Four Scarpetta Novels (119 page)

J
EAN-BAPTISTE STRETCHES OUT
on the thin wool blanket he soaks with sweat each night.

He leans against the hard, cold wall. He has decided that Rocco isn't dead. Jean-Baptiste does not fall for yet another manipulation, although he is not certain what the purpose of this manipulation might be. Ah, of course,
fear.
His father must lurk behind this lie. He is warning Jean-Baptiste that suffering and death are the reward for betrayal, even if the traitor is the mighty Monsieur Chandonne's son.

A warning.

Jean-Baptiste had better not talk now that he is about to die.

Ha.

Every hour of every day, the enemy attempts to make Jean-Baptiste suffer and die.

Don't talk.

I will if I want. Ha! It is me, Jean-Baptiste, who rules death.

He could kill himself easily. In minutes he could twist a sheet and tie it around his neck and a leg of the steel bed. People are misinformed about
hangings. No height is necessary, only a position—such as sitting cross-legged on the floor and leaning forward with all his weight, thus putting pressure on the blood vessels. Unconsciousness happens in seconds, then death. Fear would not touch him, and were he to end his biological life, he would transcend it first, and his soul would direct all that he would do from that point on.

Jean-Baptiste would not end his biological life in this manner. He has too much to look forward to, and he joyfully leaves his small death row cell and transports his soul into the future, where he sits behind Plexiglas and stares at the lady doctor Scarpetta, hungrily takes in her entire being, relives his brilliance at tricking his way into her lovely château and raising his hammer to crush her head. She denied herself the ecstasy. She denied Jean-Baptiste by depriving him of her blood. Now she will come to him in humility and love, realizing what she did, the foolishness of it, the joy she denied herself when she further maimed him and burned his eyes with formalin, the chemical of the dead. Scarpetta dashed it into Jean-Baptiste's face. The evil fluid demagnitized him briefly, and ever so briefly, pain forced him to suffer the hell of living only in his body.

Madame Scarpetta will spend eternity worshipping his higher state. His higher being will direct its superiority over other humans throughout the universe, as Poe wrote under the guise of a Philadelphia Gentleman. Of course, the anonymous author is Poe. The invisible agent that is the transcendent Poe came to Jean-Baptiste in a delirium as he was restrained in the Richmond Hospital. Richmond was where Poe grew up. His soul remains there.

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.

L
UCY 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.

L
UCY 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.”

L
UCY 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.”