Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“Then what? What do you want?”

“Sit down,” Berger said.

He sat back down. “You can’t charge me with something like this. You understand? You can’t. You got a gun somewhere in here? Why don’t you just fucking shoot me.”

“Two separate issues,” Berger said. “First, we could keep investigating and maybe you’d be charged. Maybe you’d be indicted. What happens after that? You take your chances with a jury. Second, nobody’s going to shoot you.”

“I’m telling you, I didn’t do anything to that girl,” Judd said. “I didn’t hurt her.”

“What about the glove?” Lucy asked pointedly.

“Tell you what. I’m going to ask him about it,” Berger said to her.

She’d had enough. Lucy was going to stop it right now.

“I’m going to ask the questions,” Berger said, holding Lucy’s eyes until she was satisfied she was going to listen this time.

“The guard says he left the morgue, left you alone in there with Farrah Lacy’s body.” Berger continued her questioning, repeating information Marino had gathered, trying not to think about how unhappy she was with him right now. “He said he checked maybe twenty minutes later and you were just leaving. He asked you what you’d been doing in the morgue all that time and you didn’t have an answer. He remembered you had only one surgical glove on and seemed out of breath. Where was the other glove, Hap? In the video we just showed you, you had on two gloves. We can show you other video footage of you going inside the refrigerator and staying in it for almost fifteen minutes with the door open wide. What were you doing in there? Why’d you take off one of your gloves? Did you use it for something, maybe put it over some other part of your body? Maybe put it on your penis?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

“You want to tell it to a jury? You want a jury of your peers to hear all this?”

He stared down at the table, moving his finger over metal, like a little kid finger-painting. Breathing hard, his face bright red.

“What I’m hearing is you’d like this behind you,” Berger said.

“Tell me how.” He didn’t look up.

Berger had no DNA. She had no eyewitness or any other evidence, and Judd wasn’t going to confess. She would never have anything beyond circumstances that weren’t much better than innuendo. But that was as much as she needed to destroy Hap Judd. With his degree of celebrity, the accusation was a conviction. If she charged him with desecrating human remains, which was the only charge on the books for necrophilia, his life would be destroyed, and Berger didn’t take that lightly. She wasn’t known for malicious prosecution, for constructing cases out of a flawed process or from evidence extracted improperly. She’d never resorted to unjustifiable and unreasonable litigation and wasn’t about to start now, and she wasn’t going to let Lucy push her into it.

“Let’s back up three weeks, to when I called your agent. You do remember getting my messages,” Berger said. “Your agent said he passed them on to you.”

“How do I put this behind me?” Judd looked at her. He wanted a deal.

“Cooperation is a good thing. Collaboration-just like you have to do to make a movie. People working together.” Berger placed her pen on top of her legal pad and folded her hands. “You weren’t cooperative or collaborative three weeks ago when I called your agent. I wanted to talk to you, and you couldn’t be bothered. I could have sent the cops by your apartment in TriBeCa or tracked you down in L.A. or wherever you were and had you brought in, but I spared you the trauma. I was sensitive because of who you are. Now we’re in a different situation. I need your help, and you need mine. Because you’ve got a problem you didn’t have three weeks ago. You hadn’t met Eric in the bar three weeks ago. I didn’t know about Park General Hospital and Farrah Lacy three weeks ago. Maybe we can help each other.”

“Tell me.” Fear in his eyes.

“Let’s talk about your relationship with Hannah Starr.”

He didn’t react. He didn’t respond.

“You’re not going to deny you know Hannah Starr,” Berger then said.

“Why would I deny it?” He shrugged.

“And you didn’t suspect for even a second that I might be calling about her?” Berger said. “You know she’s disappeared, correct?”

“Of course.”

“And it didn’t occur-”

“Okay. Yeah. But I didn’t want to talk about her for privacy reasons,” Judd said. “It would have been unfair to her, and I don’t see what it has to do with what happened to her.”

“You know what happened to her,” Berger said, as if he did.

“Not really.”

“Sounds to me like you do know.”

“I don’t want to be involved. It has nothing to do with me,” Judd said. “My relationship with her was nobody’s business. But she’d tell you I’m not into anything sick. If she were around, she’d tell you that Park General stuff is bullshit. I mean, people who do things like that, it’s because they can’t have living people, right? She’d tell you I got no problems in that department. I got no problem having sex.”

“You were having an affair with Hannah Starr.”

“I put a stop to it early on. I tried.”

Lucy was staring hard at him.

“You signed on with her investment firm a little over a year ago,” Berger said. “I can give you the exact date if you want. You realize, of course, we have an abundance of information because of what’s happened.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s all anybody hears on the news,” he said. “And now the other girl. The marathon runner. I can’t think of her name. And maybe some serial killer driving a yellow cab. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“What makes you think Toni Darien was a marathon runner?”

“I must have heard it on TV, seen it on the Internet or something.”

Berger tried to think about any reference to Toni Darien as a marathon runner. She didn’t recall that being released to the media, only that she jogged.

“How did you first meet Hannah?” she asked.

“The Monkey Bar, where a lot of Hollywood people hang out,” he said. “She was in there one night and we started talking. She was really smart about money, told me all kinds of stuff I didn’t know shit about.”

“And you know what happened to her three weeks ago,” Berger said, and Lucy listened intensely.

“I have a pretty good idea. I think somebody did something. You know, she pissed people off.”

“Who did she piss off?” Berger asked.

“You got a phone book? Let me go through it.”

“A lot of people,” Berger said. “You’re saying she pissed off almost everybody she met?”

“Including me. I admit. She always wanted her way about everything. She had to have her own way about absolutely everything.”

“You’re talking about her as if she’s dead.”

“I’m not naïve. Most people think something bad happened to her.”

“You don’t seem upset about the possibility she might be dead,” Berger said.

“Sure it’s upsetting. I didn’t hate her. I just got tired of her pushing me and pushing me. Chasing me and chasing me, if you want me to be honest. She didn’t like to be told no.”

“Why did she give you your money back-actually, four times your original investment? Two million dollars. That’s quite a return on your investment in only a year.”

Another shrug. “The market was volatile. Lehman Brothers was going belly-up. She called me and said she was recommending I pull out, and I said whatever you think. Then I got the wire. And later on? Damn if she wasn’t right. I would have lost everything, and I’m not making millions and millions yet. I’m not A list yet. Whatever I have left over after expenses, I sure as hell don’t want to lose.”