“What reason might that be? I see you, what? Two nights a week? I’m sorry you hated your birthday.”
“Every one of them,” Berger said, the way she sounded when she was trying to ease the tension. “Wait until you’re past forty. You’ll hate your birthdays, too.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
Lucy drove faster.
“I’m assuming Marino’s on his way to your loft?” Berger asked.
“He said he might be a little late.” One of those lies that wasn’t quite one.
“I don’t feel good about this.” Berger was thinking about Hannah Starr, about Hap Judd. Preoccupied, obsessed, but not with Lucy. No matter how much Berger reassured her or apologized, things had changed.
Lucy tried to remember exactly when. Summer, maybe, when the city started announcing budget cuts and the planet began wobbling on its axis. Then, in the past few weeks, forget it. And now? Gone. It was feeling gone. It was feeling over. It couldn’t be. Lucy wasn’t going to let it go. Somehow she had to stop it from leaving her.
“I’ll say it again. It’s all about the outcome.” Lucy reached for Berger’s hand, pulled it close, and stroked it with her thumb. “Hap Judd will talk because he’s an arrogant sociopath, because he’s got nothing but self-interest, and he believes it’s in his self-interest.”
“Doesn’t mean I feel comfortable,” Berger said, lacing her fingers in Lucy’s. “About a shade away from entrapment. Maybe not even a shade away.”
“Here we go again. We’re fine. Don’t worry. Eric had an eighth of White Widow on him for pain management. Nothing wrong with medical marijuana. As for where he got it? Maybe from Hap. Hap’s a pothead.”
“Remember who you’re talking to. I don’t want to know anything about where Eric-or you-get your so-called medical marijuana, and I’m assuming you don’t have any, have never had any.” Berger had said this before, repeatedly. “I’d better not find out you’re growing it indoors somewhere.”
“I’m not. I don’t do stuff like that anymore. Haven’t lit up in years. I promise.” Lucy smiled, downshifting onto the exit ramp for I-684 South, Berger’s touch reassuring her, bolstering her confidence. “Eric had a few J’s. Just happened to be enjoying himself when he just happened to run into Hap, who just happens to frequent the same places, is a creature of habit. Not smart. Makes you easy to find and befriend.”
“Yes, so you’ve said. And I continue to say the following: What if Eric decides to talk to somebody he shouldn’t? Like Hap’s lawyer, because he’ll get one. After I’m done with him, he will.”
“Eric likes me and I give him work.”
“Exactly. You trust a handyman.”
“A stoner with a record,” Lucy said. “Not credible, no one would believe him if it came down to that. Nothing for you to worry about, I promise.”
“There’s plenty for me to worry about. You induced a famous actor…”
“Not exactly Christian Bale, for Christ’s sake,” Lucy said. “You never even heard of Hap Judd before all this.”
“I’ve heard of him now, and he’s famous enough. More to the point, you encouraged him to break the law, to use a controlled substance, and you did it on behalf of a public servant so you could gain evidence against him.”
“Wasn’t there, not even in New York,” Lucy said. “You and I were in Vermont Monday night when Hap and my handyman had so much fun.”
“So, that’s really why you wanted to steal me away during a workweek.”
“I didn’t decide your birthday was December seventeenth, and it wasn’t my intention for us to get snowed in.” Stung again. “But yes, it made sense to have Eric cruise various bars while we were out of town. Especially while you were out of town.”
“You didn’t just ask him to cruise various bars, you supplied the illegal substance.”
“Nope. Eric bought the stuff.”
“Where’d he get the money?” Berger said.
“We’ve been through all this. You’re making yourself crazy.”
“The defense will claim entrapment, outrageous government conduct.”
“And you’ll say Hap was predisposed to do what he did.”
“Now you’re coaching me?” Berger laughed ruefully. “Don’t know why I bothered going to law school. In summary, let’s be honest, you had ideas implanted in Hap’s mind that could get him indicted for something we can never prove. You basically got him stoned and had your snitch handyman lure him into a conversation about Park General Hospital, which you got suspicious about because you hacked into Hap’s e-mail account and God knows what else. Probably the goddamn hospital’s, too. Jesus God.”
“I got their info fair and square.”
“Please.”
“Besides, we don’t need to prove it,” Lucy said. “Isn’t that the point? To scare the shit out of Mr. Hollywood so he’ll do what’s right?”
“I don’t know why I listen to you,” Berger said, holding Lucy’s hand tighter and tucking it against her.
“He could have been honorable. He could have been helpful. He could have been a normal law-abiding citizen, but guess what, he’s not,” Lucy said. “He’s brought this upon himself.”
12
Searchlights swept a crisscross of steel bracing at the top of the George Washington Bridge, where a jumper was holding on to cables. He was a big man, maybe in his sixties, the wind whipping his pants legs, his bare ankles fish-belly white in the blazing light, his face dazed. Marino couldn’t stop his attention from wandering to the live feed on the flat-screen TV across the room from him.
He wished the cameras would hold steady on the jumper’s face. He wanted to see what was there and what was missing. Didn’t matter how many times he’d witnessed situations like this. For each desperate person it was different. Marino had watched people die, watched them realize they were going to live, watched people kill and be killed, had looked them in the face and witnessed the moment of recognition that it was over or it wasn’t. The look was never exactly the same. Rage, hate, shock, grief, anguish, terror, scorn, amusement, combinations of them, and nothing. As different as people are different.
The windowless blue room where Marino went data mining fairly often these days reminded him of Times Square, of Niketown. He was surrounded by a dizzying array of images, some dynamic, others static, all bigger than life on flat screens and the two-story data wall comprised of huge Mitsubishi cubes tiled together. An hourglass spun in one of the cubes as the Real Time Crime Center’s software searched the more-than-three-terabyte data warehouse for anyone who might match the description of the man in the FedEx cap, a security camera image of him ten feet tall on the wall, and next to it a satellite picture of Scarpetta’s granite apartment building on Central Park West.
“He goes, he’ll never make it to the water,” Marino said from his ergonomic chair at a work station where he was being helped by an analyst named Petrowski. “Jesus. He’ll hit the fucking bridge. What was he thinking when he started climbing out on the cables? He was going to land on a car? Take out some poor bastard minding his own business in his MINI Cooper.”
“People in his state of mind don’t think.” Petrowski, a detective in his thirties, in a preppie suit and tie, wasn’t particularly interested in what was happening on the GW Bridge at almost two o’clock in the morning.
He was busy entering keywords on a Tattoo Report. In vino and veritas, and In vino veritas, and bones, skulls, and now coffin. The hourglass twirled like a baton in its quadrant of the data wall near the video image of the man in the FedEx cap and the satellite view of Scarpetta’s building. On the flat screen, the jumper was thinking about it, caught in cables like a deranged trapeze artist. Any second, the wind was going to rip him loose. The end.
“We’ve got nothing very helpful in terms of searching,” Petrowski said.