Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

Between warehouses and fences he caught glimpses of the Palm-olive Building, and the Colgate clock showed that the time was twenty of seven. The Statue of Liberty was in bas relief against the river and the sky, with her arm held high. Benton ’s driver cut over on Vestry Street, deeper into the financial district, where the symptoms of the languishing economy were palpable and depressing: restaurant windows covered with brown paper, notices of seized businesses taped to their doors, clearance sales, retail spaces and apartments for rent.

As people moved out, graffiti moved in, spray paint marring abandoned restaurants and stores and metal shutters and blank billboards. Crude, crass scrawls, most of it outrageous and nonsensical, and cartoons everywhere, some of them stunning. The stock market as Humpty Dumpty having his big fall. The U.S.S. Economy sinking like the Titanic. A mural of Freddie Mac as the Grinch in a sleigh piled high with debt, his eight subprime-lender reindeer galloping over the rooftops of foreclosed homes. Uncle Sam bending over so AIG could fuck him in the ass.

Warner Agee was dead. Scarpetta hadn’t informed Benton. Marino had. Just a few minutes ago he’d called, not because he knew or could even guess the role Agee had played in Benton ’s life. Marino simply thought Benton would want to know that the forensic psychiatrist had jumped off a bridge, and Scarpetta’s BlackBerry had been found in the hotel room where he had been staying since mid-October, in time for CNN’s fall season. Carley Crispin must have worked out an arrangement with Agee-or someone had. She’d bring him to New York and put him up, take care of him, in exchange for information and appearing on her show. For some reason she assumed he was worth it. Benton wondered how much she really believed or if she didn’t care about the veracity of Agee’s claims as long as she could get away with making a name for herself on prime-time TV. Or was Agee involved in something Benton couldn’t imagine? He didn’t know, didn’t know anything, really, and wondered if he could ever put Warner Agee behind him and why he didn’t feel relief or vindication, why he didn’t feel something, feel anything at all. He was numb. The way he’d felt when he’d finally emerged from deep cover, from being presumed dead.

The first time he’d walked along the harbor in Boston, the city of his youth, where he’d been hiding in various hovels on and off for six years, and he’d realized he no longer had to be the fictitious man Tom Haviland, he hadn’t felt euphoric. He hadn’t felt free. He simply hadn’t felt. He’d understood completely why some people get out of prison and rob the first convenience store they see so they can go right back. Benton had wanted to go back to being exiled from himself. It had gotten easy to no longer bear the burden of being Benton. He’d gotten good at feeling bad. He’d found meaning and solace in his meaningless existence and suffering even as he’d worked desperately to calculate his way out of it, plotting and planning with surgical precision to eliminate those who made his nonexistence necessary, the organized-crime cartel, the French family of Chandonne.

Spring 2003. Cool, almost cold, the wind blowing off the harbor and the sun out, and Benton was standing on Burroughs Wharf watching the Boston Fire Department’s Marine Unit escort a de stroyer flying a Norwegian flag, the red fireboats circling the huge shark-gray ship, the firemen in good spirits as they manned deck guns, aiming them up, a plumage of water spraying high in the air, a playful salute. Welcome to America. As if the welcome had been for him. Welcome back, Benton. But he hadn’t felt welcome. Hadn’t felt anything. He’d watched the spectacle and pretended it was just for him, the equivalent of pinching himself to see if he was still alive. Are you? he kept asking himself. Who am I? His mission finally executed in the dark heart of Louisiana, in the bayous and decaying mansions and the ports, where he’d used his brain and his gun to free himself from his oppressors, the Chandonnes and their henchmen, and he’d won. It’s over, he’d told himself. You won, he’d said. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this, he kept thinking as he’d walked along the wharf, watching the firemen having fun. His fantasies of the joy he would feel had turned phony and tasteless in the blink of an eye, like biting into a steak and realizing it was plastic, like driving along a sun-scorched highway and never getting one inch closer to a mirage.

He’d found himself terrified of returning to something that was no longer there, found himself just as afraid of having choices as he’d been of having none, just as afraid of having Kay Scarpetta as he’d been afraid of never having her again. Life and its complexities and contradictions. Nothing makes sense and everything does. Warner Agee got what he deserved and he did it to himself and it wasn’t his fault and he shouldn’t be blamed. A case of meningitis at the age of four had crashed his destiny as surely as if it had been rear-ended by a car and the chain reaction had continued, one collision after the next, not stopping until his body did on the pavement of a bridge. Agee was in the morgue and Benton was in a taxi, both of them sharing one thing in common at this precise point in time: They had a day of reckoning staring them in the eye, were about to meet their Maker.

The FBI occupied six floors inside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and Customs Courthouse in the heart of the government center, a complex of modernist glass-and-concrete architecture surrounded by the more traditional columned buildings of the U.S. Courthouse and state office buildings, and blocks away, City Hall, One Police Plaza, One Hogan Place, and the city jail. As was true of most federal centers, this one was cordoned off with yellow tape and fencing, and concrete blast barriers had been strategically placed to prevent vehicles from getting too close. The entire front plaza, a maze of curling green benches and dead grass mounds patched with snow, was inaccessible to the public. To enter the building, Benton had to get out of the taxi at Thomas Paine Park, trot across Lafayette, already busy with traffic. He turned right on Duane Street, also closed to cars, a pop-up barrier with a tire shredder and a guard booth in case you didn’t notice the Do Not Enter signs.

The forty-one-story glass-and-granite building wasn’t open yet, and he pressed a buzzer and identified himself to a uniformed FBI police officer on the other side of the side entrance’s glass door. Benton said he was here to see Special Agent Marty Lanier, and after a moment of checking, the officer let him in. Benton handed over a driver’s license, emptied his pockets, and walked through the x-ray scanner, having a status no more special than the immigrants who lined up along Worth Street every business day in quest of becoming U.S. citizens. Across a granite lobby was a second checkpoint, this one behind a heavy glass-and-steel door near the elevators, and he went through the same process again, only this time he was required to surrender his driver’s license and in exchange was given a key and an ID.

“Any electronic devices, including phones, go in there,” the officer said from his booth, pointing at a bank of small lockers above a table, as if Benton had never been here before. “Keep your ID displayed at all times, and you’ll get your license back when you return your key.”

“Thanks. I’ll see if I can remember all that.”

Benton pretended to lock up his BlackBerry, tucked it up his sleeve instead. As if there was some great threat he was going to take photographs or a video of a fucking field office. He slipped the locker key in his coat pocket, and inside the elevator he pushed the button for the twenty-eighth floor. The ID with its big V indicating he was a visitor was yet another insult, and he tucked it in his pocket, contemplating whether what he’d done was right when Marino had called about Agee’s suicide.