Lucy clicked on the page from the script and it filled the entire screen:
CUT TO:
INT. BEDROOM, NIGHT
A beautiful woman in the bed, covers pulled back, bunched around her bare feet. She looks dead, hands folded over her chest in a religious pose. She’s completely nude. An INTRUDER we can’t make out moves closer, closer, closer! He grips her ankles and slides her limp body down to the foot of the bed, parting her legs. We hear the clinks of his belt being unbuckled.
INTRUDER
Good news. You’re about to go to heaven. As his pants drop to the floor.
“Where did you get that? Who the hell gave it to you? You have no right going into my e-mail,” Hap Judd said loudly. “And it’s not what you think. You’re setting me up!”
Lucy clicked the mouse and the flat screen filled with an e maiclass="underline"
Hey too bad about whats her ass. Fuck her. I dont mean littereally. Call if U want a stiff one.
Hap
“I meant a drink.” Words sticking. His voice shook. “I don’t remember who… Look, it had to be a stiff drink. I was asking someone if they wanted to meet me for a drink.”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said to Berger. “Sounds like he assumed we interpreted ‘stiff one’ as something else. Maybe a dead body? You should try spell-check sometime,” Lucy said to him. “And you should be careful what you do, what you e-mail, what you text-message on computers that are connected to a server. Like a hospital server. We can sit here all week with you if you want. I’ve got computer applications that can connect every piece of your entire screwed-up make-believe life.”
It was a bluff. At this point, they had very little, not much more than writing he’d done on hospital computers, his e-mails, whatever had resided on the server back then, and some images from security cameras and morgue log entries from the two-week period Farrah Lacy had been hospitalized. There hadn’t been time to sift through anything else. Berger had been afraid if she delayed talking to Hap Judd, she’d never get the chance. This was what she called a “blitz attack.” If she didn’t like the way she felt about it before, now she was really out of her comfort zone. She felt doubt. Serious doubt. The same doubts she’d been feeling all along, only much worse now. Lucy was driving this. She had a destination in mind. She didn’t seem to care how she got there.
“I don’t want to see anything else,” Judd said.
“Just tons of stuff to go through. My eyes are crossed.” Lucy tapped the MacBook with an index finger. “All downloaded. Things I doubt you remember, got no idea about. Not sure what the cops would do with this. Ms. Berger? What would the cops do with this?”
“What worries me is what happened while the victim was still alive,” Berger said, because she had to play it out. She couldn’t stop now. “Farrah was in the hospital two weeks before she died.”
“Twelve days, exactly,” Lucy said. “On life support, never regained consciousness. Five of those days, Hap was on duty, working at the hospital. You ever go into her room, Hap? Maybe help yourself to her while she was in a coma?”
“You’re the one who’s sick!”
“Did you?”
“I told you,” he said to Berger. “I don’t even know who she is.”
“Farrah Lacy,” Berger repeated the name. “The nineteen-year-old cheerleader whose picture you saw in the news, the Harlem News. That same picture we just showed you.”
“The same picture you e-mailed to yourself,” Lucy said. “Let me guess. You don’t remember. I’ll remind you. You e-mailed it to yourself the same day it appeared in the news online. You sent the article about the car accident to yourself. I find that very interesting.”
She clicked the photograph back on the wall-mounted flat screen. The photograph of Farrah Lacy in her cheerleading uniform. Hap Judd averted his eyes.
He said, “I don’t know anything about a car accident.”
“Family’s coming home from Marcus Garvey Memorial Park in Harlem,” Berger said. “A pretty Saturday afternoon in July 2004, some guy talking on his cell phone runs a red light on Lenox Avenue, T bones them.”
“I don’t remember,” Judd said.
“Farrah had what’s called a closed head injury, which is basically an injury to the brain caused by a nonpenetrating wound,” Berger said.
“I don’t remember. I just sort of remember her being there at the hospital.”
“Right. You remember Farrah being a patient in the hospital where you worked. On life support in the ICU. Sometimes you went into the ICU to draw blood, you remember that?” Berger asked him.
He didn’t reply.
“Isn’t it true that you had a reputation for being a skilled phlebotomist?” Berger asked.
“He could get blood from a stone,” Lucy said. “According to what one of the nurses said to Marino.”
“Who the hell’s Marino?”
Lucy shouldn’t have brought him up. Referencing Berger’s investigators or anyone she used in a case was her prerogative, not Lucy’s. Marino had talked to a few people at the hospital, over the phone and very carefully. It was a delicate situation. Berger felt a heightened sense of responsibility because of who the potential defendant was. Lucy clearly didn’t share her concerns, seemed to want Hap Judd ruined, maybe the same way she’d felt about the air traffic controller a few hours earlier and the linesman she reprimanded in the FBO. Berger had overheard every word through the bathroom door. Lucy was after blood, maybe not just Hap Judd’s blood, maybe a lot of people’s blood. Berger didn’t know why. She didn’t know what to think anymore.
“We have a lot of people looking into your situation,” Berger said to Judd. “Lucy’s been running you and all kinds of data through her computers for days.”
Not entirely true. Lucy had spent maybe one day on it remotely from Stowe. Once Marino had begun the process, the hospital was cooperative, e-mailing certain information without protest because it was a personnel issue, a matter pertaining to a former employee, and Marino had suggested as only he could that the more helpful Park General was, the more likely the matter could be resolved diplomatically, discreetly. Warrants and court orders and a former employee who was now famous, and the situation would be all over the news. Unnecessary when maybe nobody was going to be charged with anything in the end, and what a shame to put Farrah Lacy’s family through so much pain again, and wasn’t it pitiful the way everybody sued these days, Marino had said, or words to that effect.
“Let me refresh your memory,” Berger said to Hap Judd. “You went into the ICU, into the room next to Farrah’s on the night of July sixth, 2004, to draw blood from a different patient, this one quite elderly. She had terrible veins, so you volunteered to take care of her, since you could get blood from a stone.”
“I can show you her chart,” Lucy said.
Another bluff. Lucy could show no such thing. The hospital absolutely hadn’t given Berger’s office access to other patients’ confidential information.
“I can pull up the video of you going in there with your gloves on, with your cart, going into her room.” Lucy was unrelenting. “I can pull up video of every room you ever went into at Park General, including Farrah’s.”
“I never did. This is lies, all lies.” Judd was slumped down in his chair.
“You sure you didn’t go into her room that night while you were up there on the ICU?” Berger said. “You told Eric you did. You said you were curious about Farrah, that she was really pretty, that you wanted to see her naked.”
“Fucking lies. He’s a fucking liar.”
“He’ll say the same thing under oath on the witness stand,” Berger added.
“It was just talk. Even if I did, it was just to look. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t hurt anyone.”
“Sex crimes are about power,” Berger said. “Maybe it made you feel powerful to rape a helpless teenage girl who was unconscious and never going to tell, made you feel big and powerful, especially if you were a struggling actor who could barely get minor roles in soap operas back then. I imagine you were feeling pretty bad about yourself, sticking needles in the arms of sick, cranky people, mopping floors, getting ordered around by nurses, by anybody, really, you were so low on the food chain.”