Flesh and Blood (23 page)

“Crisis management. He must have someone really good,” she says and I detect a flash of anger again. “You anticipate what might get legs and kneecap them in advance. Constant online monitoring, constant risk assessment and no holds barred in protecting the brand. Whoever manages this for Rosado is extremely savvy and has leverage. I suspect the person spends a lot of time undercover in proprietary databases, does whatever it takes.”

Like you,
I think.

“Stealth and manipulation,” I say instead. “All you need is enough influence and money.”

“A politician’s nightmare having a kid like that.” Lucy holds her iPad in front of me so I can see a Facebook page.

TROY ROSADO HAS PRETTY-BOY
looks, curly black hair and a bright smile but his eyes are dead.
A budding psychopath,
and I glance down at my phone as a text from Benton lands.

If
the father
or someone on his behalf attempts contact avoid.

The FBI must be investigating Congressman Rosado or maybe it’s the son they want.

“That little girl’s a real sad one and it sounds like there will be hell to pay. An empty house, a pool and a really deep pocket?” Georgia says, and she continues staring at Lucy.

Sitting straight up in her chair, proud and serious in her navy blue CFC uniform, Georgia likes my niece a little too much.

“The boy is bad to the bone and evil kids are a whole lot worse than adults.” Georgia is indignant. “It’s some day we got going and I’ve only been here two hours. TV trucks were filming the front of the building and now you can bet the media will start poking around about Gracie Smithers.”

Georgia scans her cockpit of flat-paneled security displays. On them are images of every important perspective including interior scans of the bay, the evidence room and the receiving area where I’m now standing.

“Give me some notice before you head back out,” she says, “so I can make sure there are no camera crews lurking around.”

“Anything else I should know about?” I return the big black case log to the counter.

“Six cases so far as you can see with two more just arrived,” Georgia tells me. “The motor vehicle fatalities. Doctor Zenner says we’ll post them in the morning.”

“That’s fine.”

“They came in right before you got here. DOA at Memorial. Newlyweds. It’s real sad.” She gives in and places a cannoli on a sheet of copying paper. “Also the crane operator from yesterday.” She checks her computer. “He’s pending and Luke didn’t want him released yet.”

“Do we know why?” I ask. “Is there a question about toxicology?”

“I think there’s just questions period. He was operating that big tower crane where they’re building the high-rise apartment building on Somerville Avenue. They don’t know if he slipped on the ladder while he was climbing up to the cab early yesterday morning or if he had a heart attack and fell.” She dabs a finger in creamy ricotta cheese filling and tastes it. “Now I’ve done it. There’s no going back.”

“We’ll be in the autopsy room,” I reply. “In addition to the media there’s an insurance investigator named Rand Bloom who I’d like you to be on the lookout for. He drives a big gray pickup, a Ford, and loves to take photographs and trespass.”

Georgia is writing it down. “I know exactly who that is.” She looks up at me and her eyes are hard and flat. “I’ve seen that truck around here several times. Just the other day, late afternoon … I’m trying to think. I believe it was Monday and he was taking pictures of people pulling in and out. When the gate opened he’d photograph whatever was going on in the parking lot. So I confronted him. I gave him a piece of my mind. A sleaze with a big scar and ugly eyes like maybe he got hit in the face.”

“Another thing you can look into for me,” I say to Lucy as we follow the curved corridor away from the receiving area, deeper into my dark Emerald City where guests are taken apart and put back together again.

“You’re interested in what happened to his face?” she says. “Why does it matter?”

“I want to know who and what he really is and what motivates him besides money. Chances are he hasn’t always been an insurance investigator. A lot of people who go into that started out in law enforcement, and he seems to be a common denominator in a number of situations that involve me. Johnny Angiers, for example, the doctor who died in Estabrook Woods. And you heard what we were just saying about Leo Gantz. Bloom has been harassing Joanna Cather and spying on Jamal Nari because of an insurance claim. Then there’s Patty Marsico, murdered last Thanksgiving in Nantucket. He’s the insurance investigator in that case too because her husband sued her real estate company.”

The lights are dimmed inside the evidence room, the door shut and locked, nobody there. Through observation windows I see white paper-covered tables, countertops and drying cabinets with glass doors. A pair of jeans, a T-shirt with some sort of pattern in blue and green, and I see a small sneaker, just one. What happened to her other shoe and her underwear? What about a jacket or socks, and if she had a phone where is it?

“If it turns out this insurance investigator is connected to Gracie Smithers”—Lucy seems to be in my thoughts—“then you’ll know something seriously bad is going on.”

“I already know it’s seriously bad, and you say that as if you’re expecting it is, as if you have a reason to.” I look at her and don’t like what I sense.

A shadow behind her eyes, something dark and impenetrable, and I ask her and she says she’s fine. It’s not important. I reply that everything is.

“What is it that you think isn’t important?” I then ask.

“I don’t like to give energy to things like this.”

“Like what?”

“Okay,” she says. “There are too many weird things going on and people are starting to look at me funny. Not that I haven’t dealt with it before but not here.”

I pause us in the empty corridor. Just ahead is histology with its microtomes, tissue embedding stations and slide warmers. No one is there at this hour. It’s rare for lab workers to stay beyond five. Lucy and I are completely alone.

“What people?”

“When Jen came back from the Nari crime scene she made one of her typical comments to Bryce and of course he couldn’t resist telling me instantly. But he’s starting to act a little flighty as if I make him nervous.”

“Bryce is always flighty.”

“She needs to stop saying things about me. She needs to stop Googling.”

Lucy has never pretended to like Jen Garate and was against my hiring her. Now this, I think.

“How objective can you be about her when you had your mind made up from day one, Lucy.”

“It’s a lot of things, Aunt Kay. Things that aren’t provable and there’s nothing worse.”

“Than what?”

“Than when people start acting unsure. Paranoid. And whatever they’re thinking they won’t say it. They just give you a lot of space.”

“Not you too,” I reply. “What’s wrong with everyone? It’s as if my workplace no longer has gravity and my staff’s chemistry is altered.”

It was better when Marino worked here. Somehow he provided ballast.

“What comments are you talking about? What things are being Googled?” I ask as I think about what Jen said to me earlier today.

Her remark about Lucy flying in prohibited airspace was provocative.

“She wondered where was I this morning when Jamal Nari was shot and mentioned she wouldn’t blame me for
offing
him after the way he dissed you at the White House. Bryce said she was joking of course.” Lucy acts as if she doesn’t care, and I’m reminded of how foolish people can be.

No one with common sense would engage her in a battle, and the more she acts like it doesn’t matter, the more I’m sure it does. Lucy has patience. She’s stoical. She’ll bide her time and then one day the Jen Garates of the world won’t have any idea what just happened to them.

“There’s no place for behavior like that,” I reply. “And I don’t understand why she would make a joke about any homicide, much less imply you might have a motive for shooting someone. It certainly isn’t funny.”

“I’ve shot people before. That’s why the FBI and ATF were happy to send me packing. There are other rumors out there from when I had my own security service.”

It’s a euphemism for paramilitary government contracts that we don’t discuss.

“Does Jen know your history?” I ask.

“There’s information on the Internet. More than there used to be. About my past especially.”

“Why?”

“Blogs that paint me as dangerous and crazy.”

“You must have an idea who’s doing it and why,” I reply because it’s so damn rare she can’t find out whatever she wants.

But she says she doesn’t. Not really. Not quite. Nothing she can prove, and there’s that word again. Something she needs to prove, and I’m not convinced she doesn’t have a clue. I worry that she might.

“Let’s be honest. If you went down a list I don’t look so good,” Lucy says and something has tilted her axis.

She seems a strange mixture of energized and slightly spooked. And I also detect excitement.

“If I didn’t work for myself no one would hire me except you,” she says. “And you shouldn’t have and we both know it.”

“No one has justification to go down any
list
.”

“Behind my back Jen calls me Hack. She says I’m in everybody’s email.”

“You probably are. And it sounds like competitiveness and jealousy to me,” I decide.

We’re walking again. The anthropology lab is just ahead.

T
HE LIGHTS ARE ON
and forensic anthropologist Alex Delgado is bent over an examination table covered with a blue cloth. He’s looking at a femur, stained brown and damaged, the head of it gone, possibly gnawed off by animals.

Tall and gaunt, Alex is as bald as a lightbulb, his white lab coat buttoned up to his stalk of a neck. Rimless glasses with thick lenses make his eyes owlish and he’s a little dingy, almost dusty as if he’s begun adapting to his environment like a moth. Moving slowly, deliberately, he begins placing the femur and other bones into a cream-colored cardboard box. As we reach the next observation window I realize he’s not alone. Ernie Koppel is with him.

“Good,” I say to Lucy as I open the door. “Let’s go ahead and take care of this.”

A toothless skull on a stand stares with empty eyes as we walk inside and I detect a waxy dead smell, vaguely rancid like suet or tallow. The odor never leaves. I can detect it in bones that are centuries old.

“I was about to call you,” I say to Ernie.

“And I was on my way to find you before I head out for the day. Is that your spaceship inside the bay?” he asks Lucy.

“Which spaceship?”

“I bet it’s not as fast as my V-four Toyota.”

“You must be right,” she says, and I find myself searching for the slightest hint of anything unusual from him.

If Ernie is wary of Lucy, I see no sign of it. Alex seems his same self but he’s as obtuse as a stone. I find a Sharpie on a cart of pliers, tweezers, rib cutters, brushes, needles, calipers and saws amid tables of skeletons pieced together like puzzles, male, female, old and young, some skulls robust and rugged, others gracile and small. I sign my initials on the bag of pennies and jot what time it is, twenty past six. Ernie takes the evidence from me, the chain unbroken.

In jeans and a blue-striped shirt, he doesn’t wear a tie unless he’s in court. Already he’s working on his tan, a sun worshipper who spends every long weekend and vacation on the Texas Gulf Coast. Born and raised in Galveston he hasn’t lost his drawl, and his big stature and rugged looks seem incongruous with what he does. Not a cowboy, he’ll tell you, but more like an astronaut exploring the next galaxy of a magnified world where a single-celled diatom is a gem and a dust mite a horror.

“Benton gave me the lowdown on what was on your property this morning and his suspicions about a tumbler,” he says to me and I watch carefully to see if he’s excluding Lucy.

“Obviously the coins have been polished,” I reply. “They’re more than thirty years old.”

He holds up the transparent bag, tilting it, and the pennies catch the light, and he says, “Nineteen-eighty-one. Does that date mean anything to you?”

“It was a bad year.” Lucy looks at her computer again as if she’s searching for something. “John Hinckley Junior shot Reagan in March and six weeks later the pope was shot in Saint Peter’s Square. In August Mark David Chapman was sentenced to prison for murdering John Lennon, and two months later President Anwar Sadat was assassinated during a parade in Cairo. Four shootings the world won’t forget.” She recites information I’m quite sure she already knows, and she might just be pulling Ernie’s leg.

Sometimes it’s impossible to know when she’s being funny, and right now I don’t find anything about this amusing. Her demeanor is peculiar. It’s different. I find her humor angry, maybe hurt, maybe aggressive and spiked with machismo.

“What I remember is Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding. My wife was glued to the TV and all misty eyed.” Alex opens the glass door of a floor-to-ceiling stainless steel cabinet.

“Some fairy tale that turned out to be,” Lucy says.

“You weren’t even around yet.” He picks up the creamy box and I can hear bones shift inside it.

She doesn’t correct him and I don’t either.

“We were just talking about the remains from earlier this week.” Alex places the box inside the cabinet and shuts the door. “From the well on that old farm in North Andover?”

“The stabbing,” I remember.

“A fragment of blade,” Ernie says. “The smallest piece of the tip embedded in the left femur in the area of the upper inner thigh.”

“Which would be what killed her if it transected her femoral artery,” I suggest. “A survival time of minutes at most.”

“We may be able to fracture-match the piece of the blade back to the knife,” Alex says. “Probably no one to prosecute though as old as these remains are. At least fifty years, possibly more.”

They continue discussing sensitive case details in front of Lucy the same way they always have. I don’t blame her for being offended by inflammatory blogs and inappropriate quips but she usually has skin so thick it’s more like armor.