“What do you mean ‘used to be’?” O’Dell said. “Seems they’re alive and kicking, if everything I’m hearing is true.”
“They’re not what they were. You can’t begin to understand. Suffice it to say it’s different,” Benton said. “It’s the bad seed taking over the family store and running it into the ground or over a cliff.”
“Sounds like the last eight years in the White House,” O’Dell quipped.
“The Chandonne family isn’t the organized-crime family it was, not even close.” Benton had no sense of humor this morning. “In the end, it’s disorganized, on its way to complete chaos, with Jean-Baptiste in the driver’s seat. His story can end only one way, no matter how many times he tells it or how many different characters he plays. He can keep focused for a while, and maybe he has while his intrusive and obsessional thoughts have continued, because they don’t quit. Not with him, and the outcome is predictable. His intrusive thoughts win. He strays a little. He strays a lot. He strays way out of bounds. There is no limit to his destructiveness. Except it always ends in death. Somebody dies. Then multiple people do.”
“Sure, we can do a predictive model, put a graph on the wall,” Lanier said to O’Dell and Stockman.
“It will take a minute.” Stockman started hitting keys on his laptop. “Not just the bank robberies but everything?” He glanced up at Lanier.
“It isn’t just bank robberies we’re talking about,” she said with a hint of impatience. “I believe that’s the point Benton’s making and the point of this meeting. The bank robberies are incidental. The tip of the iceberg. Or in keeping with the time of year, the angel on top of the Christmas tree. I want the whole tree.”
The reference reminded Benton again of Dodie’s stupid song, her breathy off-key voice wishing Scarpetta and him a Ho-Dee, Do-Dee Christmas, a greeting rife with sexually violent innuendo and a hint of what was to come. Scarpetta was going to be lynched, and Benton could shove it up his ass, or something like that, and he imagined Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s delight. Likely the card was his idea, the first taunt that soon would be followed by the next: a FedEx box containing a bomb. Not just an ordinary bomb. Marino’s e-mails referred to it as “a stink bomb that might have blown the Doc’s fingers off or maybe made her blind.”
“Yeah, it’s ridiculous the Feds can’t put in something like that,” O’Dell was griping. “A damn data wall like RTCC. We need something ten times bigger than a conference room, because this isn’t a decision tree, it’s a damn decision forest.”
Stockman told him, “I’ll throw it up on a screen. Sixty inches is as big as one of RTCC’s Mitsubishi cubes.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Close enough.”
“Nope. It’s going to take an IMAX theater.”
“Quit complaining and let’s get it on the wall so we can see it.”
“I’m just saying as complex as this is, we need a two-story wall, at least. All this on one flat screen? You’ll have to shrink it as small as newspaper print.”
O’Dell and Stockman had spent so much time together, they tended to bicker and bitch like an old married couple. For the past six months, they’d been working the so-called Granny and Clyde pattern bank robberies in conjunction with other task forces in other FBI field offices, mostly Miami, New York, and Detroit. The Bureau had managed to keep the spree of robberies and their theories about them out of the news, and had done so deliberately and for good reason. They suspected the bandits were pawns in something much bigger and more dangerous. They were pilot fish, small carnivores that swam with sharks.
It was the sharks the Bureau wanted, and Benton was sure he knew what type and family of sharks. French sharks. Chandonne sharks. But the question was what names they were calling themselves now and how to find them. Where was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne? He would be the great white shark, the boss, the debauched head of what was left of the prominent crime family. The father, Monsieur Chandonne, was enjoying his retirement years at La Santé maximum-security prison outside Paris. Jean-Baptiste’s brother, the heir apparent, was dead. Jean-Baptiste wasn’t wired for a leadership role, but he was motivated, was fueled by violent fantasies and sexually obsessive thoughts, and he lusted for revenge. He could control himself for a while, keep his true inclinations contained for a discrete period of time before the fragile packaging ruptured, exposing neurons and nerves, a bundle of throbbing impulses capable of murderous lust and rages and cruel games more explosive than anything the bomb techs had ever rendered safe on their range. Jean-Baptiste had to be rendered safe. It had to happen right now.
Benton believed Jean-Baptiste had sent the package bomb. He was behind it. He likely had made it. He may have watched it being delivered last night. Maim Scarpetta physically and mentally. Benton imagined Jean-Baptiste outside their building, somewhere in the dark, watching, waiting for Scarpetta to return home from CNN. Benton imagined her reluctantly walking with Carley Crispin, walking past a homeless man bundled in layers of clothing and a quilt on a bench near Columbus Circle. The mention of the homeless man had bothered Benton the first time Scarpetta had brought it up when they were talking to Lobo inside Marino’s car. A feeling in Benton’s gut, something unsettling. It had continued to disturb him as he’d thought about it more. Whoever was behind the bomb intended it for Scarpetta or for Benton or for both of them and would have found it difficult to resist watching her last night.
Maiming her or maiming Benton. Whoever had been maimed, it may as well have been both of them wounded, ruined, maybe not dead, maybe worse than dead. Jean-Baptiste would have known Benton was in New York, was home last night, waiting for his wife to return from her live appearance on CNN. Jean-Baptiste knew whatever he wanted to know, and he knew what Scarpetta and Benton had together. Jean-Baptiste knew what they had, because he knew what he didn’t have and had never had. No one understood apartness better than Jean-Baptiste, and understanding hellish isolation made him understand its antithesis. Darkness and light. Love and hate. Creation and uncreation. The opposites of all things are intimately related. Benton had to find him. Benton had to stop him.
The surest method was to attack vulnerabilities. Benton’s credo: You’re only as good as the people around you. He kept telling himself, reassuring himself, that Jean-Baptiste had made a mistake. He’d recruited badly, had enlisted small carnivores that were neither strong-minded nor properly programmed and certainly weren’t experienced, and he was going to pay for his snap decisions and sick desires and subjective choices. He would be undone by his unsound mind. Granny and Clyde would bring him down. Jean-Baptiste should never have stooped to what by Chandonne standards was petty crime. He should have avoided people unfit for service, people unstable and driven by their own weaknesses and dysfunctions. Jean-Baptiste should have stayed the hell away from small-time character-disordered criminals and banks.
The pattern was the same in each heist, textbook, as if someone had read the manual. The bank branch had been robbed at least once in the past, in some instances more than once, and had no bulletproof partition, known as a “bandit barrier,” separating the tellers from the public. The robberies always occurred on a Friday between the hours of nine and eleven a.m., when the branch was likely to have the fewest number of customers and the greatest amount of cash. A benign-looking older woman, who until this morning the FBI had known only as Granny, would walk in, looking like a Sunday-school teacher in a frumpy dress and tennis shoes, her head covered by a scarf or a hat. She always wore tinted glasses in old-style frames. Depending on the weather, she might have on a coat and wool gloves. If the robbery occurred when it was warm, she wore a pair of transparent plastic disposable gloves, the type used by people who work in food service, to obviate leaving her fingerprints or DNA.