“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.”
“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.