Blow Fly

Lucy, Berger and Manham look at the sound spectrograms on the computer screen. Although voice analysis is not an exact science, the three of them are convinced that the man who left the message and Jean-Baptiste Chando

"As if I needed this." Berger swipes her finger across the video screen, leaving a faint trail. "I'd know the fucker's voice anywhere. Tornado. You got it. That's the damn truth. The way he tears through lives, and damn if it doesn't look like he's doing it again."

Lucy explained the satellite tracking that pointed to the immediate area around her building while caller ID showed that the call was made from across the country, at the Polunsky Unit in Texas. "How do we make sense of this?"

Berger shakes her head. "Unless there's some sort of technical glitch or some other explanation that eludes me, at least, at the moment."

"Most important, I want to know for a fact that Jean-Baptiste Chando

"No kidding," Manham mutters, repeatedly clicking a pen, a nervous habit that a

"Zach?" Berger cocks an eyebrow, staring at the pen.

"Sorry." He slides it into the breast pocket of his starched white shirt. "Unless you two need me, I've got some calls to make." He looks at both of them.

"We're fine. Will fill you in later," Lucy says. "And if anybody calls looking for me, the word is that nobody knows where I am."

"Not ready to come up for air?" Manham smiles.

"No."

He leaves, the muffled sound of the heavily padded door barely audible.

"And Rudy?" Berger asks. "Hopefully in his apartment, taking a shower or a nap? Looks like you should be doing the same."

"Nope. We're both working. He's in his office down the hall, lost in cyberspace. Rudy the Internet junkie, which is a good thing. He has more search engines ru

"For me to get a search warrant to have Chando

"Nothing," Lucy interrupts. "You know that's all I ever want leaking outside this office. Absolutely nothing."

"The unforgivable sin." Berger smiles, her eyes touched by a gentle sadness as she looks at Lucy's stern, determined face, a face still smooth and bright with youth, a face with sensuously full lips the hue of dark red earth.

If it is true that people begin to die the day they are born, then Lucy seems an exception. She is an exception to all things human, it often seems to Berger, and for this reason alone, she fears that Lucy will not live long. She envisions her compelling young face and strong body on top of a stainless-steel autopsy table, a bullet through her brain, and no matter how she struggles to strike that image from her imagination, she can't.

"Disloyalty, even born of weakness, is the unforgivable sin," Lucy agrees, puzzled and unsettled by the way Berger is looking at her. "What's the matter, Jaime? You think we've got a leak? Jesus, it's what I have nightmares about. The nightmare I live with. I fear it more than death." She is getting riled up. "I catch anybody betraying… well, one Judas in this organization, and we're all cooked. And so I have to be hard."

"Yes, you're hard, Lucy." Berger gets up, barely glancing at Chando

Lucy gets up, too, her eyes intense on Berger s, anticipating what she's about to say next.

"Chando

"Because of the death penalty," Lucy says.

67

THE TWO OF THEM PAUSE by the soundproof door, monitors glowing, images from closed-circuit cameras flashing from one to the next, and small, bright lights winking white, green and red, as if Lucy and Berger are in the cockpit of a spacecraft.

"I knew he'd be sentenced to death in Texas, and he was. May seventh," Berger mutters. "But no death penalty for him here, never in New York."

She stuffs her legal pad inside her briefcase and snaps it shut. "One of these days the DA might allow the needle, but probably not during my tenure. But I suppose the question now, Lucy, is do we want Chando

Berger says we, although she has gotten no communication from Jean-Baptiste Chando

"No judge is going to grant me a court order to get his DNA," Berger says again in her usual, calm, self-assured tone. "Not without probable cause for a search warrant. I get it, and I'll try to extradite him to New York and put him on trial for the murder of Susan Pless. Based on the DNA from his saliva, we'll get a conviction even if we know that the seminal fluid in her vagina wasn't his, was in fact Jay Talley's, his twin brother's. Chando

Lucy avoids the subject of Rocco Caggiano. Her expression registers nothing. Waves of nausea roll through her again. She wills them to pass. I will not get sick, she silently orders herself.

"I certainly would introduce Talley's seminal fluid into evidence, and there the case gets dicey. The defense will argue that Jay Talley, now a fugitive, raped and murdered Susan, and all I can prove without a doubt is that Chando

"Shit," Lucy says.

"Maybe he gets convicted. Maybe the jurors believe she suffered extreme physical pain, that the murder was vicious and wanton. It's possible he would get the death penalty, but it's never carried out in New York. So, if convicted, he'd probably get life without possibility of parole, and then we have to live with him until he dies in prison."

Lucy places her hand on the doorknob and leans against thick acoustic foam rubber padding. "I've always wanted him dead."

"And I was glad he ended up in Texas," Berger replies. "But I also want his DNA so we know for a fact that he isn't roaming the streets somewhere, his eyes on his next victim…"

"Which could be one of us," Lucy says.

"Let me make some calls. The first step is for me to tell a judge I intend to reopen Susan Pless's murder and want a court order for Chando

"Nothing like justice to help them out at election time," Lucy says cynically as she opens the door.