“Let’s go back to when you worked at Park General,” Berger said.
“I really don’t remember-well, almost nothing, not much about that situation.”
“What situation?” Berger asked, with what Lucy liked to describe as her “millpond calm.” Only when Lucy said it, she didn’t mean it as a compliment.
“The girl,” he said.
“Farrah Lacy,” Berger said.
“Yes, I mean, no. I’m trying to, what I’m saying is it was a long time ago.”
“That’s the beauty of computers,” Berger said. “They don’t care if it was a long time ago. Especially Lucy’s computers, her neural networking applications, programming constructs that mimic the brain. Let me refresh your memory about your long-ago days at Park General. When you entered the hospital morgue, you had to use your security card. Sound familiar?”
“I guess. I mean, that would be the routine.”
“So, every time you used your security card, your security code was entered into the hospital computer system.”
“Along with recordings made by the security cameras,” Lucy added. “Along with your e-mails, because they resided on the hospital server, which routinely backs up its data, meaning they still have electronic records from when you were there. Including whatever you wrote on-whatever desktop computer you happened to borrow at the hospital. And if you logged in to private e-mail accounts from there, oh, well, those too. Everything’s connected. It’s just a matter of knowing how. I won’t tax you with a lot of computer jargon, but that’s what I do in this place. I make connections the same way the neurons in your brain are making them right this minute. Inputs, outputs, from sensory and motor nerves in your eyes, your hands, signal flows that the brain pieces together to accomplish tasks and solve problems. Images, ideas, written messages, conversations. Even screenwriting. All of it interconnected and forming patterns, making it possible to detect, decide, and predict.”
“What screenwriting?” Hap Judd’s mouth was dry, sounded sticky when he talked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lucy started typing. She pointed a remote at a flat screen mounted on a wall. Judd reached for his bottle of water, fumbled with the cap, took a long swallow.
The flat screen divided into windows, each filled by an image: a younger Hap Judd in scrubs walking into the hospital morgue, grabbing latex gloves out of a box, opening the stainless-steel walk-in refrigerator; a newspaper photograph of nineteen-year-old Farrah Lacy, a very pretty, light-skinned African American in a cheerleading outfit, holding pompoms and grinning; an e-mail; a page from a script.
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.