Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“And then you treat him accordingly and maybe turn him into that,” Lanier added.

“Families hid family members who had this affliction, and Jean-Baptiste was no exception,” Benton continued. “He grew up in a basement, in what was essentially a subterranean windowless dungeon of the Chandonne family’s seventeenth-century home on Île Saint-Louis in Paris. It’s possible the gene Jean-Baptiste inherited traces back to a man in the mid-fifteen hundreds who was born covered with hair and as an infant was presented to King Henri the Second in Paris and raised in the royal palace as a curiosity, an amusement, a pet of sorts. This man married a French woman, and several of their children inherited the disorder. In the late eighteen hundreds, one of their descendants is believed to have married a Chandonne, and a hundred years later the recessive gene became dominant in the form of Jean-Baptiste.”

“What I’m trying to get across here,” O’Dell said, “is people run screaming from someone who looks like that. How could Jean-Baptiste take over and operate out of the family home in Paris?”

“We don’t know where Jean-Baptiste has been living,” Benton replied. “We don’t know what he’s been doing for the past five years. We don’t know what he looks like. Laser hair removal, prosthetic dentistry, plastic surgery, the medical technology available these days. We have no idea what he’s had done to himself since he escaped from death row. What we do know is you recovered his DNA from the backseat of a stolen Mercedes in Miami, and that unequivocally connects him to the bank robberies being committed by Jerome Wild and Dodie Hodge. Both of them are connected to Detroit, which makes it likely that Jean-Baptiste has connections to Detroit. And Miami. And here.”

“The gaming industry,” Lanier said. “And maybe the film industry.”

“The Chandonne family has had its hands in everything that might be lucrative,” Benton said. “The entertainment business, gambling, prostitution, drugs, illegal weapons, counterfeit designer labels, contraband of every sort. Whatever you historically associate with organized crime, Jean-Baptiste will be familiar with it, well versed. It’s in his family. It’s in his blood. He’s had five years to avail himself of a powerful network because of his family connections. He’s had access to money. He’s been working on whatever has been his plan, and any organized plan requires a recruitment. He needed troops. If he was going to attempt to reestablish the Chandonne crime family or build an empire for himself, to reinvent himself, re-create himself, he needed to enlist a lot of help, and he was going to pick badly. An individual with his history of abuse, his history of psychopathology and extraordinarily violent crimes, isn’t going to have what it takes to be a shrewd and successful leader, at least not for long. And he’s fueled by his sexually violent compulsions. And he’s fueled by vengeance.”

The root of the tree graph on the wall was Jean-Baptiste. His name was in the middle of the screen, and all other names branched out from it directly or indirectly.

“So we’ve got Dodie Hodge and Jerome Wild linked to him.” Benton pointed the laser, and the dot moved on names as he mentioned them.

“We should add Hap Judd,” Berger said, and she was different, extremely somber. “He’s linked to Dodie even though he claims to have nothing to do with her anymore.”

Berger wasn’t herself, and Benton didn’t know what had happened. When everyone had gotten coffee, she’d borrowed the desk of an agent who wasn’t in and had made a phone call on a landline. From that point on she’d gotten quiet. She’d stopped offering insights and arguments and had quit pushing back whenever Lanier opened her mouth. Benton had a feeling it didn’t have to do with jurisdiction, with a turf battle, with a squabble over who would prosecute what. Jaime Berger seemed defeated. She seemed used up.

“For a period Hap supposedly sought her spiritual advice,” Berger said in a flat tone, a monotone. “He stated this when I interviewed him early this morning. He says she’s a nuisance, calls his L.A. office frequently, and he avoids her.”

“How did he meet Dodie?” Lanier wanted to know.

“Apparently, she was giving spiritual advice, psychic readings, to Hannah Starr,” Berger answered. “This isn’t unusual. A rather remarkable number of celebrities and very wealthy prominent people, including politicians, seek the counsel of self-proclaimed psy chics, gypsies, witches, warlocks, prophets, most of them frauds.”

“I assume most of them don’t turn out to be bank robbers,” Stockman said.

“You’d be surprised what a lot of them turn out to be,” Berger said. “Stealing, extortion, financial scams come quite naturally to the profession.”

“Dodie Hodge ever been to the Starrs’ mansion on Park Avenue?” Lanier asked Berger.

“Hap says yes.”

“You consider Hap a suspect in the Hannah Starr case?” O’Dell asked. “He knows where she is or has something to do with it?”

“I consider him the most important suspect at this point,” she said, and she sounded worn down, almost detached or maybe broken.

It wasn’t about her being tired. It was about something else.

“Hap Judd should be on the wall because of Dodie and because of Hannah.” Berger was looking around the table but not really connecting to anyone, almost as if she was addressing a grand jury. “And also Toni Darien. His ties to High Roller Lanes and possibly Freddie Maestro, and we should add Park General Hospital in Harlem, which isn’t very far from where Toni’s body was found off One hundred and tenth Street.”

More branches on the flat screen: Hannah Starr connected to Hap Judd connected to Dodie, and indirectly to Jerome Wild. All the connections now linked to Toni Darien, High Roller Lanes, and Park General Hospital, and linked back to the root, to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. Berger explained Hap’s past at the Harlem hospital, and a young woman who died there named Farrah Lacy, and then Berger got back to Hap’s link to the Starrs, his visits to the Park Avenue mansion for at least one dinner and on other occasions for sex. O’Dell interrupted her to point out that Rupe Starr wouldn’t have courted a minor actor who had no more to invest than half a million dollars.

“These major players like Rupe,” O’Dell explained, “they won’t even talk to you unless you got a hell of a lot more than that to hand over.”

“This was about a year before Rupe Starr died,” Berger said. “By which point Hannah was married to Bobby Fuller.”

“Maybe one of those situations where the family starts crowding out the boss, starts running things the way they want,” Stockman suggested.

“I know you’ve looked into Hannah’s financials,” Berger said, and she meant that the FBI had. “Because of information I passed on that we discovered, that Lucy and I did.”

As if everyone would know who Lucy was and, significantly, who she was to Berger.

“A lot of activity in a lot of banks here and abroad,” Stockman said. “Starting about two years ago. Then after Rupe Starr died last May, most of the money’s been lost.”

“Hap claims he was in New York the night before Thanksgiving, when Hannah disappeared. The next day he flew to L.A. We’re going to want warrants to search his place in TriBeCa. We should do that without delay. He claims that Hannah and Bobby never had sex,” Berger went on, with none of the usual strength in her voice and not a glint of her wry humor. “In his words, not once.”

“Yeah, right,” O’Dell said sarcastically. “The oldest line in the book. No fire on the hearth so you go elsewhere to get warm.”