Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“Are you fighting?”

She returned to the bed and began digging through the dirty clothing on it, pulling back the linens.

“Are you not having sex?”

“Jesus,” Lucy blurted out. “For God’s sake, you’re my aunt.”

Scarpetta started opening bedside drawers and said, “I put my hands on naked dead bodies all day long, and having sex with Benton is how we exchange energy and empower each other and belong to each other and communicate with each other and are reminded we exist.” Journal articles, more printouts in the drawers, nothing else, still no Tracfone. “Sometimes we fight. We fought last night.”

She got on the floor to look under furniture.

“I used to bathe you and tend to your wounds and listen to your tantrums and fix the messes you made, or at least snatch you out of them one way or other, and sometimes I cried in my goddamn room, you drove me so wild,” Scarpetta said. “I’ve met your long string of partners and dalliances and have quite a good idea exactly what you do with them in bed because we’re all the same, have basically the same body parts and use them similarly, and I dare say I’ve seen and heard a lot that even you can’t imagine.”

She got up, not seeing any sign of a Tracfone anywhere.

“Why on earth would you be shy around me?” she asked. “And I’m not your mother. Thank God I’m not that wretched sister of mine, who practically gave you away, only I wish she had. I wish she had given you to me and I’d had you all the time from day one. I’m your aunt. I’m your friend. At this stage in our lives, we’re colleagues. You can talk to me. Do you love Jaime?”

Lucy’s hands were quiet in her lap, and she was staring down at them.

“Do you love her?”

Scarpetta started emptying wastepaper baskets, digging through balled-up paper.

“What are you doing?” Lucy finally asked.

“He had Tracfones, maybe as many as five. Possibly purchased after he moved in two months ago. Just bar codes, no stickers that might say where he bought them. Probably was using them in conjunction with Spoof Cards to disguise and fake caller ID. Do you love Jaime?”

“How much time on the Tracfones?”

“Each came with sixty minutes’ airtime and/or ninety days’ service.”

“So, you pick it up in an airport kiosk, a tourist shop, a Target, a Walmart, and pay cash. When you’ve used up your sixty minutes, instead of adding more airtime, which usually requires a credit card, you toss the phone and get a new one. About a month ago, Jaime stopped wanting me to stay over.” Lucy’s face was turning red. “First it was one or two nights a week, then three or four. She said it’s because she’s so frantic with work. Obviously, if you’re not sleeping with someone…”

“Jaime’s always been frantic with work. People like us are always frantic with work,” Scarpetta said.

She opened the closet, noting a small wall safe. It was empty, the door open wide.

“That’s worse, isn’t it? That’s the fucking point, isn’t it?” Lucy looked miserable, her eyes angry and hurt. “That means it’s different for her, doesn’t it? You still want Benton no matter how busy you are, even after twenty years, but Jaime doesn’t want me and we’ve barely been together one. So it’s not about being fucking busy.”

“I agree. It’s about something else.”

Scarpetta walked her gloved fingers through clothes that had been stylish in the eighties and nineties, pin-striped three-piece and double-breasted suits with wide lapels and pocket kerchiefs, and French-cuffed white shirts that brought to mind caricatures of gangsters during the days of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Draped over hangers were five striped ties, and looped around another hanger were two reversible belts-one stitched, the other a crocodile print-that were compatible with the brown and black Florsheim wing-tip dress shoes on the floor.

She said, “When you and I were trying to track my missing BlackBerry, it became patently clear what your WAAS GPS receiver can do. It’s why we’re sitting in this room. These nights when Jaime has been away from you and you’ve been tracking her remotely? Did you get information that was helpful?”

At the back of the closet, pushed against the wall, was a very large black hard-sided suitcase, badly scuffed and scratched, a tangle of torn luggage tags and their strings still wrapped around the handle.

“She hasn’t gone anywhere,” Lucy said. “Was working at the office late and at home. Unless she didn’t take her BlackBerry with her, and it doesn’t mean someone didn’t come to her apartment or she doesn’t have something going on with someone in her office.”

“Maybe you can hack into the provider that supplies the security cameras for her apartment building, for the district attorney’s office, for all of One Hogan Place. Will that be next? Or just install a few cameras in her office, in her conference room, in her penthouse, and spy on her that way. Please don’t tell me you did that already.”

Scarpetta was wrestling the suitcase out of the closet, noting how heavy it was.

“Jesus Christ. No.”

“This isn’t about Jaime. It’s about you.” Scarpetta pressed the clasps on the suitcase, and they sprung open with loud snaps.

The crack of a shotgun blast.

Marino and Lobo took off their hearing protectors and stepped out from behind several tons of concrete blocks and ballistic glass, about three hundred feet up-range from Droiden in her bomb suit. She walked to the pit where Scarpetta’s FedEx box had just been shot and knelt to examine what she had defeated. Her helmet turned toward Marino and Lobo, and she gave them a thumbs-up, her bare hand small and pale surrounded by dark-green padding that made her look twice her normal size.

“Like opening a box of Cracker Jacks,” Marino said. “Can’t wait to see the prize.”

He hoped whatever was in Scarpetta’s FedEx box was worth all the trouble, and he hoped it wasn’t. His career was a chronic conflict he didn’t talk about, didn’t even like to admit to himself what he really felt. For an investigation to be rewarding meant there needed to be real danger or damage, but what decent human being would hope for such a thing?

“What we got?” Lobo asked her.

Another tech was helping her take off the bomb suit. Droiden had an unpleasant expression on her face as she put her coat back on, zipping it up.

“Something that stinks. That same nasty smell. Not a hoax device, but not like anything I’ve ever seen. Or smelled, for that matter,” she said to Lobo and Marino as the other tech busied himself with the bomb suit, packing it up. “Three AG-ten-type button batteries and aerial repeaters, pyrotechnics. Some kind of greeting card with a voodoo-looking doll attached to the top. A stink bomb.”

The FedEx box had been blasted wide open. It was a mass of soggy shredded cardboard, broken glass, the remnants of a small white cloth doll, and what looked like dog fur confined within a berm of dirty sandbags. A recordable voice module not much bigger than a credit card had been blown into several pieces, the mangled button batteries nearby, and as Marino got closer he got a whiff of what Droiden was talking about.

“Smells like a mixture of asphalt, rotten eggs, and dog shit,” he said. “What the hell is it?”

“It’s whatever was in the vial, a glass vial.” Droiden opened a black Roco sack and got out evidence bags, an epoxy-lined aluminum can, face masks, and nitrile gloves. “Not like anything I’ve ever smelled before, sort of a petroleum-type smell but not. Like tar, sulfur, and dung.”

“What was it supposed to do?” Marino asked.

“I think the point was you open the box, and there’s a greeting card inside with the doll attached to the top of it. When you open the card, it explodes, causing the glass vial of this stinky liquid to shatter. The voice module’s power source, the batteries, was connected to three commercial repeating aerial bombs tied to an electric match, a professional pyrotechnic igniter.” She pointed to what was left of three flash firecrackers attached to a thin bridge wire.