The Scarpetta Factor by Patricia Cornwell

Author:Patricia Cornwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 0399156399
Publisher: Putnam Adult
Published: 2009-10-20T05:00:00+00:00

Lucy’s forensic computer investigative agency, Connextions, was located in the same building where she lived, the nineteenth-century former warehouse of a soap-and-candle company on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, technically the Far West Village. Two-story brick, boldly Romanesque, with rounded arched windows, it was registered as a historic landmark, as was the former carriage house next door that Lucy had purchased last spring to use as a garage.

She was a dream for any preservation commission, since she had not the slightest interest in altering the integrity of a building beyond the meticulous retrofits necessary for her unusual cyber and surveillance needs. More relevant to any nonprofit was her philanthropy, which wasn’t without personal benefit, not that Jaime Berger had the slightest faith in altruistic motives being pure, not hardly. She had no idea how much Lucy had donated to de facto conflicts of interest, and she should have an idea, and that bothered her. Lucy should keep nothing from her, but she did, and over recent weeks, Berger had begun to feel an uneasiness about their relationship that was different from misgivings she’d experienced so far.

“Maybe you should get it tattooed on your hand.” Lucy held up her hand, palm first. “To cue yourself. Actors like cues. It all depends. ” She pretended to read something written on the palm of her hand. “Get a tattoo that says It all depends and look at it every time you’re about to lie.”

“I don’t need cues, and I’m not lying,” Hap Judd replied, maintaining his poise. “People say all kinds of things, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they did anything wrong.”

“I see,” Berger said to Judd as she wished Marino would hurry up. Where the hell was he? “Then what you meant in the bar this past Monday night, the night of December fifteenth, all depends on how one—in this case, me—interprets what you said to Eric Mender. If you stated to him that you can understand being curious about a nineteen-year-old girl in a coma and wanting to see her naked and perhaps touch her in a sexual manner, it’s all in the interpretation. I’m trying to figure out how I might interpret a remark like that beyond finding it more than a little troubling.”

“Good God, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. The interpretation. It’s not . . . It’s not the way you’re thinking. Her picture was all over the news. And it was where I was working then, the hospital she was in happened to be where I had a job,” Judd said with less poise. “Yeah, I was curious. People are curious if they’re honest. I’m curious for a living, curious about all kinds of things. Doesn’t mean I did anything.”

Hap Judd didn’t look like a movie star. He didn’t look like the type to have roles in big-budget franchises like Tomb Raider and Batman. Berger couldn’t stop thinking that as she sat across from him at the brushed-steel conference table in Lucy’s barnlike space of exposed timber beams and tobacco-wood floors, and computer flat screens asleep on paperless desks.

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