Dust (8 page)

Marino, who is anything but little, rants on about a truck he bought in the fall, his angry story one I’ve heard so often I practically have it memorized. After he’d driven the brand-new pickup for less than a week he noticed the rear was
squatting
, as he put it. When he gets to the part about the bump stop being impacted by the rear axle and the frame being too weak, I cut him off.

“I can’t tell if the cases were settled.” I return his attention to Gail Shipton’s lawsuit against Double S and the suspicious fact that it appears she’s conveniently dead less than two weeks before the trial is to start. “But so far I don’t see any mention of settlements, just that the cases were dropped. That’s the word used in a story that ran in the
Financial Times
several years ago. ‘Double S is a big international business run by a small company in the horse country of Massachusetts.’”

I skip ahead to the most significant part. “‘Claims made by former clients were frivolous and were dropped, according to CEO Dominic Lombardi. In a recent interview with
The Wall Street Journal
he explained that “sadly, sometimes clients expect miracles and then get angry when that doesn’t happen.” He added that Double S continues to be a highly respected financial management company with clients all over the world.’”

“A weird name for money managers. Sounds like the name of a ranch,” Marino comments as the silo-shaped silhouette of the Cambridge Forensic Center, the CFC, appears up ahead.

But that’s not where we’re going. I’m reminded of how close the death scene is to my headquarters.

“It certainly could be one of the horse farms around there.” I’m struck by another close proximity.

Double S is but a mile or two from Lucy’s fifty-acre country estate, fenced in and gated, cameras everywhere, a helipad, indoor firing range, and multiple garages. She has a series of rustic buildings that belie the spartan décor and intense technology inside a main house that is sided in one-way glass with a sweeping view of the Sudbury River. I wonder if she knows her neighbor Dominic Lombardi, and I certainly hope she’s not a client but I doubt she would be. My niece has been burnt before and is very careful with her money.

“Maybe he runs his financial business out of his home,” I suggest as I continue searching the Internet for details about Gail Shipton’s lawsuit, what few there are.

News about her case is almost nonexistent, and I suspect Double S has made sure of that.

“It looks like she filed the suit some eighteen months ago for a hundred million dollars. I seriously doubt a jury around here would go for a number like that. Breach of fiduciary duty, breach of contract,” I read on as I explain. “The upshot seems to be that financial management software used by Double S has rendered the accounting unreliable, and money may be missing.”

“In other words, stolen,” Marino says.

“Obviously that can’t be proven or this would be a criminal matter, not civil.” I’m again reminded of the case Carin Hegel mentioned when I ran into her a few weeks ago. I wonder if it’s the same one.

I have an unsettled feeling it is.

“Where the hell would a grad student get money like that?” Marino turns on the defrost.

“Technology, mobile-phone apps,” I read and again I think of Lucy, who amassed a fortune at a very young age from creating and selling search engines and software systems.

I send her a text.

“Huh.” Marino leans close to me, popping open the glove box. “Getting filthy rich from high-tech stuff. Sounds familiar, right?” He grabs a lint-free window-cleaning paper towel. “I sure as hell hope the two of them don’t know each other.”

Boats moored for the winter are shrink-wrapped in white plastic on the river, the red triangle Citgo sign glowing brightly over Fenway Park on the Boston side of the Harvard Bridge.

I check my phone again but there’s no word from Lucy. Fog hangs over the dark ruffled water as I ride inside Marino’s SUV, an ominous feeling tightening its grip on me. I’m not sure if my unsettledness is left over from the weekend or if it’s related to the prowler. I’m not sure if I’m sensing something else or am simply exhausted.

Marino is full of himself and his policing philosophies and plans. His assessments about crime trends couldn’t be more depressing or bleaker. He hasn’t stopped talking while I barely listen, my mind pulled into an ugly, dreadful place where I don’t want to be.

Put your hands up in the air!
 

Don’t shoot!
 

Words heard over a school intercom intrude upon my thoughts when I least expect it. I continue to be stunned that an exchange would be so banal between a mass murderer and his victims.

“Mimicry,” Benton offered an explanation that doesn’t satisfy. “Mimicking TV shows, movies, games. When people are reduced to their most primal impulses they talk like cartoons.”

“They cry out for their mothers. They beg. Yes, I know that and I know nothing. We know nothing, Benton,” I said to him over the phone late Saturday after I got home. “This is a new enemy.”

“Spectacle killings.”

“That sounds trivializing.”

“A dramatic public display, Kay. The dam began to crumble with Columbine. It’s not new, just the classification is. People have become addicted to attention, to fame. Profoundly disturbed individuals will kill and die for it.”

I still haven’t heard from Benton. I’m beginning to worry about him, too. My worldview changed dramatically after I believed he was dead. I’ve lost him before. I could lose him again. Most people don’t get even one miracle and I’ve had several. I fear I’ve used up my miracles and won’t be granted more.

Marino turns onto Fowler Street, a hyphen that connects Memorial Drive to a narrow unlighted alley. He wipes off the inside of the windshield again with his blue lint-free paper towel. I remember I need food. I remember that tomorrow is Benton’s birthday and I don’t know where he is. I’m so hungry my stomach is sour. Everything will get better once I eat, and for an instant I fantasize about what I’ll cook when I get home.

I will make my special stew. Veal, lean beef, asparagus, mushrooms, potatoes, onions, peppers, pureed tomatoes, heavy with fresh basil, oregano, crushed garlic, and red wine, with cayenne pepper. Simmering all day. Filling the entire house with its savory aroma. Everyone will be together and we’ll decorate for the holidays and eat and drink.

I text my niece a second time. “Where are you?”

I wait ten seconds and text her partner Janet next. “Trying to get hold of Lucy.”

Janet texts me right back. “Will let her know.”

It seems an odd reply, as if they don’t live together.

“Any area where you could possibly access the body we got a unit posted,” Marino is saying, and I tune back in. “Nobody enters or exists without our seeing.”

A patrol officer in a Cambridge cruiser flicks his light bar at us in a quick roll of red-blue. I lower and raise my window to clear condensation off the glass.

“What I call an invisible perimeter,” Marino repeats what he’s already told me. “Uniforms on foot and tucked out of sight in cruisers, keeping a scan going.”

“That’s a very good idea.”

“Yeah it’s a good idea because I’m the one who thought of it,” Marino says.

He’s going to be like this for a while, so grandiose it’s barely tolerable and having no idea how obnoxious he sounds. But I go along with it and ask, “Has any unusual activity been noticed so far?” I check my phone again.

When I texted Lucy the first time I asked if the names Gail Shipton and Double S meant anything to her. It’s unusual that she’s not gotten back to me. I have a feeling her silence spells trouble.

“Nope. Nothing out of the ordinary,” Marino answers my question. “But the guy could be anywhere. He could be watching through one of these thousands of windows,” he adds as his phone rings again.

Carin Hegel’s voice is tense and uncertain as it sounds from the SUV’s speakerphone. She begins by telling Marino that she spent most of yesterday with Gail Shipton in witness preparation for the trial.

“The plaintiff’s case goes on first and she’s my first witness. Obviously she’s my most important one and we were trying to get a good start before the holidays,” the Boston lawyer says in her distinctive alto voice with its strong Massachusetts accent that makes me think of the Kennedys.

“What time did you finish yesterday?” Marino asks.

“She left my firm around four p.m. and not long afterward something important came up that I needed to address with her. I sent her a text message asking her to call me, which she did, but we got disconnected. Is she all right?”

“When did you get disconnected?”

“Hold on and I’ll check my phone so I can give you the exact time. Do we know if she’s all right?”

We head deeper into a part of the MIT campus where student residential buildings and fraternity houses are brick with limestone trim. They crowd the alley to our left, and to our right is the vast open area of tennis courts and playing fields behind a high chain-link fence. In the distance the luminescence of police lighting is an eerie nimbus.

“At five fifty-seven p.m. she called me.” Carin Hegel is back. “She told me she was at the Psi Bar and had stepped outside where it was quiet. I brought up what I wanted to discuss with her —”

“And what was that?” Marino asks.

“I’m not at liberty…It’s privileged – attorney-client privilege.”

“Maybe now’s not a good time to hide behind privilege, Ms. Hegel. If you know anything that might help us —”

“What I can tell you is this,” she interrupts. “I was talking to Gail and it took me a minute or so to realize she was gone.”

“What do you mean
gone
?” Marino drives slowly along the narrow, dark alleyway, the headlights bright on wet pavement.

“The call was lost.”

“And you didn’t hear anything? Like maybe she said something to someone? Maybe someone approached her?”

A tense pause and she says, “The call was dropped so I heard nothing at all.”

“What about right before it was dropped? You didn’t hear anything?”

“Before that she was talking. Is Gail all right?” Carin Hegel’s voice is demanding and as unyielding as concrete. “What is this about her being reported missing? You left me a message that she’s been reported missing and it’s on the Internet. Apparently she was last seen at the very bar she called me from, a place she frequents. An MIT hangout that’s not far from where the body’s been found, the one on the news. Is that true?”

“It’s true that a body has been found.”

“Has something happened to Gail? Do we know that for sure?” Carin Hegel, known as a pit bull of a litigator who never loses a case, sounds terrified now.

“Is there any reason your lawsuit that’s about to go to trial might be a threat to her personal safety?” Marino asks.

“Oh God. It’s her.”

“That’s not been confirmed yet.”

“Is Dr. Scarpetta involved in this? I need to talk to her. I need you to tell her that there are matters we need to discuss,” she says. “Please tell her it’s imperative we speak.”

“What makes you think I’d be talking to her?”

“You used to work for her.”

Marino hesitates, glancing over at me.

I shake my head. I’ve not said anything to her. I don’t know why she would be aware that Marino used to work for me. His recent departure from the CFC hasn’t been in the news. It’s a detail not generally known or even of interest.

“Has Gail been threatened by anyone involved in your case?” Marino asks. “Anyone in particular we might want to be looking at?”

“The trial starts in less than two weeks. Connect the dots, Detective Marino. This can’t be a coincidence. Do you think it’s her? The body found at MIT? It sounds like that’s what you’re thinking.”

“To be honest, it’s not looking good.”

“Oh God. Dear God.”

“If the worst turns out to be true, would that be enough to stop the trial?” Marino asks. “I’m looking for a motive here if we confirm and we’ve definitely not done that yet.”

“It would be all the more reason to go forward. The evil bastards.” Her voice trembles. “But the answer is yes about the motive.” She struggles to steady herself, clearing her throat. “You have no idea what these people are like or their connections, about as far up as it goes, I suspect. That’s as much as I’m saying over my phone, which is probably tapped, and not long ago someone tried to hack into my firm’s computer. That’s all I’m saying but it should be enough.”

“If you think of anything we need to know right away, you got my number.” Marino doesn’t want to hear anything else. Not over the phone. Not when there seems to be a suggestion of organized crime or political corruption or possibly both.

The portable light tower I saw on the news illuminates a muddy red infield where a yellow tarp is staked down by blaze-orange crime scene flags that flutter in the wind. The body is protected from the elements and the curious, the scene secured by Sil Machado and two uniformed officers. They restlessly pace, waiting for me.

“You got any idea why she’d want to talk to you?” Marino asks me about what Carin Hegel just said.

“Probably for the same reason other people do,” I reply. “But beyond the obvious questions I’m always asked? No, except I ran into her at the federal courthouse last month and she alluded to a case she has that involves very bad people. Thugs, she called them, and I got the impression she was worried about her safety. So I’m assuming that might be what she was just referring to. It’s possible she’s done a lot of digging and has discovered that Double S is involved in a number of unsavory things.”

“What does she expect you to do about it?”

“People vent. They know they can say anything to me.”

“Crooks. I pretty much can’t stand rich people anymore.”

“Lucy’s okay. And Benton. Not everybody who’s wealthy is bad.”

“At least Lucy earned what she’s got.” Marino has to get in a dig about Benton’s old family money.

“I have no idea how she could have found out you don’t work for me anymore.”

“Obviously someone told her.”

“I can’t imagine why it would be a topic of conversation.”

“Someone with Cambridge PD might have said something to her,” Marino says. “Or someone at the CFC.”

“I can’t imagine why,” I repeat.

On the other side of the fenced-in fields and across Vassar Street, the dormitory called Simmons Hall is a massive aluminum-clad construction of cubed solids and voids that shines like a silvery space station. I note two more uniformed officers on the sidewalk in front of it, and a jogger not slowing his pace while a bicyclist in reflective clothing disappears toward the football stadium.

“Sounds to me like she’s got good reason to worry Gail’s been murdered,” Marino then says.

“She very well may be worrying exactly that. And she may have good reason, considering the details she’d know about Double S.”

“In other words, what Carin Hegel’s really worried about is herself, worried about her case. A case she’s making a fortune from,” Marino says cynically. “Did I tell you how much I hate lawyers?”

“It will be getting light in about an hour.” I’m not interested in hearing another diatribe about litigation lawyers, or “bottom feeders,” as Marino calls them. “We need to get the body out of here soon.”

I watch the jogger, a distant figure in black, barely visible. For some reason he’s caught my eye, graceful and lean and light on his feet in running tights, a small person, possibly a young student. MIT gets them before they’re old enough to leave home, fourteen or fifteen and stunningly gifted. He jogs through a parking lot and is swallowed by the darkness in the direction of Albany Street.

“Dumping a body in the wide open for all the world to see under normal circumstances. But this isn’t exactly Normalville.” Marino looks around as he drives slowly. “He probably came down this same alley unless he accessed the area from the other side, from Vassar Street, which would have put him practically on top of the MIT Police Department in order to get back here. Those are the only two ways if you’re driving. And he had to have a vehicle to transport her unless he carried her out of one of the dorms or apartment buildings. Whatever he did, he dumped her right in the middle of everything. Crazy as shit.”

“Not crazy but deliberate,” I reply. “He was surrounded by an audience of people who don’t look.”

“You got that right. And MIT’s even worse than Harvard, a hundred times worse,” Marino says as if he’s an expert in academia. “They have to hand out deodorant and toothpaste in the library because the kids live in there like it’s a homeless shelter, especially this time of year. Final exams week. You get a B, you kill yourself.”

“Your comrades have done a good job being low-key,” I point out, figuring he’ll take credit for that, too. “It’s not obvious what’s going on unless you happen to see news feeds on the Internet.”

“Nothing’s obvious to the Einsteins around here. I’m telling you, they’re not in the same world as you and me.”

“I’m not sure I want them in the same world as you and me.”

We reach a sprawling red brick residential complex called Next House, where garden plots are dead and bare branches reach over the narrow pavement and shiver in the wind. Then the alley takes a hard right past a red steel tetrahedral sculpture, and we drive toward the parking lot, fenced-in and bordered by trees. The security arm has been raised, frozen in the open position.

The only vehicles inside are police cars and one of my CFC windowless vans, white with our crest on the doors, the caduceus and scales of justice in blue. My transport team has arrived. Rusty and Harold see us and climb out of the van’s front seat.

“This is where I’d come in if it was me,” Marino summarizes as we drive in.

“Assuming you had a way to access this parking lot. It’s not open to the public.”

“It is if you drive through over there.”

He indicates the far side of the lot flanking Vassar Street, where a chain-link pedestrian gate is wide open and moving in the wind. A car could fit through easily but it would require driving over the sidewalk and the curb directly across the street from the MIT red brick and blue tile police station.

“If that’s what he did, it was brazen.” Everywhere I look I see fencing, gates, and parking that are off-limits to people who don’t have magnetic swipes and keys.

There is nothing welcoming if you don’t belong here. Like Harvard, MIT is a private, exclusive club, about as private and exclusive as it gets.

“Maybe not all that brazen at two or three o’clock in the morning when it’s pouring rain,” Marino says. “There’s no other way to get in here unless you have a swipe to raise the gate.”

“Was the arm up like it is now when the police got here?”

“Nope. The lot was secure and empty except the gate for foot traffic over there. It was open like it is right now.”

“Is it possible the couple who found the body opened it?”

“I asked Machado that. He says it was already open.” Marino stops the SUV and shifts it into park. “Apparently it’s never locked. Don’t ask me why because it sure as hell wouldn’t stop someone unauthorized from parking in here.”

“Maybe not,” I observe. “But most people aren’t going to drive over a sidewalk and a curb in view of the campus police headquarters. I also expect that cars authorized to park here have stickers. So if you manage to get in without a swipe, you still might get towed.”

Marino kills the engine, switching on his high beams to annoy Rusty and Harold as they open the back of the van. They exaggerate shielding their eyes with their hands, yelling at him.

“Jesus!”

“You trying to blind us?”

“Turn those damn things off!”

“Po-lice brutality!”

“Under one of these trees in the rain and dark, and no one’s going to see anything even if they’re paying attention.” Marino continues telling me what his thinking would have been were he a deranged killer.

Clearly he’s decided that’s what we’re up against and I have my own reasons to worry he might be right. I think of Benton’s cases and I wonder where he is and what he’s doing.

Marino lowers the windows several inches.

“Will he be okay in here?” I ask about his dog.

Quincy is awake, sitting up in his crate and making his usual crying sounds when Marino leaves him.

“I’m not sure what the utility is hauling him around everywhere if he’s just going to stay in the car,” I add.

“He’s in training.” Marino opens his door. “He’s got to get used to things like crime scenes and riding around in a cop car.”

“I think what he’s used to is exactly that – riding around.” I climb out as Rusty and Harold clack open the folded aluminum legs of a stretcher and I’m again reminded that I’ve lost my lead investigator.

A stretcher isn’t going to work in these conditions. But it won’t be Marino giving that instruction. The rain is on and off, barely spitting, the overcast ceiling lifting. I don’t bother pulling up my hood or zipping my jacket as I study the fence separating the parking lot from Briggs Field. An open gate is crisscrossed with yellow ribbons of reflective scene tape.

I imagine someone parking in this lot and having a way to open a gate, perhaps by cutting off the lock. This person then moved the dead body inside the fence, transporting it some fifty yards across grass and mud, leaving it in the middle of a red infield that during baseball season might be a pitcher’s mound. As I look at the scene in the context of its surroundings I think of what Marino said:
Some sick fuck out there
just getting started.
Already I don’t agree with the
just getting started
part of it.

My intuition picks up on a calculating intelligence, an individual with a decided purpose. He’s not a novice. What he did wasn’t a reaction to the unexpected. It wasn’t an act of panic. He has a method that works for him. Bringing the dead woman here and leaving her the way he did has meaning. That’s what I feel. I could be wrong, and I hope I am as I continue to think about the Washington, D.C., cases I’ve reviewed. What I’m not wrong about is whoever is responsible left evidence out here. They all do. Locard’s exchange principle. You bring something to the scene and you take something away.

“The grass is soaked and the area she’s in is thick mud so you can forget a stretcher,” I tell Rusty and Harold, or Cheech and Chong as Marino rudely refers to them behind their backs. “Use a spine board. You’re going to have to carry her. And bring extra sheets and plenty of tape.”

“What about a body bag?” Rusty asks me.

“We’re going to carefully preserve the position of the body and the way it’s draped, transporting her exactly as she is. I don’t want to pouch her. We’ll have to be creative.”

“You got it, Chief.”

Rusty looks like a refugee from the sixties with his long graying hair and preference for baggy pants and knit beanies, what Marino calls
surfer
clothes
. This early morning he’s outfitted for the weather in a rain jacket with a lightning bolt on the front, faded jeans, tall rubber boots, and a tie-dyed bandanna around his head.

“I guess from now on we don’t have to do what you tell us,” he zings Marino, his former supervisor.

“And I don’t have to bother telling you shit or pretend I like you,” Marino retorts as if he means it.

“Do you have a gun under that jacket or are you just happy to see us?” Harold needles him back, looking like the former undertaker he is, in a suit and tie and double-breasted raincoat, the legs of his creased trousers rolled up to the top of his boots. “I see you brought your K-nine just in case we can’t find the body that’s out there in plain view.”

“The only thing Quincy can find is his doggie bowl.”

“Watch out. Better not piss off De-tect-ive Marino. He’ll write you a parking ticket.”

Rusty and Harold continue with the banter and snipes. They return the stretcher to the van and collect sheets, the spine board, and other equipment as I get my field case out of the backseat and Quincy cries.

“We won’t be very far away. You be a good boy and take a nap.” I find myself talking to a dog again, this one vocal, unlike mine. “We’ll be right over there, just a stone’s throw away.”

I stare up at lighted windows in apartments around us, counting at least twenty people watching what’s going on. Most of them look young and dressed for bed or maybe they’re up studying, pulling all-nighters. I don’t notice anyone on foot loitering nearby, only the officers on the other side of the playing fields patrolling the sidewalk near the fence.

I imagine looking out a dormitory or apartment window at the exact moment someone was moving a dead body through the rain and mud of Briggs Field, virtually right under everybody’s nose. It would have been too dark to discern what was happening except that something out of the ordinary was. But students around here don’t pay attention. Marino’s right about that. They don’t even look when they cross a busy street, their situational awareness almost nonexistent, especially this time of year.

In several days undergraduate students will be numb with exhaustion and headed home for the holidays. The campus will be largely deserted and I can’t stop thinking about the timing, during final exams not even a week before Christmas. And the proximity bothers me, too. Across the street from the MIT police station and within walking distance from the CFC, not even a mile from here.