Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“Again,” Lobo said, removing a bag from his shoulder, “I’m not saying this Dodie lady used a SpoofCard. I’m just saying that caller ID doesn’t mean shit anymore.”

“Don’t talk to me about it,” Droiden said, plugging one end of the tubing. “My boyfriend got spoofed, some asshole he has a restraining order against. She calls him and the caller ID says it’s his mother.”

“That’s too bad,” Marino said. He didn’t know she had a boyfriend.

“It’s like these anonymizers people use so you can’t trace their IP, or you do and think they’re in another country when they’re your next-door neighbor.” She inserted the shotgun round into the breech, which she screwed to the plugged back end of the tube. “You can’t be sure anything’s what it appears to be when it’s got to do with phones, with computers. Perps wear cloaks of invisibility. You don’t know who’s doing what, and even if you do, it’s hard to prove. Nobody’s accountable anymore.”

Lobo had removed a laptop computer from his bag and was turning it on. Marino wondered why a computer was okay out here and not his phone. He didn’t ask. He was in overload, like his engine might overheat any minute.

“So I don’t need a suit on or anything,” he said. “You sure there’s nothing in there like anthrax or some chemical that’s going to give me cancer?”

“Before I put the package in the day box last night,” Droiden said, “I checked it out soup to nuts with the FH Forty, the Twenty-two-hundred R, and APD Two thousand, a high-range ion chamber, a gas monitor, every detector you can think of, in part because of the target.”

She meant Scarpetta.

“It was taken seriously, to say the least,” Droiden went on. “Not that we’re lax out here on any given day, but this is considered special circumstances. Negative for biological agents, at least any known ones like anthrax, ricin, botulism, SEB, and plague. Negative for alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron radiation. No CW agents or irritants. No nerve or blister agents-again, no known ones. No toxic gases, such as ammonia, chlorine, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide. No alarms went off, but whatever’s in the package is off-gassing something. I could smell it.”

“Probably what’s in the vial-shaped thing,” Marino said.

“Something with a foul smell, a fetid, tarry-type odor,” she answered. “Don’t know what it is. None of the detectors could identify it.”

“At least we know what it’s not,” Lobo said. “Which is somewhat reassuring. Hopefully it’s nothing to worry about.”

“Maybe picking up on a contaminant out here?” Marino was thinking about all the different devices that were rendered safe on the range. Decades of bombs and pyrotechnics being shot with water cannons and detonated.

“Like we’re saying, we didn’t get a reading,” Droiden said. “In addition, we account for potential interference vapors that can cause false positives. Devices we’ve rendered safe out here that might off-gas anything from gasoline to diesel fuel to household bleach? There wouldn’t be enough of an interferent vapor at this point for detectable levels. Nothing false-alarmed last night, although cold temperatures aren’t ideal, the LCDs sure as hell don’t like the weather out here, and we weren’t going to carry the frag bag inside any sort of shelter when we don’t know what type of device we might be dealing with.”

She tilted the PAN disrupter, pointing it almost straight up, and filled it with water, then plugged the front end with a red cap. She leveled the steel tube and tightened the clamps. Reaching back into the open case, she picked out a laser aiming device that slid over the tip of the barrel like a bore sight. Lobo set the laptop on a sandbag, an x-ray of Scarpetta’s package on the screen. Droiden would use the image to map a targeting grid that she would align with the laser sight so she could take out the power source-button batteries-with the water cannon.

“Maybe you could hand me the shock tube,” she said to Lobo.

He opened the portable magazine, a midsize Army green steel box, and lifted out a reel of what looked like bright yellow plastic-coated twelve-gauge wire, a low-strength det-cord that was safe to handle without fire-retardant clothing or an EOD bomb disposal suit. The inside of the tubing was coated with the explosive HMX, just enough to transmit the necessary shock waves to hit the firing pin inside the breech, which in turn would strike the primer of the cartridge, which would ignite the powder charge, only this shotgun cartridge was a blank. There were no projectiles. What got blasted out of the tube was about five ounces of water traveling at maybe eight hundred feet per second, enough to blow a good-size hole in Scarpetta’s FedEx box and take out the power source.

Droiden unrolled several yards of the tube and attached one end to a connector on the breech and the other end to a firing device, what looked like a small green remote control with two buttons, one red, one black. Unzipping two of the Roco bags, she pulled out the green jacket, trousers, and helmet of the bomb suit.

“Now, if you boys will excuse me,” she said. “I need to get dressed.”

Warner Agee’s laptop, a Dell several years old, was connected to a small printer, both devices plugged into the wall. Cords ran across the carpet, printouts piled and scattered, making it hard to walk without tripping or stepping on paper.

Scarpetta suspected Agee had worked nonstop in the hotel room Carley apparently had rented for him. He’d been busy doing something not long before he removed his hearing aids and glasses, and left his magnetic key card on the vanity, then took the stairs and likely got into a cab, eventually headed to his death. She wondered what he’d been able to hear those last moments of his life. Probably not the ESU rescuers with their ropes and harnesses and gear, risking their own safety as they tried to reach him. Probably not the traffic on the bridge. Not even the wind. He’d turned off the volume and blurred the picture so it would be easier to descend into nothingness with no turning back. He not only didn’t want to be here anymore, for some reason he’d decided it wasn’t an option.

“Let’s start with the most recent calls,” Lucy said, turning her attention to Agee’s phone, which she’d plugged into a charger she’d found in an outlet near the bed. “Doesn’t look like he spent a lot of time on it. A couple calls yesterday morning, then nothing until six minutes past eight last night. After that, one more call about two and a half hours later, at ten-forty. Starting with this first one at eight-oh-six, I’ll do a search and see who it comes back to.” She started typing on her MacBook.

“I disabled the password on my BlackBerry.” Scarpetta wasn’t sure why she said it at this exact moment. It had been on her mind but not on her tongue, and now it was before them, as if it was overripe and had dropped from a tree. “I don’t think Warner Agee looked at my BlackBerry. Or that Carley did, unless she got into scene photographs. From what I can tell, any calls, messages, or e-mails that have come in since I used it last haven’t been opened.”

“I know all about it,” Lucy said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Jesus. Like a million people have had this number that called Agee’s cell phone. His cell phone’s registered to him, by the way, with a D.C. address. A Verizon account, the cheapest low-minute plan. Doesn’t appear he was much of a talker, maybe because of his hearing.”

“I doubt that’s why. His hearing aids are the newest technology, Bluetooth-enabled,” Scarpetta said.

She could look around the hotel room and deduce that Warner Agee had spent most of his time in a claustrophobic world that often was silent. She doubted he had friends, and if he had family, he wasn’t close to them. She wondered if his only human contact, his only emotional connection in the end, was the woman who had become his self-serving patron: Carley. She gave him work and a roof over his head, it seemed, and now and then showed up with a new key. Scarpetta suspected Agee had no money, and she wondered what had happened to his wallet. Maybe he’d gotten rid of it after leaving the room last night. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to be identified but had overlooked the Siemens remote control, which most likely he kept in his pocket as a matter of routine. He may have forgotten about the message on it that would lead someone like Scarpetta directly to him.