was.” Sixth Precinct, where the bomb squad was headquartered, was in the Village, close to Lucy’s loft. She knew a few of the techs.

“Thanks, Special Agent ATF, but it’s handled. NYPD will somehow manage without you. I’m doing what needs to be done, not to worry. The Doc will tell you about it. She’s fine. This same nut job of Benton ’s might have a connection with Hollywood.” Marino’s sarcastic nickname for Hap Judd. “I’m going to check it out at RTCC. But maybe the subject should come up. Her name’s Dodie Hodge. A mental patient at McLean ’s.”

“Why would she know him?” Lucy started walking again.

“Might be more of her make-believe, a hallucination, right? But seeing as how there was this incident at your aunt’s apartment building, maybe you should ask Hollywood about her. I’ll be at RTCC probably all night. Explain it to the boss.” He meant Berger. “I don’t want her pissed at me. But this is important. I’m going to get to the bottom of it before something worse happens.”

“So, where are you? In TriBeCa?” Lucy wove between jet wings, careful of tip extensions sticking up like dorsal fins and communications antennas that could put a person’s eye out. She’d once watched a pilot walk into his trailing edge Junker flap while he was drinking coffee and on the phone, gashed his head wide open.

“Cruised by Hollywood ’s place a few minutes ago, on my way downtown. Looks like he’s home. That’s good news. Maybe he’ll show up,” Marino said.

“You should stake him out, make sure he does. That was our deal.” Lucy couldn’t stand depending on other people to get the job done. The damn weather. If she’d gotten here earlier, she would have tailed Hap Judd herself and made sure he didn’t miss their meeting.

“I got more important things to do right now than bird-dog some pervert who thinks he’s the next James Dean. Call if you get detoured and end up lost, Amelia Earhart.”

Lucy got off the phone and picked up her pace, thought about checking on her aunt, and then thought about the number she’d written down on her kneeboard. Maybe she should call the supervisor before she left the airport. Maybe it would be better to wait until tomorrow and call the ATC manager or, better yet, complain to the FAA and get the guy sent to refresher training. She was seething as she thought about what he’d broadcast over the tower’s frequency, making sure everybody on it heard him accuse her of being an incompetent pilot, accuse her of not knowing her way into an airport she flew in and out of several times a week.

She hangared her helicopter and Citation X jet here, for God’s sake. Maybe that was his motivation. To bring her down a notch or two, to rub it in because he’d heard the rumors or was making assumptions about what had happened to her during what everyone was calling the worst financial meltdown since the thirties. Only it wasn’t the crash of Wall Street that had done the real damage. Hannah Starr had. A favor, a gift her father, Rupe, would have wanted Lucy to have. A parting gesture. When Hannah was dating Bobby, that’s all she heard. Lucy this and Lucy that.

“He thought you were Einstein. A pretty Einstein but a tomboy. He adored you,” Hannah had said to Lucy not even six months ago.

Seductive or making fun, Lucy couldn’t tell what Hannah meant or knew or supposed. Rupe had known the facts of Lucy’s life, for damn sure. Thin gold-rimmed glasses, fuzzy white hair, and smoky blue eyes, a tiny man in tidy suits and as honest as he was smart. Didn’t give a shit who was in Lucy’s pants as long as they stayed out of her pockets, as long as it didn’t cost her in any way that counted. He understood why women loved women since he loved them, too, said he might very well be a lesbian because if he were a woman, he’d want women. So, what was anybody, anyway? It’s what’s in your heart, he used to say. Always smiling. A kind, decent man. The father Lucy never had. When he died last May during a business trip to Georgia, from a strain of salmonella infection that ran him down like a cement truck, Lucy had been disbelieving, devastated. How could someone like Rupe be done in by a jalapeño pepper? Was existence contingent on nothing more than the fucking decision to order nachos?