Depraved Heart by Patricia Cornwell
“I wasn’t in Florida. Why would I shoot you?” Lucy is saying. “Why would I hurt you? Why would I allow anybody to hurt you? Why do you ask me? How could you think for even a minute …?”
“It’s not Kay thinking it,” Donoghue interrupts her. “And this may be what they intend to prove. This may be the case they present to a grand jury.” She directs this at me. “That Lucy was in Florida and was present when you were shot because she’s an accomplice to Carrie Grethen. Or worse? Lucy’s the one who did it and there is no Carrie Grethen.”
“Maybe the FBI’s position is that she really did die in a helicopter crash thirteen years ago.” Janet says this and it sounds like more than a suggestion, and she looks at Lucy. “And that you’ve fabricated everything about her.”
“Exactly.” Donoghue is nodding. “It’s the scenario all of us should be worried about. But I’m curious,” she says to me, “what about Benton? He witnessed what happened. He saved your life. He must have looked right at the person who shot you. He must have been very close to this person.”
“He didn’t see her.” I’ve asked Benton this many times and his answer is always the same. “When he realized I was in distress that was it. He was completely preoccupied with me and she must have fled.”
“More likely she hung back out of sight and watched,” Lucy counters.
“So it sounds to me that if asked Benton will say he can’t swear Carrie Grethen shot you and the two police divers,” Donoghue decides. “Specifically I’m anticipating what he’s said to his FBI colleagues because you can rest assured they have questioned him ad nauseam.”
“If Benton says to them what he’s continued to say to me in private,” I reply, “then he wouldn’t swear to anything except that it happened. He knows what happened to me. He knows Lucy wasn’t with us.”
“In my opinion the Bureau wants to pin everything on her,” Janet says, and it’s more than opinion.
She’s stating what she believes.
“I think they intend to show that Carrie Grethen is a ruse, a ghost Lucy has conjured up as an alibi,” Janet adds.
“But what I don’t understand is why they would want to show such a thing,” I say to them as I consider the Depraved Heart videos and whether they’re evidence that Carrie is alive.
They’re not. I’m forced to admit it to myself as much as I can’t stand the thought. I know damn well the videos don’t mean what I wish they did. The recordings were made seventeen years ago. All they really show is that Carrie was alive then, and besides that I don’t have these videos or even the links texted to me. I can’t prove a goddamn thing.
“Payback,” Lucy says.
“I doubt the FBI has the time or energy to get a warrant and do all this simply because they’re vindictive.” Donoghue tap-tap-taps the tip of her pen on the legal pad.
“You’d be surprised by the government’s capacity for pettiness and wasting money and time.” Lucy’s sarcasm is biting, her hostility simmering.
“Payback might be the icing on the cake. A little bit of icing on a very little cake.” Janet is always the voice of reason and if anything tends to understate. “But certainly not the whole of it, maybe not even a significant part. Of greater importance is the FBI has reason to want Carrie dead. They want it badly. That’s more important to them than paying you back, Lucy. Again it’s just my opinion but an educated one. I know the Feds. I used to be the Feds.”
“They want Carrie dead now? Or they want her to stay dead?” I ask.
“That’s my question too,” Donoghue says, and I wish she’d stop tapping her pen.
Everything is plucking my nerves right now.
“Do they want her dead?” Donoghue poses. “Or is it that they don’t want anyone to think she wasn’t dead after all?”
“They want her to stay dead,” Janet replies. “They don’t want anyone to find out she was never gone.”
“What reason besides the obvious embarrassment?” I inquire.
“That’s what I want to know,” Janet answers. “But the obvious reason is a bad enough one for them. It would be like finding out Bin Laden is still out there somewhere after our government has reassured us that he’s buried at sea. Just as Carrie supposedly was buried at sea when the helicopter went down.”
“I can see why everybody might want her dead,” Donoghue comments. “Certainly what she did to you”—she looks at me—“demonstrates her callous indifference to human life, her depravity. You could have died. You could have been permanently maimed. You could have lost your leg at the very least.”
“True,” I reply. “All of the above.”
“If Carrie’s still alive you can imagine the black eye the Bureau gets.” Janet pushes the point.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN if?” Lucy says to her.
“I didn’t mean to imply …,” Janet starts to say.
“But you did imply it. You said if,” Lucy confronts her.
“Well it’s hard,” Janet says as I envision the recording I watched moments ago, a recording that is gone. “I’ve not seen Carrie. I’ve not seen a recent picture or a video. I’ve seen absolutely nothing that would prove she’s alive. Only what you’ve said. Only what Kay says she saw.”
I look at Lucy sprawled in a chair, a sliver of her flat belly showing between the hem of her shirt and the waistband of her gym shorts. I think of her dragonfly and what it covers, and then I think about the FBI and other possible motives it might have to raid Lucy’s property, seizing her weapons and electronics.
“Let’s talk about motivation. Is it possible that what they’re really after is access to the CFC database, to all of our records?” I voice that concern, and Donoghue stops tapping her pen. She starts writing again. “Lucy is certainly a conduit into every state and federal case I’ve ever worked.”
“What might they be after that they couldn’t get in a less convoluted fashion?” Donoghue is jotting notes in her loopy scrawl.
“There could be a lot of things.”
“And how do you know the FBI isn’t already in your database?”
“I would know,” Lucy says, and I’m struck by her nonanswer.
Saying she would know if someone has violated our database isn’t the same thing as saying it hasn’t happened.
“Something’s going on with my e-mail. There’s been snooping,” she adds.
“Snooping? That’s a mild way to put it,” Donoghue says.
“I know that some of the time it’s Carrie.”
“And you’ve condoned it?” Donoghue’s tone turns sharp.
“She can’t go anyplace I don’t let her. Think of it as a rat in a cyber maze. She just keeps running into my firewalls. And so what if she sees e-mails I want her to see? But the CFC electronic case records are a different story.” Lucy doesn’t answer that question either.
She continues to speak ambiguously when asked if the security of the CFC database has been breached. She’s simply saying she would know if it were true. She’s not saying it isn’t.
“And the FBI?” Donoghue taps her pen for emphasis. “Could they get into the CFC database, into its sensitive records through the networks here on your property?”
“I’m sure they believe they can.” Lucy continues to be cryptic.
“Then that might be the real reason they’re here. They want to use you as a portal.”
“They may think that’s what they’re going to do.”
“But they can’t?” Donoghue watches Lucy carefully.
“I have no automatic log-ons, nothing that’s going to help them look at anything important. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this is part of their motivation. They want to use my personal technology, my personal communication software as a gateway.”
“It’s important to accept that they don’t want just one thing.” Janet’s repeated comment is making me curious.
“What could they want?” Donoghue again asks me. “One thing, two things, however many things? What might they want that’s in your
“They may not know what they’re looking for,” I decide. “It may be something they don’t know enough about to list on a warrant.”
“A fishing expedition in other words.”
“They may be casting a net for something they don’t want to draw attention to or have no authority to request. Or they may not even know how to request it or what or why, and mind you I’m coming up with any imaginable bonuses that might entice them to go after Lucy,” I explain. “For sure she’s a path that leads to me. For sure she’s a means of getting to me, for acquiring extremely confidential information that relates to both local and federal law enforcement and also in some instances to the military and other government agencies including the intelligence community.”
“You have CIA, NSA cases in your computer system?” This piques Donoghue’s attention.
“We have data that are of interest to our State Department. That’s as much as I’m going to say about it.”
“Have you had any recent cases of that nature?” she asks.
“I can’t discuss it.” I’m thinking about Joel Fagano, a New York forensic accountant found dead in a Boston hotel room last month.
The door was bolted from the inside with a DO NOT DISTURB sign turned on, and what appeared an obvious suicide by hanging wouldn’t have aroused my suspicion had the federal government not showed up for the autopsy. The two FBI agents turned out to be a stalking horse for the CIA, and it wasn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. Spies die in car and plane crashes. They kill themselves and get murdered like other people but there’s a big difference.
When it’s a government operative the assumption has to be foul play. But in Fagano’s case there wasn’t any. Every finding was consistent with him looping a belt around his neck and cutting off the oxygen to his brain, and I remember Benton’s cryptic comment that Fagano took the only power he had when he took his own life—that he must have feared something much more than death. And it lands hard on me.
Data fiction.
Joel Fagano’s body came to us with a thumb drive in his pocket, and on it was financial software Lucy claimed was capable of fraud massive enough to undermine the entire U.S. banking system. I remember her saying the point was to make it appear money was present or accounted for, and then one day you wake up and realize you have nothing left. You’re told you spent it all and to prove it you’re shown a general ledger also generated by the fraudulent software.
What if we go to war, pull the plug, make life-and-death decisions based on data fiction?
Lucy said the term is trending on the Undernet where users are chatting about whether it’s possible anymore to be sure what’s real. How do we know what to trust in this day and age? It’s not a new concern for me. I never accept anything as reliable unless I have empirical proof. This is my nature and it’s also my training. The Greek root of the word autopsy is autopsi, which means to see for oneself, to look, to touch, hear and smell. I can’t exactly do that in cyberspace, and when every detail of our lives and businesses is turned into an electronic symbol it’s both convenient and extremely dangerous.
Technology made everything better for a while and now it seems life is circling back around to the dark ages. Digital communication has begun to make me feel I’m moving faster than ever even as I lose the trusted navigational equipment I was born with. My own eyes. My own ears. My own sense of touch. I miss paper and pen. I miss face-to-face conversations. I worry we’re on a collision course with doubt and delusion on a galactic scale.
What if we are finally put in a position of distrusting everything managed by computers? That would include medical charts, emergency services, blood types, health histories, professional directories, fingerprints, DNA, money wires, financial information, background checks and even personal text messages and e-mails. What if we can’t believe anything anymore?
“Where were you at the exact time your aunt was shot on June fifteenth?” Donoghue relentlessly questions Lucy.
“I was flying my helicopter from Morris County, New Jersey. Headed back here,” she says.
“The attack occurred at what time?” Donoghue asks me.
“About two-forty-five in the afternoon.”
“You were in the air at that exact time?” She directs this at Lucy.
“By then the helicopter was back in the hangar. I was in my car.”
“Which car?”
“I think I was in my Ferrari FF that day. I may have run a few errands on my way home. I don’t remember what I did every minute.”
“It’s the I don’t remember part that’s a problem,” Donoghue says. “Janet? Do you know what Lucy was doing on that day?”
“I didn’t see her. Things weren’t so good with us then. She’d asked me to move out and I’d left town to spend time with my sister in Virginia.” Janet’s eyes are on Lucy. “Natalie was in really bad shape. She was in pain. And she was scared. So it was a good time for me to relocate there and as it turned out she didn’t last long.” She looks away from us, her eyes bright with tears. “But I wasn’t happy about the reason I left home. Suffice it to say it was a rough time.”
“I didn’t want Carrie to hurt you,” Lucy says quietly.
“She has anyway.”
“Your problems with Janet and the fact that she’d left town aren’t good for you either,” Donoghue says to Lucy. “You don’t have a witness. Domestic difficulties point to personal instability, which also isn’t helpful. And with your resources you could have climbed out of your helicopter and straight onto a private jet and been in Fort Lauderdale in two and a half to three hours.” She plays the bad guy as if she enjoys it. “Tell me that wasn’t physically possible.”
“It was more than possible in a Citation-Ten. With the winds that day I could have made it to Fort Lauderdale in two hours.”
“So that’s a vulnerability they’ll exploit,” Donoghue informs me. “They’ll poke big holes in the alibi that she wasn’t in Florida when you were attacked. They’ll say she could have been.”
“What about other proof?” I ask Lucy. “I.P. addresses, telephone logs, recordings on your security cameras? Is there anything that would place you here in Concord, for example, here at your house? I realize Janet wasn’t home. But what about anything else that might place you here?”
“You know how good I am at making my life untraceable.”
“You’re so good at it that you sacrifice the chance of ever having an alibi if you need one,” Donoghue says.
“I don’t make it a habit to think in terms of alibis.”
“In this instance that’s too bad.”
“I don’t live a life that requires alibis.”
“But you live a life that seems to require you to cover your tracks, to make sure no one knows where you are or when or why.” Donoghue is sparring with her now.
“Are you asking if there are people out to get me?”
“I’m not asking that,” Donoghue says. “It’s obvious you think so.”
“I know so.”
“What’s important right now is your own relentless privacy measures that make my job difficult.”
“I’m sure there isn’t much about me that wouldn’t make your job difficult.”
“Your electronic communications never come back to a real location and you don’t use your real name if you decide to jet somewhere and don’t want anybody to know. Am I right?”
“Close enough.”
“It’s very hard for spies to have alibis,” Donoghue says to her. “I hope you thought of that when you started living your so-called untraceable life.”
CHAPTER 23
I’M NOT A SPY.” LUCY BEGINS THE NEXT ROUND OF verbal volleys.
“You live like one,” Donoghue says.
“I learned to a long time ago.”
“Did Carrie teach you?”
“I was a college intern, a teenager when I first met her. She taught me a lot of things but nowhe
“What is that?” Donoghue asks.
“The FBI’s Toyland where the latest greatest technologies are developed for surveillance, biometrics and obviously data management that includes their artificial intelligence network I created in the late nineties. CAIN. That was all mine and Carrie took credit for it. She stole my work.”
“Meaning both of you might be capable of getting into the FBI database. Since both of you created it.”
“Hypothetically,” Lucy says. “But I did most of the creating despite her lies about it.”
“The two of you were close friends for a while.” Donoghue isn’t interested in any credit that might have been stolen. “Until eventually you realized who and what she is.”
“That’s fair to say,” Lucy agrees, and I look at Janet.
I wonder how hard it is for her to be reminded that Carrie was Lucy’s first love. What Carrie says in the videos is true, and I’m not sure Lucy has ever loved anyone else as much. It’s understandable. The first fall is the most intense, the hardest, and when Lucy began as an intern at ERF she was emotionally immature. She was more like a twelve-year-old, and it will forever be her misfortune that the supervisor she was assigned to would end up on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. It occurs to me to inquire if Carrie is back on it.
“That’s one way to know if the Bureau takes her existence seriously,” I explain.
“Well too bad. Because she didn’t make the list.” It’s Janet who answers. “They’ve known for more than two months that she was in Russia and Ukraine for the past ten years and now is back in the U.S. And she’s not officially wanted. She’s not been added back to any list anywhere.”
“They’ve known?” Donoghue says pointedly.
“For months at least that she’s now back in the U.S.”
“They’ve known?”
“They know she’s tied to serial murders and that she tried to kill Doctor Scarpetta.” Janet powers forward with her argument, and it’s as if a dim light flicks on in a distant part of my psyche.