“No,” he said, shaking his head side to side. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything.”
“Well, it seems you did, Hap,” Berger said. “I’ll continue to refresh your memory with a few facts. July seventh, it was in the news that Farrah Lacy was going to be disconnected from life support. At the very time she was disconnected, you came to work even though the hospital hadn’t summoned you. You were a per-diem employee, only on duty when you were called. But the hospital didn’t call you on the afternoon of July seventh, 2004. You showed up anyway and took it upon yourself to clean the morgue. Mopping the floor, wiping down stainless steel, and this is according to a security guard who’s still there and happens to be in a video clip we’re about to show you. Farrah died and you headed straight up to the tenth floor, to the ICU, to wheel her body down to the morgue. Sound familiar?”
He stared at the brushed steel tabletop and didn’t reply. She couldn’t read his affect. Maybe he was in shock. Maybe he was calculating what he was going to say next.
“Farrah Lacy’s body was transported by you down to the morgue,” Berger repeated. “It was captured on camera. Would you like to see it?”
“This is fucked up. It’s not what you’re saying.” He rubbed his face in his hands.
“We’re going to show you that clip right now.”
A click of the mouse, and then another click and the video began: Hap Judd in scrubs and a lab coat, wheeling a gurney into the hospital morgue, stopping at the shut stainless-steel refrigerator door. A security guard entering, opening the refrigerator door, looking at the tag on top of the shroud covering the body, and saying, “What are they posting her for? She was brain-dead and had the plug pulled.” Hap Judd saying, “Family wants it. Don’t ask me. She was fucking beautiful, a cheerleader. Like the dream girl you’d take to the prom.” Guard saying, “Oh, yeah?” Hap Judd pulling the sheet down, exposing the dead girl’s body, saying, “What a waste.” The guard shaking his head, saying, “Get her on in there, I got things to do.” Judd wheeling the gurney inside the refrigerator, his reply indistinguishable.
Hap Judd scraped back his chair and got up. “I want a lawyer,” he said.
“I can’t help you,” Berger said. “You haven’t been arrested. We don’t Mirandize people who haven’t been arrested. If you want a lawyer, up to you. No one is stopping you. Help yourself.”
“This is so you can arrest me. I assume you’re going to, which is why I’m here.” He looked uncertain, and he wouldn’t look at Lucy.
“Not now,” Berger said.
“Why am I here?”
“You’re not being arrested. Not now. Maybe you will be, maybe you won’t. I don’t know,” Berger said. “That’s not why I asked to talk to you three weeks ago.”
“Then what? What do you want?”
“Sit down,” Berger said.
He sat back down. “You can’t charge me with something like this. You understand? You can’t. You got a gun somewhere in here? Why don’t you just fucking shoot me.”
“Two separate issues,” Berger said. “First, we could keep investigating and maybe you’d be charged. Maybe you’d be indicted. What happens after that? You take your chances with a jury. Second, nobody’s going to shoot you.”
“I’m telling you, I didn’t do anything to that girl,” Judd said. “I didn’t hurt her.”
“What about the glove?” Lucy asked pointedly.
“Tell you what. I’m going to ask him about it,” Berger said to her.
She’d had enough. Lucy was going to stop it right now.
“I’m going to ask the questions,” Berger said, holding Lucy’s eyes until she was satisfied she was going to listen this time.
“The guard says he left the morgue, left you alone in there with Farrah Lacy’s body.” Berger continued her questioning, repeating information Marino had gathered, trying not to think about how unhappy she was with him right now. “He said he checked maybe twenty minutes later and you were just leaving. He asked you what you’d been doing in the morgue all that time and you didn’t have an answer. He remembered you had only one surgical glove on and seemed out of breath. Where was the other glove, Hap? In the video we just showed you, you had on two gloves. We can show you other video footage of you going inside the refrigerator and staying in it for almost fifteen minutes with the door open wide. What were you doing in there? Why’d you take off one of your gloves? Did you use it for something, maybe put it over some other part of your body? Maybe put it on your penis?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
“You want to tell it to a jury? You want a jury of your peers to hear all this?”
He stared down at the table, moving his finger over metal, like a little kid finger-painting. Breathing hard, his face bright red.
“What I’m hearing is you’d like this behind you,” Berger said.
“Tell me how.” He didn’t look up.
Berger had no DNA. She had no eyewitness or any other evidence, and Judd wasn’t going to confess. She would never have anything beyond circumstances that weren’t much better than innuendo. But that was as much as she needed to destroy Hap Judd. With his degree of celebrity, the accusation was a conviction. If she charged him with desecrating human remains, which was the only charge on the books for necrophilia, his life would be destroyed, and Berger didn’t take that lightly. She wasn’t known for malicious prosecution, for constructing cases out of a flawed process or from evidence extracted improperly. She’d never resorted to unjustifiable and unreasonable litigation and wasn’t about to start now, and she wasn’t going to let Lucy push her into it.
“Let’s back up three weeks, to when I called your agent. You do remember getting my messages,” Berger said. “Your agent said he passed them on to you.”
“How do I put this behind me?” Judd looked at her. He wanted a deal.
“Cooperation is a good thing. Collaboration-just like you have to do to make a movie. People working together.” Berger placed her pen on top of her legal pad and folded her hands. “You weren’t cooperative or collaborative three weeks ago when I called your agent. I wanted to talk to you, and you couldn’t be bothered. I could have sent the cops by your apartment in TriBeCa or tracked you down in L.A. or wherever you were and had you brought in, but I spared you the trauma. I was sensitive because of who you are. Now we’re in a different situation. I need your help, and you need mine. Because you’ve got a problem you didn’t have three weeks ago. You hadn’t met Eric in the bar three weeks ago. I didn’t know about Park General Hospital and Farrah Lacy three weeks ago. Maybe we can help each other.”
“Tell me.” Fear in his eyes.
“Let’s talk about your relationship with Hannah Starr.”
He didn’t react. He didn’t respond.
“You’re not going to deny you know Hannah Starr,” Berger then said.
“Why would I deny it?” He shrugged.
“And you didn’t suspect for even a second that I might be calling about her?” Berger said. “You know she’s disappeared, correct?”
“Of course.”
“And it didn’t occur-”
“Okay. Yeah. But I didn’t want to talk about her for privacy reasons,” Judd said. “It would have been unfair to her, and I don’t see what it has to do with what happened to her.”
“You know what happened to her,” Berger said, as if he did.
“Not really.”
“Sounds to me like you do know.”
“I don’t want to be involved. It has nothing to do with me,” Judd said. “My relationship with her was nobody’s business. But she’d tell you I’m not into anything sick. If she were around, she’d tell you that Park General stuff is bullshit. I mean, people who do things like that, it’s because they can’t have living people, right? She’d tell you I got no problems in that department. I got no problem having sex.”