Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“That was quite a stunt you pulled in the hospital morgue,” Lucy said to Judd.

“I didn’t pull a stunt.” Directing everything to Berger. “I was just talking, saying I thought it might be going on, maybe when the funeral homes showed up and because she was really pretty and not all that banged up for someone hurt that bad. I was halfway kidding, although I have wondered what some of these funeral home people are into, and that’s the truth. I was suspicious about some of the ones I came across. I think people do all kinds of stuff if they can get away with it.”

“I’ll quote you on that,” Lucy said. “Hap Judd says people do whatever they can get away with. An instant Yahoo! headline.”

Berger said to her, “Maybe now’s a good time to show him what we’ve found.” She said to Judd, “You’ve heard of artificial intelligence. This is more advanced than that. I don’t suppose you were curious about why we asked you to meet us here.”

“Here?” He looked around the room, a blank expression on his Captain America face.

“You mandated the time. I mandated the place. This high-tech minimalist space,” Berger said. “See all the computers everywhere? This is a forensic computer investigative firm. ”

He didn’t react.

“That’s why I picked this location. And let me clarify. Lucy is an investigative consultant retained by the district attorney’s office, but she’s quite a lot more than that. Former FBI, ATF, I won’t bother with her résumé, would take too long, but your describing her as not a real cop isn’t quite accurate.”

He didn’t seem to understand.

“Let’s go back to when you worked at Park General,” Berger said.

“I really don’t remember-well, almost nothing, not much about that situation.”

“What situation?” Berger asked, with what Lucy liked to describe as her “millpond calm.” Only when Lucy said it, she didn’t mean it as a compliment.

“The girl,” he said.

“Farrah Lacy,” Berger said.

“Yes, I mean, no. I’m trying to, what I’m saying is it was a long time ago.”

“That’s the beauty of computers,” Berger said. “They don’t care if it was a long time ago. Especially Lucy’s computers, her neural networking applications, programming constructs that mimic the brain. Let me refresh your memory about your long-ago days at Park General. When you entered the hospital morgue, you had to use your security card. Sound familiar?”

“I guess. I mean, that would be the routine.”

“So, every time you used your security card, your security code was entered into the hospital computer system.”

“Along with recordings made by the security cameras,” Lucy added. “Along with your e-mails, because they resided on the hospital server, which routinely backs up its data, meaning they still have electronic records from when you were there. Including whatever you wrote on-whatever desktop computer you happened to borrow at the hospital. And if you logged in to private e-mail accounts from there, oh, well, those too. Everything’s connected. It’s just a matter of knowing how. I won’t tax you with a lot of computer jargon, but that’s what I do in this place. I make connections the same way the neurons in your brain are making them right this minute. Inputs, outputs, from sensory and motor nerves in your eyes, your hands, signal flows that the brain pieces together to accomplish tasks and solve problems. Images, ideas, written messages, conversations. Even screenwriting. All of it interconnected and forming patterns, making it possible to detect, decide, and predict.”

“What screenwriting?” Hap Judd’s mouth was dry, sounded sticky when he talked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lucy started typing. She pointed a remote at a flat screen mounted on a wall. Judd reached for his bottle of water, fumbled with the cap, took a long swallow.

The flat screen divided into windows, each filled by an image: a younger Hap Judd in scrubs walking into the hospital morgue, grabbing latex gloves out of a box, opening the stainless-steel walk-in refrigerator; a newspaper photograph of nineteen-year-old Farrah Lacy, a very pretty, light-skinned African American in a cheerleading outfit, holding pompoms and grinning; an e-mail; a page from a script.

Lucy clicked on the page from the script and it filled the entire screen:

CUT TO:

INT. BEDROOM, NIGHT

A beautiful woman in the bed, covers pulled back, bunched around her bare feet. She looks dead, hands folded over her chest in a religious pose. She’s completely nude. An INTRUDER we can’t make out moves closer, closer, closer! He grips her ankles and slides her limp body down to the foot of the bed, parting her legs. We hear the clinks of his belt being unbuckled.

INTRUDER

Good news. You’re about to go to heaven. As his pants drop to the floor.

“Where did you get that? Who the hell gave it to you? You have no right going into my e-mail,” Hap Judd said loudly. “And it’s not what you think. You’re setting me up!”

Lucy clicked the mouse and the flat screen filled with an e mail:

Hey too bad about whats her ass. Fuck her. I dont mean littereally. Call if U want a stiff one.

Hap

“I meant a drink.” Words sticking. His voice shook. “I don’t remember who… Look, it had to be a stiff drink. I was asking someone if they wanted to meet me for a drink.”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said to Berger. “Sounds like he assumed we interpreted ‘stiff one’ as something else. Maybe a dead body? You should try spell-check sometime,” Lucy said to him. “And you should be careful what you do, what you e-mail, what you text-message on computers that are connected to a server. Like a hospital server. We can sit here all week with you if you want. I’ve got computer applications that can connect every piece of your entire screwed-up make-believe life.”

It was a bluff. At this point, they had very little, not much more than writing he’d done on hospital computers, his e-mails, whatever had resided on the server back then, and some images from security cameras and morgue log entries from the two-week period Farrah Lacy had been hospitalized. There hadn’t been time to sift through anything else. Berger had been afraid if she delayed talking to Hap Judd, she’d never get the chance. This was what she called a “blitz attack.” If she didn’t like the way she felt about it before, now she was really out of her comfort zone. She felt doubt. Serious doubt. The same doubts she’d been feeling all along, only much worse now. Lucy was driving this. She had a destination in mind. She didn’t seem to care how she got there.

“I don’t want to see anything else,” Judd said.

“Just tons of stuff to go through. My eyes are crossed.” Lucy tapped the MacBook with an index finger. “All downloaded. Things I doubt you remember, got no idea about. Not sure what the cops would do with this. Ms. Berger? What would the cops do with this?”

“What worries me is what happened while the victim was still alive,” Berger said, because she had to play it out. She couldn’t stop now. “Farrah was in the hospital two weeks before she died.”

“Twelve days, exactly,” Lucy said. “On life support, never regained consciousness. Five of those days, Hap was on duty, working at the hospital. You ever go into her room, Hap? Maybe help yourself to her while she was in a coma?”

“You’re the one who’s sick!”

“Did you?”

“I told you,” he said to Berger. “I don’t even know who she is.”

“Farrah Lacy,” Berger repeated the name. “The nineteen-year-old cheerleader whose picture you saw in the news, the Harlem News. That same picture we just showed you.”