play it on Marino’s computer. Hopefully we’ll be able to hear it over speakerphone. A recording of a nine-one-one call that came in at around two p.m. today.”
“Doing it now,” Bonnell said. “Let me know if you can’t hear it.”
Benton turned up the volume on the VoiceStation as the recording began:
“Police operator five-one-nine, what is the emergency?”
“Um, my emergency is about the lady they found in the park this morning, the north side of the park off One hundred and tenth Street?” The voice was nervous, scared. A man who sounded young.
“What lady are you referring to?”
“The lady, um, the jogger who was murdered. I heard about it on the news. . . .”
“Sir, is this an emergency?”
“I think so because I saw, I think I saw, who did it. I was driving by that area around five this morning and saw a yellow cab pulled over and a guy was helping what looked like a drunk woman out of the back. The first thing I thought was it was her boyfriend, like they’d been out all night. I didn’t get a good look. It was pretty dark and foggy.”
“It was a yellow cab?”
“And she was, like, drunk or passed out. It was real quick and, like I said, dark and a lot of mist and fog, really hard to see. I was driving toward Fifth Avenue and caught a glimpse. I had no reason to slow down, but I know what I saw, and it was definitely a yellow cab. The light on the roof was turned off, like when cabs are in use.”
“Do you have a tag number or the identification number painted on the door?”
“No, no. I didn’t see a reason, um, but I saw on the news, they said it’s a jogger and I do remember this lady looked like she had on some type of running clothes. A red bandana or something? I thought I saw something red around her neck, and she had on a light-colored sweatshirt or something like that instead of a coat, because I noticed right away she didn’t look all that warmly dressed. According to the time they said she was found, well, it wasn’t long at all after I drove past that spot. . . .”
The WAV file stopped.
“I was contacted by dispatch, and I did speak to this gentleman over the phone and will follow up in person, and we’ve run a background on him,” Bonnell said.
Scarpetta envisioned the yellow paint chip she had recovered from Toni Darien’s hair, in the area of her head wound. She remembered thinking in the morgue when she was looking at the paint under a lens that the color reminded her of French’s mustard and yellow cabs.
“Harvey Fahley, a twenty-nine-year-old project manager at Kline Pharmaceuticals in Brooklyn, has an apartment in Brooklyn,” Bonnell continued. “And his girlfriend does have an apartment in Manhattan, in Morningside Heights.”
Scarpetta certainly didn’t know if the paint was automotive. It could be architectural, aerosol, from a tool, a bicycle, a street sign, from almost anything.
“What he told me is consistent with what he said on the nine-one-one recording,” Bonnell said. “He’d spent the night with his girlfriend and was driving home, was headed to Fifth Avenue, planning to cut over on Fifty-ninth to the Queensboro Bridge so he could get ready for work.”
It made sense why Berger was resistant to what Scarpetta believed was Toni’s time of death. If a cabdriver was the killer, it seemed more plausible that he was cruising and spotted Toni while she was out, possibly walking or jogging late last night. It seemed implausible that a cabdriver would have picked her up at some point on Tuesday, perhaps in the afternoon, and then kept her body until almost five o’clock this morning.
As Bonnell continued to explain, “There was nothing suspicious about anything he said to me, nothing about his background. Most important, the description about the way the woman was dressed, his description of her as she was being helped out of the taxi? How could he possibly know those details? They haven’t been made public.”
The body doesn’t lie. Scarpetta reminded herself of what she’d learned during her earliest days of training: Don’t try to force the evidence to fit the crime. Toni Darien wasn’t murdered last night. She wasn’t murdered yesterday. No matter what Berger wanted to believe or any witness said.
“Did Harvey Fahley offer a more detailed description of the man who was allegedly helping the drunk-looking woman out of