Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

Googling Michigan on the Internet. The new Las Vegas, and a lot of movies were being filmed there, the state doing what it could to pump money into its hemorrhaging economy. A forty percent tax incentive. And casinos. Michigan had a vocational school for casino dealer training, and some of the organizations supplying tuition assistance included the Veterans Administration, the United Steelworkers, and the United Auto Workers. Come home from Iraq or lose your job at GM and become a blackjack dealer.

“I fucked up. Rupe died last May, and Hannah inherited everything and completely took over. An MBA from Wharton, I’m not saying she isn’t smart,” Lucy said.

“She took over your account?”

“She tried.”

People had to survive any way they could these days, and vices and entertainment were doing well. Movies, the food and beverage industry. Especially liquor. When people feel bad they actively seek feeling good. What did this have to do with Warner Agee? What had he gotten involved in? Scarpetta thought about Toni Darien’s dice keychain and High Roller Lanes being like Vegas, as Bonnell had put it. Mrs. Darien said Toni hoped to end up in Paris or Monte Carlo someday, and her MIT-trained father, Lawrence Darien, was a gambler who might have ties to organized crime, according to Marino. Freddie Maestro, Scarpetta remembered. The name of the man who owned High Roller Lanes. He had game arcades and other businesses in Detroit, Louisiana, South Florida, and she couldn’t remember where else. Ultimately, he had been Toni Darien’s boss. Maybe he knew her father.

“I’d met her a few times, then we had a discussion at her place in Florida and I told her no,” Lucy said. “But I let my guard down and acted on a tip she gave me. I dodged a bullet and got a knife in my back. I didn’t follow my instincts, and she fucked me. She fucked me good.”

“Are you bankrupt?” Scarpetta asked.

Googling Dr. Warner Agee with a combination of keywords. Gambling, casinos, the gaming industry, and Michigan.

“No,” Lucy said. “What I have isn’t the point. It’s not even what I lost. She wanted to hurt me. It gave her pleasure.”

“If Jaime’s doing such a thorough investigation, how can she not know?”

“Who’s doing the thorough investigation, Aunt Kay? It isn’t her. Not the electronic information. All of that’s from me.”

“She has no idea you knew Hannah, that you have this conflict of interest. Because that’s exactly what it is.” Scarpetta talked as she went through more accordion files.

“She’d boot me out of the process, and that would be completely self-defeating and ridiculous,” Lucy answered. “If anybody should be helping, it’s me. And I wasn’t Hannah’s client. I was Rupe’s. You know what’s in his records? Put it this way: Nothing relevant to what Hannah did to me is going to show up. I’ve made sure.”

Scarpetta said, “That’s not right.”

“What’s not right is what she did.”

An article Agee had published in a British journal, Quantum Mechanics, two years earlier. Quantum epistemology and measurement. Planck, Bohr, de Broglie, Einstein. The role of human consciousness in the collapse of the wave function. Single photon interference and causality violations in thermodynamics. The elusiveness of human consciousness.

“What the hell are you looking at?” Lucy asked.

“I’m not sure.”

Scarpetta flipped pages, skimming, reading, stopping at certain sections.

She said, “Students recruited for studies. The relationship between creative and artistic ability and psi. A study done at Juilliard here in New York. Research at Duke University, Cornell, Princeton. The Ganzfeld experiments.”

“Psychic phenomena? ESP?” Lucy had a blank expression on her face.

Scarpetta looked up at her and said, “Sensory deprivation. Why do we want to achieve a state of sensory deprivation?”

“It’s inversely proportional to perception, to acquiring information,” Lucy answered. “The more I deprive my senses, the more I perceive and create. That’s why people meditate.”

“Then why would we want the opposite for anyone? Overstimulation, in other words?” Scarpetta asked.

“We wouldn’t.”

“Unless you’re in the casino business,” Scarpetta said. “Then you would want to seek the most efficient means to overstimulate, to prevent a state of sensory deprivation. You want people to be impulse-driven, to lose their way, so you bombard the visual and auditory environment, the total field, the Ganzfeld, and your clients become a confused quarry without the slightest inkling of what’s safe and what’s not. You blind and deafen them with bright lights and noise so you can take what they’ve got. So you can steal.”

Scarpetta couldn’t stop thinking about Toni Darien and her job in a glitzy place of flashing lights and fast-moving images on huge video displays, where people were encouraged to spend money on food, liquor, and games. Bowl badly and play some more. Bowl badly and drink some more. Hap Judd’s photograph was hanging in High Roller Lanes. He might have known Toni. He might know a former patient of Benton’s, Dodie Hodge. Marino had said something about it to Berger during the conference call last night. Warner Agee might have known Toni Darien’s boss, Freddie Maestro. These people might all know one another or be connected somehow. It was almost nine a.m., and Scarpetta was surrounded by the receipts, spent tickets, schedules, publications-the detritus of Agee’s self-serving, ill-purposed life. The soulless bastard. She got up from the floor.

“We need to go,” she said to Lucy. “The DNA Building. Now.”

Security camera images of a woman and a man filled multiple flat screens inside the SAC conference room. Since last June, at least nineteen different banks had been robbed by the same pair of brazen bandits the FBI had dubbed Granny and Clyde.

“You getting all this?” Jaime Berger tilted her MacBook so Benton could see what she was looking at, another e-mail just sent.

He nodded. He knew. He was opening messages as they landed on his BlackBerry, the same messages Lucy and Marino were sending Berger, the four of them communicating almost in real time. The package bomb had been viable and the bare voice module recovered from it was the same type used in Dodie Hodge’s singing card, only Benton no longer believed the card was from Dodie. She had recorded it and may have penned the address on the airbill, but Benton doubted the hostile holiday ditty was her idea. She wasn’t the mastermind who’d scripted anything that had happened thus far, including her call to CNN, the point of that to upset Benton, give him a warning before the next bomb dropped. Literally.

Dodie thrived on drama, but this wasn’t her drama, wasn’t her show, wasn’t even her modus operandi. Benton knew whose it was, he was sure he did, and he should have figured it out before, but he hadn’t been looking. He had quit looking because he’d wanted to believe he didn’t need to look. Unbelievable to simply say he forgot, but he had. He’d forgotten to keep his scan going, and now the monster was back, had taken on a different shape, a different form, but his personal stamp was as recognizable as a stench. Sadism. Inevitably there had to be sadism, and once it started it wasn’t going to stop. Toy with the mouse and torture it within an inch of its life before mauling it to death. Dodie wasn’t creative enough, wasn’t experienced enough, wasn’t deranged or brilliant enough to come up with such a massive and intricate plot on her own. But she was histrionic and borderline, and she’d been willing and able to audition.

At some point, Dodie Hodge had climbed into bed with organized crime. So had Warner Agee, who appeared to be responsible for unethical research projects that were connected to the international gaming industry, to casinos in the United States and abroad, particularly in France. Benton believed that Agee and Dodie were foot soldiers for the family of Chandonne, had gotten entangled with the worst one of them, the perversely violent surviving son, Jean-Baptiste, who had left his DNA in the backseat of a 1991 black Mercedes used in the commission of a bank robbery in Miami last month. What he was doing in the car was unknown. Maybe for the thrill of it, had gone along for the ride, or perhaps was as mundane as his being chauffeured in the stolen Mercedes for some reason prior to its being used as a getaway car. Jean-Baptiste certainly would know his DNA was in the FBI’s CODIS database. He was a convicted murderer and a fugitive. He was getting careless, his compulsions taking over. If his past history was any indication, he might be abusing alcohol and drugs.