CHAPTER 11
I TURN ON THE TELEVISION AND HAND BERGER THE remote control.
“Dr. Scarpetta”she completely ignores Marino”before we get into this, let me give you a little background on how the district attorney’s office works in Manhattan. As I’ve already mentioned, we do a number of things very differently from what you’re accustomed to here in Virginia. I was hoping to explain all that to you before you were subjected to what you are about to see. Are you familiar with our system of homicide call?”
“No,” I reply as my nerves tighten and begin to hum.
“Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, an assistant D.A. is on call should a homicide go down or the cops locate a defendant. In Manhattan, the cops can’t arrest a defendant without the D.A.’s office giving them the go-ahead, as I’ve already explained. This is to ensure that everythingsearch warrants, for exampleare executed properly. It’s common for the prosecutor, the assistant, to go to the crime scene, and in a situation where a defendant is arrested, if he’s willing to be interviewed by the assistant, we jump all over it. Captain Marino,” she says, giving him her cool attention, “you started out in NYPD, but that may have been before all this was implemented.”
“Never heard of it before today,” he mumbles, face still dangerously red.
“What about vertical prosecution?”
“Sounds like a sex act,” Marino replies.
Berger pretends she didn’t hear that. “Morgenthau’s idea,” she says to me.
Robert Morgenthau has been the district attorney in Manhattan for nearly twenty-five years. He is a legend. It is obvious Berger loves working for him. Something stirs deep inside me. Envy? No, maybe wistfulness. I am tired. I experience a growing feeling of powerlessness. I have no one but Marino, who is anything but innovative or enlightened. Marino is not a legend and right now I don’t love working with him or even want him around.
“The prosecutor has the case from intake on,” Berger begins to explain vertical prosecution. “Then we don’t have to fool with three or four people who have already interviewed our witnesses or the victim. If a case is mine, for example, I might literally start out at the crime scene and end up in court. A purity you absolutely can’t argue with. If I’m lucky, I interrogate the defendant before he retains counselobviously, no defense attorney’s going to agree to his client talking to me.” She hits the play button on the remote control. “Fortunately, I caught Chandonne before he got counsel. I interviewed him several times in the hospital beginning at the rather inhumane hour of three o’clock this morning.”
To say I am shocked would be a gross trivialization of my reaction to what she has just revealed. It can’t be possible that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne would talk to anyone.
“Clearly, you’re a bit taken aback.” Berger’s comment to me seems rhetorical, as if she has some point to make.
“You might say that,” I answer her.
“Maybe it hasn’t really occurred to you that your assailant can walk, talk, chew gum, drink Pepsi? Maybe he doesn’t
seem fully human to you?” she suggests. “Maybe you think
he really is a werewolf.”
I never actually saw him when he spoke cogently on the other side of my front door. Police. Is everything all right inthere? After that, he was a monster. Yes, a monster. Yes, a monster coming after me with a black iron tool that looked like something from the Tower of London. Then he was grunting and screaming and sounded very much the way he looks, which is hideous, unearthly. A beast.
Berger smiles a bit wearily. “Now you’re about to see our challenge, Dr. Scarpetta. Chandonne isn’t crazy. He isn’t supernatural. And we don’t want jurors holding him to a different standard just because he has an unfortunate medical condition. But I also want them to see him now, before he’s cleaned up and wearing a three-piece suit. I think the jurors need to fully appreciate the terror his victims felt, don’t you?” Her eyes touch mine. “Might help them get the drift that no one in her right mind would have invited him into her home.”