Scarpetta slipped off the elastic band of the accordion file that appeared to be the most recent one, beginning January first of this year, the end date left blank.
“You are different from them,” she said.
“I can’t take it back,” Lucy said.
“What is it you can’t take back?”
The file’s six compartments were crammed with papers, receipts, a checkbook, and a brown leather wallet that was worn smooth and curved from years of being carried in a back pocket.
“I can’t take back that I did it.” Lucy took a deep breath, refusing to cry. “I’m a bad person.”
“No, you’re not,” Scarpetta replied.
Agee’s driver’s license had expired three years ago. His Master-Card was expired. His Visa and American Express cards were expired.
“I am,” Lucy said. “You know what I’ve done.”
“You’re not a bad person, and I say that knowing what you’ve done. Maybe not everything, but plenty,” Scarpetta said. “You were FBI, ATF, and like Benton, involved in so much that you really couldn’t help and you certainly couldn’t talk about and likely still can’t. Of course I’m aware, and I’m also aware it’s been in the line of duty or for a very sound reason. Like a soldier on the front line. That’s what cops are, they’re soldiers who go beyond the limits of what’s normal so they can somehow keep life normal for the rest of us.”
She counted fourteen hundred and forty dollars cash, all twenties, as if they had come from an ATM.
Lucy then said, “Really? What about Rocco Caggiano?”
“What about his father, Pete Marino, if you hadn’t?” Scarpetta didn’t know the details of what had happened in Poland, and she didn’t want to, but she understood the reason. “Marino would be dead,” she said. “Rocco was involved in organized crime and would have killed him. It was already set in motion, and you stopped it.”
She began looking at receipts for food, toiletries, and transportation, a lot of them from hotels, stores, restaurants, and taxicabs in Detroit, Michigan. Paid in cash.
“I wish I hadn’t, that somebody else had. I killed his son. I’ve done a lot of things I can’t take back,” Lucy said.
“What can any of us take back? Foolish words, a phrase. People say it all the time, but in fact, we can’t take anything back,” Scarpetta said. “All we can do is step around the messes we’ve made and take responsibility and apologize and try to move on.”
She was making piles on the floor, digging in the accordion files to see what Agee had thought was important enough about his life to save. She found an envelope of canceled checks. Last January he spent more than six thousand dollars on two Siemens Motion 700 hearing aids and accessories. He’d donated his old ones to Goodwill and gotten a receipt. Soon after, he’d become a subscriber to a Web-based captioning telephone service. No pay stubs or bank records that might indicate where he was getting his money. She pulled out a manila envelope labeled IAP. It was thick with newsletters, conference programs, journal articles, all in French, and more receipts and plane tickets. In July 2006 Agee had traveled to Paris to attend a conference at the Institut Anomalous Psychologie.
Scarpetta’s conversational French wasn’t good, but she could read it fairly well. She scanned a letter from a committee member of the Global Consciousness Project, thanking Agee for agreeing to participate in a discussion on the use of scientific tools in looking for structure in random data during major global events, such as 9/11. The committee member was pleased that he would be seeing Agee again and wondered if his research in psychokinesis was still encountering difficulties in replicating its findings. The problem, of course, is the raw material of human subjects and the legal and ethical constraints, she translated.
“Why are you thinking about killing and dying?” she asked Lucy. “Who do you want to kill, and do you wish you were dead?” she said, and again was answered by silence. “You’d better tell me, Lucy. I intend to stay in this room with you for as long as it takes.”
“Hannah,” Lucy answered.
“You want to kill Hannah Starr?” Scarpetta glanced up at her. “Or you did kill her or you wish she was dead?”
“I didn’t kill her. I don’t know if she’s dead and don’t care. I just want her punished. I want to do it personally.”
Agee had written the committee member back in French: While it is true that human subjects are biased and as a result tend to be unreliable, this obstacle can be sidestepped if the subjects in a study are monitored in a way that obviates self-consciousness.
“Punished for what? What did she do to you that merits your personally taking care of it?” Scarpetta asked.
She opened another accordion file. More on parapsychology. Journal articles. Agee was fluent in French and prominent in the field of paranormal psychology, the study of the “seventh sense,” the science of the supernatural. The Paris-based Institute of Anomalous Psychology paid his expenses when he traveled and may have been supplying him with stipends and other fees, including grant monies. The Lecoq Foundation that funded the IAP was keenly interested in Agee’s work. There were repeated mentions of Monsieur Lecoq’s eagerness to meet with Agee and discuss their “mutual passions and interests.”
“She did something to you,” Scarpetta continued, and it wasn’t a question. Lucy must know Hannah. “What happened? Did you have an affair with her? Did you have sex with her? What?”
“I didn’t have sex with her. But…”
“But what? You either did or you didn’t. Where did you meet her?”
An abstract. Dans cet article, publié en 2007, Warner Agee, l’un des pionniers de la recherche en parapsychologie, en particulier l’expérience de mort imminente et de sortie hors du corps…
“She wanted me to try something, to start something, to make an overture,” Lucy said.
“A physical one.”
“She assumed everybody wanted to try something with her, to hit on her,” Lucy said. “I didn’t. She flirted. She flaunted it. We were alone. I thought Bobby was going to be there, but he wasn’t. It was just her, and she teased me. But I didn’t. The fucking bitch.”
Near-death and out-of-body experiences. People who die and come back to life with paranormal gifts and abilities: healing and mind over matter. The belief that thoughts can control our own bodies and influence physical systems and objects, Scarpetta kept reading… such as electronic devices, noise, and dice, in the same way that lunar phases can influence casino payout rates.
She asked Lucy, “So, what exactly did Hannah do that was so terrible?”
“I used to tell you about my financial planner.”
“The one you called the Money Man.”
Agee’s tax return for 2007. Income from a retirement fund but no other fees, yet it was clear from correspondence and other paperwork that he was getting money from somewhere or someone. Possibly from the Lecoq Foundation in Paris.
“Her father. Rupe Starr. He was the Money Man,” Lucy said. “From the beginning, when I wasn’t even twenty yet and started doing so well, he managed me. If it hadn’t been for him? Well, I might have given everything away, you know, I was just so happy inventing, dreaming, coming up with ideas I could execute. Creating something out of nothing and making people want it.”
2008. No trips to France. Agee was back and forth to Detroit. Where was he getting his cash?
“At one point I was doing some cool digital stuff that I thought might have promise for animation,” Lucy was saying, “and this person I’d gotten to know who worked for Apple gave me Rupe’s name. You probably know that he was one of the most well-respected and successful money managers on Wall Street.”
“I’m wondering why you felt you could never talk to me about him or your money,” Scarpetta said.