Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

The windowless blue room where Marino went data mining fairly often these days reminded him of Times Square, of Niketown. He was surrounded by a dizzying array of images, some dynamic, others static, all bigger than life on flat screens and the two-story data wall comprised of huge Mitsubishi cubes tiled together. An hourglass spun in one of the cubes as the Real Time Crime Center’s software searched the more-than-three-terabyte data warehouse for anyone who might match the description of the man in the FedEx cap, a security camera image of him ten feet tall on the wall, and next to it a satellite picture of Scarpetta’s granite apartment building on Central Park West.

“He goes, he’ll never make it to the water,” Marino said from his ergonomic chair at a work station where he was being helped by an analyst named Petrowski. “Jesus. He’ll hit the fucking bridge. What was he thinking when he started climbing out on the cables? He was going to land on a car? Take out some poor bastard minding his own business in his MINI Cooper.”

“People in his state of mind don’t think.” Petrowski, a detective in his thirties, in a preppie suit and tie, wasn’t particularly interested in what was happening on the GW Bridge at almost two o’clock in the morning.

He was busy entering keywords on a Tattoo Report. In vino and veritas, and In vino veritas, and bones, skulls, and now coffin. The hourglass twirled like a baton in its quadrant of the data wall near the video image of the man in the FedEx cap and the satellite view of Scarpetta’s building. On the flat screen, the jumper was thinking about it, caught in cables like a deranged trapeze artist. Any second, the wind was going to rip him loose. The end.

“We’ve got nothing very helpful in terms of searching,” Petrowski said.

“Yeah, you already told me,” Marino said.

He couldn’t get a good look at the jumper’s face, but maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe he knew the feeling. The guy had finally said Fuck it. The question was what he’d meant by it. This early morning he either died or stayed in his living hell, so what did he mean when he climbed up on top of the bridge’s north tower and ventured out on the cables? Was his intention to exterminate himself or to make a point because he was pissed? Marino tried to determine his socioeconomic status from his grooming, his clothing, his jewelry. Hard to tell. Baggy khakis, no socks, some kind of running shoe, a dark jacket, no gloves. A metal watch, maybe. Kind of slovenly-looking and bald. Probably lost his money, his job, his wife, maybe all three. Marino knew what he felt like. He was pretty sure he did. About a year and a half ago he felt the same way, had thought about going off a bridge, came within an inch of driving his truck through the guardrail, plunging hundreds of feet into Charleston ’s Cooper River.

“No address except where the victim lives,” Petrowski added.

He meant Scarpetta. She was the victim, and it rattled Marino to hear her referred to as a victim.

“The tattoo’s unique. It’s the best thing we got going.” Marino watched the jumper cling to cables high above the upper span of the bridge, high above the black abyss of the Hudson. “Jesus, don’t shine the friggin’ light in his eyes. How many million candlepower? His hands got to be numb. You imagine how cold those steel cables are? Do yourself a favor, eat your gun next time, buddy. Take a bottle of pills.”

Marino couldn’t help thinking about himself, reminded of South Carolina, the blackest period of his life. He’d wanted to die. He’d deserved to die. He still wasn’t a hundred percent sure why he hadn’t, why he hadn’t ended up on TV same as this poor bastard on the GW. Marino imagined cops and firefighters, a scuba team, hoisting his pickup truck out of the Cooper River, him inside, how ugly that would have been, how unfair to everyone, but when you’re that desperate, that whacked, you don’t think about what’s fair. Bloated by decomposition, floaters the worst, the gases blowing him up and turning him green, eyes bulging like a frog, lips and ears and maybe his dick nibbled off by crabs and fish.

The ultimate punishment would have been to look disgusting like that, to stink so bad he made people gag, a freakin’ horror on the Doc’s table. He would have been her case, her office in Charleston the only show in town. She would have done him. No way she would have had him transported hundreds of miles away, no way she would have brought in another forensic pathologist. She would have taken care of him. Marino was positive of that. He had seen her do people she knew in the past, would drape a towel over their faces, keep their naked dead bodies covered by a sheet as much as possible, out of respect. Because she was the best one to take care of them, and she knew it.

“… It’s not necessarily unique, and it probably isn’t in a database,” Petrowski was saying.

“What isn’t?”

“The tattoo. As for the guy’s physical description, that would include about half the city,” Petrowski said. The jumper on the flat screen may as well have been a movie he’d already seen. Barely made Petrowski turn his head. “Black male between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, height between five-eight and six-two. No phone number, no address, no license tag, nothing to search on. I can’t do much else at this point.” As if Marino really shouldn’t have come to the eighth floor of One Police Plaza and bothered an RTCC analyst with minutiae like this.

It was true. Marino could have called and asked first. But better to show up with a disk in hand. Like his mother used to say, “Foot in the door, Pete. Foot in the door.”

The jumper’s foot slipped on a cable and he caught himself.

“Whoa,” Marino said to the flat screen, halfway wondering if his thinking the word foot had caused the jumper’s foot to move.

Petrowski looked where Marino was looking and commented, “They get up there and change their minds. Happens all the time.”

“If you really want to end it, why put yourself through it? Why change your mind?” Marino started feeling contempt for the jumper, started feeling pissed. “You ask me, it’s bullshit. Nutcakes like this one? They just want attention, want to be on TV, want payback, want something besides death, in other words.”

Traffic on the upper level of the bridge was backing up, even at this hour, and on the span directly below the jumper, police were setting up a staging area, laying down an air bag. A negotiator was trying to talk the jumper out of it, and other cops were climbing the tower, trying to get close. Everybody risking his life for someone who didn’t give a shit, someone who had said Fuck it, whatever that meant. The volume was turned off, and Marino couldn’t hear what was being said and didn’t need to because it wasn’t his case, had nothing to do with him, and he shouldn’t be caught up in it. But he was always distracted in the RTCC, where there was too much sensory input and yet not enough. All sorts of images thrown up on the walls but no windows, just blue acoustical panels, curved rows of work stations with dual screens, and gray carpet.

Only when the adjoining conference room’s window shades were open, and they weren’t right now, was he given a reference point, a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, Downtown Presbyterian, Pace Union, the old Woolworth Building. The New York he remembered from when he was just getting started with the NYPD, was a nothing from Bayonne who gave up boxing, gave up beating the shit out of people, decided to help them instead. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t sure how it happened that he’d ever left New York and ended up in Richmond, Virginia, in the early eighties. At this stage of things it seemed he just woke up one day to discover he was the star detective in the former capital of the Confederacy. The cost of living, a good place to raise a family. What Doris wanted. That was probably the explanation.