The Scarpetta Factor

“Sounds like the last eight years in the White House,” O’Dell quipped.

“The Chando

“Sure, we can do a predictive model, put a graph on the wall,” Lanier said to O’Dell and Stockman.

“It will take a minute.” Stockman started hitting keys on his laptop. “Not just the bank robberies but everything?” He glanced up at Lanier.

“It isn’t just bank robberies we’re talking about,” she said with a hint of impatience. “I believe that’s the point Benton’s making and the point of this meeting. The bank robberies are incidental. The tip of the iceberg. Or in keeping with the time of year, the angel on top of the Christmas tree. I want the whole tree.”

The reference reminded Benton again of Dodie’s stupid song, her breathy off-key voice wishing Scarpetta and him a Ho-Dee, Do-Dee Christmas, a greeting rife with sexually violent i

“Yeah, it’s ridiculous the Feds can’t put in something like that,” O’Dell was griping. “A damn data wall like RTCC. We need something ten times bigger than a conference room, because this isn’t a decision tree, it’s a damn decision forest.”

Stockman told him, “I’ll throw it up on a screen. Sixty inches is as big as one of RTCC’s Mitsubishi cubes.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Close enough.”

“Nope. It’s going to take an IMAX theater.”

“Quit complaining and let’s get it on the wall so we can see it.”

“I’m just saying as complex as this is, we need a two-story wall, at least. All this on one flat screen? You’ll have to shrink it as small as newspaper print.”

O’Dell and Stockman had spent so much time together, they tended to bicker and bitch like an old married couple. For the past six months, they’d been working the so-called Gra

It was the sharks the Bureau wanted, and Benton was sure he knew what type and family of sharks. French sharks. Chando

Benton believed Jean-Baptiste had sent the package bomb. He was behind it. He likely had made it. He may have watched it being delivered last night. Maim Scarpetta physically and mentally. Benton imagined Jean-Baptiste outside their building, somewhere in the dark, watching, waiting for Scarpetta to return home from CNN. Benton imagined her reluctantly walking with Carley Crispin, walking past a homeless man bundled in layers of clothing and a quilt on a bench near Columbus Circle. The mention of the homeless man had bothered Benton the first time Scarpetta had brought it up when they were talking to Lobo inside Marino’s car. A feeling in Benton’s gut, something unsettling. It had continued to disturb him as he’d thought about it more. Whoever was behind the bomb intended it for Scarpetta or for Benton or for both of them and would have found it difficult to resist watching her last night.

Maiming her or maiming Benton. Whoever had been maimed, it may as well have been both of them wounded, ruined, maybe not dead, maybe worse than dead. Jean-Baptiste would have known Benton was in New York, was home last night, waiting for his wife to return from her live appearance on CNN. Jean-Baptiste knew whatever he wanted to know, and he knew what Scarpetta and Benton had together. Jean-Baptiste knew what they had, because he knew what he didn’t have and had never had. No one understood apartness better than Jean-Baptiste, and understanding hellish isolation made him understand its antithesis. Darkness and light. Love and hate. Creation and uncreation. The opposites of all things are intimately related. Benton had to find him. Benton had to stop him.

The surest method was to attack vulnerabilities. Benton’s credo: You’re only as good as the people around you. He kept telling himself, reassuring himself, that Jean-Baptiste had made a mistake. He’d recruited badly, had enlisted small carnivores that were neither strong-minded nor properly programmed and certainly weren’t experienced, and he was going to pay for his snap decisions and sick desires and subjective choices. He would be undone by his unsound mind. Gra

The pattern was the same in each heist, textbook, as if someone had read the manual. The bank branch had been robbed at least once in the past, in some instances more than once, and had no bulletproof partition, known as a “bandit barrier,” separating the tellers from the public. The robberies always occurred on a Friday between the hours of nine and eleven a.m., when the branch was likely to have the fewest number of customers and the greatest amount of cash. A benign-looking older woman, who until this morning the FBI had known only as Gra

Gra