The Scarpetta Factor

  “I assume that was the point,” Lobo said. “Someone wanted this liquid on her, whatever it is. And to mess her up pretty good. Let me take a look at the card.”

  Marino unzipped his briefcase and gave Lobo the evidence pouch Scarpetta had given to him. Lobo pulled on a pair of gloves and started looking. He opened the Christmas card, an upset Santa on the glossy cover being chased by Mrs. Claus with a rolling pin. A woman’s thin, off-tune voice singing. “Have a Ho-Dee, Do-Dee Christmas . . .” Lobo peeled back stiff paper and slid out the voice module as the annoying tune continued, “Stick some mistletoe where it ought to go . . .” He disconnected the recorder from its batteries, three button batteries, AG10s no bigger than what goes inside a wristwatch. Silence, the wind gusting in from the water and through the fence. Marino couldn’t feel his ears anymore, and his mouth was like the Tin Man’s, in need of oil. It was getting hard to talk, he was so cold.

  “A bare talking module ideal for greeting card mounting.” Lobo held the recorder close to Marino to show him. “The kind used by crafters and do-it-yourselfers. Full circuit with a speaker. Ready-made slider switch for auto play, which is the key to the whole thing. The sliding contact closes the firing circuit and triggers the bomb. Ready to order. Hell of a lot easier than making one yourself.”

  Droiden was plucking bomb parts out of the wet, filthy mess in the pit. She got up and got closer to Marino and Lobo, holding silver, black, and dark-green plastic and metal fragments and black and copper wire in the palm of her nitrile-gloved hand. She took the intact recording module from Lobo and began making a comparison.

  “Microscopic examination will confirm,” she said, but her meaning was plain.

  “Same kind of recorder,” Marino said, cupping his big hands around hers to shield the frag from the wind and wishing he could stand there for a long time that close to her. Didn’t matter if he’d been up all night and was turning into a chunk of ice, he felt suddenly warm and alert. “Jesus, that stinks. And what is that, dog fur?” With a synthetic rubber-sheathed finger, he prodded several long, coarse hairs. “Why the hell is dog fur in it?”

  “Looks like the doll was stuffed with fur. It might be dog fur,” she said. “I’m seeing significant similarities in the construction. The circuit board, the slider switch, the record button and microphone speaker.”

  Lobo was studying the Santa card. He turned it over to see what was on the back.

  “Made in China. Recyclable paper. An environmentally friendly Christmas bomb. How nice,” he said.

  Scarpetta dragged the open suitcase across the floor. The twenty-nine accordion file folders inside it, bound by elastic bands and labeled with white stickers that had handwritten dates on them, covered a span of twenty-six years. Most of Warner Agee’s career.

  “If I talked to Jaime, what do you think she’d tell me about you?” she continued to probe.

  “That’s easy. I’m pathological.” Lucy’s anger flashed.

  Sometimes her anger was so sudden and intense that Scarpetta could see it like lightning.

  “I’m pissed all the time. Want to hurt someone,” Lucy said.

  Agee must have moved a lot of his personal belongings to the Hotel Elysée, certainly ones that were important to him. Scarpetta picked out the most recent folders and sat on the carpet at her niece’s feet.

  “Why do you want to hurt someone?” Scarpetta asked her.

  “To get back what was fucking taken from me. To redeem myself somehow and get a second chance so I never let anybody do something like that to me again. Do you know what’s terrible?” Lucy’s eyes blazed. “It’s terrible to decide there are some people it’s okay to destroy, to kill. And to imagine it, to work it out in your mind, and not feel even a twitch or a twinge. To feel nothing. Like he probably felt.” Waving her arm as if Warner Agee was in the room. “That’s when the worst happens. When you feel nothing anymore. That’s when you do it—you do something you can’t take back. It’s terrible to know you’re really no different from the assholes you’re chasing and trying to protect people from.”

  Scarpetta slipped off the elastic band of the accordion file that appeared to be the most recent one, beginning January first of this year, the end date left blank.

  “You are different from them,” she said.

  “I can’t take it back,” Lucy said.

  “What is it you can’t take back?”

  The file’s six compartments were crammed with papers, receipts, a checkbook, and a brown leather wallet that was worn smooth and curved from years of being carried in a back pocket.

  “I can’t take back that I did it.” Lucy took a deep breath, refusing to cry. “I’m a bad person.”

  “No, you’re not,” Scarpetta replied.

  Agee’s driver’s license had expired three years ago. His Master-Card was expired. His Visa and American Express cards were expired.

  “I am,” Lucy said. “You know what I’ve done.”

  “You’re not a bad person, and I say that knowing what you’ve done. Maybe not everything, but plenty,” Scarpetta said. “You were FBI, ATF, and like Benton, involved in so much that you really couldn’t help and you certainly couldn’t talk about and likely still can’t. Of course I’m aware, and I’m also aware it’s been in the line of duty or for a very sound reason. Like a soldier on the front line. That’s what cops are, they’re soldiers who go beyond the limits of what’s normal so they can somehow keep life normal for the rest of us.”

  She counted fourteen hundred and forty dollars cash, all twenties, as if they had come from an ATM.

  Lucy then said, “Really? What about Rocco Caggiano?”

  “What about his father, Pete Marino, if you hadn’t?” Scarpetta didn’t know the details of what had happened in Poland, and she didn’t want to, but she understood the reason. “Marino would be dead,” she said. “Rocco was involved in organized crime and would have killed him. It was already set in motion, and you stopped it.”

  She began looking at receipts for food, toiletries, and transportation, a lot of them from hotels, stores, restaurants, and taxicabs in Detroit, Michigan. Paid in cash.

  “I wish I hadn’t, that somebody else had. I killed his son. I’ve done a lot of things I can’t take back,” Lucy said.

  “What can any of us take back? Foolish words, a phrase. People say it all the time, but in fact, we can’t take anything back,” Scarpetta said. “All we can do is step around the messes we’ve made and take responsibility and apologize and try to move on.”

  She was making piles on the floor, digging in the accordion files to see what Agee had thought was important enough about his life to save. She found an envelope of canceled checks. Last January he spent more than six thousand dollars on two Siemens Motion 700 hearing aids and accessories. He’d donated his old ones to Goodwill and gotten a receipt. Soon after, he’d become a subscriber to a Web-based captioning telephone service. No pay stubs or bank records that might indicate where he was getting his money. She pulled out a manila envelope labeled IAP. It was thick with newsletters, conference programs, journal articles, all in French, and more receipts and plane tickets. In July 2006 Agee had traveled to Paris to attend a conference at the Institut Anomalous Psychologie.

  Scarpetta’s conversational French wasn’t good, but she could read it fairly well. She scanned a letter from a committee member of the Global Consciousness Project, thanking Agee for agreeing to participate in a discussion on the use of scientific tools in looking for structure in random data during major global events, such as 9/11. The committee member was pleased that he would be seeing Agee again and wondered if his research in psychokinesis was still encountering difficulties in replicating its findings. The problem, of course, is the raw material of human subjects and the legal and ethical constraints, she translated.

  “Why are you thinking about killing and dying?” she asked Lucy. “Who do you want to kill, and do you wish you were dead?” she said, and again was answered by silence. “You’d
better tell me, Lucy. I intend to stay in this room with you for as long as it takes.”

  “Hannah,” Lucy answered.

  “You want to kill Hannah Starr?” Scarpetta glanced up at her. “Or you did kill her or you wish she was dead?”

  “I didn’t kill her. I don’t know if she’s dead and don’t care. I just want her punished. I want to do it personally.”

  Agee had written the committee member back in French: While it is true that human subjects are biased and as a result tend to be unreliable, this obstacle can be sidestepped if the subjects in a study are monitored in a way that obviates self-consciousness.

  “Punished for what? What did she do to you that merits your personally taking care of it?” Scarpetta asked.

  She opened another accordion file. More on parapsychology. Journal articles. Agee was fluent in French and prominent in the field of paranormal psychology, the study of the “seventh sense,” the science of the supernatural. The Paris-based Institute of Anomalous Psychology paid his expenses when he traveled and may have been supplying him with stipends and other fees, including grant monies. The Lecoq Foundation that funded the IAP was keenly interested in Agee’s work. There were repeated mentions of Monsieur Lecoq’s eagerness to meet with Agee and discuss their “mutual passions and interests.”

  “She did something to you,” Scarpetta continued, and it wasn’t a question. Lucy must know Hannah. “What happened? Did you have an affair with her? Did you have sex with her? What?”

  “I didn’t have sex with her. But . . .”

  “But what? You either did or you didn’t. Where did you meet her?”

  An abstract. Dans cet article, publié en 2007, Warner Agee, l’un des pionniers de la recherche en parapsychologie, en particulier l’expérience de mort imminente et de sortie hors du corps . . .

  “She wanted me to try something, to start something, to make an overture,” Lucy said.

  “A physical one.”

  “She assumed everybody wanted to try something with her, to hit on her,” Lucy said. “I didn’t. She flirted. She flaunted it. We were alone. I thought Bobby was going to be there, but he wasn’t. It was just her, and she teased me. But I didn’t. The fucking bitch.”

  Near-death and out-of-body experiences. People who die and come back to life with paranormal gifts and abilities: healing and mind over matter. The belief that thoughts can control our own bodies and influence physical systems and objects, Scarpetta kept reading . . . such as electronic devices, noise, and dice, in the same way that lunar phases can influence casino payout rates.

  She asked Lucy, “So, what exactly did Hannah do that was so terrible?”

  “I used to tell you about my financial planner.”

  “The one you called the Money Man.”

  Agee’s tax return for 2007. Income from a retirement fund but no other fees, yet it was clear from correspondence and other paperwork that he was getting money from somewhere or someone. Possibly from the Lecoq Foundation in Paris.

  “Her father. Rupe Starr. He was the Money Man,” Lucy said. “From the beginning, when I wasn’t even twenty yet and started doing so well, he managed me. If it hadn’t been for him? Well, I might have given everything away, you know, I was just so happy inventing, dreaming, coming up with ideas I could execute. Creating something out of nothing and making people want it.”

  2008. No trips to France. Agee was back and forth to Detroit. Where was he getting his cash?

  “At one point I was doing some cool digital stuff that I thought might have promise for animation,” Lucy was saying, “and this person I’d gotten to know who worked for Apple gave me Rupe’s name. You probably know that he was one of the most well-respected and successful money managers on Wall Street.”

  “I’m wondering why you felt you could never talk to me about him or your money,” Scarpetta said.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  What was in Detroit besides the failing auto industry? Scarpetta picked up Lucy’s MacBook.

  “I must have asked.” But she couldn’t think of an occasion when she had.

  “You didn’t,” Lucy said.

  Googling the Lecoq Foundation and finding nothing. Googling Monsieur Lecoq and finding only the expected multiple references to the nineteenth-century French detective novel by Émile Gabo riau. Scarpetta couldn’t find any reference to a real person named Monsieur Lecoq who was a wealthy philanthropist invested in paranormal psychology.

  “And you certainly don’t hesitate to interrogate me about anything else that comes to your mind,” Lucy continued. “But you never asked me any specifics about my finances, and if I mentioned the Money Man, you didn’t even ask about him.”

  “Maybe I was afraid.” Scarpetta reflected on that sad probability. “So I shied away from the subject by rationalizing that I shouldn’t pry.”

  Googling Motor City Casino Hotel and the Grand Palais in Detroit. Receipts from both hotels over the past few years but no evidence Agee had ever stayed in either of them. Doing what? Gambling? Was he a gambler and got rooms comped, perhaps? How could he afford to be a gambler? A piece of paper from a personalized memo pad: From the Desk of Freddie Maestro and what looked like a PIN and City Bank of Detroit and an address written with a felt-tip pen. Why was the name Freddie Maestro familiar? Was the PIN for an ATM?

  “Right,” Lucy said. “You can talk about dead bodies and sex but not about someone’s net worth. You can dig through some dead person’s pockets and dresser drawers and personal files and receipts but not ask me very basic questions about how I make my living and who I’m in business with. You never asked me,” Lucy emphasized. “I figured you didn’t want to know because you believed I was doing something illegal. Stealing or cheating the government, so I let it go because I sure as hell wasn’t going to defend myself to you or anyone.”

  “I didn’t know because I didn’t want to know.” Scarpetta’s own insecurity because she’d grown up poor. “Because I wanted a level playing field.” Her own inadequacy because she was powerless when she was a child and her family had no money and her father was dying. “And I can’t compete with you when it comes to making money. I’m pretty good at holding on to what I’ve got, but I’ve never had the Midas touch or been in the business of business for the sake of business. I’m not particularly good at it.”

  “Why would you want to compete with me?”

  “That’s my point. I didn’t. I wouldn’t because I can’t. Maybe I was afraid of losing your respect. And why would you respect my business acumen? If I’d been a brilliant businesswoman, I wouldn’t have gone to law school, to med school, spent twelve years of postgraduate education so I could earn less than a lot of Realtors or car salesmen.”

  “If I was such a brilliant businesswoman we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Lucy said.

  Googling Michigan on the Internet. The new Las Vegas, and a lot of movies were being filmed there, the state doing what it could to pump money into its hemorrhaging economy. A forty percent tax incentive. And casinos. Michigan had a vocational school for casino dealer training, and some of the organizations supplying tuition assistance included the Veterans Administration, the United Steelworkers, and the United Auto Workers. Come home from Iraq or lose your job at GM and become a blackjack dealer.

  “I fucked up. Rupe died last May, and Hannah inherited everything and completely took over. An MBA from Wharton, I’m not saying she isn’t smart,” Lucy said.

  “She took over your account?”

  “She tried.”

  People had to survive any way they could these days, and vices and entertainment were doing well. Movies, the food and beverage industry. Especially liquor. When people feel bad they actively seek feeling good. What did this have to do with Warner Agee? What had he gotten involved in? Scarpetta thought about Toni Darien’s dice keychain and High Roller Lanes being like Vegas, as Bonnell had put it. Mrs. Darien said Toni hoped to end up in Paris or Monte Carlo someday, and her MIT-trained father, Lawr
ence Darien, was a gambler who might have ties to organized crime, according to Marino. Freddie Maestro, Scarpetta remembered. The name of the man who owned High Roller Lanes. He had game arcades and other businesses in Detroit, Louisiana, South Florida, and she couldn’t remember where else. Ultimately, he had been Toni Darien’s boss. Maybe he knew her father.

  “I’d met her a few times, then we had a discussion at her place in Florida and I told her no,” Lucy said. “But I let my guard down and acted on a tip she gave me. I dodged a bullet and got a knife in my back. I didn’t follow my instincts, and she fucked me. She fucked me good.”

  “Are you bankrupt?” Scarpetta asked.

  Googling Dr. Warner Agee with a combination of keywords. Gambling, casinos, the gaming industry, and Michigan.

  “No,” Lucy said. “What I have isn’t the point. It’s not even what I lost. She wanted to hurt me. It gave her pleasure.”

  “If Jaime’s doing such a thorough investigation, how can she not know?”

  “Who’s doing the thorough investigation, Aunt Kay? It isn’t her. Not the electronic information. All of that’s from me.”

  “She has no idea you knew Hannah, that you have this conflict of interest. Because that’s exactly what it is.” Scarpetta talked as she went through more accordion files.

  “She’d boot me out of the process, and that would be completely self-defeating and ridiculous,” Lucy answered. “If anybody should be helping, it’s me. And I wasn’t Hannah’s client. I was Rupe’s. You know what’s in his records? Put it this way: Nothing relevant to what Hannah did to me is going to show up. I’ve made sure.”

  Scarpetta said, “That’s not right.”

  “What’s not right is what she did.”

  An article Agee had published in a British journal, Quantum Mechanics, two years earlier. Quantum epistemology and measurement. Planck, Bohr, de Broglie, Einstein. The role of human consciousness in the collapse of the wave function. Single photon interference and causality violations in thermodynamics. The elusiveness of human consciousness.