Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“The only thing I can think of is he wasn’t here,” Marino said, using a Sharpie to label an evidence bag he neatly arranged with others inside his field case.

Scarpetta was reminded of the old days when he used to deposit evidence, a victim’s personal effects, police equipment, in whatever was handy, usually walking out of a crime scene with multiple brown-paper grocery bags or recycled boxes that he would slam shut in the Bermuda Triangle of a trunk that might also have fishing gear, a bowling ball, and a case of beer in it. Somehow he’d managed to never lose or contaminate anything that mattered, and she could recall but a few instances when his lack of discipline posed so much as a minor setback in a case. Mostly he’d always been a threat to himself and anyone who depended on him.

“She shows up and stops by the desk because she doesn’t have much choice. She needs to make sure she has a key that works, and she wants to change the reservation, then upstairs she lets herself in and finds him gone.” Marino was trying to figure out what Carley had done when she’d gotten here last night. “Unless she decided to use the john while she was here, no reason for her to notice what was in there. All his hair, his hearing aids. Me, personally? I don’t think she saw all that or him. I think she left your phone and a new key and then snuck out, taking the stairs, wanting to draw as little attention to herself as possible because she was up to no good.”

“So maybe he was out for a while, wandering around.” Scarpetta’s mind was on Agee. “Thinking about it. Thinking about what he intended to do. Assuming he did something tragic.”

Marino snapped shut his field case as his phone rang. Looking at the display, he handed it to Scarpetta. It was the office.

“Nothing in his pockets, which were inside out,” Dennis said. “From the police already going through them, looking for something that might ID him, contraband, a weapon, whatever. They put a few things in a bag, some loose change and what looks like a really small remote control. Maybe something that goes to a boom box or satellite radio?”

“Does it have a manufacturer’s name on it?” Scarpetta asked.

“Siemens,” and Dennis spelled it.

Someone started knocking on the door, and Marino answered it as Scarpetta said to Dennis, “Can you tell if the remote’s turned on?”

“Well, there’s a little window, you know, a display.”

Lucy walked in, handing Marino a manila envelope and taking off her black leather bomber jacket. She was dressed for flying, in cargo pants, a tactical shirt, and lightweight boots with rubber soles. Slung over her shoulder was the dark earth-colored PUSH pack, Practical Utility Shoulder Hold-all, that she carried everywhere, an off-duty bag with multiple mesh and stash pockets and pouches, and probably in one of them a gun. She slipped the pack off her shoulder, unzipped the main compartment, and slid out a MacBook.

“There should be a power button,” Scarpetta said, watching Lucy open her computer as Marino directed her attention to Scarpetta’s BlackBerry, the two of them talking in low voices that Scarpetta blocked out. “Press it until you think you’ve turned off the remote,” she instructed Dennis. “Did you send a photo?”

“You should have it. I think this thing’s off now.”

“Then it must have been on while in his pocket,” Scarpetta said.

“I’m thinking it was.”

“If it had been, the police wouldn’t have seen anything in the display that would identify him. You don’t see messages like that until you power up whatever it is. Which is what you need to do now. Hold the button down again to power it up and see if you get any sort of system message. Similar to when you power up your phone and your number appears on the display. I think the remote you have belongs to a hearing aid. Actually, two hearing aids.”

“There’s no hearing aids with the body,” Dennis told her. “Of course, they probably would come off when you jump from a bridge.”

“Lucy?” Scarpetta said. “Can you log on to my office e-mail and open a file just sent? A photograph. You know my password. It’s the same one you enabled for my BlackBerry.”

Lucy placed her computer on the console under the wall-mounted TV. She started typing. An image appeared on the computer screen, and she dug into her pack and pulled out a VGA adapter and a display cable. She plugged the adapter into one of the computer’s ports.

“I got something in the display. If lost, please contact Dr. Warner Agee.” And Dennis recited a phone number. “Now, that’s something.” His excited voice in Scarpetta’s ear. “That makes my night. What’s two-oh-two? Isn’t that the area code for Washington, D.C.?”

“Call the number and let’s see what happens.” Scarpetta had a pretty good idea.

Lucy was plugging the cable into the side of the wall-mounted TV when the cell phone rang on the bed inside the hotel room. The ringtone was loud, Bach’s Fugue in D Minor, and a gory image of a dead body on a gurney filled the flat screen on the wall.

“That’s the guy on the bridge,” Marino said, walking closer to the TV. “I recognize the clothes he had on.”

The black body pouch was unzipped and spread wide, the shaved and beardless face covered with dark dried blood and deformed beyond recognition. The top of his head was fragmented, blood and brain extruding from the torn tissue edges of his badly lacerated scalp. His left mandible was fractured in at least one place, his jaw gaping and crooked, bared lower teeth bloody and broken and some of them gone, and his left eye was almost completely avulsed, the orb barely attached to the socket. The dark jacket he had on was torn at the shoulder seams, and his left trouser seam was split, and the jagged end of his femur protruded from torn khaki fabric like a snapped-off stick. His ankles were bent at unnatural angles.

“He landed feetfirst and then hit on his left side,” Scarpetta said as the cell phone stopped ringing on the bed and Bach’s Fugue quit. “I suspect his head struck some abutment on the bridge on his way down.”

“He had on a watch,” Dennis said over the phone. “It’s in the bag with the other effects. Smashed. An old silver metal Bulova on a stretch band that stopped at two-eighteen. I guess we know his time of death. You want me to call the police with the info?”

“I have the police with me,” Scarpetta said. “Thank you, Dennis. I’ll take care of it from here.”

She ended the call, and Marino’s BlackBerry started ringing as she was handing it back to him. He answered and started walking around.

“Okay,” he said, looking at Scarpetta. “But it will probably be just me.” He got off the phone and told her, “Lobo. He just got to Rodman’s Neck. I need to head out.”

“I’ve barely gotten started here,” she said. “His cause and manner of death aren’t going to be hard. It’s the rest of it.”

The autopsy she needed to perform on Dr. Warner Agee was a psychological one, and her niece might just need one, too. Scarpetta retrieved her kit bag from where she’d left it on the carpet against the wall, just inside the door. She pulled out a transparent plastic evidence bag that had a FedEx envelope and Dodie Hodge’s singing Christmas card inside. Scarpetta hadn’t looked at the card. She hadn’t listened to it. Benton had given it to her when she’d left without him earlier this morning.

She said to Marino, “You probably should take this with you.”

The lights of Manhattan cast a murky glow along the horizon, turning it a purplish blue like a bruise as Benton traveled south on the West Side Highway, following the Hudson, headed downtown in the dark.