Blow Fly

  After a coughing bout, Dr. Lanier replies, “The hotel where she died is in a not-so-nice part of the city, in my jurisdiction. A housekeeper found her body.”

  “What about blood tests? In the paperwork you sent me, all I got were postmortem levels. So I don’t know whether she might have had the elevated GGTP or CDT associated with alcohol abuse.”

  “Since I first contacted you, I have managed to track down premortem blood test results, because she was in the hospital about two weeks before her death. Misfiled, I’m embarrassed to say. I’ve got a particular clerk I’d pay heaven and earth to get rid of. But she’s the sort to sue for one thing or another. The answer to your question is no—no elevated GGTP or CDT.”

  “In the hospital for what?”

  “Tests after her most recent blackout. So, obviously, she had one of these blackouts two weeks before she died. Again, I say allegedly.”

  “Well, if she didn’t have elevated GGTP or CDT, it would seem to me that we can rule out alcohol as the cause of her blackouts,” Scarpetta replies. “And Dr. Lanier, I can’t offer you a second opinion if I’m not supplied with all of the information.”

  “Be nice if I was supplied all the information, too. Don’t get me started on the police down here.”

  “What was Mrs. Dard’s behavior during her blackouts?”

  “Supposedly violent, throwing things, trashing the house or wherever she was staying. On one occasion, she vandalized her Maserati by smashing the windows, doors and hood with a hammer. She poured bleach all over the leather seats.”

  “A record of this with a body shop?”

  “It happened in May of 1995 and required two months to repair the damage, then her husband traded it in on a new one for her.”

  “That wasn’t her last blackout, though.” Scarpetta flips to another page in her legal pad, writing quickly and illegibly.

  “No, the last one—two weeks before her death—was in the fall. September first, 1995. On that occasion, she took a razor of some sort to paintings valued at more than a million dollars. Supposedly.”

  “This was in her home?”

  “In a parlor, as I understand it.”

  “Witnessed?”

  “Only the aftermath, based on what I’m told. Again, this is according to what her sister and husband said way back when.”

  “Certainly her drug abuse could cause blackouts. Another possibility is temporal lobe epilepsy. Any record of her having suffered a head injury?”

  “None that I’m aware of, and no old fractures or scarring showed up on X ray and gross examination. Hospital records indicate that after her second blackout, which, as I’ve said, was September first, 1995, she went through the gamut of tests: MRI, PET scan and so on. Nothing. Of course, temporal lobe epilepsy doesn’t always show up, and maybe she did suffer some sort of head injury and we just don’t know about it. Hard to imagine. I’m inclined to think her drug abuse was to blame.”

  “Based on the information I have, I agree. Her findings correlate with chronic abuse and not from one single overdose of OxyContin. Sounds like the only answer as to manner of death is investigation.”

  “Jesus God. That’s the problem. The cops who worked the case didn’t do shit and sure as hell aren’t going to do shit now. Hell, everything’s a problem down here. Except the food.”

  “Mrs. Dard is probably a heart death with chronic drug abuse as a contributing factor,” Scarpetta tells him. “That’s the most I can offer you.”

  “Doesn’t help that we’ve got an idiot of a U.S. Attorney, Weldon Winn,” Dr. Lanier continues to complain. “Since this damn serial killer’s been on the loose, a lot of people are sticking their noses in everything. Politics.”

  “I presume you’re on the task force,” Scarpetta interrupts him.

  “No. They say I’m not needed, since no bodies have turned up.”

  “And if a body does turn up, you don’t need to know anything about the investigation? Even though it’s believed that each of the women was murdered? Everything you’re telling me goes from bad to worse,” Scarpetta says.

  “You’re absolutely right. I haven’t been invited to look at the scenes of their abductions. I haven’t looked at their homes, cars, not a single crime scene.”

  “Well, you should have,” Scarpetta replies. “When a person is abducted and assumed to be a homicide, the police should ask you to look at everything and know every detail. You should be fully informed.”

  “Should doesn’t mean crap down here.”

  “How many of the abducted women are—or were—from your parish?”

  “So far, seven.”

  “And you haven’t been to a single scene of an abduction? I’m sorry to keep asking you the same questions. But I’m incredulous. And now those scenes no longer exist, am I right?”

  “Cases are as cold as an ice block,” he replies. “I guess the cars are still impounded, and at least that’s a good thing. But you can’t secure a parking lot or house forever, and I have no idea what’s happened with their homes.” He pauses to cough. “It’s going to happen again. Soon. He’s escalating.”

  THE SKY IS TURNING A dirty blue with haze, and the wind picks up.

  Scarpetta picks through paperwork as she talks to Dr. Lanier. Just now she finds a copy of the death certificate, folded up inside an envelope. The document isn’t certified and should not have been released by Dr. Lanier’s office. Only vital records would be authorized to send Scarpetta or any other requesting party a copy—a certified one. When Scarpetta was Chief, it would have been unthinkable for one of her clerks to make such an egregious error.

  She mentions the problematic copy of the death certificate, adding, “I’m not trying to interfere with how you run your office, but thought you should know . . .”

  “Goddamn!” he exclaims. “Let me guess which clerk. And don’t assume it was a mistake. Some people around here would love nothing better than to get me into serious trouble.”

  The maiden name on her death certificate is De Nardi, her father Bernard De Nardi, her mother Sylvie Gaillot De Nardi.

  Charlotte De Nardi Dard was born in Paris.

  “Dr. Scarpetta?”

  She vaguely hears his hoarse voice and coughing. Her mind locks on the abducted women, on Charlotte Dard’s suspicious death and the information blackout that keeps the coroner clueless. The Louisiana legal system is infamous for corruption.

  “Dr. Scarpetta? You there? Did I lose you?”

  Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is scheduled to die soon.

  “Hello?”

  “Dr. Lanier,” she finally says. “Let me ask you something. How did you hear about me?”

  “Oh, good. I thought we’d gotten disconnected. An indirect referral. A rather unorthodox one suggesting I contact Pete Marino. That led me to you.”

  “An unorthodox referral from whom?”

  He waits for another coughing fit to pass. “A guy on death row.”

  “Let me guess. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.”

  “I’m not surprised you would figure that out. I’ve been checking, I admit it. You have a pretty scary history with him.”

  “Let’s don’t go into that,” she says. “I also assume he’s the source of information about Charlotte Dard. And by the way, Rocco Caggiano, the lawyer who represented our mysterious pharmacist who allegedly fled to Palm Desert? He’s also Chandonne’s lawyer.”

  “Now that I didn’t know. You think Chandonne had something to do with Charlotte Dard’s death?”

  “I’m betting that he or someone either in his family or associated with it did,” she says.

  LUCY ISN’T SHOWERED, her usual demeanor in the office fractured by exhaustion and by post-traumatic stress that she will not acknowledge.

  Her clothes look slept in because they were—twice. Once in Berlin, when the flight was cancelled, and the next time in Heathrow, when she and Rudy had to wait three hours to board an eight-hour flight that landed them at Kennedy Airport not even an hour ag
o. At least they had no baggage to lose, their few belongings stuffed into one small carry-on duffel bag. Before leaving Germany, they showered and disposed of the clothing they had worn in room 511 of the Szczecin Radisson Hotel.

  Lucy wiped all prints off her tactical baton, and without a pause in her step, tossed it through the slightly open window of a dented Mercedes on the side of a quiet, narrow street crowded with parked cars. Certainly the Mercedes’s owner would puzzle over the baton and wonder who deposited it inside his or her front seat and why.

  “Merry Christmas,” Lucy muttered, and she and Rudy briskly walked off into the dawn.

  The morning was too dark and cool for blow flies, but with the afternoon, when Rudy and Lucy were long gone, the flies would awaken in Poland. More of the filthy winged insects would find Rocco Caggiano’s slightly open window and heavily drone inside to feed on his cold, stiff body. The flies should be busy depositing hundreds—maybe thousands—of eggs.

  Lucy’s chief of staff, Zach Manham, needs but one piece of evidence to deduce that his boss is not herself and that something very bad happened wherever she’s just been. She reeks of body odor. Even when Manham has spent hours in the gym or run miles with Lucy, she doesn’t stink, not like this. Hers is the strong odor of fear and stress. Its secretion requires little perspiration, which is clammy and concentrated in the armpits and strongly permeates clothing, becoming more unpleasant and noticeable with time. Accompanying this acute reaction is an elevated heartbeat, shallow breathing, pallor and constricted pupils. Manham doesn’t know the physiology of a response he learned to recognize early in his former career as a detective for the New York District Attorney’s Office, but he doesn’t need to know.

  “Go home and get some rest,” he repeatedly says to Lucy.

  “Cut it out,” she finally barks at him, interested in the large digital recorder on Manham’s desk.

  She slips on headphones and presses the Play button again, manipulating the volume.

  For the third time, she listens to the cryptic message that their highly technical caller-identification system has narrowed down to the Polunsky Unit, while a satellite tracking system indicates the call was made from virtually the front door of Lucy’s office building, or perhaps even inside it. Hitting the Off button, she sits down, worn-out and beside herself.

  “Goddamn, goddamn it!” she exclaims. “I don’t get it! You screw up something, Zach?”

  She rubs her face, a residue of mascara sticky on her eyelashes and driving her crazy. When she played the role of pretty young thing who seemed perfectly in place at the Radisson in Szczecin, she somehow grabbed a tube of waterproof mascara, and she hates mascara, and she had no makeup remover because she’s rather much a stranger to cosmetics. So she scrubbed her face hard, succeeding only in getting soap in her eyes, which are bloodshot and puffy, as if she had been drinking all night. With rare exception, alcohol on the job is forbidden, and the first words out of her mouth when she appeared in her office not even an hour ago, leaving a jet stream of stench whenever she moved, was that she had not been on a bender, as if Manham or anybody else would have suspected, for even two seconds, that she had been.

  “I didn’t screw up anything, Lucy,” Manham patiently replies, looking at her with concern.

  He is moving closer to fifty years old, fit, six feet tall, with thick brown hair and a brush of gray at the temples, his former thick Bronx accent neutralized or altered when necessary. Manham is a natural mimic. Amazingly, he can fit into virtually any environment. Women find him irresistibly attractive and entertaining, and he uses this to his professional advantage. Moral judgments do not exist at The Last Precinct, unless an investigator is foolish and selfish enough to violate an unbending code of impeccable behavior. One’s personal choices must never, absolutely never, come within miles of the boundaries of missions that place lives at risk daily.

  “I honestly have no idea what happened here, why the satellite tracking system pinpoints the immediate area of this building,” Manham tells her. “I contacted Polunsky, and Jean-Baptiste is there. They say he’s there. He could not have been here. That would be impossible, unless he can levitate, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I think what you mean is travel out of body,” Lucy retorts, and her unfairness and arrogance are uncontrollable right now, and she feels terrible about it. “Levitate means to hover off the ground.”

  She feels powerless because her usually brilliant and logical mind cannot decipher what has happened, and she wasn’t here when it happened.

  Manham politely looks at her. “It’s him. You’re sure?”

  Lucy knows Jean-Baptiste’s voice, soft, almost sweet, with a heavy French accent. His is a voice she will never forget.

  “It’s him, all right,” she says. “Go ahead and run voice analysis, but I already know what it’s going to show. And I think Polunsky needs to prove that the asshole they’ve got on death row is really Chandonne—as in proving it with DNA. Maybe his fucking family’s pulled something. If need be, I’ll go there and look at his ugly face myself.”

  She hates that she hates him. No competent investigator can give in to emotions, or judgment is obscured, even deadly. But Jean-Baptiste tried to kill Lucy’s aunt. For that, she despises him. For that, he should die. Painfully, Lucy wishes. For what he intended and attempted, he should feel the abject terror he inflicted on others and lusted to inflict on Scarpetta.

  “Demand a new DNA test? Lucy, we need a court order.” Manham is aware of jurisdictional and legal limitations and has lived by their standards for so long that he is programmed to at least worry when Lucy suggests a plan that in the past would have been unthinkable and impossible and, if nothing else, would have resulted in a suppression of evidence that would destroy a case in court.

  “Berger can request it.” Lucy refers to Assistant DA Jaime Berger. “Give her a call and ask her to come over here as soon as she can. Like right now.”

  Manham has to smile. “I’m sure she has nothing to do and will welcome the diversion.”

  SCARPETTA SPREADS OUT dozens of eight-by-ten color photographs she made by placing each sheet of the Polunsky commissary paper on a lightbox and photographing all of them under ultraviolet light, and then again at a magnification of 50X.

  She compares them to photographs of the Chandonne letter she received. The paper has no watermarks and is composed of closely matted wood fibers, common in cheap paper as opposed to fine papers that include rag.

  Visually, the paper has a smooth, shiny surface, typical in typing paper, and she sees no irregularities that might suggest it came from the same manufacturer’s batch, which doesn’t matter, really. Even if the paper did come from the same batch, that scientific evidence would be weak in court because the defense would instantly insist that because of the enormous size of a manufacturer’s batch, inexpensive grades of paper such as this are produced with untold millions and millions of sheets to a batch.

  The eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, twenty-pound paper is no different from what Scarpetta uses in her printer. Ironically, the defense might make a case that she wrote the Chandonne letter and mailed it to herself.

  She has been subjected to more ridiculously bizarre accusations than that. She doesn’t fool herself. Once accused, always accused, and she has been accused of too many professional, legal and moral breaches to survive the intense scrutiny of anyone who might wish to destroy her again.

  Rose peeks her head into Scarpetta’s office. “If you don’t leave right this minute, you’re going to miss another flight.”

  BUYING COFFEE ON THE STREET is an old routine that gives Jaime Berger a temporary escape from mayhem.

  She takes her change from Raul, thanks him, and he nods, busy, aware of the long line behind her, and asks if she wants butter, even though she has refused butter for all the years she has patronized his kiosk across Centre Street from the District Attorney’s office. She walks off with her coffee and usual high-carbohydrate lunch of a bagel—this one p
oppy-seed—and two packets of Philadelphia cream cheese in a white paper bag with a napkin and a plastic knife. The cell phone on her belt vibrates like a stinging insect.

  “Yes,” she answers, pausing on the sidewalk across from her granite building downtown, close to Ground Zero, where on September 11, 2001, she was looking out her office window when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center.

  That empty hole along the Hudson has left an empty hole in her, too. Staring at blank air, at what is no longer there, makes her feel older than her forty-eight years, and with every passing era in her life, she has lost a part of herself that can never be resurrected.

  “What are you doing?” Lucy asks. “I hear street chaos, so you’re in the midst of cops, lawyers and thugs swarming around the courthouse. How quickly can you get to the Upper East Side, where things are more civilized?”

  Typically, Lucy doesn’t give Berger an opportunity to get in a word until it is too late for her to say no.

  “You’re not scheduled for court, are you?”

  Berger says that she’s not. “I suppose you want me now.”

  Realistically speaking, now is more like forty-five minutes, due to sluggish traffic. It is close to one p.m. when Berger is keyed up to the twenty-first floor of Lucy’s building. The elevator doors open to a mahogany reception area with Infosearch Solutions in brass letters on the wall behind the curved glass desk. There is no area for clients to wait, and the desk is flanked by two opaque glass doors. The left one electronically unlocks as the elevator doors shut, an invisible camera in the chandelier broadcasting Berger and every sound she makes on platinum-screen TVs in every interior office.

  “You look like holy hell. But what matters is how I look,” she dryly says as Lucy greets her.

  “You’re very photogenic,” Lucy replies with a quip she’s used before. “You could have had a brilliant acting career in Hollywood.”

  Berger is a dark-haired woman with sharp features and pretty teeth. She is always dressed impeccably in power suits accented by expensive accessories, and although she might not think of herself as an actor, any good prosecutor is theatrical during interviews and certainly in the courtroom. Berger looks around at a wall of closed mahogany doors. One opens, and Zach Manham walks out, holding a stack of CDs.