Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(80)
"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 suppling. 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 temperatures 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.
78
LUCY 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."