“Then what?” Scarpetta asked, after describing to Lucy what had happened last night after Carley’s show. “Did she step away from the door, perhaps return to her dressing room and make a quick call to Warner? What did she say to him?”
“Maybe that his services were no longer going to be needed,” Lucy said. “She loses her show, what would she need him for anymore? If she’s not on the air, he wasn’t going to be, either.”
“Since when do talk-show hosts provide long-term hotel rooms for guests.” Scarpetta got around to that. “Especially these days, when everybody is cutting back.”
“I don’t know.”
“I sincerely doubt CNN was reimbursing her. Does she have money? This hotel for two months would cost a fortune, no matter how reasonable a rate they gave her. Why would she spend that kind of money? Why not put him somewhere else, rent him something infinitely less expensive?”
“Don’t know.”
“Maybe it had to do with the location,” Scarpetta considered. “Maybe someone else was involved and funding this. Or him. Someone we know nothing about.”
Lucy didn’t seem to be listening.
“And if she called at ten-forty to tell Warner he was fired and about to get evicted, then why would she go to the trouble to drop off my BlackBerry?” Scarpetta continued thinking out loud. “Why not just tell him to pack his things and leave the hotel the next day? If she planned to kick him out, why would she bring him my phone? Why would he feel obliged to help her with anything further if she was about to cut him off? Possible Agee was supposed to give my BlackBerry to someone else?”
Lucy didn’t answer.
“Why is my BlackBerry so important?”
It was as if Lucy didn’t hear a word Scarpetta said.
“Except that it’s a conduit to me. To everything about me. To everything about all of us, really,” she answered her own question.
Lucy was silent. She wasn’t eager to talk further about the stolen BlackBerry, because she didn’t want to talk about why she’d bought it to begin with.
“It even knows where I am because of the GPS receiver you put in it,” Scarpetta added. “As long as I had it with me, of course. Although I don’t think you were particularly worried about where I’ve been or might be.”
Scarpetta started going through computer printouts on the coffee table, what looked like hundreds of Internet searches for news stories, editorials, references, blogs pertaining to the Hannah Starr case. But it was difficult to concentrate, the most important question a barrier as solid as a concrete wall.
“You don’t want to discuss it or own up to what you’ve done,” said Scarpetta.
“Discuss what?” Not looking up.
“Well, we’re going to discuss it.” As Scarpetta skimmed more news stories that Agee had printed, research he no doubt had been doing for Carley. “You give me a gift I didn’t ask for or frankly want, this extremely sophisticated smartphone, and suddenly my entire existence is on some network you created and I’m held hostage by a password. And then you forget to check on me? If you were really so intent on making my life better-making Marino’s, Benton ’s, and Jaime’s lives better-why wouldn’t you do what any respectable system administrator would do? And check on your users to make sure their passwords are enabled, that the integrity of data is what it ought to be, that there are no breaches in security and no problems?”
“I didn’t think you liked it when I checked on you.” Lucy rapidly tapped keys on the Dell laptop, going into the downloads folder.
Scarpetta picked up another stack of papers and said, “How does Jaime feel about it when you check on her?”
“This past September he signed an agreement with a D.C. real-estate agency,” Lucy said.
“Does Jaime know about the WAAS-enabled GPS receiver?”
“It appears he put his house on the market and moved out of it. It’s listed as unfurnished.” Lucy went back to her MacBook and typed something else. “Let’s just see if it ever sold.”
“Are you going to talk to me?” Scarpetta said.
“Not only hasn’t sold, it’s a preforeclosure. A condo, two bedrooms, two baths, on Fourteenth Street, not too far from Dupont Circle. Started out at six hundred and twenty thousand, is now a little over five. So, maybe one of the reasons he ended up in this room is he had nowhere else to go.”
“Don’t try to dodge me, please.”
“When he bought it eight years ago, he got it for a little under six. Times were better for him back then, I guess.”
“Did you tell Jaime about the GPS?”
“I’d say the guy’s broke. Well, now he’s dead,” Lucy said. “So I guess it doesn’t matter if the bank takes his house.”
Scarpetta said, “I know about the GPS receiver you installed. But does she? Did you tell Jaime?”
“You lose everything and maybe that’s what finally pushes you over the edge, or in Agee’s case off the bridge,” Lucy said, and her demeanor changed and her voice wavered almost imperceptibly. “What was it you used to read to me when I was a little kid? That poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. ‘The One-Hoss Shay.’ Now in building of chaises, I tell you what / there is always a weakest spot… And that’s the reason beyond a doubt / That a chaise breaks down, but doesn’t wear out… When I was a little kid visiting you in Richmond, living with you on and off and wishing you would keep me. My fucking mother. This time of year, it’s always the same thing. Am I coming home for Christmas. I don’t hear from her for months, and then she asks me if I’m coming home for Christmas, because what she really wants is to make sure I don’t forget to send her a gift. Send her something expensive, preferably a check. Fuck her.”
“What’s happened to cause you to distrust Jaime?” Scarpetta said.
“You used to sit next to me in bed in that room down the hall from yours, the room that ended up being mine in your house in Windsor Farms. I loved that house. You’d read to me from a book of his poems. ‘Old Ironsides,’ ‘The Chambered Nautilus,’ ‘Departed Days.’ Trying to explain the facts of life and death to me. You’d say people are like that one-hoss shay. They run for a hundred years and then one day they collapse all at once into a pile of dust.” Lucy talked with her hands on both keyboards, files and links opening and closing on laptop screens as she looked at anything other than her aunt. “You said it was the perfect metaphor for death, these people who ended up in your morgue with everything under the sun wrong with them, and yet they kept on going until one day it was that one thing. That one thing that probably had to do with their weakest spot.”
Scarpetta said, “I assumed your weakest spot was Jaime.”
Lucy said, “And I assumed it was money.”
“Have you been spying on her? Is that why you got us these?” Scarpetta indicated the two BlackBerrys on the coffee table, hers and Lucy’s. “Are you afraid Jaime is taking money from you? Are you afraid she’s like your mother? Help me understand.”
“Jaime doesn’t need my money, and she doesn’t need me.” Steadying her voice. “Nobody has what they did. In this economy it melts like ice right before your eyes, like some elaborate ice sculpture that cost a fortune to make and turns into water and evaporates. And you wonder if it ever existed to begin with and what all the excitement was about. I don’t have what I did.” She hesitated, as if whatever she was thinking was almost impossible for her to say. “It’s not about money. It’s about something else I got involved in and then I misread everything. Maybe that’s as much as I need to say. I started misreading things.”
“You do a fine job misreading for someone who quotes poetry so well,” Scarpetta said.