Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

“I am ruined!” he cries out. “I am ugly and blind and ac­cused of crimes I didn’t do! You Americans want to execute a

Frenchman! Isn’t that it! To make an example!” Chairs scrape

loudly and Marino and Talley are all over him, holding him in his chair. “I killed no one! She tried to kill me! Look what she did to me!”

And Berger is calmly saying to him, “We’ve been at this an hour. We’re going to stop now. That’s enough. Calm down, calm down.”

Frames flicker and bars fill the screen before it turns the bright blue of a perfect afternoon. Berger turns off the VCR. I sit in stunned silence.

“Hate to tell you.” She breaks the appalling spell Chan-donne has cast over my small, private conference room. “There are some antigovernment, paranoid idiots in the world who are going to find this guy believable. Let’s hope none of them end up on the jury. It only takes one.”[“_Toc37098918″]

CHAPTER 16

JAY TALLEY,” BERGER STARTLES ME BY SAYING. Now that Chandonne has vanished from our midst with a simple pointing of a remote control, this New York prosecu­tor wastes no time shifting her intense focus to me. We are re­turned to a small, bland realitya conference room with a round wooden table and wooden built-in bookcases and a va­cant television screen. Case files and gory photographs are spread out before us, forgotten, ignored, because Chandonne has preempted everything and everyone for the past two hours.

“Do you want to volunteer, or should I start with telling you what I know?” Berger confronts me.

“I’m not sure what you want me to volunteer.” I am taken aback, then offended, then furious all over again as I think of Talley’s presence at Chandonne’s interview. I imagine Berger talking to Talley before and after her interrogation of Chan­donne and during his break for rest and fast food. Berger had hours with Talley and Marino. “And more to the point,” I add, “what does this have to do with your New York case?”

“Dr. Scarpetta.” She leans back in her chair. I feel as if I have been inside this room with her for half my life, and I am late. I am hopelessly late for meeting the governor. “As hard as it’s going to be for you,” Berger says, “I’m asking you to trust me. Can you do that?”

“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” I reply truthfully.

She smiles a little and sighs. “That’s honest. Fair enough. You have no reason to trust me. Maybe you have no reason to trust anyone. But you really have no factual reason not to trust me as a professional whose singular intent is to make Chandonne pay for his crimesif he murdered these women.”

“If?” I ask her.

“We have to prove it. And absolutely anything I can learn from what has happened here in these Richmond cases is in­valuable to me. I promise you, I’m not trying to be a voyeur or to violate your privacy. But I must have the full context. Frankly, I need to know what the hell I’m dealing with, and my difficulty lies in that I don’t know who all the characters are or what they are or if any of them might in any way over­lap my case in New York. For example, could Diane Bray’s prescription drug habit in fact be a marker for other illegal ac­tivity possibly connected to organized crime, to the Chan­donne family? Or possibly even connected to why brother Thomas’s body ended up in Richmond?”

“By the way.” I am stuck on another matter, namely, my credibility. “How does Chandonne explain that there were two chipping hammers at my house? Yes, 1 bought one at the hard­ware store, as I have told you. So where did the other one come from if he didn’t bring it with him? And if I wanted to kill him, why didn’t I use the pistol? My Glock was right there on the dining-room table.”

Berger hesitates and completely dodges my questions. “If I don’t know the whole truth, then it makes it very difficult to sort out what’s relevant to my case and what isn’t.”

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