Four Scarpetta Novels (58 page)

“Could it be his family has cartel connections in my fair city?” Berger lightly suggests.

“Hell, they probably have a damn penthouse apartment,” Marino retorts.

“And Richmond?” Berger goes on. “Isn't Richmond a stopping-off point between New York and Miami along the I-95 drug corridor?”

“Oh yeah,” Marino answers. “Before Project Exile got going and slapped these drones with time in federal prison if they were caught with guns, drugs. Yeah, Richmond used to be a real popular place to do your business. So if the Chandonne cartel's in Miami—and we already know that, based on the undercover stuff Lucy was doing down there—and if
there's a big New York connection, then no big surprise that cartel guns and drugs were ending up in Richmond, too.”

“Were?” she queries. “Maybe still are.”

“I guess all this will keep ATF busy for a while,” I say.

“Huh,” Marino snorts again.

A weighty pause, then Berger says, “Well, now that you've brought that up.” Her demeanor tells me she is about to give me news I will not appreciate. “ATF has a little problem, it appears. As do the FBI and the French police. The hope, obviously, was to use Chandonne's arrest as an opportunity to get warrants to search his family's Paris home and maybe during the course of it find evidence that might help bring down the cartel. But we're having a little difficulty placing Jean-Baptiste inside the family house. In fact, we have nothing to prove who he is. No driver's license. No passport or birth certificate. No record this bizarre man even exists. Only his DNA, which is so close to the DNA of the man found in your port we can assume they are probably related, probably brothers. But I need something more tangible than that if I'm going to get a jury on my side.”

“And no way in hell his family's going to come forward and claim the Loup-Garou,” Marino says in awful French. “That's the whole reason there's no record of him to begin with, right? The mighty Chandonnes don't want the world to know they got a son who's a hairy-ass serial-killing freak.”

“Wait a minute,” I stop them. “Didn't he identify himself when he was arrested? Where did we get the name Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, if not from him?”

“We got it from him.” Marino rubs his face in his hands. “Shit. Show her the videotape,” he suddenly blurts out to Berger. I have no idea what videotape he is talking about, and Berger isn't at all happy he mentioned it. “The Doc has a right to know,” he says.

“What we have here is a new spin on a defendant who has a DNA profile but no identity.” Berger sidesteps the subject Marino has just tried to force.

What tape? I think, as paranoia heats up. What tape?

“You got it with you?” Marino regards Berger with open hostility, the two of them squaring off in a stony angry tableau, staring across the table at each other. His face darkens. He outrageously grabs her briefcase and slides it toward him as if he plans to help himself to whatever is inside it. Berger places her hand on top of it with an arresting look. “Captain!” she warns in a tone that bodes the worst trouble he has ever seen. Marino withdraws his hand, his face a furious red. Berger opens her briefcase and gives me her full attention. “I have every intention of showing the tape to you,” she measures her words. “I just wasn't going to do it right this minute, but we can.” She is very controlled but I can tell she is very angry as she slides a videotape out of a manila envelope. She gets up and inserts it into the VCR. “Someone know how to work this thing?”

I
TURN ON
the television and hand Berger the remote control.

“Dr. Scarpetta”—she completely ignores Marino—“before we get into this, let me give you a little background on how the district attorney's office works in Manhattan. As I've already mentioned, we do a number of things very differently from what you're accustomed to here in Virginia. I was hoping to explain all that to you before you were subjected to what you are about to see. Are you familiar with our system of homicide call?”

“No,” I reply as my nerves tighten and begin to hum.

“Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, an assistant D.A. is on call should a homicide go down or the cops locate a defendant. In Manhattan, the cops can't arrest a defendant without the D.A.'s office giving them the go-ahead, as I've already explained. This is to ensure that everything—search warrants, for example—are executed properly. It's common for the prosecutor, the assistant, to go to the crime scene, and in a situation where a defendant is arrested, if he's willing to be interviewed by the assistant, we jump all over it. Captain Marino,” she says, giving him her cool attention, “you started out in NYPD, but that may have been before all this was implemented.”

“Never heard of it before today,” he mumbles, face still dangerously red.

“What about vertical prosecution?”

“Sounds like a sex act,” Marino replies.

Berger pretends she didn't hear that. “Morgenthau's idea,” she says to me.

Robert Morgenthau has been the district attorney in Manhattan for nearly twenty-five years. He is a legend. It is obvious Berger loves working for him. Something stirs deep inside me. Envy? No, maybe wistfulness. I am tired. I experience a growing feeling of powerlessness. I have no one but Marino, who is anything but innovative or enlightened. Marino is not a legend and right now I don't love working with him or even want him around.

“The prosecutor has the case from intake on,” Berger begins to explain vertical prosecution. “Then we don't have to fool with three or four people who have already interviewed our witnesses or the victim. If a case is mine, for example, I might literally start out at the crime scene and end up in court. A purity you absolutely can't argue with. If I'm lucky, I interrogate the defendant before he retains counsel—obviously, no defense attorney's going to agree to his client talking to me.” She hits the play button on the remote control. “Fortunately, I caught Chandonne before he got counsel. I interviewed him several times in the hospital beginning at the rather inhumane hour of three o'clock this morning.”

To say I am shocked would be a gross trivialization of my reaction to what she has just revealed. It can't be possible that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne would talk to anyone.

“Clearly, you're a bit taken aback.” Berger's comment to me seems rhetorical, as if she has some point to make.

“You might say that,” I answer her.

“Maybe it hasn't really occurred to you that your assailant can walk, talk, chew gum, drink Pepsi? Maybe he doesn't seem fully human to you?” she suggests. “Maybe you think he really is a werewolf.”

I never actually saw him when he spoke cogently on the other side of my front door.
Police. Is everything all right in there?
After that, he was a monster. Yes, a monster. Yes, a monster coming after me with a black iron tool that looked like something from the Tower of London. Then he was grunting and screaming and sounded very much the way he looks, which is hideous, unearthly. A beast.

Berger smiles a bit wearily. “Now you're about to see our challenge, Dr. Scarpetta. Chandonne isn't crazy. He isn't supernatural. And we don't want jurors holding him to a different standard just because he has an unfortunate medical condition. But I also want them to see him now, before he's cleaned up and wearing a three-piece suit. I think the jurors need to fully appreciate the terror his victims felt, don't you?” Her eyes touch mine. “Might help them get the drift that no one in her right mind would have invited him into her home.”

“Why? Is he saying he was invited in?” My mouth has gone dry.

“He's saying quite a lot of things,” Berger replies.

“Biggest bunch of fucking bullshit you ever heard,” Marino says in disgust. “But then I knew that right off the bat. I go to his room late last night, right? Tell him Ms. Berger wants to interview him and so he asks me what she looks like. I don't say a word, play the asshole along. I tell him, ‘Well, let's just put it this way, John. A lotta guys have a real hard time—no pun intended—concentrating when she's around, know what I mean?'”

John, I numbly think. Marino calls him John.

“Testing, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five,” a voice sounds on the tape, and a cinder-block wall fills the screen. The camera begins to focus on a bare table and a chair. In the background a telephone rings.

“He wants to know if she has a good body, and Ms. Berger, I hope you'll excuse me for making reference to it.” Marino oozes sarcasm, still furious with her for reasons I don't yet fully understand. “But I'm just repeating what the piece of shit said. And so I tell him, ‘Geez, it wouldn't be right for me to comment, but like I said, the guys can't think straight when she's around. At least straight guys can't think straight.'”

I know damn well this is not what Marino said. In fact, I doubt Chandonne asked about Berger's appearance at all. More likely, the suggestion of her sexy good looks came from Marino, to bait Chandonne into talking to her, and as I recall the crude comment Marino made about Berger when we were walking out to Lucy's car last night, I feel a rush of resentment, of anger. I am fed up with him and his machismo. I am sick of his male chauvinism and crudity.

“What the hell is this?” I feel like hosing him off with cold water. “Do female body parts have to enter every goddamn conversation? Do you think it's possible, Marino, that you might focus on this case without obsessing over how big a woman's breasts are?”

“Testing, one, two, three, four, five,” the cameraman's voice sounds again on tape. The telephone stops ringing. Feet shuffle. Voices murmur. “We're gonna sit you at this table and chair right here.” I recognize Marino's voice on tape, and in the background someone knocks on a door.

“The point is, Chandonne talked.” Berger is looking at me, palpating me with her eyes again, finding my weaknesses, my inflamed spots. “He talked to me quite a lot.”

“For whatever that's worth.” Marino angrily stares at the TV screen. So that's it. Marino might have helped induce Chandonne into talking to Berger, but the truth is, Marino wanted Chandonne to talk to him.

The camera is fixed and I see only what is directly in its view. Marino's big gut comes into the picture as he pulls out a wooden chair, and someone in a dark blue suit and deep red tie helps Marino steer Jean-Baptiste Chandonne into the chair. Chandonne wears short-sleeved blue hospital scrubs and long pale hair hangs from his arms in tangles of wavy, soft fur the color of pale honey. Hair splays over his v-necked collar and climbs up his neck in repulsive, long swirls. He sits and his head enters the frame, swathed in gauze from mid-forehead to the tip of his nose. Directly around the bandages, the flesh has been shaven and is as white as milk, as if it has never seen the sun.

“Can I have my Pepsi, please?” Chandonne asks. He wears no restraints, not even handcuffs.

“You want it topped off?” Marino says to him.

No answer. Berger moves past the camera and I note that she is wearing a chocolate brown suit with padded shoulders. She sits across from Chandonne. I see only the back of her head and shoulders.

“You want a refill, John?” Marino asks the man who tried to murder me.

“In a minute. Can I smoke?” Chandonne says.

His voice is soft and heavily French. He is polite and calm. I stare at the television screen, my concentration flickering. I experience electrical disturbances again, post-traumatic stress, my nerves jump like water hitting hot grease, and I am getting another bad headache. The dark blue–sleeved arm with the white cuff reaches into the picture, setting a drink and a pack of Camel cigarettes in front of Chandonne, and I recognize the blue-and-white tall paper cup as coming from the hospital cafeteria. A chair scrapes back and the blue-sleeved arm lights a cigarette for Chandonne.

“Mr. Chandonne.” Berger's voice sounds at ease and in charge, as if she talks to mutant serial killers every day. “I'm going to start with introducing myself. I'm Jaime Berger, a prosecutor with the New York County district attorney's office. In Manhattan.”

Chandonne raises a hand to lightly touch his bandages. The backs of his fingers are covered with downy pale hair, almost albino, colorless hair. It is maybe half an inch long, as if until recently he shaved the backs of his hands. I have flashbacks of those hands coming after me. His fingernails are long and filthy and for the first time, I catch the contours of powerful muscles, not thick and bulging like men who obsessively work out in the gym, but ropey and hard, the physical habitat of one who, like a wild animal, uses his body to feed, to fight and flee, to survive. His strength seems to contradict our assumption that he has lived a rather sedentary and useless life, hiding inside his family's
hôtel particulier
, as the elegant private houses on Île Saint-Louis are called.

“You've already met Captain Marino,” Berger says to Chandonne. “Also present is Officer Escudero from my office—he's the cameraman. And Special Agent Jay Talley with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.”

I feel Berger's eyes touch me. I avoid looking. I refrain from interrupting to ask,
Why? Why was Jay there?
It streaks through my mind that she is exactly the sort of woman he would be attracted to—intensely. I slip a tissue out of a jacket pocket and blot cold sweat off my brow.

“You know this is being videotaped, don't you, and you have no objection to that,” Berger is saying on tape.

“Yes.” Chandonne takes a drag on the cigarette and picks a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue.

“Sir, I'm going to ask you some questions about the death of Susan Pless on December fifth, nineteen-ninety-seven.”

Chandonne has no reaction. He reaches for his Pepsi, finding the straw with his pink, uneven lips as Berger goes on to give him the victim's address in New York's Upper East Side. She tells him that before they can go any further, she wants to advise him of his rights, even though he has already been advised of them God knows how many times. Chandonne listens. Maybe it is my imagination, but he seems to be enjoying himself. He does not seem in pain or the least bit intimidated. He is quiet and courteous, his hairy, awful hands resting on top of the table or touching his bandages, as if to remind us of what we—what I—did to him.

“Anything you say can be used against you in court,” Berger goes on. “Do you understand? And it would be helpful if you would say
yes
or
no
instead of nodding.”

“I understand.” He cooperates almost sweetly.

“You have a right to consult a lawyer now before any questioning or to have a lawyer present during any questioning. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“And if you don't have a lawyer or can't afford one, a lawyer will be provided to you free of charge. Do you understand?”

At this, Chandonne reaches for his Pepsi again. Berger relentlessly goes on making sure that he and all the world know this process is legal and fair and that Chandonne is completely informed and is talking to her of his own volition, freely, without any pressure of any sort. “Now that you have been advised of your rights,” she concludes her forceful, self-assured opening, “are you going to tell the truth about what happened?”

“I always tell the truth,” Chandonne replies softly.

“And you've been read these rights in front of Officer Escudero, Captain Marino and Special Agent Talley, and you understood these rights?”

“Yes.”

“Why don't you just tell me in your own words what happened to Susan Pless?” Berger says.

“She was very nice,” Chandonne replies, to my amazement. “I am still made sick by it.”

“Yeah, I just bet you are,” Marino sardonically mutters inside my conference room.

Berger instantly hits the pause button. “Captain,” she fires at him, “no editorializing. Please.”

Marino's sullenness is like a poisonous vapor. Berger points the remote control and on tape she is asking Chandonne how he and Susan Pless met. He replies that they met in a restaurant called Lumi on 70th Street, between Third and Lexington.

“You were what? Eating there, working there?” Berger pushes ahead.

“Eating there by myself. She walked in, also by herself. I had a very nice bottle of Italian wine. A nineteen-ninety-three Massolino Barolo. She was very beautiful.”

Barolo is my favorite Italian wine. The bottle he mentions is pricey. Chandonne goes on to tell his story. He was eating antipasto—“
Crostini di polenta con funghi trifolati e olio tartufato
,” he says in perfect Italian—when he noticed a stunning African-American woman enter the restaurant alone. The maître d' treated her as if she was important and a regular customer, and seated her at a corner table. “She was well-dressed,” Chandonne says. “She obviously was not a prostitute.” He asked the maître d' to see if she would like to come to his table and join him, and she was
very easy
.

“What do you mean,
very easy
?” Berger inquires.

Chandonne gives a slight shrug and reaches for his Pepsi again. He takes his time sucking on the straw. “I think I would like another.” He holds up the cup and the dark blue–sleeved arm—Jay Talley's arm—takes it from him. Chandonne blindly feels for the pack of cigarettes, his hairy hand groping over the top of the table.