The black body pouch was unzipped and spread wide, the shaved and beardless face covered with dark dried blood and deformed beyond recognition. The top of his head was fragmented, blood and brain extruding from the torn tissue edges of his badly lacerated scalp. His left mandible was fractured in at least one place, his jaw gaping and crooked, bared lower teeth bloody and broken and some of them gone, and his left eye was almost completely avulsed, the orb barely attached to the socket. The dark jacket he had on was torn at the shoulder seams, and his left trouser seam was split, and the jagged end of his femur protruded from torn khaki fabric like a snapped-off stick. His ankles were bent at unnatural angles.
“He landed feetfirst and then hit on his left side,” Scarpetta said as the cell phone stopped ringing on the bed and Bach’s Fugue quit. “I suspect his head struck some abutment on the bridge on his way down.”
“He had on a watch,” Dennis said over the phone. “It’s in the bag with the other effects. Smashed. An old silver metal Bulova on a stretch band that stopped at two-eighteen. I guess we know his time of death. You want me to call the police with the info?”
“I have the police with me,” Scarpetta said. “Thank you, Dennis. I’ll take care of it from here.”
She ended the call, and Marino’s BlackBerry started ringing as she was handing it back to him. He answered and started walking around.
“Okay,” he said, looking at Scarpetta. “But it will probably be just me.” He got off the phone and told her, “Lobo. He just got to Rodman’s Neck. I need to head out.”
“I’ve barely gotten started here,” she said. “His cause and manner of death aren’t going to be hard. It’s the rest of it.”
The autopsy she needed to perform on Dr. Warner Agee was a psychological one, and her niece might just need one, too. Scarpetta retrieved her kit bag from where she’d left it on the carpet against the wall, just inside the door. She pulled out a transparent plastic evidence bag that had a FedEx envelope and Dodie Hodge’s singing Christmas card inside. Scarpetta hadn’t looked at the card. She hadn’t listened to it. Benton had given it to her when she’d left without him earlier this morning.
She said to Marino, “You probably should take this with you.”
17
The lights of Manhattan cast a murky glow along the horizon, turning it a purplish blue like a bruise as Benton traveled south on the West Side Highway, following the Hudson, headed downtown in the dark.
Between warehouses and fences he caught glimpses of the Palm-olive Building, and the Colgate clock showed that the time was twenty of seven. The Statue of Liberty was in bas relief against the river and the sky, with her arm held high. Benton ’s driver cut over on Vestry Street, deeper into the financial district, where the symptoms of the languishing economy were palpable and depressing: restaurant windows covered with brown paper, notices of seized businesses taped to their doors, clearance sales, retail spaces and apartments for rent.
As people moved out, graffiti moved in, spray paint marring abandoned restaurants and stores and metal shutters and blank billboards. Crude, crass scrawls, most of it outrageous and nonsensical, and cartoons everywhere, some of them stunning. The stock market as Humpty Dumpty having his big fall. The U.S.S. Economy sinking like the Titanic. A mural of Freddie Mac as the Grinch in a sleigh piled high with debt, his eight subprime-lender reindeer galloping over the rooftops of foreclosed homes. Uncle Sam bending over so AIG could fuck him in the ass.
Warner Agee was dead. Scarpetta hadn’t informed Benton. Marino had. Just a few minutes ago he’d called, not because he knew or could even guess the role Agee had played in Benton ’s life. Marino simply thought Benton would want to know that the forensic psychiatrist had jumped off a bridge, and Scarpetta’s BlackBerry had been found in the hotel room where he had been staying since mid-October, in time for CNN’s fall season. Carley Crispin must have worked out an arrangement with Agee-or someone had. She’d bring him to New York and put him up, take care of him, in exchange for information and appearing on her show. For some reason she assumed he was worth it. Benton wondered how much she really believed or if she didn’t care about the veracity of Agee’s claims as long as she could get away with making a name for herself on prime-time TV. Or was Agee involved in something Benton couldn’t imagine? He didn’t know, didn’t know anything, really, and wondered if he could ever put Warner Agee behind him and why he didn’t feel relief or vindication, why he didn’t feel something, feel anything at all. He was numb. The way he’d felt when he’d finally emerged from deep cover, from being presumed dead.
The first time he’d walked along the harbor in Boston, the city of his youth, where he’d been hiding in various hovels on and off for six years, and he’d realized he no longer had to be the fictitious man Tom Haviland, he hadn’t felt euphoric. He hadn’t felt free. He simply hadn’t felt. He’d understood completely why some people get out of prison and rob the first convenience store they see so they can go right back. Benton had wanted to go back to being exiled from himself. It had gotten easy to no longer bear the burden of being Benton. He’d gotten good at feeling bad. He’d found meaning and solace in his meaningless existence and suffering even as he’d worked desperately to calculate his way out of it, plotting and planning with surgical precision to eliminate those who made his nonexistence necessary, the organized-crime cartel, the French family of Chandonne.
Spring 2003. Cool, almost cold, the wind blowing off the harbor and the sun out, and Benton was standing on Burroughs Wharf watching the Boston Fire Department’s Marine Unit escort a de stroyer flying a Norwegian flag, the red fireboats circling the huge shark-gray ship, the firemen in good spirits as they manned deck guns, aiming them up, a plumage of water spraying high in the air, a playful salute. Welcome to America. As if the welcome had been for him. Welcome back, Benton. But he hadn’t felt welcome. Hadn’t felt anything. He’d watched the spectacle and pretended it was just for him, the equivalent of pinching himself to see if he was still alive. Are you? he kept asking himself. Who am I? His mission finally executed in the dark heart of Louisiana, in the bayous and decaying mansions and the ports, where he’d used his brain and his gun to free himself from his oppressors, the Chandonnes and their henchmen, and he’d won. It’s over, he’d told himself. You won, he’d said. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this, he kept thinking as he’d walked along the wharf, watching the firemen having fun. His fantasies of the joy he would feel had turned phony and tasteless in the blink of an eye, like biting into a steak and realizing it was plastic, like driving along a sun-scorched highway and never getting one inch closer to a mirage.
He’d found himself terrified of returning to something that was no longer there, found himself just as afraid of having choices as he’d been of having none, just as afraid of having Kay Scarpetta as he’d been afraid of never having her again. Life and its complexities and contradictions. Nothing makes sense and everything does. Warner Agee got what he deserved and he did it to himself and it wasn’t his fault and he shouldn’t be blamed. A case of meningitis at the age of four had crashed his destiny as surely as if it had been rear-ended by a car and the chain reaction had continued, one collision after the next, not stopping until his body did on the pavement of a bridge. Agee was in the morgue and Benton was in a taxi, both of them sharing one thing in common at this precise point in time: They had a day of reckoning staring them in the eye, were about to meet their Maker.
The FBI occupied six floors inside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and Customs Courthouse in the heart of the government center, a complex of modernist glass-and-concrete architecture surrounded by the more traditional columned buildings of the U.S. Courthouse and state office buildings, and blocks away, City Hall, One Police Plaza, One Hogan Place, and the city jail. As was true of most federal centers, this one was cordoned off with yellow tape and fencing, and concrete blast barriers had been strategically placed to prevent vehicles from getting too close. The entire front plaza, a maze of curling green benches and dead grass mounds patched with snow, was inaccessible to the public. To enter the building, Benton had to get out of the taxi at Thomas Paine Park, trot across Lafayette, already busy with traffic. He turned right on Duane Street, also closed to cars, a pop-up barrier with a tire shredder and a guard booth in case you didn’t notice the Do Not Enter signs.