“The only witchcraft connection I could find is the Navajo word for ‘wolf’-mai-coh-means ‘witch.’ A person who can transform himself into something or someone else if he puts on a wolf skin. According to myth, witches or werewolves change shape so they can travel unnoticed. And the Pawnees used wolf skins and fur to protect their treasures and for various magical ceremonies. I’ve been looking up what I can as we’ve been moving things along in here. Don’t want you to think I’m the world’s expert on hexes and mumbo jumbo and folklore.”
“I guess the question’s going to be if it’s the same person who sent the singing Christmas card.” Scarpetta was thinking of Benton’s former patient Dodie Hodge, and she was looking at data rolling by.
Pulse oximetry the same, but Toni’s heart rate was dropping. At the corner of Park and East 58th she must have stopped running. Heart rate one thirty-two, one thirty-one, one thirty, and dropping. She was walking south on Park Avenue in the rain. The time was now eleven past three p.m.
Geffner said, “I think the question is what the person who made your stink bomb might have to do with the Toni Darien homicide.”
“Would you please repeat that?” Scarpetta asked as she looked at a GPS screen shot captured by Toni Darien’s BioGraph watchlike device at three-fourteen this past Tuesday afternoon. A red arrow on a topographic map pointing to a Park Avenue address.
Hannah Starr’s mansion.
“What did you say about Toni Darien?” Scarpetta asked, looking at more GPS screen shots, thinking she was misinterpreting, but she wasn’t.
Toni Darien’s run had taken her to the Starrs’ address. That was why she was jogging in gloomy weather. She was meeting someone.
“More wolf fur,” Geffner said. “Fragments of guard hairs.”
Pulse oximetry ninety-nine percent. Heart rate eighty-three and dropping. GPS screen shot after screen shot as minutes passed and Toni’s heart rate dropped, returning to its resting rate. The sound of shoe covers on tile. Marino and Lucy were walking toward Scarpetta.
“You see where she is?” Lucy’s eyes were intense behind the safety glasses. She was making sure Scarpetta understood the significance of the GPS data.
“I’m nowhere near done with analyzing what you submitted in the Darien case.” Geffner’s voice inside the training lab. “But mixed in with the samples you submitted yesterday are fragments of wolf hair, guard hair, microscopic fragments that are similar to what I just saw when I looked at the fur from the voodoo doll. White, black, coarse. I might not have been able to identify it as wolf fur because it’s not intact enough, but it crossed my mind. That or canine. But after seeing what came in with your bomb? That’s what I’m thinking it is. In fact, willing to bet.”
Marino frowned, and he was very agitated when he said, “You’re saying it’s not dog fur. It’s wolf fur, and it’s in both cases? In Toni Darien’s case and the bomb case?”
“Marino?” Geffner sounded confused. “That you?”
“I’m here. In the lab with the Doc. What the hell are you talking about? You sure you didn’t get something mixed up?”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that. The DNA lab I was telling you about, Dr. Scarpetta?”
“I agree,” she replied. “We should get the species of wolf identified, make sure they’re the same, that the hairs in both cases are from Great Plains wolves.”
She listened to him, and she looked at data. Temperature thirty-eight degrees, relative humidity ninety-nine percent, heart rate seventy-seven. Two minutes and fifteen seconds later, at three-seventeen p.m., the temperature was sixty-nine degrees and the humidity was thirty percent: Toni Darien had walked inside Hannah Starr’s house.
Detective Bonnell parked in front of a limestone mansion that reminded Berger of Newport, Rhode Island, of massive monuments from an era in America when staggering wealth was made from coal, cotton, silver, and steel, from tangible commodities that scarcely existed anymore.
“I don’t get it.” Bonnell was staring at the limestone façade of a residence that took up the better part of a city block just a few minutes’ walk from Central Park South. “Eighty million dollars? Who the hell has money like that?” The expression on her face was a mixture of awe and disgust.
“Not Bobby anymore,” Berger said. “At least not that we know of. I assume he’ll have to sell it, and nobody’s going to buy it unless it’s some sheikh from Dubai.”
“Or if Hannah shows up.”
“She and the family fortune are long gone. One way or the other,” Berger said.
“Jesus.” Bonnell looked at the mansion, and she looked at cars and pedestrians going past. She was looking at everything except Berger. “It makes me think we’re really not on the same planet as some people. My place in Queens? I wouldn’t know what it’s like to live somewhere and not hear assholes yelling and cars honking and sirens morning, noon, and night. The other week, I had a rat. It ran across the bathroom floor and disappeared behind the toilet, and that’s all I think about every time I go in there, if you know what I mean. It’s probably not true they can come up from the sewer.”
Berger unfastened her seat belt and tried Marino on her BlackBerry again. He wasn’t answering, and neither was Lucy. If they were still inside the DNA Building, they either weren’t getting a signal or weren’t allowed to have their cell phones with them, depending on which lab or work space they were in. The OCME’s forensic biological sciences facility was probably the largest, most sophisticated one in the world. Marino and Lucy could be anywhere in there, and Berger didn’t feel like calling the damn switchboard and tracking them down.
“I’m about to go into the interview on Park Ave,” she left Marino another message. “So I might not be able to answer when you call back. Wondering what you found in the lab.”
Her voice sounded cool, her tone flat and unfriendly. She was angry with Marino, and she didn’t know what she felt about Lucy, grief or fury, love or hate, and something else that was a little bit like dying. What Berger knew about dying, at any rate. She imagined it must be like sliding off the side of a cliff, hanging on until you lose your grip, and on your way down wondering who to blame. Berger blamed Lucy, and she blamed herself. Denial, looking the other way, maybe the same thing Bobby was doing when he continued e-mailing Hannah every day.
For three weeks Berger had known about the photographs taken in 1996 at the very mansion she and Bonnell were about to enter, and Berger’s response was to hop aboard avoidance, to pick up the pace and outrun what she couldn’t handle. If anybody knew about untruthfulness and its derailments, Berger did. She talked to evasive, unrealistic people all the time, but that hadn’t made a difference-knowing better never does when one is about to suffer, about to lose it all-and she’d ridden hard and fast until this morning. Until Bonnell had tracked her down at the FBI field office to pass along information she thought the prosecutor would want to know.
“I’m just going to say this before we go inside,” Berger said. “I’m not a weak person, and I’m not a coward. Seeing a few photographs taken twelve years ago is one thing. What you told me is another. I had reason to believe Lucy knew Rupe Starr when she was in college, but no reason to believe she was financially involved with Hannah as recently as six months ago. Now the story has changed and we will act accordingly. I want you to hear this directly, because you don’t know me. And this isn’t a good way to start.”
“I didn’t mean to do anything out of line.” Bonnell had said this several times. “But what Lucy found in Warner Agee’s hotel room, in his computer? Now it involves my case because of him impersonating my witness, Harvey Fahley. And we don’t know how deep it’s going to get, what all these people are involved in, especially with the implications of organized crime and what you were telling me about the French guy with the genetic disorder.”