Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“When was the last time you had sex with Hannah?” Berger was taking notes on the legal pad again, conscious of Lucy, of her stoni ness, of the way she was staring at Hap Judd.

He had to think. “Uh, okay. I remember. After that call. She told me she was pulling my money out, and could I drop by and she’d explain what was going on. It was just an excuse.”

“Drop by where?”

“Her house. I dropped by, and one thing led to another. That was the last time. July, I think. I was heading off to London, and anyway, she has a husband. Bobby. I wasn’t all that comfortable at her house when he was there.”

“He was there on that occasion? When she asked you to drop by before you headed to London?”

“Uh, I don’t remember if he was that time. It’s a huge house.”

“Their house on Park Avenue.”

“He was hardly ever home.” Judd didn’t answer the question. “Travels all the time in their private jets, back and forth to Europe, all over the place. I got the impression he spends a lot of time in South Florida, that he’s into the Miami scene, and they’ve got this place there on the ocean. He’s got an Enzo down there. One of those Ferraris that costs more than a million bucks. I don’t really know him. I’ve met him a few times.”

“Where did you meet him and when?”

“When I started investing with their company a little over a year ago. They invited me to their house. I’ve seen him at their house.”

Berger thought about the timing, and she thought about Dodie Hodge again.

“Is Hannah the person who referred you to the fortune-teller, to Dodie Hodge?”

“Okay, yeah. She’d do readings for Hannah and Bobby at the house. Hannah suggested I talk to Dodie, and it was a mistake. The lady’s crazy as shit. She got obsessed with me, said I was the reincarnation of a son she’d had in a former life in Egypt. That I was a pharaoh and she was my mother.”

“Let me make sure I understand which house you’re talking about. The same one you said you visited this past July, when you had sex with Hannah for the last time,” Berger said.

“The old man’s house, worth, like, eighty million, this huge car collection, unbelievable antiques, statues, Michelangelo paintings on the walls and ceilings, frescoes, whatever you call them.”

“I doubt they’re Michelangelos,” Berger said wryly.

“Like a hundred years old, un-freakin’-believable, practically takes up a city block. Bobby’s from money, too. So he and Hannah had a business partnership. She used to tell me they never had sex. Like, not even once.”

Berger made a note that Hap Judd continued to refer to Hannah in the past tense. He continued talking about her as if she was dead.

“But the old man got tired of her being this rich little playgirl and said she needed to settle down with someone so he’d know the business was going to be handled right,” Judd continued. “Rupe didn’t want to leave everything to her if she was still running around, you know, single and partying, and then ended up marrying some schmuck who got his hands on everything. So you can see why she’d screw around on Bobby-even though she used to tell me that sometimes she was afraid of him. It wasn’t really screwing around because they didn’t have that kind of deal.”

“When did you begin having a sexual relationship with Hannah?”

“That first time at the mansion? Let me put it to you this way. She was real friendly. They have an indoor pool, an entire spa like something in Europe. It was me and some other VIP clients, new clients, there for a swim, for drinks and dinner, all these servants everywhere, Dom Pérignon and Cristal flowing like Kool-Aid. So I’m in the pool and she was paying a lot of attention. She started it.”

“She started it on your first visit to her father’s house a year ago this past August?”

Lucy sat with her arms crossed, staring. She was silent and wouldn’t look at Berger.

“It was obvious,” Judd said.

“Where was Bobby while she was being obvious?”

“I don’t know. Maybe showing off his new Porsche. I do remember that. He’d gotten one of those Carrera GTs, a red one. That picture of him all over the news? That’s the car. He was giving people rides up and down Park Avenue. You ask me, you ought to be checking Bobby out. Like, where was he when Hannah disappeared, huh?”

Bobby Fuller was in their North Miami Beach apartment when Hannah disappeared, and Berger wasn’t going to offer that.

She said, “Where were you the night before Thanksgiving?”

“Me?” He almost laughed. “Now you’re thinking I did something to her? No way. I don’t hurt people. That’s not my thing.”

Berger made a note. Judd was assuming Hannah had been “hurt.”

“I asked a simple question,” Berger said. “Where were you the night before Thanksgiving, Wednesday, November twenty-sixth?”

“Let me think.” His leg was jumping up and down again. “I honestly don’t remember.”

“Three weeks ago, the Thanksgiving holiday, and you don’t remember.”

“Wait a minute. I was in the city. Then the next day I flew to L.A. I like to fly on holidays, because the airports aren’t crowded. I flew to L.A. Thanksgiving morning.”

Berger wrote it down on her legal pad and said to Lucy, “We’ll check that out.” To Judd, “You remember what airline, what flight you were on?”

“American. Around noon, I don’t remember the flight number. I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, don’t give a damn about turkey and stuffing and all that. It’s nothing to me, which is why I had to think for a minute.” His leg bounced rapidly. “I know you probably think it’s suspicious.”

“What do I think is suspicious?”

“She disappears and the next day I’m on a plane out of here,” he said.

Marino’s Crown Vic was coated with a film of salt, reminding him of his dry, flaky skin this time of year, both him and his car faring similarly during New York winters.

Driving around in a dirty vehicle with scrapes and scuffs on the sides, the cloth seats worn and a small tear in the drooping headliner, had never been his style, and he was chronically self-conscious about it, at times irritated and embarrassed. When he’d seen Scarpetta earlier in front of her building, he’d noticed a big swath of whitish dirt on her jacket from where it had brushed against his passenger door. Now he was about to pick her up, and he wished there was a car wash open along the way.

He’d always been fastidious about what his ride looked like, at least from the outside, whether it was a police car, a truck, a Harley. A man’s war wagon was a projection of who he was and what he thought of himself, the exception being clutter, which didn’t used to bother him as long as certain people couldn’t see it. Admittedly, and he blamed this on his former self-destructive inclinations, he used to be a slob, especially in his Richmond days, the inside of his police car nasty with paperwork, coffee cups, food wrappers, the ashtray so full he couldn’t shut it, clothes piled in the back, and a mess of miscellaneous equipment, bags of evidence, his Winchester Marine shotgun commingled in the trunk. No longer. Marino had changed.

Quitting booze and cigarettes had completely razed his former life to the ground, like an old building torn down. What he’d constructed in its place so far was pretty good, but his internal calendar and clock were off and maybe always would be, not only because of how he did and didn’t spend his time but because he had so much more of it, by his calculation three to five additional hours per day. He’d figured it out on paper, an assignment Nancy, his therapist, had given to him at the treatment center on Massachusetts’ North Shore, June before last. He’d retreated to a lawn chair outside the chapel, where he could smell the sea and hear it crashing against rocks, the air cool, the sun warm on top of his head as he sat there and did the math. He’d never forget his shock. While each smoke supposedly took seven minutes off his life, another two or three minutes were used up just for the ritual: where and when to do it, getting out the pack, knocking a cigarette from it, lighting it, taking the first big hit, then the next five or six drags, putting it out, getting rid of the butt. Drinking was a worse time killer, the day pretty much ending when happy hour began.