Blow Fly (27 page)

B
UYING 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 poppy-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.

“Step into my parlor,” Lucy says to Berger. “A spider's turned up.”

“A tarantula,” Manham gravely adds. “How'ya doin, Boss?” He shakes Berger's hand.

“Still miss the good ol' days?” Berger smiles at him, but her eyes belie her light demeanor.

Losing Manham from the DA's detective squad, or from her A Team,
as she calls it, still hurts, even though it is for the best and she continues to work with him at times such as this one.

Another era passed.

“Step this way,” Manham says.

Berger follows him and Lucy inside what is simply referred to as
the lab.
The room is large and soundproof, like a professional recording studio. Overhead shelves are stacked with sophisticated audio, video and global-positioning and various tracking systems that defy Berger's expertise and never cease to amaze her when she comes to Lucy's office. Everywhere, lights blink and video screens flash from one image to another, some of them the interior of the building, others monitoring locations that make no sense to Berger.

She notices what looks like a bundle of tiny microphones on top of a desk crowded with modems and monitors.

“What's this latest contraption?” she asks.

“Your latest piece of jewelry. An ultramicro transmitter,” Lucy replies, picking up the bundle and pulling loose one of the transmitters, no bigger than a quarter and attached to a long, thin cord. “It goes with this.” She taps what looks like a black box with jacks and an LCD. “We can disappear this baby in the hem of one of your Armani jackets, and if you get snatched, the quasi-Doppler direction finder can locate your exact position by VHF and UHF signals.

“Frequency range, twenty-seven to five hundred megahertz. Channels selected on a simple keyboard, and this other thing you're looking at”—she pats the black box—“is a tracking system we can use to monitor wherever the hell you are in your car, on your motorcycle, your bicycle. Nothing more than a crystal oscillator powered by a nicad battery. Can monitor up to ten targets at a time, supposing your husband's screwing around on you with multiple women.”

Berger doesn't react to a subtlety that is anything but subtle.

“Water-resistant,” Lucy goes on. “A nice carrying case with a shoulder strap; could probably get Gurkha or Hermès to design a special one—
perhaps in ostrich or kangaroo—just for you. Aircraft antenna available if you want to feel secure when you fly on a Learjet, a Gulf Stream, however you get about, woman-on-the-go that you are.”

“Another time,” Berger says. “I hope you didn't bring me uptown to show me what happens if I get lost or kidnaped.”

“Actually, I didn't.”

Lucy sits before a large monitor. Her fingers rapidly tap on the keyboard as she flies through windows, moving deeper into a forensic scientific software application that Berger doesn't recognize.

“You get this from NASA?” she asks.

“Maybe,” Lucy replies, pointing the cursor at a folder labeled with a number that, again, is meaningless to Berger. “NASA does a lot more than bring home moon rocks. Put it this way”—Lucy pauses, hovering over a key, staring intensely at the screen—“I've got rocket-scientist buddies at the Langley Research Center.” She rolls the mouse around. “Lot of nice people there who don't get the credit they deserve”—tap-tap-tap. “We've got some pretty amazing projects going on. Okay.” She clicks on a file labeled with an accession number and today's date.

“Here we go.” She looks up at Berger. “Listen.”

“Good afternoon. May I ask who's calling?” The male voice on the tape is Zach Manham's.

“When Mademoiselle Farinelli returns, tell her Baton Rouge.”

B
ERGER PULLS UP A CHAIR
and sits down, riveted to the computer screen.

Frozen on it are two voiceprints or spectrograms—2.5-second digital cuts—of a taped human voice converted into electrical frequencies. The resulting patterns are black and white vertical and horizontal bands that, like Rorschach inkblots, evoke different imaginative associations, depending on who is looking at them. In this case, the voiceprints remind Lucy of a black-and-white abstract painting of tornadoes.

She mentions this to Berger and adds, “That figures, doesn't it? What I've done here—or, should I say, what the computer's done here—is find Chandonne's speech sounds from another source. In this case, your videotaped interview of him after his arrest in Richmond. The computer looked for matching words.

“Of course, the bastard didn't make that easy when you look at the words used in the call we got. Nowhere in his interview with you,” Lucy goes on, “does he say Baton Rouge, for example. Nor does he ever mention me—Lucy Farinelli—by name. That leaves
when, returns
and
tell her.
Nowhere near as many sounds as I'd like for comparison. We'd like at least
twenty matching speech sounds for a positive match. However, what we've got is a significant similarity. The darkest areas on the known and questioned voiceprints correspond to the intensity of the frequencies.” She points out black areas of the voiceprints on the computer screen.

“Looks the same to me,” Berger remarks.

“Definitely. In the four words
when, returns
and
tell her,
yes, I agree.”

“Hey, I'm convinced,” Manham says. “But in court, we'd have a hard time, for the reason Lucy said. We don't have enough matching sounds to convince a jury.”

“Forget court for the moment,” says New York's most respected prosecutor.

Lucy strikes other keys and activates a second file.

“I begin to touch her breasts and unhook her bra,”
says Jean-Baptiste's voice—that soft, polite voice.

Then Lucy says, “Here we go, three other fragments of an interview that contains words for comparison.”

“I was a bit confused at first when I tried to touch her and couldn't pull out her top.”

Next is,
“But I can tell you are pretty,”
Jean-Baptiste Chandonne says.

“More,” says Lucy:
“It was a return ticket, coach, to New York.”

Lucy explains: “Our four words, Jaime, close enough. As I indicated, these phrases are from your videotaped interview with him prior to his arraignment, when you were brought in as a special prosecutor.”

It is difficult for Lucy to hear segments of this interview. Vaguely, she resents Berger for forcing Scarpetta to watch the videotape, although it was necessary, completely necessary, to subject her to hours of what was nothing more than manipulative, violent pornography after he had almost murdered her. Jean-Baptiste lied and enjoyed it. No doubt, he was sexually aroused by the thought that Scarpetta, a victim and key witness, was his audience. For hours, she watched and listened to him fabricate in detail not only what he did in Richmond but his 1997 so-called romantic
encounter with Susan Pless, a television meteorologist for CNBC whose savaged dead body was found inside her apartment in New York's Upper East Side.

She was twenty-eight years old, a beautiful African-American beaten and bitten in the same grotesque fashion as Chandonne's other victims. Only in her murder, seminal fluid was recovered. In Jean-Baptiste's more recent slayings, the ones in Richmond, the victims were nude only from the waist up, and no seminal fluid was recovered, only saliva. That fact led to conclusions, based in part on DNA analysis, that the Chandonne web is a tight weave of organized crime for profit and violent aberrance committed for sadistic sport. Jean-Baptiste and Jay Talley enjoy their nonprofit sport. In the sexual slaying of Susan Pless, the two brothers tag-teamed, the debonair Jay seducing and raping Susan, then handing her off to his hideous, impotent twin.

Lucy, Berger and Manham look at the sound spectrograms on the computer screen. Although voice analysis is not an exact science, the three of them are convinced that the man who left the message and Jean-Baptiste Chandonne are one and the same.

“As if I needed this.” Berger swipes her finger across the video screen, leaving a faint trail. “I'd know the fucker's voice anywhere.
Tornado.
You got it. That's the damn truth. The way he tears through lives, and damn if it doesn't look like he's doing it again.”

Lucy explained the satellite tracking that pointed to the immediate area around her building while caller ID showed that the call was made from across the country, at the Polunsky Unit in Texas. “How do we make sense of this?”

Berger shakes her head. “Unless there's some sort of technical glitch or some other explanation that eludes me, at least, at the moment.”

“Most important, I want to know for a fact that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is still on death row in Texas and is scheduled to get the needle on May seventh,” Lucy says.

“No kidding,” Manham mutters, repeatedly clicking a pen, a nervous habit that annoys all who know him.

“Zach?” Berger cocks an eyebrow, staring at the pen.

“Sorry.” He slides it into the breast pocket of his starched white shirt. “Unless you two need me, I've got some calls to make.” He looks at both of them.

“We're fine. Will fill you in later,” Lucy says. “And if anybody calls looking for me, the word is that nobody knows where I am.”

“Not ready to come up for air?” Manham smiles.

“No.”

He leaves, the muffled sound of the heavily padded door barely audible.

“And Rudy?” Berger asks. “Hopefully in his apartment, taking a shower or a nap? Looks like you should be doing the same.”

“Nope. We're both working. He's in his office down the hall, lost in cyberspace. Rudy the Internet junkie, which is a good thing. He has more search engines running all over the universe than England has tubes.”

“For me to get a search warrant to have Chandonne swabbed for DNA,” Berger says, “I have to show probable cause, Lucy. And a taped phone call not only isn't going to do it, but I'm not sure how much you want leaked outside this office. Especially since we really don't know what the phone call means . . .”

“Nothing,” Lucy interrupts. “You know that's all I ever want leaking outside this office. Absolutely nothing.”

“The unforgivable sin.” Berger smiles, her eyes touched by a gentle sadness as she looks at Lucy's stern, determined face, a face still smooth and bright with youth, a face with sensuously full lips the hue of dark red earth.

If it is true that people begin to die the day they are born, then Lucy seems an exception. She is an exception to all things human, it often seems to Berger, and for this reason alone, she fears that Lucy will not live
long. She envisions her compelling young face and strong body on top of a stainless-steel autopsy table, a bullet through her brain, and no matter how she struggles to strike that image from her imagination, she can't.

“Disloyalty, even born of weakness, is the unforgivable sin,” Lucy agrees, puzzled and unsettled by the way Berger is looking at her. “What's the matter, Jaime? You think we've got a leak? Jesus, it's what I have nightmares about. The nightmare I live with. I fear it more than death.” She is getting riled up. “I catch anybody betraying . . . well, one Judas in this organization, and we're all cooked. And so I have to be hard.”

“Yes, you're hard, Lucy.” Berger gets up, barely glancing at Chandonne's captured voice patterns on the monitor. “We have an active unsolved case here in New York: Susan Pless.”

Lucy gets up, too, her eyes intense on Berger's, anticipating what she's about to say next.

“Chandonne is charged with her murder, and you know all the reasons why I gave in, folded up my tent, decided not to prosecute and let Texas have him instead.”

“Because of the death penalty,” Lucy says.