Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(73)
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.
67
THE TWO OF THEM PAUSE by the soundproof door, monitors glowing, images from closed-circuit cameras flashing from one to the next, and small, bright lights winking white, green and red, as if Lucy and Berger are in the cockpit of a spacecraft.
"I knew he'd be sentenced to death in Texas, and he was. May seventh," Berger mutters. "But no death penalty for him here, never in New York."
She stuffs her legal pad inside her briefcase and snaps it shut. "One of these days the DA might allow the needle, but probably not during my tenure. But I suppose the question now, Lucy, is do we want Chandonne to die? And more to the point, do we want whoever s in his cell in Polunsky to be executed when we can't be certain who that person is, now that we've gotten these communications from the infamous Loup-Garou?"
Berger says we, although she has gotten no communication from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. As far as Lucy knows, only she, Marino and Scarpetta have: letters, and now a phone call that seems to have been made from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, unless technology has failed or human programmers have.
"No judge is going to grant me a court order to get his DNA," Berger says again in her usual, calm, self-assured tone. "Not without probable cause for a search warrant. I get it, and I'll try to extradite him to New York and put him on trial for the murder of Susan Pless. Based on the DNA from his saliva, we'll get a conviction even if we know that the seminal fluid in her vagina wasn't his, was in fact Jay Talley's, his twin brother's. Chandonne's attorney, Rocco Caggiano, is going to throw in every dirty trick he can think of if we bring this case back to life-so to speak."
Lucy avoids the subject of Rocco Caggiano. Her expression registers nothing. Waves of nausea roll through her again. She wills them to pass. I will not get sick, she silently orders herself.
"I certainly would introduce Talley's seminal fluid into evidence, and there the case gets dicey. The defense will argue that Jay Talley, now a fugitive, raped and murdered Susan, and all I can prove without a doubt is that Chandonne sank his teeth into her. In summary," she is in courtroom mode, "hopefully, the donor of the seminal fluid will be of no consequence to jurors, who will be horrified that saliva found in bite marks virtually all over Susans upper body will prove that Chandonne tortured her. But I can't prove he murdered her or that she was even alive when he started biting her."