“These same people? The ones you say are after you?”
“They are here, don’t you see? They killed my brother and knew I would come to find him.”
“They certainly are amazing, aren’t they, sir? How amazing they are to know you would come all the way to Richmond, Virginia, because you just happen to read a discarded USA Today and learn that a body has turned up here, and that you would assume it’s Thomas, and that you would steal a passport and wallet and off you’d go.”
“They would know I would come. I love my brother. My brother is all I have in life. He is the only one ever good to me. And I need to find out for Papa. Poor Papa.”
“What about your mother? She wouldn’t be upset to find out Thomas is dead?”
“She is drunk so much.”
“Your mother’s an alcoholic?”
“She’s always drinking.”
“Every day?”
“Every day, all day. And then she gets angry or cries a lot.”
“You don’t live with her, yet you know she drinks every day and all day long?”
“Thomas would tell me. It’s been her life ever since I can remember. I’ve always been told she is drunk. The few times I would go to the house, she was drunk. It was mentioned to me once that my condition might have happened because she was drunk when she was pregnant with me.”
Berger looks at me. “Possible?”
“Fetal alcohol syndrome?” I consider. “Not likely. Generally severe mental and physical retardation would result if the mother were a chronic alcoholic, and cutaneous changes such as hypertrichosis would be the least of the child’s problems.”
“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe she caused his condition.”
“He certainly might believe it,” I agree with her.
“Helping to explain his extreme hatred of women.”
“As much as anything can explain his kind of hate,” I reply.
On tape, Berger has returned Chandonne to the subject of his allegedly calling the morgue here in Richmond. “So you tried to get through to Dr. Scarpetta on the phone but couldn’t. Then what?”
“Then the next day, Friday, I hear on the TV in my motel room that another woman has been murdered. This time a policewoman. They do a newsbreak, you know, and I’m watching it as it is happening and next thing the cameras focus on a big black car pulling up to the scene and they say it is the medical examiner. It is her, Scarpetta. So I get the idea to go there immediately. I will wait until she is leaving the scene and then I will approach her. I will tell her I must talk to her. So I get a taxi.”
His remarkable memory fails him here. He recalls nothing about the taxi company, not even the color of the car, only that the driver was a “black man.” Probably eighty percent of the taxi drivers in Richmond are black. Chandonne claims that while he is being driven to the scene—and he knows the address because it was on the news—he hears another newsbreak. This time, the public is being warned about the killer, that he may have a strange medical condition which causes him to have a very unusual appearance. The hypertrichotic description fits Chandonne. “I know now, for sure,” he goes on. “They have set the trap and the world thinks I have killed these women in Richmond. So I panic in the back of the taxi, trying to figure out what to do. I say to the taxi driver, ‘Do you know this lady they speak of? Scarpetta?’ He says that everyone in the city knows her. I ask where she lives and say I’m a tourist. He takes me to her neighborhood but we don’t go in because there are guards and a gate. But I know enough to find her. I get out of the taxi several blocks from there. I’m determined I will find her before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?” Berger asks.
“Before anybody else is killed. I must come back later that night and somehow get her to open the door so I can talk to her. You know, of course, I’m worried they will kill her next. It’s their pattern, you see. They did that in Paris, you know. They tried to murder the medical examiner there, a woman. She was very lucky.”
“Sir, let’s keep on the subject of what happened here in Richmond. Tell me what happened next. It’s what, midmorning on Friday, December seventeenth, last Friday? What did you do after the taxi dropped you off? What did you do the rest of the day?”
“Wandered. Found an abandoned house on the river and went in it just to get out of the weather.”
“Do you know where that house is?”
“I can’t tell you, but not far from her neighborhood.”
“From Dr. Scarpetta’s neighborhood?”
“Yes.”
“You could find that house again, the one you stayed in, couldn’t you, sir?”
“It’s under construction. Very big. A mansion no one lives in right now. I know where it is.”
Berger says to me, “The one where they think he was staying the entire time he was here?”
I nod. I am familiar with the house. I think of the poor people it belongs to and can’t imagine them ever wanting to live there again. Chandonne says he hid in the abandoned mansion until dark. Several times that night he ventured out, avoiding the guard gate in my neighborhood by simply following the river and railroad tracks that run behind it. He claims to have knocked on my door early evening and got no answer. At this point, Berger asks me when I got home that night. I tell her it was after eight. I had stopped off at Pleasants Hardware store after leaving the office. I wanted to look at tools because I was perplexed by the strange wounds I had found on Diane Bray’s body and by bloody transfers made to the mattress when the killer had set down the bloody tool he had beaten her with. It was during this foraging at Pleasants Hardware that I came across a chipping hammer, and I purchased one and went on home, I tell Berger.
Chandonne goes on to claim he began to get fearful about coming to see me. He claims there were a lot of police cars cruising the neighborhood, and that at one point when he came to my house late, there were two police cruisers parked in front. This was because my alarm had gone off—when Chandonne forced open my garage door so the police would come. Of course, he tells Berger that it wasn’t him who set off the alarm. It was them—it must have been them, he says. By now, it is getting close to midnight. It is snowing hard. He hides behind trees near my house and waits until the police leave. He says it is his last chance, he has to see me. He believes they are in the area and will kill me. So he goes to my front door and knocks.
“What did you knock with?” Berger asks him.
“I recall there was a door knocker. I believe I used that.” He drains the last of his Pepsi and Marino on tape asks him if he wants another one. Chandonne shakes his head and yawns. He is talking about coming into my house to bash my brains out and the bastard is yawning.
“Why didn’t you ring the bell?” Berger wants to know. This is important. My doorbell activates the camera system. Had Chandonne rung the bell, I would have been able to see him on a video screen inside the house.
“I don’t know,” he replies. “I saw the knocker and used it.”
“Did you say anything?”
“Not at first. Then I heard a woman ask, ‘Who is it?’”
“And what did you say?”
“I told her my name. I said I have information about the body she’s trying to identify, and to please let me talk to her.”
“You told her your name? You identified yourself as Jean-Baptiste Chandonne?”
“Yes. I said I was here from Paris and had been trying to get her at her office.” He yawns again. “The most amazing thing happens,” he goes on. “The door suddenly opens and she is there. She tells me to come in, and the minute I do, she slams the door shut behind me and I can’t believe it. She suddenly has this hammer and is trying to hit me.”
“Suddenly has a hammer? Where did she get it? Did it just appear out of thin air?”
“I believe she grabbed it off a table just inside the doorway. I don’t know. It happened so fast. And I try to get away from her. I run into the living room, yelling for her to stop, and
that’s when the terrible thing happened. It was fast. I only remember I was on the other side of the sofa, and then something was flying in my face. It felt like liquid fire in my eyes. I have never felt anything so, so . . .” He sniffs again. “The pain. I was screaming and trying to get it out of my eyes. I was trying to get out of the house. I knew she was going to kill me and suddenly it went into my mind that she is one of them. Them. They have got me at last. I walked right into their trap! It was planned all along that she would get my brother’s body because she is them. Now I would be arrested and they would finally get the opportunity they want, finally, finally.”
“And they want what?” Berger asks him. “Tell me again, because I’m having a very hard time understanding, much less believing, this part.”
“They want my father!” he says with the first emotion I have seen. “To get Papa! To find a reason to go after him and bring him down, destroy him. To make it look like my father has a son who is a killer so they can get to my family. All this for years! And I am Chandonne and look at me! Look at me!!”
He stretches out his arms in a pose of crucifixion, hair floating out from his body. I watch in shock as he rips off his dark glasses and light pierces his tender, burned eyes. I stare into those bright red, chemically burned eyes. They don’t seem to focus and tears stream down his face.
“I am ruined!” he cries out. “I am ugly and blind and accused of crimes I didn’t do! You Americans want to execute a Frenchman! Isn’t that it! To make an example!” Chairs scrape loudly and Marino and Talley are all over him, holding him in his chair. “I killed no one! She tried to kill me! Look what she did to me!”
And Berger is calmly saying to him, “We’ve been at this an hour. We’re going to stop now. That’s enough. Calm down, calm down.”
Frames flicker and bars fill the screen before it turns the bright blue of a perfect afternoon. Berger turns off the VCR. I sit in stunned silence.
“Hate to tell you.” She breaks the appalling spell Chandonne has cast over my small, private conference room. “There are some antigovernment, paranoid idiots in the world who are going to find this guy believable. Let’s hope none of them end up on the jury. It only takes one.”
CHAPTER 16
JAY TALLEY,” BERGER startles me by saying. Now that Chandonne has vanished from our midst with a simple pointing of a remote control, this New York prosecutor wastes no time shifting her intense focus to me. We are returned to a small, bland reality—a conference room with a round wooden table and wooden built-in bookcases and a vacant television screen. Case files and gory photographs are spread out before us, forgotten, ignored, because Chandonne has preempted everything and everyone for the past two hours.
“Do you want to volunteer, or should I start with telling you what I know?” Berger confronts me.
“I’m not sure what you want me to volunteer.” I am taken aback, then offended, then furious all over again as I think of Talley’s presence at Chandonne’s interview. I imagine Berger talking to Talley before and after her interrogation of Chandonne and during his break for rest and fast food. Berger had hours with Talley and Marino. “And more to the point,” I add, “what does this have to do with your New York case?”
“Dr. Scarpetta.” She leans back in her chair. I feel as if I have been inside this room with her for half my life, and I am late. I am hopelessly late for meeting the governor. “As hard as it’s going to be for you,” Berger says, “I’m asking you to trust me. Can you do that?”
“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” I reply truthfully.
She smiles a little and sighs. “That’s honest. Fair enough. You have no reason to trust me. Maybe you have no reason to trust anyone. But you really have no factual reason not to trust me as a professional whose singular intent is to make Chandonne pay for his crimes—if he murdered these women.”
“If?” I ask her.
“We have to prove it. And absolutely anything I can learn from what has happened here in these Richmond cases is invaluable to me. I promise you, I’m not trying to be a voyeur or to violate your privacy. But I must have the full context. Frankly, I need to know what the hell I’m dealing with, and my difficulty lies in that I don’t know who all the characters are or what they are or if any of them might in any way overlap my case in New York. For example, could Diane Bray’s prescription drug habit in fact be a marker for other illegal activity possibly connected to organized crime, to the Chandonne family? Or possibly even connected to why brother Thomas’s body ended up in Richmond?”
“By the way.” I am stuck on another matter, namely, my credibility. “How does Chandonne explain that there were two chipping hammers at my house? Yes, I bought one at the hardware store, as I have told you. So where did the other one come from if he didn’t bring it with him? And if I wanted to kill him, why didn’t I use the pistol? My Glock was right there on the dining-room table.”
Berger hesitates and completely dodges my questions. “If I don’t know the whole truth, then it makes it very difficult to sort out what’s relevant to my case and what isn’t.”
“I understand that much.”
“Can we start with the status of your relationship with Jay now?”
“He drove me to the hospital.” I give up. I am clearly not the one who is going to be asking the questions in this situation. “When I broke my arm. He showed up with the police, with ATF, and I spoke briefly to him Saturday afternoon while the police were still at my home.”
“Do you have any idea why he thought it necessary to fly here from France to assist in the manhunt for Chandonne?”
“I can only assume it’s because he’s so familiar with the case.”
“Or an excuse to see you?”
“He’d have to answer that.”
“Are you seeing him?”
“Not since Saturday afternoon, as I’ve said.”
“Why not? Do you consider the relationship over?”
“I don’t consider it ever began.”
“But you slept with him.” She raises an eyebrow.
“So I’m guilty of poor judgment.”
“He’s handsome, bright. And young. Some might be more likely to convict you of good taste. He’s single. So are you. It’s not as if you committed adultery.” She drags out a pause. Is she alluding to Benton, to the fact that I have been guilty of adultery in the past? “Jay Talley has a lot of money, doesn’t he?” She taps her felt-tip pen on the legal pad, a metronome measuring what a bad time I am having. “From his family, supposedly. I’ll check into that. And by the way, you should know I’ve talked to him, to Jay. At length.”
“I just assume you’ve talked to the entire world. What I haven’t yet figured out is how you’ve had time.”
“There was a little downtime at MCV, the medical college hospital.”
I imagine her drinking coffee with Talley. I can picture the look on his face, his demeanor. I wonder if she is attracted to him.
“I talked to both Talley and Marino while Chandonne had his various rest periods and whatnot.” Her hands are folded on top of a notepad that has the letterhead of her office on it. She has not taken a single note, not one word the entire time we have been inside this room. Already, she is planning for the defense to huff and puff about Rosario this and that. Whatever is in writing, the defense is entitled to see it. So don’t write anything down. Now and then she doodles. She has filled two pages with doodles since she entered my conference room. A red flag is raised in the back of my mind. She is treating me like a witness. I shouldn’t be a witness, not in her New York case.
“I’m getting the impression that you’re wondering if Jay is somehow involved. . . .” I start to say.
Berger interrupts me with a shrug. “No stone unturned,” she says. “Is it possible? By this point, I’m about to believe anything is possible. What a wonderful position Talley would be in if he were in collusion with the Chandonnes, true? Interpol, ah, that’s handy for a crime cartel. He calls you and br
ings you to France, perhaps for the purpose of seeing what you know about the loose cannon Jean-Baptiste. Suddenly, Talley’s in Richmond for the manhunt.” She crosses her arms and penetrates me with that gaze again. “I don’t like him. I’m surprised you did.”
“Look,” I say with a hint of defeat in my voice, “Jay and I were intimate in Paris over a twenty-four-hour period, at most.”
“You initiated sex. Quarreled in a restaurant that evening and you stormed out, jealous because he was looking at another woman. . . .”
“What?” I blurt out. “He said that?”
She regards me silently. Her tone is no different from the one she was using with Chandonne, a terrible monster. Now she is interviewing me, a terrible person. That is how I feel. “It had nothing to do with another woman,” I answer her. “What other woman? I certainly wasn’t jealous. He was coming on too strong and acting petulant and I’d had enough.”
“The Café Runtz on rue Favard. You made quite a scene.” She continues my story, or at least Talley’s version of it.
“I didn’t make a scene. I got up from the table and walked out, period.”
“From there you returned to the hotel, got into a cab and went to Île Saint-Louis, where the Chandonne family lives. You walked around after dark, staring up at the Chandonne home, then got a water sample from the Seine.”
What she has just said sends electrical shocks through my every cell. Sweat rolls in cold tickles beneath my blouse. I never told Jay what I did after I left him in the restaurant. How does Berger know all this? How did Jay know if he is the one who told her? Marino. How much has Marino volunteered to her?
“What was your real purpose in finding the Chandonne house? What did you think that might tell you?” Berger asks.
“If I knew what something would tell me, I wouldn’t need to investigate,” I reply. “As for the water sample, as you must know from the lab reports, we found diatoms, or microscopic algae, on the clothing of the unidentified body from the Richmond port—from Thomas’s body. I wanted a water sample from near the Chandonne home to see if there was any chance the same type of diatom might be present in that area of the Seine. And it was. Freshwater diatoms were consistent with those I found on the inside of the clothing on the body, Thomas’s body, and none of this matters. You aren’t trying Jean-Baptiste for the murder of his alleged brother, since that probably happened in Belgium. You’ve already made that clear.”