Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

Three days after the Miami hit, there was another one, the last of the known nineteen, this time in Detroit. It just so happened to have occurred on the same day Dodie was arrested in that city for shoplifting and disturbing the peace, for making a scene after stuffing three Hap Judd DVDs down the front of her pants. She was out of control. With someone like her, it was only a matter of time and she would have an episode, would lose it, act out, and she did in Betty’s Bookstore Café. It was bad timing, a bad accident, and certain people had to figure out what to do with her before she created more of an exposure for those who couldn’t afford it. Someone got her a lawyer in Detroit, Sebastian Lafourche, originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the Chandonnes once had very strong ties.

Lafourche had suggested that Dodie should be evaluated by Warner Agee. It wasn’t Agee’s newfound celebrity status that was appealing, it was his involvement with organized crime, with the Chandonne network, even if peripherally. It was like putting a gangster into the hands of a warden who was on the take from the Mob. But the plan didn’t work. The DA and McLean wouldn’t go for it. The network had to rethink, regroup, and take advantage of an opportunity for mischief and mayhem. Dodie goes to Belmont, and it signals the next act: The enemy has moved into a target’s camp, Benton’s camp, maybe indirectly Scarpetta’s camp. Dodie checked into the hospital and was breathing down Benton’s neck, and the toying and torturing continued while laughter rose to the rafters inside the medieval house of Chandonne.

Benton looked across the table at Marty Lanier and said, “This new computer system of yours? Is it able to link data the way RTCC can? Give us something like a decision tree, so we see conditional probabilities? So we can visualize what we’re talking about? Because I’m thinking it would help clarify. The roots are deep and the branches are dense and have quite a reach, and it’s important to figure out as best we can what’s relevant and what isn’t. For example? The bank robbery this past August first in the Bronx. That Friday morning at ten-twenty, when American Union was hit.” He was looking at his notes. “Not even an hour later, Dodie Hodge was issued a TAB summons on a transit bus at Southern Boulevard and East One-forty-ninth. In other words, she was in the area, a few blocks from the bank that was robbed. Was agitated, hyped up, got into an argument.”

“I don’t know anything about a TAB summons,” said NYPD Detective Jim O’Dell, early forties, thinning red hair, a bit of a paunch.

He sat next to his Joint Bank Robbery Task Force partner, FBI Special Agent Andy Stockman, late thirties, black hair, plenty of it, and no paunch.

“Came up during data mining when we were looking for anything that had to do with FedEx,” Benton said to O’Dell. “When Dodie was confronted by the officer because she was creating a disturbance on the bus, she told him he could FedEx his ass straight to hell, priority overnight. A link RTCC made.”

“A weird thing to say. Haven’t heard that one before,” Stockton said.

“She likes to FedEx things. She’s always in a hurry and wants the results of her dramas instantly. I don’t know,” Benton said impatiently, because Dodie’s clichés and hyperbole weren’t important and the thought of her irritated the hell out of him. “What matters is a pattern you’re going to see repeatedly as we get deeper into this discussion. Impulsiveness. A leader, a Mob boss, who is compulsive and impulsive and is driven by inner forces he ultimately can’t control, and the people around him aren’t much better. Opposites don’t always attract. Sometimes sameness does.”

“Birds of a feather,” Lanier said.

“Jean-Baptiste and his birds,” Benton said. “Yes.”

“We need a data wall like they got,” O’Dell said to Berger, as if she could do something about it.

“Good luck.” Stockton reached for his coffee. “We’re paying for our own bottled water up here.”

“Seeing the links, the connections would be helpful,” Berger agreed.

“You don’t know what’s there until you do,” Benton said. “Especially in something this complex. Because these crimes didn’t just start this past June. They go back before Nine-Eleven, more than a decade, at least my involvement in them does. Not specifically the bank robberies, but the Chandonne family, the massive crime network that used to be theirs.”

“What do you mean ‘used to be’?” O’Dell said. “Seems they’re alive and kicking, if everything I’m hearing is true.”

“They’re not what they were. You can’t begin to understand. Suffice it to say it’s different,” Benton said. “It’s the bad seed taking over the family store and running it into the ground or over a cliff.”

“Sounds like the last eight years in the White House,” O’Dell quipped.

“The Chandonne family isn’t the organized-crime family it was, not even close.” Benton had no sense of humor this morning. “In the end, it’s disorganized, on its way to complete chaos, with Jean-Baptiste in the driver’s seat. His story can end only one way, no matter how many times he tells it or how many different characters he plays. He can keep focused for a while, and maybe he has while his intrusive and obsessional thoughts have continued, because they don’t quit. Not with him, and the outcome is predictable. His intrusive thoughts win. He strays a little. He strays a lot. He strays way out of bounds. There is no limit to his destructiveness. Except it always ends in death. Somebody dies. Then multiple people do.”

“Sure, we can do a predictive model, put a graph on the wall,” Lanier said to O’Dell and Stockman.

“It will take a minute.” Stockman started hitting keys on his laptop. “Not just the bank robberies but everything?” He glanced up at Lanier.

“It isn’t just bank robberies we’re talking about,” she said with a hint of impatience. “I believe that’s the point Benton’s making and the point of this meeting. The bank robberies are incidental. The tip of the iceberg. Or in keeping with the time of year, the angel on top of the Christmas tree. I want the whole tree.”

The reference reminded Benton again of Dodie’s stupid song, her breathy off-key voice wishing Scarpetta and him a Ho-Dee, Do-Dee Christmas, a greeting rife with sexually violent innuendo and a hint of what was to come. Scarpetta was going to be lynched, and Benton could shove it up his ass, or something like that, and he imagined Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s delight. Likely the card was his idea, the first taunt that soon would be followed by the next: a FedEx box containing a bomb. Not just an ordinary bomb. Marino’s e-mails referred to it as “a stink bomb that might have blown the Doc’s fingers off or maybe made her blind.”

“Yeah, it’s ridiculous the Feds can’t put in something like that,” O’Dell was griping. “A damn data wall like RTCC. We need something ten times bigger than a conference room, because this isn’t a decision tree, it’s a damn decision forest.”

Stockman told him, “I’ll throw it up on a screen. Sixty inches is as big as one of RTCC’s Mitsubishi cubes.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Close enough.”

“Nope. It’s going to take an IMAX theater.”

“Quit complaining and let’s get it on the wall so we can see it.”

“I’m just saying as complex as this is, we need a two-story wall, at least. All this on one flat screen? You’ll have to shrink it as small as newspaper print.”

O’Dell and Stockman had spent so much time together, they tended to bicker and bitch like an old married couple. For the past six months, they’d been working the so-called Granny and Clyde pattern bank robberies in conjunction with other task forces in other FBI field offices, mostly Miami, New York, and Detroit. The Bureau had managed to keep the spree of robberies and their theories about them out of the news, and had done so deliberately and for good reason. They suspected the bandits were pawns in something much bigger and more dangerous. They were pilot fish, small carnivores that swam with sharks.