“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Scarpetta said. “Where’s the sensor? You can’t measure pulse oximetry, the oxygen saturation of blood, without a sensor of some type. Usually on a fingertip, sometimes a toe, sometimes an earlobe. Has to be a thin part of the person’s anatomy so a light can pass through the tissue. A light comprised of both red and infrared wavelengths that determines the oxygenation, the percentage of oxygen saturation, in your blood.”
“The BioGraph is Bluetooth-enabled,” Lucy said. “So maybe the pulse-oximetry device is Bluetooth-enabled.”
“Wireless or otherwise, there had to be one to take these measurements we’re seeing,” Scarpetta replied. “A sensor she wore virtually all of the time.”
A red laser dot moved over names and locations and the branches that connected them on the treelike graph filling the flat screen.
“Imagine Monsieur Chandonne, the father, no longer in power.” Benton held a laser pointer, illustrating what he meant as he talked. “And what family associations he has left are scattered. He and a number of his captains are in prison. The Chandonne heir apparent, the brother of Jean-Baptiste, is dead. And law enforcement for the most part has turned its attention to other international troubles. Al Qaida, Iran, North Korea, the global economic disaster. Jean-Baptiste, the surviving child, seizes the opportunity to take over, to start his life again and do it better this time.”
“I don’t see how,” O’Dell said. “He’s a lunatic.”
“He’s not a lunatic,” Benton said. “He is extremely intelligent, extremely intuitive, and for a while his intellect can overwhelm his compulsions, his obsessions. The question is how long can that last.”
“I totally disagree,” O’Dell said to Benton. “This guy a Mob boss? It’s not like he can wander around in public without putting a bag over his head. He’s an international fugitive, an Interpol Red Notice, and he’s deformed, a freak.”
“You can disagree all you want. You don’t know him,” Benton said.
“That genetic condition he has,” O’Dell went on. “I can’t remember what it’s called.”
“Congenital hypertrichosis universalis.” It was Marty Lanier talking. “Individuals suffering from this very rare condition have an overgrowth of lanugo hair, baby-fine hair, all over their bodies, including areas that usually aren’t hairy or excessively hairy. The forehead, the tops of the hands, the elbows. And there may be other deformities, gingival hyperplasia, small teeth widely spaced.”
“Like I said, a freak, he looks like a damn werewolf,” O’Dell said to everyone at the table. “People who had this condition, it’s probably where the legend came from.”
“He’s not a werewolf, and the condition isn’t something from a horror story. It isn’t a legend. It’s very real,” Benton said.
“We don’t know how many cases,” Lanier added. “Something like fifty, a hundred. Very few reported worldwide.”
“Reported is the key word,” Jaime Berger said, and she was subdued. “You can’t count cases if they’re not reported, and you can understand why hypertrichosis would have very negative associations and stigmas, implications the sufferer was a monster, was evil.”
“And then you treat him accordingly and maybe turn him into that,” Lanier added.
“Families hid family members who had this affliction, and Jean-Baptiste was no exception,” Benton continued. “He grew up in a basement, in what was essentially a subterranean windowless dungeon of the Chandonne family’s seventeenth-century home on Île Saint-Louis in Paris. It’s possible the gene Jean-Baptiste inherited traces back to a man in the mid-fifteen hundreds who was born covered with hair and as an infant was presented to King Henri the Second in Paris and raised in the royal palace as a curiosity, an amusement, a pet of sorts. This man married a French woman, and several of their children inherited the disorder. In the late eighteen hundreds, one of their descendants is believed to have married a Chandonne, and a hundred years later the recessive gene became dominant in the form of Jean-Baptiste.”
“What I’m trying to get across here,” O’Dell said, “is people run screaming from someone who looks like that. How could Jean-Baptiste take over and operate out of the family home in Paris?”
“We don’t know where Jean-Baptiste has been living,” Benton replied. “We don’t know what he’s been doing for the past five years. We don’t know what he looks like. Laser hair removal, prosthetic dentistry, plastic surgery, the medical technology available these days. We have no idea what he’s had done to himself since he escaped from death row. What we do know is you recovered his DNA from the backseat of a stolen Mercedes in Miami, and that unequivocally connects him to the bank robberies being committed by Jerome Wild and Dodie Hodge. Both of them are connected to Detroit, which makes it likely that Jean-Baptiste has connections to Detroit. And Miami. And here.”
“The gaming industry,” Lanier said. “And maybe the film industry.”
“The Chandonne family has had its hands in everything that might be lucrative,” Benton said. “The entertainment business, gambling, prostitution, drugs, illegal weapons, counterfeit designer labels, contraband of every sort. Whatever you historically associate with organized crime, Jean-Baptiste will be familiar with it, well versed. It’s in his family. It’s in his blood. He’s had five years to avail himself of a powerful network because of his family connections. He’s had access to money. He’s been working on whatever has been his plan, and any organized plan requires a recruitment. He needed troops. If he was going to attempt to reestablish the Chandonne crime family or build an empire for himself, to reinvent himself, re-create himself, he needed to enlist a lot of help, and he was going to pick badly. An individual with his history of abuse, his history of psychopathology and extraordinarily violent crimes, isn’t going to have what it takes to be a shrewd and successful leader, at least not for long. And he’s fueled by his sexually violent compulsions. And he’s fueled by vengeance.”
The root of the tree graph on the wall was Jean-Baptiste. His name was in the middle of the screen, and all other names branched out from it directly or indirectly.
“So we’ve got Dodie Hodge and Jerome Wild linked to him.” Benton pointed the laser, and the dot moved on names as he mentioned them.
“We should add Hap Judd,” Berger said, and she was different, extremely somber. “He’s linked to Dodie even though he claims to have nothing to do with her anymore.”
Berger wasn’t herself, and Benton didn’t know what had happened. When everyone had gotten coffee, she’d borrowed the desk of an agent who wasn’t in and had made a phone call on a landline. From that point on she’d gotten quiet. She’d stopped offering insights and arguments and had quit pushing back whenever Lanier opened her mouth. Benton had a feeling it didn’t have to do with jurisdiction, with a turf battle, with a squabble over who would prosecute what. Jaime Berger seemed defeated. She seemed used up.
“For a period Hap supposedly sought her spiritual advice,” Berger said in a flat tone, a monotone. “He stated this when I interviewed him early this morning. He says she’s a nuisance, calls his L.A. office frequently, and he avoids her.”
“How did he meet Dodie?” Lanier wanted to know.
“Apparently, she was giving spiritual advice, psychic readings, to Hannah Starr,” Berger answered. “This isn’t unusual. A rather remarkable number of celebrities and very wealthy prominent people, including politicians, seek the counsel of self-proclaimed psy chics, gypsies, witches, warlocks, prophets, most of them frauds.”
“I assume most of them don’t turn out to be bank robbers,” Stockman said.
“You’d be surprised what a lot of them turn out to be,” Berger said. “Stealing, extortion, financial scams come quite naturally to the profession.”