Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

“I don’t know what you’ve found.” Scarpetta was reminding him that all she knew so far was that what Marino had assumed was dog fur and now was identified as wolf fur had been recovered from the bomb debris.

Across the lab, maps were rolling by on one of the MacBooks. Street maps. Photo, elevation, and topographic maps.

“Preliminarily, this is as much as I can tell you.” Geffner’s voice. “The terrible odor, and there is one. Sort of tarry and sort of like shit, if you’ll excuse my French. You familiar with asafoetida?”

“I don’t cook Indian food, but I’m familiar enough. An herb rather notorious for its disgusting odor.”

Marino rustled as he walked closer to Scarpetta and said, “She had it on the whole time.”

“She had on what?” Scarpetta said to him.

“The watch and one of those sensors.” The part of his face that showed between the mask and the bouffant cap was flushed and he was sweating.

“Excuse me,” she said to Geffner. “I’m sorry. I’m doing about twenty things at once. What about the devil?”

“There’s a reason it’s called devil’s dung,” Geffner repeated, “and it might interest you to know that supposedly wolves are attracted to the odor of asafoetida.”

The sound of papery feet. Lucy walking across the white-tile floor to a work station, checking various connections and unplugging a large flat-screen monitor. She walked to another work station node and disconnected that monitor.

“Someone went to a fair amount of trouble to grind up asafoetida and what looks like asphalt and mix it with some kind of clear oil like a grapeseed oil, a linseed oil.”

Lucy carried the video displays to where Scarpetta sat and set them on her desk. She plugged the monitors into a port hub and the screens began to illuminate, images rolling down slowly and hazily, then sharply defined. Lucy’s papery sounds as she returned to her MacBooks, to Marino, the two of them talking. Scarpetta caught the words fucking slow and ordered wrong. Lucy was aggravated.

“I’m going to do gas chromatography-mass spec. FTIR. But with the microscope so far?” Geffner was saying.

Charts and maps and screen shots rolling by. Vital signs and dates and times. Mobility and exposure to ambient light. Scarpetta scanned data from the BioGraph device, and she looked at the file she’d just opened on the computer screen in front of her. Microscopic images: curled silvery ribbons covered with a rash of rust, and what looked like fragmented bullets.

“Definitely iron filings”-Geffner’s voice-“which were readily identifiable visually and with a magnet, and mixed in with this are dull gray particles, also heavy. They sunk to the bottom of a test tube filled with water. Maybe lead.”

Toni Darien’s vital signs, locations, the weather, dates, and times, captured every fifteen seconds. At two-twelve p.m. this past Tuesday, December 16, the temperature was seventy degrees Fahrenheit, the intensity of ambient white light luminescence was five hundred lux, typical of indoor lighting, her pulse oximetry was ninety-nine percent, her heart rate sixty-four, her pace was five steps, and her location was her apartment on Second Avenue. She was home and awake and walking around. Assuming she was the one wearing the BioGraph device. Scarpetta was going to assume it.

Geffner described, “I’ll verify with x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. Definitely quartz fragments, which I would expect with ground-up asphalt. I’ve touched a hot tungsten needle to some of the dark-brown and black sticky, viscous semisolid liquid material to see if it softened it, and it did. It does have a characteristic asphalt /petroleum odor.”

What Scarpetta had smelled when she’d carried the FedEx box upstairs. Asafoetida and asphalt. She watched charts and maps slowly roll by. She followed Toni Darien’s journey as it carried her closer to death. At two-fifteen on December 16, her pace picked up and the temperature dropped to thirty-nine degrees. Humidity eighty-five percent, ambient light eight hundred lux, winds out of the northeast. She was outside, and it was cold and overcast, her pulse oximetry ninety-nine percent as her heart rate began to climb: sixty-five, sixty-seven, seventy, eighty-five, and climbing as minutes passed, heading west on East 86th Street at a pace of thirty-three steps per fifteen seconds. Toni was running.

And Geffner was explaining, “I’m seeing what could be ground peppercorns, their physical properties and morphology characteristic for black, white, and red pepper. I’ll verify with GCMS analysis. Asafoetida, iron, lead, pepper, asphalt. The components of a potion that’s meant to be a curse.”

“Or what Marino’s calling a stink bomb.” Scarpetta talked to Geffner while she followed Toni Darien west on East 86th Street.

She turned south on Park Avenue, her pulse oximetry ninety-nine percent, her heart rate one hundred and twenty-three beats per minute.

“Ritualistic black magic, but I can’t find anything that specifically identifies a certain sect or religion,” Geffner was saying. “Not Palo Mayombe or Santeria, nothing I’ve seen reminds me of what I associate with their rituals and sorcery. I just know your potion wasn’t meant to bring any good fortune your way, which gets me back to the contradiction. Wolves are supposed to be favorable, to have great powers of restoring peace and harmony, to have healing powers and bring good luck in hunting.”

At four minutes and thirty seconds past three p.m., Toni passed 63rd Street, still jogging south on Park Avenue. The intensity of ambient light was less than seven hundred lux, the relative humidity one hundred percent. It had gotten more overcast and was raining. Her pulse oximetry was the same, her heart rate up to one forty. Grace Darien had said that Toni didn’t like to jog in gloomy weather. But she was doing it, running in the cold and rain. Why? Scarpetta kept looking at data as Geffner kept talking.

“The only witchcraft connection I could find is the Navajo word for ‘wolf’-mai-coh-means ‘witch.’ A person who can transform himself into something or someone else if he puts on a wolf skin. According to myth, witches or werewolves change shape so they can travel unnoticed. And the Pawnees used wolf skins and fur to protect their treasures and for various magical ceremonies. I’ve been looking up what I can as we’ve been moving things along in here. Don’t want you to think I’m the world’s expert on hexes and mumbo jumbo and folklore.”

“I guess the question’s going to be if it’s the same person who sent the singing Christmas card.” Scarpetta was thinking of Benton’s former patient Dodie Hodge, and she was looking at data rolling by.

Pulse oximetry the same, but Toni’s heart rate was dropping. At the corner of Park and East 58th she must have stopped running. Heart rate one thirty-two, one thirty-one, one thirty, and dropping. She was walking south on Park Avenue in the rain. The time was now eleven past three p.m.

Geffner said, “I think the question is what the person who made your stink bomb might have to do with the Toni Darien homicide.”

“Would you please repeat that?” Scarpetta asked as she looked at a GPS screen shot captured by Toni Darien’s BioGraph watchlike device at three-fourteen this past Tuesday afternoon. A red arrow on a topographic map pointing to a Park Avenue address.

Hannah Starr’s mansion.

“What did you say about Toni Darien?” Scarpetta asked, looking at more GPS screen shots, thinking she was misinterpreting, but she wasn’t.

Toni Darien’s run had taken her to the Starrs’ address. That was why she was jogging in gloomy weather. She was meeting someone.

“More wolf fur,” Geffner said. “Fragments of guard hairs.”