Four Scarpetta Novels

  Poe told Jean-Baptiste, “Read my inspired words and you will be independent of an intellect you will no longer need, my friend. You will be animated by the force and no longer distracted by pain and internal sensations.”

  Pages 56 and 57. The end of Jean-Baptiste’s limited march of reasoning powers. No more diseases or peculiar complaints. The internal voice and glorious luminosity.

  Who’s there?

  Jean-Baptiste’s hairy hand moves faster beneath the blanket. A stronger stench rises from his profuse perspiration, and he screams in furious frustration.

  LUCY SLIPS THE FOLDED PAPERS out of her back pocket as Berger sits next to her on the couch.

  “Police reports, autopsy reports,” Lucy tells her.

  Berger takes the computer printouts from her and goes through them carefully but quickly. “Wealthy American lawyer, frequently in Szczecin on business, frequently stayed at the Radisson. Apparently shot himself in the right temple with a small-caliber pistol. Clothed, had defecated on himself, a STAT alcohol of point-two-six.” She glances up at Lucy.

  “For a boozer like him,” Lucy says, “that was probably nothing.”

  Berger reads some more. The reports are detailed, noting the feces-stained cashmere pants, briefs and towels, the empty champagne bottle, the half-empty bottle of vodka.

  “It appears he was sick. Let’s see,” Berger continues, “twenty-four hundred dollars in American cash inside a sock in the bottom drawer of a dresser. A gold watch, gold ring, a gold chain. No evidence of robbery. No one heard a gunshot, or at least never reported hearing one.

  “Evidence of a meal. Steak, a baked potato, shrimp cocktail, chocolate cake, vodka. Someone—can’t pronounce the name—working in the kitchen seems to think, but isn’t sure, that Rocco had room service around eight p.m., the night of the twenty-sixth. Origin of a champagne bottle is unknown but is a brand the hotel carries. No fingerprints on the bottle except Rocco Caggiano’s . . . Room was checked for prints, one cartridge case recovered—it and the pistol checked for prints. Again, Rocco’s. His hands checked positive for gunshot residue, yada yada yada. They were thorough.” She looks up at Lucy. “We’re not even halfway through the police report.”

  “What about witnesses?” Lucy asks. “Anybody suspicious . . .”

  “No.” Berger slides one page behind another. “Autopsy stuff . . . uh . . . heart and liver disease, why am I not surprised? Atherosclerosis, et cetera, et cetera. Gunshot wound, contact with charred lacerated margins and no stippling. Instantly fatal—that would make your aunt crazy. You know how she hates it when someone says that a person died instantly. Nobody dies instantly, right Lucy?” Berger peers over the top of her reading glasses and meets Lucy’s eyes. “You think Rocco died in seconds, minutes, maybe an hour?”

  Lucy doesn’t answer her.

  “His body was found at nine-fifteen a.m., April twenty-eighth . . .” Berger looks quizzically at her. “By then he’d been dead less than forty hours. Not even two days.” She frowns. “Body found by . . . I can’t pronounce his name, a maintenance guy. Body badly decomposed.” She pauses. “Infested with maggots.” She glances up. “That’s a very advanced stage of decomposition for someone who’s been dead such a short time in what sounds to me like a relatively cool room.”

  “Cool? The room temperature’s in there?” Lucy cranes her neck to look at a printout she can’t translate.

  “Says the window was slightly opened, temperature in the room sixty-eight degrees, even though thermostat set on seventy-four degrees, but the weather was cool, temperature low sixties during the day, mid-fifties at night. Rain . . .” She is frowning. “My French is getting rusty. Ummm. No suspicion of foul play. Nothing unusual happened inside the hotel the night Rocco Caggiano ordered room service, the alleged night, if the room service guy has the date right. Ummm.” She scans. “A prostitute made a scene in the lobby. There’s a description. That’s interesting. I’d love to depose her.”

  Berger looks up. Her eyes linger on Lucy’s.

  “Well,” she says in a way that unsettles Lucy, “we all know how confusing time of death can be. And it appears that the police aren’t sure of the time and date of Rocco’s last meal, so to speak. Apparently, the hotel doesn’t log room service orders on a computer.”

  She leans forward in her chair, a look on her face Lucy has seen before. It terrifies her.

  “Shall I call your aunt about time of death? Want me to call our good detective friend Marino and ask his opinion about the disruptive prostitute in the lobby? The description in this report sounds a little bit like you. Only she was foreign. Maybe Russian.”

  Berger gets up from the couch and moves close to the windows, looking out. She starts shaking her head and running her fingers through her hair. When she turns around, her eyes are veiled with the protective curtain she keeps drawn virtually every hour of her every day.

  The prosecutorial interview has begun.

  LUCY MAY AS WELL BE shut off in a conference room on the fourth floor of the New York District Attorney’s Office, looking out dusty windows at old downtown buildings pressing in from all sides, while Berger sips her black coffee from her paper cup with the Greek key trim around the lip, just like she has done in every interview Lucy has ever watched.

  And she has observed many of them for many different reasons. She knows the noise and feel of Berger’s shifting gears. She is intimately familiar with the modulations and revolutions of Berger’s engine as she pursues, outruns or hits the perpetrator or lying witness head-on. Now the mighty machinery is directed at Lucy, and she is both relieved and petrified.

  “You were just in Berlin, where you rented a black Mercedes sedan,” Berger says. “Rudy was with you on the return flight to New York—at least I assume Frederick Mullins, supposedly your husband, was Rudy sitting next to you on Lufthansa and then British Air? Are you going to ask me how I know this, Mrs. Mullins?”

  “An awful alias. One of the worst.” Lucy feels herself breaking down. “Well, in terms of names. I mean . . .” She laughs inappropriately.

  “Answer my question. Tell me about this Mrs. Mullins. Why she went to Berlin.” Berger’s face is metallic, her eyes reflecting anger born of fear. “I have a feeling that the story I’m about to hear is anything but funny.”

  Lucy stares at her sweating glass, at the lime sinking at the bottom of it, at bubbles.

  “Your return ticket stubs and the rental car receipt were in your briefcase, and your briefcase—as usual—was wide open on top of your desk,” Berger says.

  Lucy’s face remains expressionless. She knows damn well that Berger misses nothing and wanders at will in places she doesn’t belong.

  “Maybe you wanted me to see it.”

  “I don’t know. I never thought I wanted you to see it,” Lucy quietly replies.

  Berger stares out at a cruise ship slowly being hauled in by a tugboat.

  Lucy recrosses her legs nervously.

  “So Rocco Caggiano committed suicide. I don’t suppose you coincidentally happened to see him while you were in Europe? Not saying you happened to be in Szczecin, but I do know that most people traveling to that part of northern Poland would be quite likely to fly into Berlin, just like you and Rudy did.”

  “You’d make a great prosecutor,” Lucy says drolly, still not looking up. “I would never have a chance under your direct or cross.”

  “A scenario I don’t want to imagine. Jesus. Mr. Caggiano—Mr. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s lawyer—former lawyer. Dead. A bullet in his head. I suppose that pleases you.”

  “He was going to kill Marino.”

  “Who told you that? Rocco or Marino?”

  “Rocco,” Lucy barely says.

  She’s in too deep. It’s too late. She desperately needs to purge herself.

  “Inside his hotel room,” she adds.

  “God,” Berger mutters.

  “We had to, Jaime. It’s no different than, than what the soldiers did in Iraq, you get it?”


  “No, I don’t get it.” Berger is shaking her head again. “How the hell you could do something like this.”

  “He wanted to die.”

  LUCY STANDS ON THE MOST beautiful Persian rug she has ever seen, one she has stood on many, many times during better moments with Jaime Berger.

  They are far apart from each other in the living room.

  “It’s hard for me to imagine you dressed as a prostitute and getting into an altercation with a drunk,” Berger goes on. “That was sloppy work on your part.”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “I’ll say you did.”

  “I had to go back. For my tactical baton,” Lucy tells her.

  “Which one of you pulled the trigger?”

  The question shocks Lucy. She doesn’t want to remember.

  “Rocco was planning on killing Marino, his own father,” Lucy says again. “Next time Marino went on one of his fishing trips, Rocco was going to take him out. Rocco wanted to die. He did kill himself, sort of.”

  Berger looks out at the city, her hands tightly clasped. “He sort of killed himself. You sort of murdered him. Sort of dead. Sort of being pregnant. Sort of committing perjury.”

  “We had to.”

  Berger doesn’t want to hear this. She has no choice.

  “We did, I swear.”

  Berger remains silent.

  “He was a Red Notice. He was going to die. The Chandonnes would have taken him out, and not in a nice way.”

  “Now the defense is mercy killing,” Berger finally speaks.

  “How is it different from what our soldiers did in Iraq?”

  “Now the defense is world peace.”

  “Rocco’s life was over, anyway.”

  “Now the defense is he was already dead.”

  “Please don’t make fun of me, Jaime!”

  “I’m supposed to congratulate you?” Berger goes on. “And now you’ve fucked me, too, because I know about it. I know about it.” Berger repeats each word slowly. “Am I stupid or what? Jesus! I sat right there”—she whirls around and jabs a finger at Lucy—“and translated those goddamn reports for you.

  “You may as well have walked into my office and confessed to a murder, and had me say, Don’t worry about it, Lucy. We all make mistakes. Or It happened in Poland, so it’s not my jurisdiction. It doesn’t count. Or Tell me all about it if it will make you feel better. See, I’m not a real district attorney when I’m with you. When we’re alone, when we’re inside my apartment, it’s not professional.”

  T HE FLUID WHITE as light and brilliant with sparks. Page forty-seven! Who’s there!”

  “Jesus Christ!” Eyes flash in the barred window, different eyes this time.

  Jean-Baptiste feels the heat of the eyes. They are nothing more than small, weak embers.

  “Chandonne, shut up, goddamn it! Shut up with this page-number shit. Goddamn, I’m sick and tired of this page-number shit. You hiding some book in there?” The eyes dart around the cell like sparks scattered by the wind. “And get your filthy hand out of your pants, Mini-Me Dick!”

  That familiar hateful laughter. “Mini-Dick, Mini-Dick! Mini-Dick, Mini-Dick . . . !” Beast’s is a voice from hell.

  Jean-Baptiste has been within twenty feet of Beast. That’s how far away the barred window in Jean-Baptiste’s door is from the indoor recreation area one floor below him.

  There is nothing to do during the one hour a death row inmate with privileges is allowed to spend on the rectangular wooden floor that is securely enclosed by thick wire mesh, like a cage at the zoo. Shooting hoops is popular, or simply walking a mile, which by Jean-Baptiste’s calculations requires approximately seventy laps that no one but he is motivated to do. If Jean-Baptiste runs the laps, which is his habit during the one hour per week he is allowed recreation, he doesn’t mind the other men on his cell block who leer out at him, their eyes small hot spots from sun shining through a magnifying glass. They make their usual insolent remarks. The recreation hour is the only opportunity inmates have to chat with and see one another from a distance. Many of these conversations are friendly and even funny. Jean-Baptiste is beyond caring that no one is friendly with him, and that all fun is at his expense.

  He is familiar with every detail about Beast, who is not considered a model prisoner but, unlike Jean-Baptiste, has privileges, including daily recreation and, of course, his radio. The first time Jean-Baptiste experienced every detail of Beast’s presence was when two guards escorted Beast to the indoor recreation area, where he directed his diseased energy up to Jean-Baptiste’s cell door.

  Jean-Baptiste’s hairy face looked out the bars of his window. It was time to see. One day, Beast might be useful.

  “Watch this, No Nuts!” Beast yelled at him, pulling off his shirt and flexing bulging muscles that, like his thick forearms, are almost black with tattoos. He dropped to the concrete floor and fell into one-arm push-ups. Jean-Baptiste’s face disappeared from the barred window, but not before he studied Beast carefully. He is smooth-skinned with a blaze of light brown hair that runs from his muscular chest down his belly and disappears into his groin. He is handsome, cruelly so, rather much like a swashbuckler, with a strong jaw, large, bright teeth, a straight nose and intensely cold hazel eyes.

  He keeps his hair shorn close to his scalp, and although he appears quite capable of rough sex and beating his woman, one wouldn’t be likely to suspect that his preference is abducting young girls, torturing them to death and committing acts of necrophilia on their dead bodies, in some instances returning to the shallow graves where he buried them and digging them up for further acts of perversion until they are too decomposed for even him to stand it.

  Beast is called Beast not because he looks like a beast, but because he digs up carrion like a beast and is rumored to have cannibalized some of his victims, too. Necrophilia, cannibalism and pedophilia are transgressions that are repugnant to the typical violent offender on death row, who might have raped, strangled, slashed, dismembered or chained his victims in a basement (to mention but a few examples), but violating children or dead bodies and eating people are serious enough offenses that a number of the inmates on Beast’s cell block would like nothing better than to kill him.

  Jean-Baptiste doesn’t bide his time imagining creative ways to smash Beast’s bones or crush his windpipe—idle fantasies for those who can’t get closer than ten feet to Beast. The necessity of keeping inmates separated is obvious. When people are sentenced to die, they obviously have nothing to lose by killing again, although in Jean-Baptiste’s way of thinking, he has never had anything to lose, and with nothing to lose, there is nothing to gain, and life does not exist. References to those damned at birth are descriptive and dehumanizing and, in Jean-Baptiste’s case, trace back as far as his earliest memories.

  Let’s see.

  He thinks from his magnetizing metal toilet seat. He remembers being three. He remembers his mother roughly ushering him into the bathroom, where he could see the Seine from the window, and inevitably at a very young age connecting the river to bathing. He remembers his mother lathering his frail body with perfumed soap and ordering him to sit as still as a stone while she scraped baby-fine hair from his face, arms, neck, back, legs, feet and on and on with his father’s sterling silver–handled straight razor.

  Sometimes she would scream at Jean-Baptiste if she accidentally nicked his finger or, occasionally, several fingers, as if her clumsiness was his fault. Knuckles, in particular, are very difficult. Madame Chandonne’s tremors and drunken rages put an end to shaving her ugly son when she almost sliced off Jean-Baptiste’s left nipple, and his father had to summon the family physician, Monsieur Raynaud, who coaxed Jean-Baptiste to be un grand garçon as the little boy shrieked each time the needle flashed in and out of bloody flesh, reattaching the pale nipple, which dangled by a thread of tissue from Jean-Baptiste’s downy breast.

  His drunken mother wept and wrung her hands and blamed le petit monstre vilain fo
r not sitting still. A servant mopped up the little monster’s blood while the little monster’s father smoked French cigarettes and complained about the burden of having a son who was born wearing un costume de singe—a monkey suit.

  Monsieur Chandonne could talk, joke and complain freely with Monsieur Raynaud, the only physician allowed contact with Jean-Baptiste when he, the little monster, une espèce d’imbecile, born in a monkey suit, lived in the family hôtel particulier, where his bedroom was in the basement. No medical records, including a birth certificate, exist. Monsieur Raynaud made sure of this and ministered to Jean-Baptiste only in emergencies, which did not include the usual illnesses or injuries, such as severe earaches, high fevers, burns, sprained ankles or wrists, a stepped-on nail and other medical misfortunes that send most children to the family doctor. Now Monsieur Raynaud is an old man. He will not dare speak of Jean-Baptiste, even if the press will pay large fees for secrets about his notorious former patient.

  SHAME AND FEAR overwhelm Lucy.

  She has told Berger in detail what happened in room 511 at the Radisson Hotel, but not who actually shot Rocco.

  “Who pulled the trigger, Lucy?” Berger insists on knowing.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Since you won’t answer the question, I’ll assume you did!”

  Lucy says nothing.

  Berger doesn’t move as she looks out at dazzling city lights that give way to the darkness of the Hudson and become the flickering bright urban plains of New Jersey. The space between her and Lucy could not seem more impossible, as if Berger is on the other side of the expansive glass.

  Lucy quietly steps closer, wanting to touch the curve of Berger’s shoulder, terrified that should she dare, Berger might fall from reach forever, as if she is supported by nothing but air forty-five floors above the streets.