Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“Are you going to talk to me?” Scarpetta said.

“Not only hasn’t sold, it’s a preforeclosure. A condo, two bedrooms, two baths, on Fourteenth Street, not too far from Dupont Circle. Started out at six hundred and twenty thousand, is now a little over five. So, maybe one of the reasons he ended up in this room is he had nowhere else to go.”

“Don’t try to dodge me, please.”

“When he bought it eight years ago, he got it for a little under six. Times were better for him back then, I guess.”

“Did you tell Jaime about the GPS?”

“I’d say the guy’s broke. Well, now he’s dead,” Lucy said. “So I guess it doesn’t matter if the bank takes his house.”

Scarpetta said, “I know about the GPS receiver you installed. But does she? Did you tell Jaime?”

“You lose everything and maybe that’s what finally pushes you over the edge, or in Agee’s case off the bridge,” Lucy said, and her demeanor changed and her voice wavered almost imperceptibly. “What was it you used to read to me when I was a little kid? That poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. ‘The One-Hoss Shay.’ Now in building of chaises, I tell you what / there is always a weakest spot… And that’s the reason beyond a doubt / That a chaise breaks down, but doesn’t wear out… When I was a little kid visiting you in Richmond, living with you on and off and wishing you would keep me. My fucking mother. This time of year, it’s always the same thing. Am I coming home for Christmas. I don’t hear from her for months, and then she asks me if I’m coming home for Christmas, because what she really wants is to make sure I don’t forget to send her a gift. Send her something expensive, preferably a check. Fuck her.”

“What’s happened to cause you to distrust Jaime?” Scarpetta said.

“You used to sit next to me in bed in that room down the hall from yours, the room that ended up being mine in your house in Windsor Farms. I loved that house. You’d read to me from a book of his poems. ‘Old Ironsides,’ ‘The Chambered Nautilus,’ ‘Departed Days.’ Trying to explain the facts of life and death to me. You’d say people are like that one-hoss shay. They run for a hundred years and then one day they collapse all at once into a pile of dust.” Lucy talked with her hands on both keyboards, files and links opening and closing on laptop screens as she looked at anything other than her aunt. “You said it was the perfect metaphor for death, these people who ended up in your morgue with everything under the sun wrong with them, and yet they kept on going until one day it was that one thing. That one thing that probably had to do with their weakest spot.”

Scarpetta said, “I assumed your weakest spot was Jaime.”

Lucy said, “And I assumed it was money.”

“Have you been spying on her? Is that why you got us these?” Scarpetta indicated the two BlackBerrys on the coffee table, hers and Lucy’s. “Are you afraid Jaime is taking money from you? Are you afraid she’s like your mother? Help me understand.”

“Jaime doesn’t need my money, and she doesn’t need me.” Steadying her voice. “Nobody has what they did. In this economy it melts like ice right before your eyes, like some elaborate ice sculpture that cost a fortune to make and turns into water and evaporates. And you wonder if it ever existed to begin with and what all the excitement was about. I don’t have what I did.” She hesitated, as if whatever she was thinking was almost impossible for her to say. “It’s not about money. It’s about something else I got involved in and then I misread everything. Maybe that’s as much as I need to say. I started misreading things.”

“You do a fine job misreading for someone who quotes poetry so well,” Scarpetta said.

Lucy didn’t answer.

“What have you misread this time?” Scarpetta was going to make her talk.

But Lucy wouldn’t. For a moment the two of them were silent, keys clicking as Lucy typed and the sound of paper moving as Scarpetta sifted through printouts in her lap. She skimmed more Internet searches pertaining to Hannah Starr, and also to Carley Crispin and her failing show, news stories about what one reviewer described as Carley’s free fall in the Nielsen ratings, and there were mentions of Scarpetta and the Scarpetta Factor. The only entertainment Carley had provided this season, said a blogger, was the guest appearances of CNN’s senior forensic analyst, the intrepid and steely and scalpel-sharp Scarpetta, whose commentaries were dead-on. “Kay Scarpetta cuts to the heart of the problem with her pointed remarks and is stiff competition-much too stiff-for the flaccid-minded, overblown Carley Crispin.” Scarpetta got up from her chair.

She said to her niece, “Remember one of those visits to Windsor Farms when you were angry with me and formatted everything on my computer and then took it apart? I believe you were ten and misread something I’d said or done, misinterpreted, misunderstood, overreacted, to put it mildly. Are you formatting your relationship with Jaime and in the process of completely dismantling it, and have you asked her if it’s merited?”

She opened her kit bag and got out another pair of gloves. Walking past Warner Agee’s messy, clothes-strewn bed, she began looking in drawers in the bowfront dresser.

“What has Jaime done that you’ve possibly misread?” Scarpetta filled the silence.

More men’s clothing, none of it folded. Undershorts, under-shirts, socks, pajamas, handkerchiefs, and small velvet boxes of cuff links, some of them antique, none expensive. In another drawer were sweatshirts, T-shirts with logos. The FBI Academy, various FBI field offices, the Hostage Rescue and National Response teams, all old and faded and representing memberships Agee had coveted and would never have. She didn’t have to know Warner Agee to figure out that what drove him was a desperate need for validation and an unflagging belief that life wasn’t fair.

“What might you have misread?” Scarpetta asked again.

“It’s not easy to talk about.”

“At least try.”

“I can’t talk about her. Not with you,” Lucy replied.

“Not to anyone, let’s be honest.”

Lucy looked at her.

“It’s not easy for you to talk to anyone about anything deeply relevant and profoundly important,” Scarpetta said. “You talk incessantly about things that ultimately are heartless, trifling, meaningless. Machines, the invisible intangibles of cyberspace and the people who inhabit these nothing places, people I call shades, who fritter away their time Twittering and chattering and blogging and blathering about nothing to no one.”

The bottom dresser drawer was stuck and Scarpetta had to work her fingers in, trying to dislodge what felt like cardboard and hard plastic.

“I’m real, and I’m here in a hotel room last inhabited by a man who is in a broken heap in the morgue because he decided life was no longer worth it. Talk to me, Lucy, and tell me exactly what’s wrong. Tell me in the language of flesh and blood, in the language of feelings. Do you think Jaime doesn’t love you anymore?”

The drawer pulled free, and crammed inside were empty Tracfone and Spoof Card packages and instruction booklets and guides, and activation cards that didn’t appear to have been used because the PIN strips on the backs hadn’t been scratched off. There were printed instructions for a Web-based service that allowed users who can speak but have difficulty hearing to read word-for-word captioned telephone calls in real time.

“Are the two of you not communicating?” She continued asking questions, and Lucy continued her silence.

Scarpetta dug through tangles of chargers and shiny plastic envelopes for recycling prepaid cell phones, at least five of them.