The Scarpetta Factor

Six Days Later

Inside the Memorial Room at Two Truck, chairs and benches had been set up near the Coke machine and gun safe because there wasn’t enough room in the kitchen for everyone to sit. Scarpetta had brought too much food.

Spinach and egg pappardelle, maccheroni, pe

“The whole precinct’s going to come over here,” he said, checking on the bread. “Or maybe all of Harlem. This might be ready.”

“It should sound hollow when you tap it,” Scarpetta said, wiping her hands on her apron and taking a look, a wave of fragrant heat rising from the oven.

“Sounds hollow to me.” Lobo licked the finger he’d used to tap the bread.

“Same way he checks bombs.” Marino walked into the kitchen, Mac the boxer and Lucy’s bulldog, Jet Ranger, right behind him, toenails clicking on tile. “He thumps it and if it doesn’t blow up, he gets to go home early, all in a day’s work. Can they have anything?” Marino was talking about the dogs.

“No,” Lucy answered loudly from the Memorial Room. “No people food.”

On the other side of an open doorway, she and Berger were arranging strands of white lights on top of the display case containing the personal effects of Joe Vigiano, John D’Allara, and Mike Curtin, the responders from the Two who had died on 9/11. Their gear recovered from the ruins was arranged on shelves, an assortment of handcuffs, keys, holsters, wire cutters, flashlights, D rings and clips from Roco harnesses, melted and bent, and on the floor was a section of steel beam from the World Trade Center. Photos of the three men and other members of the Two who had died on duty were arranged on maple-paneled walls, and over Mac’s dog bed was an American flag quilt made by a grammar school. Christmas music accompanied the chatter of police radios, and Scarpetta heard footsteps on the stairs.

Benton had gone out with Bo

Benton appeared in the doorway with a box, his face ruddy from the cold.

“L.A.’s still parking the car. Even cops have no place to park around here. Where would you like it?” He walked in, looking around, not an empty space on a countertop or the kitchen table.

“Here.” Scarpetta moved several bowls. “The mousse goes in the freezer for now. And I see you brought wine. Well, I guess you won’t be helping out in any emergencies. Is it legal to have wine up here?” she called out to whoever wanted to answer from the Memorial Room, where Lobo and Droiden were with Berger and Lucy.

“Only if it’s got a screw cap or comes out of a box,” Lobo answered back.

“Anything that costs more than five bucks is contraband,” Droiden added.

“Who’s on call?” Lucy said. “I’m not. Jaime’s not. I think Mac needs to potty.”

“He off-gassing again?” Lobo asked.

The brindle boxer was old and arthritic, as was Jet Ranger, both of them rescues, and Scarpetta found the package of treats she’d baked, a healthy cookie made with peanut butter and spelt flour. She whistled and the dogs hurried over to her, not spry but they hadn’t lost their enthusiasm, and she said “sit” and then rewarded them.

“If only it were that easy with people,” she said, taking off her apron. “Come on,” she said to Benton. “Mac needs a little exercise.”

Benton got the leash and they put on their coats, and Scarpetta stuffed several plastic bags in a pocket. They took Mac down the scuffed wooden stairs and through the huge garage filled with emergency trucks and gear, hardly any room to walk, and out a side door. Across Tenth Avenue was a small park next to Saint Mary’s Church, and she and Benton headed Mac over there because frozen balding grass was better than pavement.

“Status check,” Benton said. “You’ve been cooking for two days.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to bring it up in there,” he said as Mac started sniffing, pulling him toward a bare tree, then toward a bush. “They’re going to talk about it all night, anyway. And I think we should let them and in a little while you and I should go home. We should be alone. We haven’t been alone all week.”

They hadn’t slept much, either. It had taken several days to excavate the Starr mansion basement because the electronic nose, the LABRADOR, had gotten as industrious in its sniffing as Mac was right now, leading Scarpetta everywhere, alerting on traces of decomposed blood. For a while she’d feared that there were many bodies in the two levels below the house where Rupe Starr had maintained and kept his cars, but there hadn’t been. In the end, only Ha

The shift assembly was from a hand-built car called a Spyker that Lucy said Rupe had restored and then sold some five years ago, and DNA recovered from it had been contributed by multiple people, three of them positively identified: Ha

He wasn’t any more or less special than anyone, just one more body on a table, only he had more than the usual remnants of cosmetic reconstruction and improvements. His corrective surgeries would have taken years of visits to the OR and long convalescences that must have been torture. Scarpetta could only imagine the misery of full-body-hair laser removal and having every tooth crowned. But perhaps he had been pleased with the end result, because no matter how much she had studied him in the morgue, she’d found very little evidence of his deformities, just railroad tracks of surgical scars revealed when his head was shaved around the entrance and exit wounds caused by the nine-millimeter round Benton had fired through Jean-Baptiste’s upper forehead.

Jean-Baptiste Chando