Flesh and Blood (22 page)

The first stop is the digital platform floor scale, high-tech with a low-tech measuring rod near the door where Benton, Lucy and I were talking to Marino before he left moments ago. After a weight and measurement, the newest case is accessioned at the security desk where I’m now standing, the box of cannolis in one hand, the sealed Baggie of pennies in the other.

“Would you like these or know someone who would?” I set the pastry box on the counter of Georgia’s open window.

“They went to a lot of trouble to get those for you. What with this gridlock traffic and all.”

“Yes and it would be a shame to waste them.”

“Well I don’t want to know how many points they are, and tomorrow morning I weigh in.” She sighs as she opens the lid. “Why are you doing this to me, Doctor Scarpetta? You trying to sabotage Weight Watchers?”

“Never.”

“Seven pounds and five to go.”

“Congratulations. Do you like peanut butter?”

“Oh no.” She groans. “The devil is here.”

“Don’t forget they need to be refrigerated.”

“What are these?” Lucy asks about the pennies and I tell her.

“Why didn’t you let me know?” She holds the coins up to the light.

“I just did.”

“I’m talking about the minute you found them.” She’s serious and anger flashes.

“When you were buzzing the house?” I smile at her. “You were a little busy.”

“The date’s interesting.” She returns the Baggie to me.

“I know.”

1981. The year Lucy was born and I’m not going to discuss it in front of Georgia or anyone. Neighborhood kids playing a prank or a symbolic gesture for my birthday, and I’m reminded of how light of heart I was when this day started. Everything has turned heavy and savage. As the hours pass and events unfold, the coins burn brighter in my mind and I know the date on them isn’t random.

On the ledge of the security desk outside the glass is the handwritten log, heavy and bound in black leather, a permanent record of every case since the medical examiner’s system was established in Massachusetts. The large volumes go back to the 1940s and are stored in our records room along with hard copies of files that include DNA cards and in the old days toe tags. Now we use a RFID smart band embedded with a chip that is created on the 3-D printer. All I need is a handheld scanner to tell me who is inside our coolers and freezers.

“Can I help you with anything right now?” Benton is busy with his phone, his electronic tether, looking down at it, a strand of silver hair on his brow that he absently pushes away.

“What would you like to do?” I ask him.

“What I’d like to do? Sit on our balcony in Miami, look at the ocean, have a drink.” He lifts his eyes and holds my gaze, and he’s elegant in his pinstripes and gray like a CEO or an expensive lawyer.

“Sounds good to me,” says Georgia, her golden hair smartly layered and it used to be black with a simple cut, and she has makeup on and then there’s her diet.

All of it is since she started working here several months ago, a nice-looking woman, early forties, former Transit Police, and it doesn’t escape my notice she’s very aware of Lucy who doesn’t return the attention. Thank God for that. I don’t want one of my most recent hires to be the reason my niece is no longer wearing her partner’s ring. It seems to be open season on flirting and fraternizing. Liz with Machado. Georgia with Lucy. Luke and Anne. Jen Garate and her come-hither looks and invasive exchanges with everyone including me. When did my workplace become such a soap opera? What happened to boundaries?

“Until Marino is ready for us I want to continue reviewing what we were looking at upstairs. If you have no objections,” Benton says this to Lucy.

“You can pick up where we left off,” she answers. “I’m happy to help.”

“I need you to stay with me,” I say to her.

We’re going to talk. That’s not negotiable, and I review the log entries, stopping on Gracie Smithers who was just picked up. Marblehead Neck, some twenty miles north of here, a fourteen-year-old white female, a possible drowning. Her body was discovered at eight o’clock this morning in the swimming pool of a house on Ocean Avenue, and I tell Lucy the address.

“Do you mind seeing what you can find on this?” I ask her as Benton places a call, stepping away from us.

“What’s on your mind?” She’s entering a search field on her iPad.

“It strikes me as strange that the kids she allegedly was with would run off and not report to the police or anybody that she drowned,” I reply.

“Doctor Kato signed her out as an accident.” Georgia is checking her computer. “It’s not pending. Only toxicology is. She’s got the manner of death as final and that’s what’s on the death certificate too.”

“The trouble’s just begun,” I predict.

“According to police the pool cover pulled loose and the kids were drinking.” Georgia reads what’s on her display, and I remember what Jen said about the water being frigid and her dry suit leaking.

“It’s on the market. Being sold furnished, available immediately.” Lucy has pulled up the property.

“Sounds like it’s unoccupied, at least it was last night,” I reply. “I wonder how she and her friends knew it was. You wouldn’t help yourself to someone’s pool without permission if you thought they were home.”

“Friends as in more than one? Do we know how many?” Lucy asks.

“Harold and Rusty seemed to think there were several and probably got this from the police. Maybe Jen did too. But what the information was based on I don’t know since it appears whoever she was with left her body in the pool and didn’t call for help. And how did these friends get to and from the house? Did someone drive?”

“Maybe they’re local.” Lucy shows me a slide show of photographs.

THE BIG HOUSE LOOKS
turn of the century, gray with white trim, a slate roof, sweeping verandas and tall brick chimneys. It soars dramatically from a rocky rise with wooden steps leading down to a narrow beach, and the black bottom pool is L-shaped with a granite deck.

I remember what the temperature was last night, a low of sixty and on the ocean it would have been quite chilly. It would seem the pool wasn’t heated and likely had been winterized and not reopened yet. The chlorine level would be high and unsuitable for swimming. What would possess teenagers to jump on a pool cover in the dark? Not much about this is adding up.

“Do we know if her body was clothed when she came in?” I ask.

“I got the inventory here.” Georgia reads her screen and clicks the mouse. “Jeans, a tee, one sneaker.”

“That’s all?” I watch Benton on his phone.

“Nothing else,” Georgia says.

“No problem, thanks, Marty,” Benton says to his SAC, the head of the FBI’s field office in Boston. “Sorry to pull you out of a meeting.”

“Seven thousand square feet, a carriage house garage, a saltwater pool, five acres with a tennis court, listed at six million. Well it was,” Lucy adds. “I guess they’ll be lowering the price or taking it off the market. It’s not good for business if a kid drowns in your pool.”

“I overheard a mention of a lawsuit and a congressman,” I reply. “Do you have any idea what that might be about?”

“It appears the house is owned by Gordian Knot Estates Corporation which is a personal holding company for Bob Rosado’s Massachusetts real estate and who knows what else.”

“The congressman from Florida?” I ask. “He has a home here?”

Rosado is the chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security. He’s in the news often these days because of his controversial push to build a virtual fence on the Arizona-Mexican border. He’s also had his share of scandals.

“His wife is from Massachusetts. They have homes here, New York, Washington, Aspen, and the main residence in West Palm Beach,” Lucy says and I’m getting worried.

My forensic fellow Shina Kato is bright but inexperienced. She’s not board certified yet and would be dismantled as an expert witness in court. Had I been here this morning she wouldn’t have been assigned the Gracie Smithers case or at the very least I would have supervised. Luke should have paid attention but he must have been distracted and busy, and I look at the log again. Harold and Rusty transported the body here and I note their initials and also Jen’s. I need to review the photographs and get myself up to speed as quickly as I can. There’s going to be a stink.

“Gracie Smithers is named in news reports as the victim and it doesn’t appear she was with
several friends
when she drowned.” Lucy is finding more information on the Internet and Benton is confirming with his office that no agents are to respond to Leo Gantz’s house. “Just one so-called friend,” Lucy says, “a teenaged male who isn’t identified.”

“Probably because he’s a juvenile.”

“They don’t say and that suggests to me he’s not. I find it unusual the police wouldn’t release his name,” Lucy adds while Benton goes on to explain that Marino is on his way to the Gantz house and there can be no interference whatsoever.

“My guess is the male who was with Gracie Smithers isn’t a juvenile and had a reason to pick that particular house for whatever he really had in mind,” Lucy decides. “Sounds like someone powerful keeping things quiet if you ask me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out that the person in question is Bob Rosado’s son, Troy. He’s been in trouble before, cyberbullying a thirteen-year-old girl. She hanged herself in her closet and the Rosados were sued. Apparently they settled. This was Palm Beach County five years ago when Troy was fourteen. Two years later he was stopped for driving erratically. In the backseat was a .416 Rigby with a Swarovski scope, a dangerous thirty-five-thousand-dollar safari game rifle that belonged to his father. When Troy refused to get out of the car the cop tased him.”

“It sounds like he’s a real personality disorder,” I reply.

“It gets worse.” Lucy has found something else.

A
DUI LAST AUGUST, NO
jail time or fine, his driver’s license was suspended for a year and he was sentenced to an alcohol-drug program for sixteen weeks,” she informs me. “Instead it appears he ended up in boarding school.”

“Was this in Florida?” I inquire.

“The DUI yes. But now he’s here.”

“He’s nineteen or twenty and in boarding school?”

“Just north of here, Needham Academy, which is basically a cushy place for rich people to park their messed-up kids,” Lucy says. “And it doesn’t look like he stays on campus. A month after the DUI and only a week after he started at Needham he was arrested for arson but the charges were dropped.”

I watch Benton walking down the corridor, headed to the elevator. I can tell he’s listening.

“An apartment building that burned after someone shot a flare through a window. It appeared random, no known motive.” Lucy’s data mining search engines find information fast and furiously. “There was one fatality, a man in a wheelchair who couldn’t get out.”

“Smoke inhalation.” I remember the case.

“And right after that the Rosados put their place in Marblehead on the market. A suspended driver’s license? Right. How is Troy getting around?”

“And why wasn’t he charged in the homicide?”

“Apparently they couldn’t find the flare gun or link one to him. And by the way, his father is an avid outdoorsman, a big fisherman and hunter. It’s not unheard of for a hunter to have a flare gun and he probably has one on his yacht.”

“His yacht?”

“An extremely nice one.”

“I’m trying to remember where he got so much money.”

“Real estate, which is why he could afford to go into politics and have a lot of hobbies. Hunting, fishing, whatever he wants including a beautiful wife.”

“He’s certainly been in the news a lot but I don’t recall anything about the son,” I remark.

“They obviously have a crisis management team that knows how to bury things. You have to know how to look if you’re going to find what I just did.”

What she means is you have to know how to hack. I watch Benton push the elevator button and the polished steel doors quietly open. He’s listening to us.

“Here we go.” Lucy leans against the counter, focused on her iPad, and Georgia is focused on her. “Uber,” Lucy says. “Troy uses the on-demand car service and has the app on his phone.”

“And how do we know that?” I ask.

“He may not have been charged in criminal court but there’s litigation. Short-lived but enough to create a record if you can find it.”

Lucy is accessing Bloomberg Law, LexisNexis, maybe PACER. If she’s surfing other sites, ones she shouldn’t, I don’t want to know.

“The owner of the building that burned and the family of the man who died sued but it was immediately settled,” she says. “According to the original complaint, the plaintiffs claim that the night of the fire Troy took Uber to a paintball arena in South Boston. He was dropped off and several hours later was spotted watching the building burn.”

“Spotted by whom?” I ask and Benton is holding open the elevator doors, his eyes on us. “And this never made the news either?” It’s hard to fathom.

“A firefighter questioned him, asked who he was and what he was doing there.” Lucy skims through another file she’s mined. “In the firefighter’s statement to the police he described Troy as excited by the inferno and indifferent to people being injured or killed. When it was brought to his attention that some of the residents had lost their homes and everything they owned he commented that they didn’t have much to begin with anyway.”

“Pure garbage,” Georgia chimes in with disdain. “They should have drowned him as a puppy.”

“You can find the complaint on PACER if you dig through enough subsets of records,” Lucy adds.

The Public Access to Court Electronic Records service is a restricted government website that most nonlawyers find difficult to navigate. Even so that wouldn’t deter a motivated journalist.

“My question is why other people haven’t found the complaint,” I point out. “A high-profile federal official and somehow his son has remained below the radar? How is that possible?”