Flesh and Blood (13 page)

“Anymore?”

“Yes.”

She goes on to claim that she doesn’t know for a fact why the couple’s need to move was urgent. She knows only what Nari mentioned last week, which was that they wanted something bigger and preferred not living in the same city where he worked.

“I know privacy was a big concern,” Mary Sapp repeats, and she describes Nari as a popular musician and teacher who had been in the news last year and was “pestered by his students” because he lived too close to the school. If she’d had any inkling they were in any kind of trouble, she wouldn’t have leased the house to them “to begin with and this entire ordeal would never have happened.”

She makes the point that she was under the impression Joanna recently had quit her job as a school psychologist so she could “stay at home and start a family.” She says the couple never let on that maybe “their circumstances” had changed and weren’t at all what was represented when she first showed them the house on Gallivan Boulevard. After Joanna made the phone call, possibly to her husband, she and the Realtor got “into a discussion.” It wasn’t pleasant.

“I tried in the nicest way to convey to her that I no longer thought the property was well suited for them,” she explains, “and she said it was a done deal. Her exact words. She began unpacking things over my objections, threatening to sue me for breach of contract.”

“Were you still at the house with her when she got the call about her husband’s death?” Marino asks.

“I wasn’t. I finally left. That man is just sitting,” she says. “I think he’s waiting for me but I can’t imagine why.”

I recall that Joanna told us the moving truck was scheduled to pick up their furniture today at three
P.M.
and bring it to the house in Dorchester. If she’s still planning to go ahead with the move she should be arriving at any moment but I have a strong feeling she won’t. She hasn’t even picked a funeral home yet and Bryce described her as being in a
fugue
state. If she can’t make a decision about what to do with her husband’s body then it’s unlikely that she’s made any other important decisions either. She’s in shock. I hope she has family. I hope she has friends.

“I’m two minutes from you,” Marino says to the Realtor. “Just stay where you are, okay?”

“He’s sitting in the same place, right behind my car. He’s just sitting inside the truck. It says ‘Hands On Mechanics’ on the door and I don’t know why someone like a mechanic would be waiting here if that’s what he’s doing. It’s odd though. When I saw the truck yesterday I thought it was a lawn care person, like I said. He might be eating something. I can’t really tell from where I am.”

“I’m going to get off the phone now.” Marino is very calm. “You just stay put. You’ve got the doors locked and the alarm on?” He’s asked her this before, and she says yes, she’s made sure of it, and Marino ends the call. “There’s got to be an explanation,” he says to me. “If he just killed Jamal Nari he sure as hell wouldn’t drive over here and sit in front of their house.”

“The fact is we don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I answer. “Including with Mary Sapp. I don’t trust her.”

ON GRANITE AVENUE WE
drive over water. For a moment we’re surrounded by it and I feel airborne. On our right is the Dorchester Bay with its sliver of tawny beach, on our left the Neponset River where small boats are moored.

Marino blasts through an intersection of bright-white-painted crosswalks, no pedestrians in sight, and he hangs a sharp left on Gallivan Boulevard and floors it. I recognize the small shingle-sided house from photographs on the Internet, a white Mercedes parked directly in front and behind it the gray Ford pickup truck.

If the truck’s driver seems concerned that an unmarked police vehicle has pulled up behind him, he makes no sign of it. If the strobing blue and red grille lights are disconcerting or even a surprise there is no indication. He appears to be drinking a large coffee, his sunglasses watching us in the rearview mirror. But he makes no move to get out of the truck even as a Boston Police Department cruiser speeds around the corner and stops in the middle of the street next to us.

“You sit tight and let’s see what the hell this is.” Marino opens his door at the same time the uniformed officer in the cruiser opens his.

At least Marino left the engine running. I unlock the windows and roll mine down so I don’t get any more surprises or feel trapped. I watch him approach the old gray truck, his Harley windbreaker moved out of the way of the .40 caliber Sig on his right hip. He raps the driver’s window with his knuckle as the uniformed officer lowers his hand to his gun and steps around Marino to get a different perspective of the person inside.

“What can I help you with?” I hear a rude male voice say as the window goes down.

“License and registration and step outside,” Marino says.

“Have I done something wrong?”

“Maybe I should be asking you that.”

“I’ll assume you just did and the answer is no. I’ve done nothing wrong,” he says and I have the unsettling sensation that I’ve heard the voice before, aggressive and unpleasant.

“Sir, you need to step out of your truck,” the uniformed officer says rather fiercely, young, dark skinned with a V-shaped build and biceps bulging from the short sleeves of his blue shirt.

The driver’s door opens as the man says, “Don’t get excited and do something stupid. I need to get my wallet and the registration out of the glove box, that’s what I’m reaching for.”

“Sir, do you have a gun in your vehicle?” the uniformed officer almost shouts.

“I do not. For God’s sake don’t shoot me.”

M
ARINO AND THE UNIFORMED
officer have their hands by their guns, their attention riveted to the driver’s every move.

I can see him leaning to the right, his right arm reaching, and the same thought replays itself in my mind, caught in a loop, I keep thinking it. If the worst happens, there’s nothing I can do except call 911. Not all police vehicles have built-in radios anymore. Marino’s SUV doesn’t. He uses his portable instead and has it in hand, leaving me alone with an iPhone, the vest beneath my shirt and my wits.

I didn’t bother with my .380 today, and I wish I had as I watch the driver step out of the truck, the same light-complexioned man who passed us on Memorial Drive. He has short curly black hair, is coarse featured, slender, medium height, dressed in jeans and a baggy denim shirt that isn’t tucked in. In the lobe of his left ear is a small diamond stud, and his watch is military-looking, a black dial with a rotating bezel on a black silicone band. He hasn’t shaved for days. He’s not afraid. His demeanor is mocking and defiant.

“Move your glasses out of the way,” Marino says loudly.

“Do what …?”

“Take them off.”

The man parks the sunglasses on top of his head and blinks in the brightness. There’s something wrong with his eyes. They aren’t symmetrical, are different sizes, one slightly lower than the other. I try Benton’s cell phone and he answers.

“Arms out!” Marino steps closer to the truck and looks through the open window. “Nice scanner. Handheld. You make it your practice to monitor the police around here? What you got it set on? Let me guess. One-thirty-one-point-eight.”

I tell Benton where I am and then I tell him about Machado. I mention the bleach as I watch Marino reach inside the truck and pick up the scanner. Benton recalls that Machado was at the scene about an hour before Marino was called, before I was.

“Yes,” I confirm. “That’s right.”

“Poor judgment if nothing else,” he says.

“At the very least.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“Marino’s not in a position to be objective about it. I’m not saying it’s anything …”

“I understand what you’re saying and it’s a problem no matter what,” Benton replies. “Something gets compromised and it can’t always be fixed.”

We end the call as I watch Marino toss the handheld scanner back on the seat.

“BAPERN,” he says to the man. “So you can monitor what we say to each other and our pursuits and descriptions of assholes like you.”

The Boston Area Police Emergency Radio Network is intercity. Its 131.8 frequency covers most police departments in the greater Boston area, and I wonder who he is. Maybe a journalist, maybe a cop, but neither makes sense unless he’s on some oddball assignment that includes displaying magnetic signs and wrong phone numbers on a truck that’s registered to an eighty-three-year-old man in Springfield.

“I’m not wanted,” he says.

“Right now you are.”

“And you don’t have a warrant to search my truck.” He points a finger at Marino.

“Arms out!”

“I don’t have a weapon.” He holds out his arms, waving his vehicle registration and a wallet.

“Take your license out of your wallet.”

He does it.

“Arms out! Don’t make me tell you again!”

“Don’t shoot me! Don’t tase me!” he exclaims as if either is imminent.

“Turn around and place your hands on the truck,” Marino orders him.

“You don’t need to be so nasty.”

The voice is familiar. I try to place it and I can’t. I watch Marino frisk him, and satisfied he’s unarmed he takes the license and registration. He looks them over and calls them in to the dispatcher. Rand Bloom, thirty-two years old, a South Boston address. I can hear every word of it over the radio Marino holds and the scanner inside the pickup truck.

“This your truck?” Marino asks.

“My grandfather’s.” Rand Bloom leans against it, crossing his arms. “Clay Schmidt. He lives in a retirement community in Springfield but I’m guessing you already know that. What’s your interest in me?”

“I’m the one asking the questions here.”

“Ever heard of the First Amendment, freedom of speech? Maybe not since you don’t seem to know about illegal searches.”

“You want to tell me what you were doing in Cambridge this morning and why you had a different sign on this truck?”

“No. I don’t want to tell you.” He doesn’t sound remotely intimidated.

In fact he seems amused as if the joke is on the police and he knows they’re about to find that out.

“Thirty-three,” the Cambridge dispatcher sounds.

Marino answers without taking his eyes off Bloom, who has no outstanding warrants. Arrested this past March for trespassing, he currently has a restraining order against him and lists his occupation as Specialized Investigations. I realize why his bitchy, condescending voice is familiar. I open my door and step out of the SUV.

MARINO WATCHES AS
I approach. Then Rand Bloom is staring at me. He smiles as if we’re friends.

“Nice to see you up close and personal, Doctor Scarpetta.” His asymmetrical eyes are lasers locked on mine, a yellowish brown like a snake’s or a cat’s. “We’ve spoken on the phone, had several very pleasant conversations as a matter of fact.”

“I know who you are,” I reply. “And our conversations haven’t been pleasant.”

“You know each other?” Marino is knocked off his game, then he gets it back. “How?” he asks.

“Mister Bloom is an investigator for TBP Insurers.”

“There we go,” Marino says to him. “I knew you were a bottom-feeder.”

“It looks like you got another unfortunate case, not that any of them are fortunate in your line of work,” Bloom says to me, and I don’t answer as I hold his intense stare. “A really bad day, a really tough one, and now you’ve got a canceled vacation. What a shame. But just so you know,” he adds and I don’t say a word, “I’m not here about his murder.”

“Oh really?” Marino says. “Why would you assume we’d think you’re here because of a murder? And what murder are you talking about?
His
murder?
Whose
murder?”

“It’s on the news, all over it like I’m telling you something you don’t know.” Bloom stares at me, unwaveringly like a cobra I decide, swaying to his own music before he spits venom in my eyes. “Very sad but his death isn’t covered by us and as depressing as it is life goes on. Well for most of us. Maybe not for you, Doctor Scarpetta.”

“His death isn’t covered by you?” Marino moves closer to him, almost nose to nose. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Bloom doesn’t answer, and I take in the faint scars on his face, the deformity of his right eye from old lacerations and a fractured orbit. An obvious bridge, not a good one, replaces his upper front teeth. I can’t tell about the lower ones. At some earlier time he suffered a violent event that injured his face and mouth. A car accident or a bad fall. Maybe he was beaten.

“Your life just stops when someone dies, am I right? And by the way Fort Lauderdale is a perfect eighty degrees and sunny. Well actually, North Miami Beach, right?” He looks me up and down, his gaze lingering where it shouldn’t and I can feel the heat of Marino’s anger. “Have you seen the building, Haulover Towers? I’m just wondering because it’s right across the inlet from Haulover Park, thus the name. The park is public, constant barbecues, parties, music and ice cream trucks. Can be extremely loud. Same with the causeway, all those cars.”

“Why don’t you shut the hell up?” Marino is glancing at me and at messages landing on his phone, and his face is dangerous.

“The fact is Joanna Cather and I have unresolved business pertaining to her husband’s frivolous suit against my company’s client Emerson Academy.” Bloom continues to ignore Marino and direct his comments to me, and I don’t show my outrage.

I don’t show my shock.

H
E KNOWS ABOUT THE
condo in Bal Harbour. How is that possible?

Benton wouldn’t lease or purchase a property in either of our names. He always uses Limited Liability Companies, LLCs. He’s FBI, former undercover, former protected witness, a seasoned profiler who has seen it all. He’s as secretive as anybody could possibly be and ferocious about protecting our personal lives.

“Unfortunately Jamal Nari’s tragic death doesn’t change the fact he and his wife are greedy and unreasonable,” Bloom is saying. “I was going to try to talk some sense into her and had no choice but to hang out and wait.”