Flesh and Blood (32 page)

“There was no sign of sexual assault,” I remind him.

“The sexual gratification came from the violence.” He studied the scene when he was there, taking in every detail silently, oddly, like a peculiar savant. “But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a motive,” he says. “I’ve always felt there was, that Patty Marsico was a problem for someone.”

“Her husband? He wanted to collect insurance money that he wouldn’t be entitled to after the divorce? And he staged her death to look like a sexual homicide? That’s what TBP wants everyone to think.”

“It’s not what happened and there’s no evidence her husband was ever inside the house, which is one of many reasons why he’s never been arrested,” Benton says. “He also has an alibi. He was at work. It was witnessed by at least half a dozen people.”

On North Shore Road now we cross Pines River, and the water is dark and empty on both sides of the bridge. To our right, the Broad Sound is as black as outer space. The GPS says we have ten miles to go. At the speed limit it will take us almost twenty minutes.

“Gracie Smithers.” I get to what is bothering me most.

“I’m considering the same thing.” Relaxed and driving smoothly, he has his left hand on the wheel and I reach for his right one.

I lace my fingers in his and feel his warm smooth skin, the tension in the fine muscles, the tapered hardness of his bones. He glances over at me as we talk.

“She was incapacitated by having her head slammed against a flat surface, then held down in water, her cause of death drowning,” I point out. “A murder that was staged and it feels like an ambush unless she was abducted which I seriously doubt.”

Gracie’s parents didn’t know she was gone until they got up early this morning in their Salem home, Investigator Henderson told me some three hours ago after he was assigned to the case. The Smitherses called the police and almost simultaneously their daughter’s body was discovered some five miles southeast in Marblehead Neck. A Realtor checking on the Rosado house noticed a vodka bottle near the pool, the cover partially pulled back.

Henderson went on to tell me that at some point late last night when Gracie’s parents thought she was asleep she snuck out her bedroom window. He believes she was meeting someone and that this person was Troy Rosado. He’s known to party at Salem State College where Gracie’s father teaches economics, and several days ago he spotted Troy and Gracie at the college ATM. She was forbidden to see the troubled nineteen-year-old again.

Conveniently the congressman’s son is now nowhere to be found, it seems. Henderson contacted Troy’s mother who claimed he’s supposed to fly to Florida early tomorrow morning for a weekend of scuba diving with the family. She’s certain that if the investigator checked he’d find Troy packing up his room on the boy’s residential campus of Needham Academy, getting ready to come home for the summer. For privacy and security reasons she refused to release information about the private jet he’s scheduled to be on.

“The important question is whether Gracie Smithers’s murder was premeditated or did something get out of hand?” Benton says as we pass through Swampscott on 129 and the darkness around us is almost complete. “Was there expediency in her being killed and I continue to ask the same thing about Patty Marsico.”

I envision the murders as if they’re happening before my eyes, and what doesn’t fit is that Gracie was killed by an impulse-driven teenaged boy.

“He might have gotten sexually aggressive with her,” I explain. “Things might have gotten out of hand. But I find it improbable that he murdered her and then had the organization and cool to pull the cover back from the pool and stage an accidental drowning.”

“I tend to agree.” Benton slowly strokes my hand with his thumb. “And if someone else in fact killed her then this person must have been on the property with them.”

“If this isn’t about money then what?”

“Whatever is of value. Money is obvious. But equally worth killing for is information.”

“Such as being an unwitting observer, being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I suggest.

“Exactly,” Benton says. “Patty Marsico and Gracie Smithers might have known something even if they had no idea they did.”

In the distance are the scattered lights of Marblehead Neck and beyond are the harbor and the sea. I’m worried about how dark it is, the moon and stars obliterated by building clouds but waiting until morning isn’t an option. If word gets out that I believe Gracie Smithers is a homicide then the actual scene of her death may be tampered with. I worry it already has been. I need to see the saltwater pool and I need a sample of the sediment at the bottom of it, and I need to be ahead of heavy rain and winds that are closing in. Moments ago big drops spattered the windshield and then we drove out of it. But advancing thunderstorms will catch up with us soon.

I check my phone with growing concern. Joe Henderson is supposed to meet us and he said to let him know when we were an hour out. I’ve texted him three times and left voice mails twice and there is no response. I call the police department’s investigative unit and the man who answers says that Henderson marked off duty at six
P.M.

“Which is about the time I talked to him,” I reply. “He agreed to meet me.”

“On his own time as a courtesy.” It’s not a friendly thing to say.

“I wonder if you have a way to reach him. Special Agent Benton Wesley and I are maybe twenty minutes out. This is in reference …”

“Yes, ma’am. I know what it’s in reference to and you have an FBI agent with you? I’m wondering when the FBI got involved and why no one bothered to mention it?” He’s not hostile or rude but he’s not warm either.

“He happens to be with me.” I don’t offer that Special Agent Wesley is my husband.

“Hold on and let me see if Joe’s at home. You’re aware that we’re expecting severe weather?”

“That’s why I’m doing this now.”

I hear him calling a landline and I catch that his last name is Freedman and he’s a detective sergeant. He has a brief exchange with someone and I overhear that Joe Henderson was “meeting the medical examiner at the congressman’s house where the girl drowned.”

“Sure I know. My thought too and that was about oh-nineteen-hundred hours when you talked last and he planned to come home after he was done? Okay. Sure, makes sense,” Sergeant Freedman says to whomever he has on the landline. “He was buying a coffee at that time and since that was more than two hours ago chances are he’s been back and forth to Starbucks buying more coffee, addict that he is. How he sleeps at night I’ll never know.” He laughs. “That and babies, I get it. Thanks again. Sorry to bother you.”

Next Freedman is back with me and I’m told that cell reception can be bad on the Neck, possibly explaining why I can’t reach Investigator Henderson. He also might be getting coffee somewhere, maybe grabbing a sandwich while he’s at it. Something could have come up and then Freedman offers that maybe Henderson forgot.

“Forgot?” I repeat.

“He’s got a full plate. Not only on the job but he coaches soccer and he and his wife have three-month-old twins. Let me put it this way. Joe’s a great guy, one of our best investigators, but sometimes he’s got the attention span of a gnat.”

“Just so we’re clear,” I answer, “if he’s not there we’d like to check out the pool area and the grounds but we don’t want to alarm the neighbors.”

“Not much to worry about. The nearest neighbor’s about ten acres away. I was out there this morning when the body was found. It’s pretty desolate. Not sure why you’re doing this in the pitch-dark. That far out on the Neck and it can be a black hole, and if we get lightning you don’t want to be anywhere near it.”

“Time is of the essence.”

“I’ll make sure dispatch is reminded again so no one confuses you with a prowler.” He’s halfway joking but what registers is the word
again.

Joe Henderson let his sergeant know about the plans, and information has gone out over the radio. The latter is unfortunate, and I think of Bloom’s pickup truck tailing us, I think of the handheld scanner that was inside it earlier today.

“If Investigator Henderson’s not there when we arrive I would like another unit as quickly as possible,” I inform Freedman and I’m completely professional.

“Hey I’ll show up myself.”

“Thank you.” There’s nothing light in my tone.

I end the call and Benton says, “They don’t seem to take this very seriously.”

“Most people would think that what I have in mind could wait until daylight assuming it’s necessary at all.”

“Then they don’t know you.”

“Not every investigator in the world thinks my vigilance is a good thing.” I’m no stranger to the gossip.

It gets back to me, usually passed along by Bryce. I’m obsessive. I’m a pit bull who doesn’t know when to let go. I overextend police resources and wear out my welcome. I’m Doctor Death. I’m a pain in the ass.

“Not to mention once manner has been established and then I overrule it, that doesn’t always set well either,” I reply. “The police in this case were comfortable that Gracie Smithers is an accidental drowning. They don’t understand that Doctor Kato is inexperienced. She’s not board certified and I won’t keep her once her fellowship is complete and I can’t say that anyway. I’ve just made everybody’s life a lot harder.”

“Doing what’s right always does,” Benton says.

FOR THE NEXT TEN
minutes we wind in and out of narrow roads with different names that lead to large waterfront estates. Lighted windows glow in the dark but don’t begin to dispel it, and Benton brings up Julie Eastman, the New Jersey woman shot to death at the Edgewater Ferry this past April. He wants to know what Marino has told me about her.

“Only that he used to date her mother in high school,” I reply.

“Beth Eastman, the mother, still lives in Bayonne. She and Marino communicate on and off through Twitter.” He downshifts and the engine growls loudly in a lower octave.

“I assume this is from Lucy but it matters why exactly?”

“If somebody wanted to know who Marino knows it wouldn’t be hard.”

“Do Marino and his former high school sweetheart communicate through direct messages or through tweets? Because if it’s direct messages, that’s not public.”

“I worry about hacking,” Benton says. “I worry we’re dealing with someone who has extreme cyber skills, explaining the tweets we can’t trace and possibly explaining your credit card fraud. That’s been recent, just the past few months and it’s happening repeatedly. Every time you get a new card it happens again, and while I’ve not wanted to plant unfounded fears in your mind, I’ve been concerned that there might be a breach in security.”

“You blew it off this morning when I brought it up.”

“I didn’t want to ruin our vacation.”

“Well it’s ruined so go ahead and ruin it some more.”

“Lucy claims it’s impossible anyone could be getting past the CFC firewalls but I don’t share her confidence,” Benton says.

“When did you start thinking this way?”

“It’s entered my mind in recent weeks. As the day has worn on my suspicions have intensified.”

“Well I do share Lucy’s confidence. I’m not sure the NSA could get past her firewalls, Benton.” I’m not exaggerating.

By the time Lucy was a teenager she was interning for the FBI and was instrumental in developing their Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, CAIN. Creating machine language from source code comes as naturally to her as handling powerful machines, and protecting her domain from viruses and malware is automatic and unrelenting. A breach of computer security is something my niece would take extremely personally. It would be a fatal error. She wouldn’t let it happen.

“It’s easy to get complacent,” Benton says.

“You feel Lucy has gotten complacent?”

“She doesn’t lack confidence,” he repeats. “So much confidence that sometimes she isn’t objective. That’s the problem with narcissists.”

“Now she’s a narcissist. A sociopath and a narcissist. How fortunate for her that she has someone close who can profile her.”

“Come on, Kay,” he says quietly. “She is what she is but that doesn’t mean she’s bad. It just means that she could be.”

“Everybody could be.”

“That’s absolutely true.”

“Are you having misgivings about her that you haven’t shared with me?” I think of her aloofness, her paranoia and her reason for why she’s no longer wearing Janet’s family ring.

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.” I don’t take my eyes off him.

“We’ve had conversations that concern me about her state of mind,” he says. “Her thinking that people like Jen Garate are out to get her et cetera …”

“Et cetera?” I won’t let him breeze past the remark. “As in more than one person who is out to get her?”

“References and allusions that are disturbing. Suffice it to say I worry that recent events in her personal life have had a destabilizing effect.”

“What recent events?”

“Whatever might be going on between Janet and her in addition to evidence that her computer empire is being breached and her adamance that it isn’t possible,” he says. “Well it is. And the more she protests, the more I have my doubts.”

“About what?”

“About who’s really doing it.”

“Are you suggesting Lucy is contriving all of this? The untraceable tweets to me, the credit card fraud?” I stare at him, stunned. “Are you thinking that Lucy might be shooting people too?”

“
Contriving
is a good word for it,” he replies evasively. “Someone is contriving something.”

“And the motive of whoever might be contriving what’s been happening of late?”

“The tweets like the pennies and possibly somebody using your credit card may be for attention.”

“The bullet with a three etched on it?” I add. “The same thing?”

“Yes. A calling card from someone invisible who’s in our faces.”

“Lucy is in our faces.” My eyes are locked on his sharp unsmiling profile as he hints at a hypothesis that for me is out of the question.

“I’m not ready to go that far. I don’t ever want to go that far, Kay. But put it this way—somebody is way too interested in us.”