Chaos

CHAPTER 19

I INTRODUCE MYSELF AS KAY Scarpetta, which means nothing to them.

I don’t say I’m a doctor, a Ms. or a Mrs. Maybe I’m a cop. Maybe I work with social services. I suppose I could pass for Marino’s girlfriend. I can’t tell what the twins think of me or what assumptions they might make about my reason for showing up to chat with them about a dead body they stumbled upon.

“How are you both holding up?” I set down my scene case and smile.

“Fine.”

They look flushed and tired but from what I understand they’ve refused every opportunity to sit in an air-conditioned car. They’re content to stand outside in the hot dark night, and it occurs to me they might crave attention. I have a feeling they spend much of their time picked on or ignored, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they put up with more than their share of being ostracized and bullied.

“She’d like to ask you a few things,” Marino says to them about me. “Then we’ll get you someplace where you can get cool, have a nice drink, a snack. How would you like to see what a real police department looks like?”

“Okay,” one of them says.

“Where are the TV cameras?” the other asks. “How come this isn’t on the news? It should be on the news!”

“We don’t want any TV cameras or reporters here right now,” Marino replies.

“But why aren’t they?”

“Because I’m in charge,” Marino says flatly. “That nice lady officer you were with a few minutes ago? Officer Flanders is going to give you a ride to my headquarters in her police car.”

“Are we in trouble?”

“Why would you be in trouble?” Marino asks.

“Because somebody’s dead.”

“Because somebody did something bad.”

As Marino and I were walking here, he informed me that the girls are fourteen years old. Their names are Anya and Enya Rummage-as in the ROOMage and not the RUMmage sisters, God help them, I can’t help but think. What unfortunate names for identical twins. As if they don’t get ridiculed enough, I’m guessing. I give them another reassuring, sympathetic look as if all of us are out in the miserable heat and in this mess together, which of course couldn’t be further from the truth.

“I’m wondering exactly where you were when you noticed the body,” I say to them as if I’m perplexed and need their help.

“There.” Anya in pink points toward the distant trees behind us where Rusty and Harold are assembling the tent scaffolding.

“So you were walking through the woods, following the path toward the clearing,” I reply.

“Yes, and we saw the bike on the ground.”

“Then we saw her.”

“When you were entering the park from John F. Kennedy Street, did you see anyone? Hear anything at all? I’m wondering how long she might have been here when you found her.”

They say they didn’t hear or see anything unusual as they cut through the park. They didn’t hear anyone talking and certainly they didn’t hear shrieks or someone yelling for help. As both of them continue to recount what happened, I get a picture of them walking along the fitness path the same way Marino and I did a while ago.

When they reached the clearing they saw what they at first assumed was a bicycle accident. It was almost completely dark by then, and there was no one else around. The park was empty as far as they could tell except for “animals,” they continue to say. A squirrel, possibly a deer, they tell me. I ask what time it was when they discovered the bicycle and the woman’s body, and the girls shake their heads. They don’t know.

“Then what did you do? Do you think you can describe for me exactly what happened next?” I ask, and both of them look at Marino for approval, and he nods. “How close did you get to her?” I inquire.

“Tell her. It’s okay,” he reassures them. “She’s a doctor and is trying to help.”

But it’s not quite the right thing to say. The twins stare in the direction of the body as if it’s not too late for a doctor’s intervention.

“I’m a doctor who works with the police,” I explain to them without using any of the buzzwords like medical examiner, coroner or forensic pathologist. “We need to find out what might have happened to the person you discovered. It’s my job to figure out now she got hurt and died.”

“She must’ve wrecked,” Enya in yellow says. “Or someone jumped out at her maybe because she couldn’t see very well. You ride slow because you can’t see? And then a bad person is waiting to get you.”

“It was too dark,” the other sister says.

“Too dark to be riding a bicycle through the park?” I go with their train of thought, and they nod.

“So what made you decide to walk through here?” Marino asks. “Did you worry about how dark it is?”

“No because we do it all the time.”

“Not all the time,” Anya in pink disagrees. “Not usually after dark but our pizza was slow.”

“Because you added sausage. Even though I didn’t want it.”

“So what if I did?”

“You got here and it was dark. And you weren’t scared walking through here alone?” Marino asks, and they shake their heads.

“We watch out for cars. And there’s no cars through the park. Mom doesn’t like us walking around cars.”

“We don’t come here in the rain, though.”

“We only walk through here sometimes. Not in the winter or when it’s too cold near the water.”

“Mostly when it’s hot.”

“Mom gives us money for food when she doesn’t feel good.”

“She doesn’t feel good today.”

“She’s very tired.”

“She’s asleep and doesn’t want to get up.”

I look from one face to the other, from Anya to Enya. Or maybe it’s Enya to Anya. Both of them have on stretch shorts with drawstrings, and tees with tulip hems. As I continue to ask questions, they tell me the same story I heard from Barclay. They got close to the body but didn’t touch it, and their eyes jump around as they describe this. When I ask them how long they waited before they called the Cambridge police, neither of them replies, and they won’t look at me.

I ask Enya, the sister in yellow, if she made the call, and she shakes her head, no.

“What about you?” I ask Anya in pink.

“No.” She shakes her head vigorously, and now both of them stare at me.

“Maybe you’ll let me see your phone,” Marino says. “I’m betting one or both of you have a phone, right?” And the girls indicate they don’t. “So neither of you called the police?” Marino asks. “Now come on. Somebody had to, right? How’d we know about it if you didn’t call us?”

“I didn’t call the police,” Enya says slowly in her blunted tone.

As both of them continue to assert what seems a blatant lie, I get a sneaking suspicion it isn’t. I have an idea what might have happened.

WE KNOW THE CAMBRIDGE police received a 911 call about a person down in the park, and that would indicate the girls had access to a phone. But if they literally don’t own the phone in question, then that might suggest they used one that belongs to someone else.

To this equation I add my earlier observation when I briefly looked at the bicycle on the path. The phone holder on the handlebars is empty. If the woman I met earlier was Elisa Vandersteel, as I suspect, then I saw her clamp her iPhone into the holder before she rode off across Quincy Street and into the Yard. So what happened to her phone after that? I might know, and if I’m right it could explain why Anya and Enya are swearing they don’t have a phone.

Maybe they don’t-not one of their own. They claim they didn’t call the police, and very possibly they couldn’t have. Not literally if the phone didn’t belong to them-not if it was locked and they didn’t have the password. They absolutely couldn’t dial the Cambridge Police Department. They couldn’t even call 911 without getting past the locked screen, and I doubt they’d know how to do that in emergencies unless someone had shown them.

I propose this to Enya in yellow. I ask her if she knows what an iPhone is, and she does. It would seem her mother has one, and yes she understands about swiping the locked screen to the right, to the password keypad. At the bottom on the left side is the word emergency. All you have to do is touch it and you’re given a dial pad that allows you to enter your country’s emergency three-digit number, which is 911 in this case.

So neither Enya nor Anya dialed the Cambridge Police Department’s general number. One of the sisters pressed EMERGENCY, and then entered 911, afterward pressing SEND. Literally, that’s what Anya in pink-not Enya in yellow-admits to having done.

“How’d you know to do something like that?” Marino acts impressed.

“Mom showed us,” they say in unison.

“She showed you how to use her phone in case there’s ever an emergency?” I suggest, and they nod.

“If we need to call an ambulance,” Anya adds.

“Is that what you thought you were calling? You thought you were asking for an ambulance?” I ask, and they verify that was their intention.

“Then you didn’t think about the police,” Marino picks up where I leave off. “You didn’t know the police would come if you called for help. That’s not who you were asking for.”

They confirm that they didn’t want the police and never intended for them to come. They tell us they wanted to help her, and the police don’t help anybody. The police are who you call when you want to get someone into trouble.

“When someone’s mean,” Anya says, “and you have to lock them up in jail.”

Marino and I realize without having to say it that the girls weren’t deliberately misleading us about the phone and who they did or didn’t call. It’s clear there are limitations in what they comprehend, and an emergency isn’t the same thing as a crime. One requires medics. The other the police. What this might suggest is that at first the sisters weren’t sure the victim was dead, and they weren’t assuming she’d been attacked. Their immediate thought was she’d had an accident, and their response was to get medical help, which is exactly as their mother has taught them, it seems.

“You weren’t asking for the police to come.” Marino makes sure. “You wanted an ambulance.”

“Yes.”

“Did you think she was alive?” He’s going to keep asking until he gets a satisfactory answer.

“She didn’t move.”

“And the bad smell.” Anya in pink wrinkles her nose.

“Can you describe it?” I ask.

“It smelled like mom’s blow dryer when it won’t work.”

“You noticed an odor that reminded you of your mother’s blow dryer?” I try to decipher what she means, pretending it’s the first I’ve heard of a strange smell.

I’m not going to let on that Barclay told me something similar.

“It gets too hot,” Enya says.

“An electrical smell?” I suggest as I think of the broken lamp.

“If you thought somebody had done something bad to her would you have called the police?” Marino then asks, and after a pause the girls shake their heads in unison.

They shrug and say they don’t know. Then he points toward the clearing, asking them to remember their initial impression when they saw the bike and the woman on the ground. They continue to assert that they thought she was in an accident at first.

“You wanted to help her,” he says, and they nod. “You saw she was hurt,” and they nod again.

“We didn’t want her getting more hurt.”

“Like if another bike might run over her,” Anya in pink says, and her handoff couldn’t be smoother.

“That’s the danger when someone’s down in the middle of the path, right?” Marino doesn’t miss a beat. “Maybe you moved her out of the way a little? So no one would run over her?” he asks, and they nod.

It’s as simple as that.

“What happened to make you sick?” Marino asks either one of them since we don’t know who did what.

“My stomach,” Enya says.

“And the shirt you cleaned up with?” Marino boldly powers forward. “Did she have it on when you first saw her?” He assumes the girls removed the shirt from the body, but they shake their heads, no, and they don’t look unnerved.

They don’t look the least bit frightened or unhappy anymore.

“It was in the bushes where the thing was. It scared me and made me sick.” Anya points.

“Hmm,” Marino frowns. “I’m wondering if it’s the same bushes where we just found it.”

“All I did was see what it was. And then something was in there.” Her eyes suddenly widen behind her glasses. “It tried to kick me and I screamed.”

“Who do you think it was?” Marino asks as if her comment was normal.

“It might have been a deer.”

“And maybe she heard it too as she was riding past, and it scared her. So she wrecked.”

“Did you actually see a deer?” I ask.

“I heard it,” Anya says excitedly. “I heard it running away.”

“What about you?” Marino asks Enya.

“I heard it too!” she exclaims the way kids do when they realize everyone is eager to hear a story they’re telling. “I heard it run away in the dark, and then the policeman got here.”

“So let me make sure I get this straight,” Marino says. “You heard something run out of the bushes, and then Investigator Barclay showed up. You got any idea how many minutes passed between when you heard the commotion in the bushes and when Barclay got here?”

“One minute,” Enya says.

“I don’t know,” Anya chimes in.

“One minute and I don’t know?” Marino looks at both of them. “Which is it?”

“Maybe more than one minute. I don’t know.”

“I was scared and then he was walking toward us. Are we in trouble?” Enya looks uncertain again.

“Now why would you be in trouble?” Marino asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Hmm.” He pauses, puts on the big act of entertaining an unhappy thought. “Wait a minute. Hold the phone. Have you done something I don’t know about? Something that you’re worried might get you in trouble?”

Technically, the answer is yes. It appears they’ve tampered with a crime scene and perhaps tried to abscond with an expensive phone taken from a dead person. Even if they borrowed it initially, it would appear they intend to keep it unless there’s a better explanation for what happened to it. But I think it’s safe to say they won’t be held accountable-nor should they be. I’m not sure they know better.

Then as if Enya can read my mind she picks up her knapsack, which is in the grass by her feet. It’s pink with small hearts, and her sister’s is just like it. Enya digs into a front pocket and slides out an iPhone in an ice-blue case-like the one I saw the cyclist clamp into the holder on her handlebars.

Marino doesn’t touch the phone. He doesn’t act surprised and certainly not suspicious or judgmental. He opens a brown paper evidence bag and holds it in front of Enya. He instructs her to drop the phone inside it.

“Well now that’s really helpful,” he says to both girls, and I can imagine Barclay’s smoldering resentment when he finds out what Marino’s just done. “You know what I can’t figure out?” He looks at both of them.

“What?”

“How you got hold of this. How did you manage that?”

Anya in pink admits with a hint of pride that she saw the phone “on the handlebars” and “borrowed” it.

“That was a pretty smart idea to borrow the phone to call for help,” Marino says, and they look pleased.

He wants to know if they’d mind him taking a peek at what’s inside their knapsacks. Maybe there’s something else they have that might be helpful.

“Okay,” Enya says, and she takes his hand.

She presses it to her face as if she might love him.