“Maybe you could hand me the shock tube,” she said to Lobo.
He opened the portable magazine, a midsize Army green steel box, and lifted out a reel of what looked like bright yellow plastic-coated twelve-gauge wire, a low-strength det-cord that was safe to handle without fire-retardant clothing or an EOD bomb disposal suit. The inside of the tubing was coated with the explosive HMX, just enough to transmit the necessary shock waves to hit the firing pin inside the breech, which in turn would strike the primer of the cartridge, which would ignite the powder charge, only this shotgun cartridge was a blank. There were no projectiles. What got blasted out of the tube was about five ounces of water traveling at maybe eight hundred feet per second, enough to blow a good-size hole in Scarpetta’s FedEx box and take out the power source.
Droiden unrolled several yards of the tube and attached one end to a connector on the breech and the other end to a firing device, what looked like a small green remote control with two buttons, one red, one black. Unzipping two of the Roco bags, she pulled out the green jacket, trousers, and helmet of the bomb suit.
“Now, if you boys will excuse me,” she said. “I need to get dressed.”
18
Warner Agee’s laptop, a Dell several years old, was connected to a small printer, both devices plugged into the wall. Cords ran across the carpet, printouts piled and scattered, making it hard to walk without tripping or stepping on paper.
Scarpetta suspected Agee had worked nonstop in the hotel room Carley apparently had rented for him. He’d been busy doing something not long before he removed his hearing aids and glasses, and left his magnetic key card on the vanity, then took the stairs and likely got into a cab, eventually headed to his death. She wondered what he’d been able to hear those last moments of his life. Probably not the ESU rescuers with their ropes and harnesses and gear, risking their own safety as they tried to reach him. Probably not the traffic on the bridge. Not even the wind. He’d turned off the volume and blurred the picture so it would be easier to descend into nothingness with no turning back. He not only didn’t want to be here anymore, for some reason he’d decided it wasn’t an option.
“Let’s start with the most recent calls,” Lucy said, turning her attention to Agee’s phone, which she’d plugged into a charger she’d found in an outlet near the bed. “Doesn’t look like he spent a lot of time on it. A couple calls yesterday morning, then nothing until six minutes past eight last night. After that, one more call about two and a half hours later, at ten-forty. Starting with this first one at eight-oh-six, I’ll do a search and see who it comes back to.” She started typing on her MacBook.
“I disabled the password on my BlackBerry.” Scarpetta wasn’t sure why she said it at this exact moment. It had been on her mind but not on her tongue, and now it was before them, as if it was overripe and had dropped from a tree. “I don’t think Warner Agee looked at my BlackBerry. Or that Carley did, unless she got into scene photographs. From what I can tell, any calls, messages, or e-mails that have come in since I used it last haven’t been opened.”
“I know all about it,” Lucy said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Jesus. Like a million people have had this number that called Agee’s cell phone. His cell phone’s registered to him, by the way, with a D.C. address. A Verizon account, the cheapest low-minute plan. Doesn’t appear he was much of a talker, maybe because of his hearing.”
“I doubt that’s why. His hearing aids are the newest technology, Bluetooth-enabled,” Scarpetta said.
She could look around the hotel room and deduce that Warner Agee had spent most of his time in a claustrophobic world that often was silent. She doubted he had friends, and if he had family, he wasn’t close to them. She wondered if his only human contact, his only emotional connection in the end, was the woman who had become his self-serving patron: Carley. She gave him work and a roof over his head, it seemed, and now and then showed up with a new key. Scarpetta suspected Agee had no money, and she wondered what had happened to his wallet. Maybe he’d gotten rid of it after leaving the room last night. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to be identified but had overlooked the Siemens remote control, which most likely he kept in his pocket as a matter of routine. He may have forgotten about the message on it that would lead someone like Scarpetta directly to him.
“What do you mean, you know all about it?” she again asked Lucy. “What do you know? You already knew that no one had gotten into my BlackBerry?”
“Hold on. I’m going to try something.” Lucy got on her own BlackBerry and dialed a number she was looking at on her MacBook. She listened for a long moment before ending the call and saying, “It just rang and rang. Bet you it’s a disposable phone, explaining why so many different people have had that same number and why voicemail hasn’t been set up.” She was looking at Agee’s cell phone again. “I did some checking,” she then said. “When you e-mailed me and I told you I wanted to nuke your BlackBerry and you said no, I checked right then and saw that new messages, e-mails, voicemails hadn’t been accessed. That’s one reason I didn’t just go on and nuke it anyway, regardless of your instructions. Why did you disable the password?”
“How long have you known?”
“Not until you told me you’d lost your phone.”
“I didn’t lose it.”
Lucy was having a hard time looking her in the eye. Not because she was feeling remorse, because that wasn’t what Scarpetta sensed. Her niece was emotional. She was scared, her eyes a dark green like the deep water of a quarry, and her face was unusually defeated and spent. She looked thin, as if she hadn’t been working out as much, her trademark strength and fitness at a low ebb. In the course of the several weeks since Scarpetta had seen her last, Lucy had gone from looking fifteen to forty.
Lucy tapped keys and said, “Now I’m looking at this second number that called his phone last night.”
“The call made at ten-forty?”
“Right. Comes back as unlisted and unpublished, but the person didn’t bother blocking caller ID, which is why it’s showing up on Agee’s cell phone. Whoever this is, it’s the last person he talked to. At least that we know of. So he was still alive and well at ten-forty.”
“Alive, but I doubt he was well.”
Lucy typed some more on the MacBook and was rolling through files on the Dell laptop as well, able to do about ten tasks at once. She could do almost anything except have a truthful conversation about what was really important in her life.
“He was smart enough to delete his history and empty his cache,” she said. “In case you’re interested. Won’t stop me from finding what he thought he’d gotten rid of. Carley Crispin,” she then said. “The unlisted number that called him at ten-forty. It was her. It was Carley. That’s her cell phone, an AT &T account. She called Agee, and they talked for about four minutes. Must not have been a good conversation if a couple hours later he jumped off a bridge.”
At ten-forty last night Scarpetta was still at CNN, in the makeup room, talking to Alex Bachta with the door shut. She tried to pinpoint exactly when she’d left. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, and she had a sinking feeling that what she’d feared was true. Carley had been eavesdropping and had heard enough to realize what lay ahead. Scarpetta was going to take her place as a talk show host, or that was what Carley would have assumed, at any rate, because it would never occur to her that someone might say no to the sort of offer Alex had made. Carley was going to be let go, and she must have been devastated. Even if she’d hovered outside the door long enough to overhear Scarpetta resisting the notion and voicing why she thought it was a bad idea, Carley had to accept an inevitability she’d fought like hell to prevent: At the age of sixty-one, she was going to have to look for another job, and the odds were almost impossible that she’d find one with a network as well respected and powerful as CNN. In this economy and at her age, she might find nothing.