"You look like holy hell. But what matters is how I look," she dryly says as Lucy greets her.
"You're very photogenic," Lucy replies with a quip she's used before. "You could have had a brilliant acting career in Hollywood."
Berger is a dark-haired woman with sharp features and pretty teeth. She is always dressed impeccably in power suits accented by expensive accessories, and although she might not think of herself as an actor, any good prosecutor is theatrical during interviews and certainly in the courtroom. Berger looks around at a wall of closed mahogany doors. One opens, and Zach Manham walks out, holding a stack of CDs.
"Step into my parlor," Lucy says to Berger. "A spider's turned up."
"A tarantula," Manham gravely adds. "How'ya doin, Boss?" He shakes Berger's hand.
"Still miss the good ol' days?" Berger smiles at him, but her eyes belie her light demeanor.
Losing Manham from the DA's detective squad, or from her A Team, as she calls it, still hurts, even though it is for the best and she continues to work with him at times such as this one.
Another era passed.
"Step this way," Manham says.
Berger follows him and Lucy inside what is simply referred to as the lab. The room is large and soundproof, like a professional recording studio. Overhead shelves are stacked with sophisticated audio, video and global-positioning and various tracking systems that defy Berger's expertise and never cease to amaze her when she comes to Lucy's office. Everywhere, lights blink and video screens flash from one image to another, some of them the interior of the building, others monitoring locations that make no sense to Berger.
She notices what looks like a bundle of tiny microphones on top of a desk crowded with modems and monitors.
"What's this latest contraption?" she asks.
"Your latest piece of jewelry. An ultramicro transmitter," Lucy replies, picking up the bundle and pulling loose one of the transmitters, no bigger than a quarter and attached to a long, thin cord. "It goes with this." She taps what looks like a black box with jacks and an LCD. "We can disappear this baby in the hem of one of your Armani jackets, and if you get snatched, the quasi-Doppler direction finder can locate your exact position by VHF and UHF signals.
"Frequency range, twenty-seven to five hundred megahertz. Channels selected on a simple keyboard, and this other thing you're looking at"-she pats the black box-"is a tracking system we can use to monitor wherever the hell you are in your car, on your motorcycle, your bicycle. Nothing more than a crystal oscillator powered by a nicad battery. Can monitor up to ten targets at a time, supposing your husbands screwing around on you with multiple women."
Berger doesn't react to a subtlety that is anything but subtle.
"Water-resistant," Lucy goes on. "A nice carrying case with a shoulder strap; could probably get Gurkha or Hermes to design a special one- perhaps in ostrich or kangaroo-just for you. Aircraft antenna available if you want to feel secure when you fly on a Learjet, a Gulf Stream, however you get about, woman-on-the-go that you are."
"Another time," Berger says. "I hope you didn't bring me uptown to show me what happens if I get lost or kidnaped."
"Actually, I didn't."
Lucy sits before a large monitor. Her fingers rapidly tap on the keyboard as she flies through windows, moving deeper into a forensic scientific software application that Berger doesn't recognize.
"You get this from NASA?" she asks.
"Maybe," Lucy replies, pointing the cursor at a folder labeled with a number that, again, is meaningless to Berger. "NASA does a lot more than bring home moon rocks. Put it this way"-Lucy pauses, hovering over a key, staring intensely at the screen-"I've got rocket-scientist buddies at the Langley Research Center." She rolls the mouse around. "Lot of nice people there who don't get the credit they deserve"-tap-tap-tap. "We've got some pretty amazing projects going on. Okay." She clicks on a file labeled with an accession number and today's date.
"Here we go." She looks up at Berger. "Listen."
"Good afternoon. May I ask who's calling?" The male voice on the tape is Zach Manham's.
"When Mademoiselle Farinelli returns, tell her Baton Rouge. "
66
BERGER PULLS UP A CHAIR and sirs down, riveted to the computer screen.
Frozen on it are two voiceprints or spectrograms-2.5-second digital cuts-of a taped human voice converted into electrical frequencies. The resulting patterns are black and white vertical and horizontal bands that, like Rorschach inkblots, evoke different imaginative associations, depending on who is looking at them. In this case, the voiceprints remind Lucy of a black-and-white abstract painting of tornadoes.
She mentions this to Berger and adds, "That figures, doesn't it? What I've done here-or, should I say, what the computers done here-is find Chandonnes speech sounds from another source. In this case, your videotaped interview of him after his arrest in Richmond. The computer looked for matching words.
"Of course, the bastard didn't make that easy when you look at the words used in the call we got. Nowhere in his interview with you," Lucy goes on, "does he say Baton Rouge, for example. Nor does he ever mention me-Lucy Farinelli-by name. That leaves when, returns and tell her. Nowhere near as many sounds as I'd like for comparison. We'd like at least twenty matching speech sounds for a positive match. However, what we've got is a significant similarity. The darkest areas on the known and questioned voiceprints correspond to the intensity of the frequencies." She points out black areas of the voiceprints on the computer screen.
"Looks the same to me," Berger remarks.
"Definitely. In the four words when, returns and tell her, yes, I agree."
"Hey, I'm convinced," Manham says. "But in court, we'd have a hard time, for the reason Lucy said. We don't have enough matching sounds to convince a jury."
"Forget court for the moment," says New York's most respected prosecutor.
Lucy strikes other keys and activates a second file.
"I begin to touch her breasts and unhook her bra, " says Jean-Baptiste's voice-that soft, polite voice.
Then Lucy says, "Here we go, three other fragments of an interview that contains words for comparison."
"Iwas a bit confused at first when I tried to touch her and couldn't pull out her top."
Next is, "But I can tell you are pretty, "Jean-Baptiste Chandonne says.
"More," says Lucy: "It was a return ticket, coach, to New York. "
Lucy explains: "Our four words, Jaime, close enough. As I indicated, these phrases are from your videotaped interview with him prior to his arraignment, when you were brought in as a special prosecutor."
It is difficult for Lucy to hear segments of this interview. Vaguely, she resents Berger for forcing Scarpetta to watch the videotape, although it was necessary, completely necessary, to subject her to hours of what was nothing more than manipulative, violent pornography after he had almost murdered her. Jean-Baptiste lied and enjoyed it. No doubt, he was sexually aroused by the thought that Scarpetta, a victim and key witness, was his audience. For hours, she watched and listened to him fabricate in detail not only what he did in Richmond but his 1997 so-called romantic encounter with Susan Pless, a television meteorologist for CNBC whose savaged dead body was found inside her apartment in New York's Upper East Side.
She was twenty-eight years old, a beautiful African-American beaten and bitten in the same grotesque fashion as Chandonne's other victims. Only in her murder, seminal fluid was recovered. In Jean-Baptistes more recent slayings, the ones in Richmond, the victims were nude only from the waist up, and no seminal fluid was recovered, only saliva. That fact led to conclusions, based in part on DNA analysis, that the Chandonne web is a tight weave of organized crime for profit and violent aberrance committed for sadistic sport. Jean-Baptiste and Jay Talley enjoy their nonprofit sport. In the sexual slaying of Susan Pless, the two brothers tag-teamed, the debonair Jay seducing and raping Susan, then handing her off to his hideous, impotent twin.