Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

Benton didn’t know what she was talking about or where she’d gotten her information. He met her eyes to ask the question because he didn’t want to ask it out loud, and the lingering look she gave him was her answer. No. Lucy hadn’t told her. Berger had found out some other way.

“Photographs,” Berger said to everyone. “Leather-bound volumes in Rupe Starr’s rare book room. Parties and dinners with clients over the years. She’s in one of the albums. Lucy is.”

“You found this out when,” Benton said.

“Three weeks ago.”

If she’d known that long, then her sudden change in demeanor was related to something else. Bonnell must have relayed other information over the phone that was even more unsettling.

“Nineteen ninety-six. She was twenty, still in college. I didn’t see photographs of her in any other albums, possibly because she became an FBI agent after college, would have been extremely careful about appearing at big parties and dinners, and certainly wouldn’t have allowed her picture to be taken,” Berger went on. “As you know, after Hannah’s disappearance was reported by her husband, Bobby, we asked permission to get personal effects, her DNA, from the house on Park Avenue, and I wanted to talk to him.”

“He was in Florida when she disappeared, right?” O’Dell said.

“The night she didn’t come home from the restaurant,” Berger said, “Bobby was in their apartment in North Miami Beach, and we have that confirmed by e-mails sent from the apartment’s IP address, and we have confirmation from phone records and the Florida housekeeper, Rosie. She was interviewed. I talked to her myself over the phone, and she confirmed Bobby was there the night of November twenty-sixth, the day before Thanksgiving.”

“You know for a fact it was Bobby sending the e-mails and making the phone calls?” Lanier asked. “How do you know Rosie the housekeeper hasn’t been doing it and lying to protect her boss?”

“I don’t have probable cause or even reasonable suspicion to place him under surveillance when there’s no evidence whatsoever of criminal activity on his part,” Berger said with no inflection in her voice. “Does that mean I trust him? I don’t trust anybody.”

“We know what’s in Hannah’s will?” Lanier asked.

“She’s Rupe Starr’s only child, and when he died last May he left everything to her,” Berger responded. “She revised her will soon after. If she dies, everything goes to a foundation.”

“So she cut Bobby out. That strike you as a little unusual?” Stockman said.

“The best prenuptial is to make sure your spouse can’t profit by betraying you or killing you,” Berger answered. “And now it’s moot. Hannah Starr has a few million left and a lot of debt. Supposedly lost almost everything in the market and to Ponzi scams and all the rest this past September.”

“She’s probably on a yacht in the Mediterranean, having her nails done in Cannes or Monte Carlo,” Lanier said. “So Bobby gets nothing. What was your impression of him? Besides your natural inclination not to trust anyone.”

“Extremely upset.” Berger didn’t direct anything to anyone. She continued addressing the table, as if it was a jury. “Extremely worried, stressed, when I talked to him in their home. He’s convinced she’s the victim of foul play, claims she never would have run off and never would have left him. I was inclined to take that possibility very seriously until Lucy discovered the financial information all of you know about.”

“Let’s go back to the night Hannah disappeared,” O’Dell said. “How did Bobby know she was gone?”

“He tried to call her, and that’s reflected in phone records he’s made available to us,” Berger said. “The following day, Thanksgiving Day, Hannah was to board a private jet for Miami to spend the long weekend with him, and from there go to Saint Barts.”

“Alone?” Stockman asked. “Or both of them?”

“She was going to Saint Barts alone,” Berger answered.

“So, maybe she was about to skip the country,” Lanier said.

“That’s what I’ve wondered,” Berger said. “If she did, it wasn’t on her private jet, the Gulfstream. She never showed up at the FBO in White Plains.”

“This is what Bobby told you?” Benton asked. “We know it’s true?”

“He said it, and there’s a manifest for the flight. She didn’t show up at the FBO. She didn’t board the jet, and Bobby wasn’t on the manifest for the flight to Saint Barts,” Berger answered. “She also wasn’t answering the phone. Their New York housekeeper-”

“And her name is?” Lanier asked.

“Nastya.” She spelled it, and the name appeared on the wall. “She lives in the mansion and, according to her, Hannah never came home after having dinner in the Village on November twenty-sixth. But apparently this wasn’t reason enough to call the police. Sometimes she didn’t come home. She’d been at a birthday dinner. One if by Land, Two if by Sea on Barrow Street. She was with a group of friends and supposedly was seen getting into a yellow cab as everyone left the restaurant. That’s what we know so far.”

“Bobby know she screwed around on him?” O’Dell said.

“ ‘A lot of space in their togetherness’ is the way he described it. I don’t know what he knows,” Berger said. “Maybe what Hap said is true. Bobby and Hannah were business partners more than anything else. He claims he loves her, but we certainly hear that all the time.”

“In other words, they have an arrangement. Maybe both of them screw around. He’s from money, right?” O’Dell said.

“Not her kind of money. But from a well-off family in California, went to Stanford, got his MBA from Yale, was a successful alternative asset manager, involved in a couple of funds, one U.K. based, one Monaco-based.”

“These hedge fund guys. I mean, some of them were making hundreds of millions,” said O’Dell.

“A lot of them aren’t now, and some are in jail. What about Bobby?” Stockman said to Berger. “He lose his shirt?”

“Like a lot of these investors, he was counting on energy prices and mining stocks continuing to soar while financials continued to fall. This is what he told me,” she replied.

“And then the trend reversed in July,” Stockman said.

“He described it as a bloodbath,” Berger said. “He can’t afford the lifestyle he’s grown accustomed to without the Starr fortune, that’s for sure.”

“So the two of them are more of a merger than a marriage,” O’Dell said.

“I can’t attest to his real feelings. Who the hell ever knows the truth about what people feel,” she said without a trace of emotion. “He seemed distraught when I talked to him, when I met with him. When she didn’t show up for her flight on Thanksgiving, he claims he began to panic, called the police, and the police contacted me. Bobby claims he was afraid his wife was the victim of violence and stated that she’d had trouble in the past with being stalked. He flew to New York, met us at the house, walked us through it, at which time we collected a toothbrush of Hannah’s to get her DNA in case it turned out to be needed. In the event a body turns up somewhere.”

“The photo albums.” Benton was still thinking about Lucy and wondering what other secrets she kept. “Why would he show them to you?”

“I inquired about Hannah’s clients, if one of them might have targeted her. He said he didn’t know who most of her late father’s clients, Rupe Starr’s clients, were. Bobby suggested we-”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Marino was with me. Bobby suggested we look through the photo albums because it was Rupe’s habit to entertain a new client at the mansion, an initiation more than an invitation. If you didn’t come to dinner, he didn’t take you on. He wanted to have relationships with his clients, and apparently did.”