Chaos

CHAPTER 9

WE’RE CALM AND RESERVED as we walk with purpose through the dining room, avoiding the curious glances of other couples being seated.

Benton and I are together but separate, each of us on the phone. To look at us, you’d never know anything out of the ordinary was going on. We could be talking to our Realtors, our bankers, our brokers, our pet sitters.

We could be a well-heeled couple getting calls from our adoring children, and Benton would be the rich handsome breadwinner. While in comparison I’d be the hardworking rather peculiar and difficult wife who always looks shopworn and halfway blown together. Our eyes are slightly downcast as we weave between tables, and I recognize the fixed stare, the flexing of his jaw, the tenseness of his hands.

I know the way he gets when something is serious. He’s probably listening to his employer, the U.S. Department of Justice. Not his divisional office but Washington, D.C., possibly someone high up in the FBI or the director himself, and it could be the White House. It’s not Quantico, where Benton got his start and used to work. That’s not the area code I just saw on his phone when it vibrated.

My husband’s special power is his ability to get into the mind of the offender, to discover the why and the what for, and unearth whatever traumas and bad wiring unleashed the latest monster into our midst. Benton’s quarry could be one individual. It could be several or a group of them, and when he goes after them, he must become an empathic Method actor. He has to think, anticipate and even feel what evildoers feel if he’s to catch them. But it’s not without a price.

“Yes, speaking,” Benton says, and he listens. Then, “I understand. No, I’m not aware of it.” He glances at me. “It’s the first I’ve heard.” He looks down at the red carpet. “Please explain. I’m listening.”

“I’m walking out,” I quietly tell Marino.

Something has happened, and my imagination is getting the better of me. I sense a presence that’s suffocating, heavy and dark. It’s palpable like ozone in the air, like the eerie vacuum right before a massive storm breaks. I feel it at a visceral level.

“What is it exactly that you’d like me to do?” Benton turns his head away from people looking at us.

“Should be there… in three.” Marino’s voice is fractured in my earpiece, another bad connection, and everything that’s weirdly unfolded in the past few hours suddenly is crashing around me. “No one saw anything… that we know of. But two girls, these two twins found her…” he says, and I do my best to decipher.

But it’s as if I’ve walked into a tornado. There’s so much flying around I can’t tell what’s up, down, inside out or backward.

“Hold on,” I again say to him because I won’t discuss a case until no one can overhear me.

“Turning off Kennedy… On Harvard Street now,” his voice is choppy.

“Give me two more seconds. I’m finding someplace quiet,” I reply, and I can hear the sound of his engine as sirens wail in the background.

Past Mrs. P’s empty station, Benton takes a right at the entryway’s round table with its sumptuous fragrant arrangement of cut lilies and roses. I keep going back to what he said just moments ago about an anticipated terrorist attack on the East Coast, possibly in the Boston area again. Now something has happened here in Cambridge, and he’s on the phone with Washington, D.C., as the terror alert is off the charts. I don’t like what I’m feeling.

I don’t like the way Benton glanced at me as he said over the phone that he wasn’t aware of something, that he hadn’t been informed of whatever it is. As if there’s something happening in the here and now that he should know about, that both of us should. Whatever’s going on isn’t simply a local problem, and as I think this I also know I’m ahead of myself. The two of us getting important if not urgent calls simultaneously doesn’t mean they’re related. It could be a coincidence.

But I can’t shake the ominous signals I’m picking up. I have a feeling I’m going to discover soon enough that Benton and I are about to have the same problem but won’t be able to discuss it much if at all. In our different positions we won’t handle it the same way, and we could even end up at odds with each other. It wouldn’t be the first time and certainly won’t be the last.

“Doc…? Did you get the part about…? Interpol calling…?” Marino says, and I must have misheard him.

“I can hardly understand you,” I reply in a loud whisper. “And I can’t talk. One second please.”

Benton heads into the drawing room, and I wish the drapes had been pulled across the tall expansive windows. It’s completely dark out with only vague smudges of distant lamps pushing back the inkiness, and I’m conscious of the night and what might be in it, possibly close by, possibly watching. Maybe right under our very noses. I detect something sinister has been tampering with us all day and probably for longer than that.

I RETURN TO THE entrance, where I avoid the old corroded mirror on the wall, and I stand with my head bent, facing the front door but not really seeing anything as I listen to Marino over the phone.

It’s difficult to hear everything he’s saying. We have at best a spotty connection, and I’m beginning to get jumpy. I don’t know who’s doing what or spying on whom, and in light of everything else it’s hard not to feel hunted and disoriented.

“Okay, stop. You need to say that again only much more slowly.” I huddle near an ornate cast-iron umbrella stand, and I don’t want to believe this is happening. “What do you mean she’s already stiff?”

“The first guy there checked her vitals said she’s already stiff,” Marino replies, and the connection is almost perfect suddenly.

“And have you seen this yourself or is it what you’ve been told?” I reply because what he’s saying sounds completely wrong.

“I was told.”

“Were there any attempts at resuscitation?”

“She was obviously dead,” Marino says clear as a bell.

“That’s what you were told.”

“Yeah.”

“What was obvious about it?” I ask.

“For one thing she was stiff. The squad didn’t touch her.”

“Then how did they determine she’s stiff?”

“I don’t know but apparently she is.” Marino again reminds me he hasn’t been to the scene.

“As far as we know, the first responding officer is the only one who’s touched her?” I want to know.

“That’s what I’ve been told.”

“And what about her temp? Warm? Cool?”

“Warm supposedly. But what do you expect when it’s still ninety degrees out? She could be out there all day and not cool off.”

“I’ll have to see when I get there. But the rigor doesn’t make sense,” I tell Marino. “Unless she’s been out there much longer than one might initially assume. And that wouldn’t make sense either. Even in this weather there are still some people out and about, especially near the water. She would have been found long before now, I would think.”

For rigor mortis to be obvious, the victim would have had to be dead for several hours at least, depending on what muscles are noticeably affected and how advanced the postmortem process has gotten. The high temperatures we’ve been having would escalate decomposition, meaning rigor would set in sooner. But it’s extremely unlikely that what Marino’s been told is correct. That’s also not surprising. Patrol officers are often the first responders, and they can’t always know what they’re looking at.

“… Got him waiting with the twins… uh, who found the body…” Marino is saying, and then I lose the rest.

“Okay. You must be in a bad space again.” I’m getting exasperated, but at least it sounds like he has the scene secured.

But I can’t imagine what he meant when he said that Interpol was trying to call him.

“Looks like someone was hiding in the trees, waiting,” he then says, and the connection is much better again. “That’s what I’m guessing. No eyes or ears.”

“Not if it were the middle of the day,” I point out as I continue glancing around me, making sure no one can hear. “And if she’s been dead for hours as her alleged rigor would suggest? There would have been eyes and ears because it would have been broad daylight, possibly early or midafternoon.”

“I agree with you. That part can’t be right.”

“It doesn’t sound it. But I’ll see when I get there,” I repeat. “What else can you tell me?”

Marino begins to describe what he knows about a violent death that may have happened within the past hour not even a mile from here. The woman’s body is on the fitness path along the river. Some of her clothing has been ripped off, her helmet more than twenty feet away, and there’s visible blood. It appears she died from a blow to the head, or that’s what the first responding officer told Marino.

“He says you can see where she was struggling, moving around as her head was banged against the path,” Marino adds, but what I alert on is his mention of a helmet. “Like someone was waiting until she was passing through a thick clump of trees where nobody could see, then grabbed her and she fought like hell.”

“What helmet?” I ask. “The victim was on a bicycle?”

“It appears she was attacked while she was riding,” Marino answers, and I can hear his excitement in his tense tone while I feel a chill along my spine.

I can’t help but think of my encounter earlier today, first at the repertory theater and then on the sidewalk along Quincy Street. Suddenly the young woman with the British accent is in my mind, and I wish she weren’t.

“She was on the path that cuts through the middle of the park,” Marino is explaining, “and it happened in the spot where there’s a small clearing in a stand of trees. I’m thinking it was planned like that to ambush her.”

“And her helmet was off and some twenty feet from the body?” It’s another detail that like her rigor defies logic, and I wonder what color the helmet is.

I hope it’s not a robin’s-egg blue.

“That’s the story,” Marino says, and I know exactly what he sounds like when something big goes down.

Not just big. But explosively bad. The blitz attack he’s describing will create a public panic if it’s not handled properly. I feel slightly sick inside. I remember the young woman on her bicycle looking at me quizzically as Benton handed her the bottle of water she dropped. She put her helmet back on before she rode off, and she didn’t bother fastening the chin strap. I remember seeing it dangling as she rode off across the street, through the Yard, heading in the direction of the Square and the river.

This would have been close to seven P.M., barely an hour ago as the sun was setting. I tell myself if it turns out the victim is the woman I saw, it would be a bizarre twist of fate, an almost unbelievable one. I almost hope the detail about rigor turns out to be accurate. If it is, the victim couldn’t be the young cyclist in Converse sneakers.

But even as I reassure myself, I also know that what Marino said about the rigor can’t be true. Or the reporting officer is confused. Because I don’t think it’s possible-even in this weather-for a dead body on the fitness path inside John F. Kennedy Park not to be discovered for hours. I suspect the death happened recently, and then I envision the young woman’s flushed face and smile again.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I hear her voice in my head.

“I’ve already talked to your office,” Marino says in my earpiece. “Rusty and Harold are bringing a truck.”

“I need a big one.”

“The MCC,” he says, and the tri-axle thirty-five-foot mobile command center is a fine idea if there’s a place to park it.

“We’re going to need a barricade,” I remind Marino, and I can’t get the woman’s face, her sporty sunglasses and self-assured smile, out of my thoughts.

“That’s what I ordered. Remember who you’re talking to.”

When he headed investigations at the CFC, he was in charge of our fleet. In some ways he knows more about the nuts and bolts of our operations than I do.

“I want a place to duck out of the heat and away from the curious,” I reply. “And we’ll need plenty of water.”

“Yeah, there’s not exactly a 7-Eleven handy, and the park is dark as shit. We’re setting up lights.”

“Please don’t turn them on yet. The scene will blaze like Fenway.”

“Don’t worry. We’re keeping everything dark until we’re ready. Doing what we can to keep the gawkers away, especially any assholes trying to film with their phones. There’s student housing everywhere. Eliot House is right there on the other side of Memorial Drive and it’s as big as the Pentagon, plus you got the Kennedy School, and traffic on Memorial Drive. Not to mention the bridge is right there, and across the water is Boston. So we got no plans of lighting up the scene right this minute.”

“Do we have a name?” I ask.

“An ID was found on the path near her bike. Elisa Vandersteel, twenty-three years old from the UK. Of course that’s if it’s the dead lady’s. I’m guessing it probably is,” Marino says, and my mood sinks lower. “I’m told the picture looks sort of like her, for what it’s worth. And I just pulled up in front of the Faculty Club. You coming out?”

“Where in the UK?” I almost don’t want to ask.

“London, I think.”

“Do you know what kind of shoes she had on?” I envision the cyclist’s off-white Converse sneakers, and I’m pretty sure I caught a peek of bike socks, the kind that are below the ankle.

“Her shoes?” Marino asks as if he didn’t hear me right.

“Yes.”

“Got no idea,” he says. “Why?”

“I’ll see you in a minute,” I reply.