Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

Scarpetta got up from the dining-room table. She got on the phone.

“Hotel Elysée. How may I help you?” a man with a French accent answered.

“Carley Crispin, please.”

A long pause, then, “Ma’am, are you asking me to ring her room? It’s quite late.”

Lucy had finally stopped typing. She’d quit looking at maps and writing e-mails. She was going to say something she shouldn’t. Berger could feel it coming and couldn’t stop her.

“I’ve been sitting here wondering what your fans would think,” Lucy said to Hap Judd. “I’m trying to get into the mind-set of one of your fans. This movie star I’ve got a crush on-and now I’m in a fan’s mind. And I’m imaging my idol Hap Judd with a latex glove on for a condom, fucking the dead body of a nineteen-year-old girl in a hospital morgue refrigerator.”

Hap Judd was stunned, as if he’d been slapped, his mouth open, his face bright red. He was going to erupt.

“Lucy, it’s occurred to me, Jet Ranger may need to go out,” Berger said, after a pause.

The old bulldog was upstairs in Lucy’s apartment and had been out to potty not even two hours ago.

“Not quite yet.” Lucy’s green eyes met Berger’s. Boldness, stubbornness. If Lucy wasn’t Lucy, Berger would fire her.

“What about another water, Hap?” Berger said. “Actually, I could use a Diet Pepsi.” Berger held Lucy’s eyes. Not a suggestion. An order.

She needed a moment alone with her witness, and she needed Lucy to back off and cut it out. This was a criminal investigation, not road rage. What the hell was wrong with her?

Berger resumed with Judd. “We were talking about what you told Eric. He claims you made sexual references about a girl who had just died in the hospital.”

“I never said I did something as disgusting as that!”

“You talked about Farrah Lacy to Eric. You told him you suspected inappropriate behavior at the hospital. Staff, funeral home employees engaging in inappropriate behavior with her dead body, perhaps with other dead bodies,” Berger said to Judd as Lucy got up from the table and left the room. “Why did you mention all this to someone you didn’t know? Maybe because you were desperate to confess, needed to assuage your guilt. When you were talking about what was going on at Park General, you were really talking about yourself. About what you did.”

“This is bullshit! Who the hell is setting me up?” Judd was yelling. “Is this about money? Is the little fucker trying to blackmail me or something? Is this some sick lie that insane bitch Dodie Hodge has cooked up?”

“No one is trying to blackmail you. This isn’t about money or someone allegedly stalking you. It’s about what you did at Park General before you had money, possibly before you had stalkers.”

A tone sounded on Berger’s BlackBerry next to her on the table. Someone had just sent her an e-mail.

“Dead bodies. Makes me want to puke just thinking about it,” Judd said.

“But you’ve more than thought about it, haven’t you,” Berger stated.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re going to see,” she said.

“You’re looking for a scapegoat or want to make a name for yourself at my fucking expense.”

Berger didn’t offer that she’d already made a name for herself and didn’t need the help of a second-rate actor.

She said, “I’ll repeat myself, what I want is the truth. The truth is therapeutic. You’ll feel better. People make mistakes.”

He wiped his eyes, his leg bouncing so hard he might fly out of the chair. Berger didn’t like him, but she was liking herself less. She was reminded that he had brought this on, could have avoided it had he been helpful when she’d placed that first call three weeks ago. If he’d talked to her, she wouldn’t have found it necessary to come up with a plan that rather much had taken on a life of its own. Lucy had made sure it had taken on a life of its own. It had never been Berger’s intention to prosecute Hap Judd for what allegedly had happened at Park General Hospital, and she had little or no faith in some handyman pot-smoking snitch named Eric whom she’d never interviewed or met. Marino had talked to Eric. Marino said Eric had told him about Park General, and yes, the information was disconcerting, possibly incriminating. But Berger was interested in a much bigger case.

Hap Judd was a client of Hannah Starr’s highly respected and successful money-management company, but he didn’t lose his fortune, not a penny of it, to what Berger was calling a Ponzi-by-proxy scam. He was saved when Hannah purportedly pulled his investments out of the stock market this past August 4. That same day exactly two million dollars was wired into his bank account. His original investment of one-fourth that amount made a year earlier had never been in the stock market, but in the pockets of a real-estate investment banking firm, Bay Bridge Finance, whose CEO was recently arrested by the FBI for felony fraud. Hannah would claim ignorance, would say she no more knew about Bay Bridge Finance’s Ponzi scheme than did the reputable financial institutions, charities, and banks that were victims of Bernard Madoff and his kind. No doubt Hannah would claim that she was duped like so many others.

But Berger didn’t buy it. The timing of the transaction Hannah Starr had instigated on behalf of Hap Judd, apparently without any prompting from him or anyone else, was evidence that she knew exactly what she was involved in and was a conspirator. An investigation into her financial records that had been ongoing since her disappearance the day before Thanksgiving hinted that Hannah, the sole beneficiary of her late father Rupe Starr’s fortune and his company, had creative business practices, especially when it came to billing clients. But that didn’t make her a criminal. Nothing stood out until Lucy’s discovery of that two-million-dollar wire to Hap Judd. Then, suddenly, Hannah’s disappearance, which had been assumed to be a predatory crime and therefore Berger’s turf, had begun to take on different shadings. Berger had joined forces with other attorneys and analysts in her office’s Investigative Division, primarily its Frauds Bureau, and she also had consulted with the FBI.

Hers was a highly classified investigation that the public knew nothing about, because the last thing she wanted transmitted all over the universe was her belief that contrary to popular theories, Hannah Starr wasn’t the victim of some sexual psychopath, and if a yellow cab was involved, most likely it was one that had carried her to an FBO where she’d boarded a private plane, which was exactly what was scheduled. She was supposed to have boarded her Gulfstream on Thanksgiving day, bound for Miami, and after that, Saint Barts. She never showed up because she had other plans, more secretive ones. Hannah Starr was a con artist, and very possibly alive and on the lam, and she wouldn’t have spared Hap Judd a terrible financial fate unless she’d had more than a professional interest in him. She’d fallen for her celebrity client, and he might just have a clue as to where she was.

“What you never imagined is Eric would call my office Tuesday morning and get my investigator on the phone and repeat everything you told him,” Berger said to Judd.

If Marino had shown up for this interview, he could help her at this point. He could repeat what Eric had said to him. Berger was feeling isolated and trivialized. Lucy wasn’t respectful and kept things from her, and Marino was too damn busy.

“Ironically,” Berger continued, “I’m not sure Eric was suspicious of you as much as he wanted to show off. Wanted to brag about hanging out with a movie star, brag that he had information about a huge scandal, be the next American Idol by ending up all over the news, which seems to be everybody’s motivation these days. Unfortunately for you, when we started looking into Eric’s story, the Park General scandal? Turns out there’s something to it.”