Berger looks at me. “Possible?”
“Fetal alcohol syndrome?” I consider. “Not likely. Gener- ally severe mental and physical retardation would result if the mother were a chronic alcoholic, and cutaneous changes such as hypertrichosis would be the least of the child’s problems.”
“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe she caused his condition.”
“He certainly might believe it,” I agree with her.
“Helping to explain his extreme hatred of women.”
“As much as anything can explain his kind of hate,” I reply.
On tape, Berger has returned Chandonne to the subject of his allegedly calling the morgue here in Richmond. “So you tried to get through to Dr. Scarpetta on the phone but couldn’t. Then what?”
“Then the next day, Friday, I hear on the TV in my motel room that another woman has been murdered. This time a policewoman. They do a newsbreak, you know, and I’m watching it as it is happening and next thing the cameras focus on a big black car pulling up to the scene and they say it is the medical examiner. It is her, Scarpetta. So I get the idea to go there immediately. I will wait until she is leaving the scene and then I will approach her. I will tell her I must talk to her. So I get a taxi.”
His remarkable memory fails him here. He recalls nothing about the taxi company, not even the color of the car, only that the driver was a “black man.” Probably eighty percent of the taxi drivers in Richmond are black. Chandonne claims that while he is being driven to the sceneand he knows the address because it was on the newshe hears another news-break. This time, the public is being warned about the killer, that he may have a strange medical condition which causes him to have a very unusual appearance. The hypertrichotic description fits Chandonne. “I know now, for sure,” he goes on. “They have set the trap and the world thinks I have killed these women in Richmond. So I panic in the back of the taxi, trying to figure out what to do. I say to the taxi driver, ‘Do you know this lady they speak of? Scarpetta?’ He says that everyone in the city knows her. I ask where she lives and say I’m a tourist. He takes me to her neighborhood but we don’t go in because there are guards and a gate. But I know enough to find her. I get out of the taxi several blocks from there. I’m determined 1 will find her before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?” Berger asks.
“Before anybody else is killed. I must come back later that night and somehow get her to open the door so I can talk to her. You know, of course, I’m worried they will kill her next. It’s their pattern, you see. They did that in Paris, you know. They tried to murder the medical examiner there, a woman. She was very lucky.”
“Sir, let’s keep on the subject of what happened here in Richmond. Tell me what happened next. It’s what, midmorn-ing on Friday, December seventeenth, last Friday? What did you do after the taxi dropped you off? What did you do the rest of the day?”
“Wandered. Found an abandoned house on the river and went in it just to get out of the weather.”
“Do you know where that house is?”
“I can’t tell you, but not far from her neighborhood.”
“From Dr. Scarpetta’s neighborhood?”
“Yes.”
“You could find that house again, the one you stayed in, couldn’t you, sir?”
“It’s under construction. Very big. A mansion no one lives in right now. I know where it is.”
Berger says to me, “The one where they think he was staying the entire time he was here?”
I nod. I am familiar with the house. I think of the poor people it belongs to and can’t imagine them ever wanting to live there again. Chandonne says he hid in the abandoned mansion until dark. Several times that night he ventured out, avoiding the guard gate in my neighborhood by simply following the river and railroad tracks that run behind it. He claims to have knocked on my door early evening and got no answer. At this point, Berger asks me when I got home that night. I tell her it was after eight. I had stopped off at Pleasants Hardware store after leaving the office. I wanted to look at tools because I was perplexed by the strange wounds I had found on Diane Bray’s body and by bloody transfers made to the mattress when the killer had set down the bloody tool he had beaten her with. It was during this foraging at Pleasants Hardware that I came across a chipping hammer, and I purchased one and went on home, I tell Berger.