“Which hotel?” Bonnell asked.
“The Hotel Elysée. The Starr family has used it for years when they have out-of-town guests and business associates who they didn’t want staying in the house. It’s only a few minutes’ walk. You can appreciate why I wouldn’t want to stay here right now. Well, it’s been very stressful these past weeks. What happened to Hannah and then the media, the vans with their cameras. You never know when they will appear, and it’s worse because of that same woman who said those things on CNN last night. Every night, it’s all she talks about, and she’s constantly bothering Mr. Fuller for interviews. People have no respect. Mr. Fuller gave me time off because why would I want to stay here alone right now?”
“Carley Crispin,” Berger said. “She bothers Bobby Fuller?”
“I can’t stand her, but I watch because I want to know. But I don’t know what to believe,” Nastya said. “That was terrible what she said last night. I burst into tears, I was so upset.”
“How does she bother Mr. Fuller?” Bonnell asked. “I would imagine he’s not easy to reach.”
“All I know is she’s been here before.” Nastya pulled an armchair close and sat. “At a party or two in the past. When she was a White House person, what do you call it? A press secretary. I wasn’t here, it was before my time, but you know about Mr. Starr and his famous dinners and parties. That’s why there are all these picture books.” She indicated the photo albums on the library table. “And many, many more on the shelves. Over thirty years of them, and you probably didn’t go through all of them?” she asked, because she hadn’t been here the day Berger and Marino had been.
Only Bobby had been home, and Berger hadn’t gone through all the albums, only a few. After she found the photographs from 1996, she’d stopped looking.
“Not that it’s surprising about Carley Crispin having been to dinners here,” Nastya went on proudly. “At one time or another, probably half the famous people in the world have been through this house. But Hannah probably knew her or at least met her. I hate how quiet it’s been. Since Mr. Starr died, well, those days are past. And we used to have so many celebrations, so much excitement, so many people. Mr. Fuller is much more private, and he’s gone most of the time.”
The housekeeper seemed perfectly at ease sitting in a library that she had neither tidied nor cleaned in the last three weeks. Were it not for her uniform, she could be the mistress of the mansion, and it was interesting that she called Hannah Starr by her first name and spoke of her in the past tense. Yet Bobby was Mr. Fuller, and he was late. It was four-twenty, and there was no sign of him. Berger wondered if it was possible he wasn’t home, had decided not to meet with them after all. The house was extremely quiet, not even the distant sounds of traffic penetrated the limestone walls, and there were no windows in here, the space like a mausoleum or a vault, perhaps to protect the rare books, art, and antiques from unwanted exposure to sunlight and moisture.
“It’s all the more terrible she talks about Hannah the way she does,” Nastya went on about Carley Crispin. “Night after night. How do you do that when it’s someone you’ve met?”
“Do you have any idea the last time Carley was here?” Berger asked, getting out her phone.
“I don’t know.”
“You said she bothers Mr. Fuller.” Bonnell got back to that. “She knows him, maybe because of Hannah?”
“I just know she’s called here.”
“How does she have the number?” Bonnell asked.
Berger wanted to try Bobby’s cell phone to see where he was, but she couldn’t get a signal in the library.
“I don’t know. I don’t answer the phone anymore. I’m afraid it might be a reporter. You know, people can find out so much these days. You never know who might somehow get your number,” Nastya said as her eyes wandered to an enormous canvas of clipper ships, what looked like a Montague Dawson that filled a mahogany panel of wall between floor-to-ceiling bookcases.
“Why would Hannah take a taxi?” Bonnell asked. “How did she usually get around when she went out to dinner?”
“She drove herself.” Nastya’s eyes were fixed on the painting. “But if she was going to have a few drinks, she didn’t drive. Sometimes clients or friends gave her a ride or she would use a limo. But you know, you live in New York, no matter who you are, you take taxis if that’s what you need to do. And sometimes she would if it was last minute. All their cars, a lot of them very old and not driven on the street. Mr. Starr’s collection? You’ve seen it. Maybe when you were here, Mr. Fuller showed it to you?”
Berger hadn’t seen it, and she didn’t answer.
“In the basement garage,” Nastya added.
When Bobby Fuller had shown Berger and Marino around, they hadn’t been given a tour of the basement. An antique car collection hadn’t seemed important at the time.
“Sometimes one of them gets blocked in,” Nastya said.
“Blocked in?” Berger said.
“The Bentley, because Mr. Fuller had been moving things around down there.” Nastya’s attention returned to the maritime painting. “He’s very proud of his cars and spends a lot of time with them.”
“Hannah couldn’t drive her Bentley to dinner because it was blocked in,” Berger repeated.
“The weather was messy, too. And all those cars, and most you can’t take out. The Duesenberg. Bugati. Ferrai.” She didn’t pronounce them right.
“Maybe I’m confused,” Berger said. “I thought Bobby wasn’t home that night.”
22
Scarpetta sat at the work station, alone in the training lab, Lucy and Marino having left moments ago to find Berger and Benton.
She continued to review what Geffner was sending and what was rolling by on the other two monitors, studying multilayered paint chips, one chrome-yellow, the other racecar-red, and data that moved Toni Darien’s life minute by minute closer to its end.
“The debris you collected from Toni Darien’s head wound and particularly from her hair,” Geffner said over speakerphone. “I cross-sectioned the ones you’re looking at but haven’t had a chance to Melt Mount any of the samples yet, so this is rough, really quick and dirty. You got the images up?”
“I’ve got them.” Scarpetta looked at the paint chips, and she looked at charts and maps and a multitude of graphs.
Thousands of reports from the BioGraph, and she couldn’t pause the images or replay them or skip forward, had no choice but to look at data as Lucy’s programs sifted through and sorted it. The process wasn’t fast enough or facile, and it was confusing. The problem was Caligula. They didn’t have the proprietary software that had been developed for the express purpose of aggregating and manipulating the galaxy of data collected by the BioGraph devices.
“The chrome-yellow chip is an oil-based paint, an acrylic melamine and alkyd resin, from an older vehicle,” Geffner was explaining. “And then the red chip. That’s much newer. You can tell because the pigments are organic-based dyes versus inorganic heavy metals.”
Scarpetta had been following Toni Darien through Hannah Starr’s house for the past twenty-seven minutes, Toni Darien’s minutes, from three-twenty-six p.m. to three-fifty-three p.m. this past Tuesday. During that interval, the ambient temperature of the Park Avenue mansion had remained between sixty nine and seventy two as Toni had moved through different areas of it, her pace slow and sporadic, her heart rate not peaking above sixty-seven, as if she was relaxed, maybe walking around and talking to someone. Then the temperature suddenly began to drop. Sixty-nine to sixty-five to sixty-three and falling, while her mobility was constant, ten to twenty paces every fifteen seconds, a leisurely pace. She was walking somewhere in the Starr house where it was cooler.