Chaos

CHAPTER 38

THE LAST THING I want is federal agents roaming around my headquarters, and Bryce will be even more out of control. He’ll be a hot mess. Everyone will be.

But there’s not much I can do, and it does no good to get incensed. I need to be clearheaded, and then Benton is reaching over the back of the seat, handing me his phone.

“Police photographs taken at the scene,” he says, and I brace myself as I begin to go through them.

There’s nothing of Briggs in situ as Ruthie discovered him because when the rescue squad arrived the first thing they did was pull him out of the water. That was about the extent of any heroic measures because it was quickly apparent that he was dead. In the pictures I’m looking at he’s faceup on the deck near the wooden side of the Endless Pool.

I recognize the outdoor furniture, the back of his Bethesda house and the yard, and it pains me to be so familiar with what I’m looking at, to think of all the stories. He’s wearing what he called his dogaflage, the baggy swim trunks his skilled-seamstress wife made for him a few years ago as a surprise. The green-and-brown camouflage pattern includes the cartoon dog from Family Guy, and Briggs had multiple pairs that traveled wherever he went.

It’s awful to see his strong vibrant face slack and suffused a deep purplish red with barely open eyes, and I can make out the impression left in his skin by the goggles he was wearing when he died. There’s foam protruding from his lips, and Mahant asks me about it.

“That’s what you see in drownings, right?”

“Sometimes.” I have to watch every word I say with bureaucrats like him.

I don’t want to read my casual comments in a report or hear them on the news. Already I can tell he’s not going to grasp much of what I talk about while he believes he knows more than I do about everything. Picturing him and his subordinates in certain areas of the CFC is worse than a bull in a china shop. They can do real damage that can’t be fixed.

“But you don’t just drown in a pool not much bigger than a hot tub,” Mahant says. “It’s what? Four feet deep? So obviously something happened.”

“You can drown in a puddle or a bowl of soup. But yes, something happened,” I agree with his banal assessment as his eyes glance at me in the mirror.

“And the sudsy stuff coming out of his mouth is from breathing, meaning he didn’t die instantly.”

“Almost nobody does,” I reply. “Unless you’re decapitated or blown to smithereens your brain takes a moment to shut everything down. That doesn’t mean he was conscious as he took an agonal breath or two and aspirated water. If that’s what happened, it could explain external foam in the mouth or nostrils.”

“You’re telling me if your heart stopped you could still breathe? Like for how long and how many breaths?”

“I don’t know. It would be a little difficult to research something like that,” I reply, and Wyeth smiles and stifles a laugh.

I click on other photographs, finding a close-up of the copper bracelet, then several others of his body turned on its side to show the odd round burn on the back of his neck. I hope Briggs was instantly incapacitated, that he never saw it coming, and for an instant I envision the drone I noticed earlier, silhouetted blackly against the sun. I think how simple it would be to do something hideous with one.

“I assume you won’t be starting the autopsy right this minute,” Mahant continues talking to me as my thoughts jump disturbingly to another recent case.

“There’s a lot to do before that,” I reply as I think about the Cambridge woman electrocuted this past Monday night.

Molly Hinders was watering her yard at sunset, and was found sometime later dead in the wet grass with a burn on her head.

“And I won’t have much of a staff until everybody starts coming in to work.” I’m not lying but I don’t intend to be helpful-not the way he wants me to be.

“So I should get back here at what time, Kay?” Mahant asks.

“Whatever works for you. We’ll be here.”

“But what time do you plan to do her autopsy exactly? I’m assuming you have an electronic schedule I can access so I don’t have to bother you? Anyway, set the time and I’ll plan to meet you.”

“We don’t really schedule autopsies in the way you’re describing. We’re not like a hospital OR or a doctor’s office.” I sound perfectly reasonable and not the least bit condescending even as I marvel over how uninformed he is.

“Yep. What’s the hurry when your patients are dead?” Wyeth quips.

“Why don’t we just set a time.” Mahant isn’t asking, he’s telling, and he’s about to be a real thorn in my side if I let him.

“That’s a little tricky because first she has to go into the CT scanner…” I start to say but it’s too much to explain.

I’m not sure the Boston division’s second in command has ever been inside my building. I know I’ve never worked with him, and that’s no surprise. Officials like Mahant are pencil necks and suits, as Marino calls them. They’re not out in the field investigating, and when they do show up at a scene or the autopsy room you can be assured it’s political. There’s an agenda that likely won’t be shared, and no matter how friendly and collegial the relationship begins, it goes off the rails fast and rarely ends well.

I have no intention of honoring any sort of schedule ASAC Roger Mahant might decide. But the writing’s on the wall. He’s going to do everything he can to insert himself into the business of the CFC, and I’ll do everything I can to make him wish he hadn’t. For better or worse I can be pretty good at that, and I remind him that when he comes back later to be sure to bring shower supplies and a change of clothing.

“Why?” His dark eyes are in the mirror.

“You’ll want to clean up thoroughly afterward and stuff what you’ve got on in trash bags. I remind you that the odor gets into your hair, your clothing, way up into your sinuses. In fact, I apologize because it’s never a good idea to be inside a closed car after you’ve been working a scene for hours where the body is decomposing rapidly.”

Benton lifts his arms and sniffs his folded-up shirtsleeves. “I think I’m all right but I wasn’t there long or on top of everything like you were,” he plays along with what I’m up to.

Mahant cracks his window an inch, turning the air-conditioning as far up as it will go.

“We have disposable gowns, hair covers, gloves and such that we’ll supply,” I say to him over the blasting air. “And we’re also taking care of food. You’re just not allowed to have anything to eat or drink in the autopsy rooms. But there’s a break area upstairs.”

“Eating in the autopsy rooms? Judas Priest. Do people really do that?”

“Not anymore. When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

“Hell if I know.” Mahant’s reflection in the rearview mirror looks impatient and unhappy.

“What about hepatitis A and B?” I ask that next.

AROUND A BEND IN the river, the Cambridge Forensic Center comes into view up ahead near the Harvard Bridge.

My seven-story metal-skinned cylindrical building has been compared to a lot of things. An unjacketed lead projectile, a dum-dum round, a snub-nosed missile, a pickle. It juts up like a tarnished metal silo across the road from a different section of the same fitness path where Elisa Vandersteel was riding her bicycle when she was killed. The scene I just worked is barely a mile from my office, although one would never know it because Mahant had to take a circuitous route as we left the park unless he wanted to bother flashing his creds and asking police to move barricades from streets closed off.

He turns left off Memorial Drive. Then another left, and we stop in front of the CFC’s ten-foot-high black PVC-coated privacy fence. I open my window and reach out to enter a code on a keypad mounted to the left of the black metal gate topped by triple-pointed spikes. With a loud beep it lurches to life and begins to slide open on its tracks.

The Tahoe drives inside the back parking lot, and I recognize the personal cars belonging to certain members of my staff. Bryce is here. So is Anne, and the Tahoe creeps past parked vans, SUVs and trucks, all of them ghostly white and silent at the quiet hour. We stop behind the unmarked white Ford Explorer in the first space to the left of a pedestrian door at the back of the building.

It’s what I drove to work yesterday. But I left it here thinking I would be off the next day spending time with my sister, Janet, Lucy, Desi and everyone. I got a ride with Bryce, and then I would have ridden home with Benton from dinner. But nothing’s turned out that way, and the next day is here. There will be no time off or family gathering in my immediate future, and I get out of the Tahoe.

“I’ll be right there,” Benton says to me, and he stays inside the SUV with the doors shut.

I can imagine at least some of what they’re talking about. Mahant doesn’t want me around when he and his cronies help themselves to my headquarters and everybody in it alive and dead. But that’s too bad. No one is chasing me off, and I wait by the pedestrian door. I wait several minutes, then Benton steps out of the SUV. I scan my right thumb to unlock the biometric lock and we walk into a vehicle bay the size of a small hangar.

I smell fresh-scented disinfectant. The epoxy-sealed floor, the walls lined with storage cabinets, everything is spotless. Gleaming steel gurneys are neatly parked in a washing area, and in a far corner is La Morte Café, where Rusty and Harold drink coffee and smoke cigars at a table and chairs that can be hosed off.

“Lucy was able to hack into Elisa Vandersteel’s phone,” Benton starts in telling me what he thinks he can and probably more than he should.

As usual he’s smarter than everybody else. He knew Lucy would get into the phone far more quickly than the labs in Quantico would.

“So we know who the boyfriend is, the kid we saw at the Faculty Club,” Benton says. “Chris Peabody.”

“As in Mrs. P?” I remember she mentioned her grandson was working part-time at the Faculty Club.

“Probably but we’ll confirm. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Ash Street, west of here.”

“Which was the direction Elisa Vandersteel was headed as she rode through the park,” and I can tell by the look on Benton’s face that he’s very worried.

“The last phone call she made was to him at seven-oh-six P.M. as she was putting a FedEx in the drop box on JFK Street right next to the school of government,” he says. “We know this because of the content of the voice mail when the boyfriend tried her back about ten minutes later, and based on everything else, I’m thinking she was dead by then. I’m thinking she did exactly what we thought, Kay. She entered the park off JFK Street, and as she rode near the lamp something got her.”

“Does her boyfriend know?” I recall seeing him and other staff going in and out of rooms while we were at the Faculty Club.

No doubt there will be plenty of witnesses to vouch for his whereabouts at the time of Elisa Vandersteel’s death, and it’s unlikely he has anything to do with it. But Mrs. P’s grandson is in for a god-awful time in every way imaginable.

“There are a lot of people to talk to. This is going to be a shit storm, and you’ve been up for twenty-something hours with no end in sight,” Benton is saying. “Let Luke handle the autopsy, Kay. You’ve already done the hardest part. Why don’t you come with us?”

“Us? Who else besides Lucy?”

“Wyeth.” Benton walks me to the far end of the bay where a ramp leads up to another door. “As you may have gathered he’s one of us, with our NCTC.”

The National Counterterrorism Center monitors both domestic and international threats. It works hand in glove with U.S. intelligence agencies such as the CIA.

“If he’s been in the Boston area for the past few days I assume he wasn’t here because of Briggs unless you had intel about his death in advance,” I reply, and our voices echo inside the vast hollow concrete space where we talk, just the two of us near a huge drain in the floor and a thick coiled hose. “And I hope that’s not true. Because if you had even a glimmer-”

“We didn’t. There was no forewarning that I’m aware of, just the photograph e-mailed, as I’ve said, and he was already gone by then.” Benton uses that euphemism again.

Gone.

“Wyeth has been in the area on another matter.” Benton pauses, his eyes on mine, and then he says, “I’m very concerned about the possibility of some major attack planned for the Washington area, and that what we’re seeing right now is the tip of the iceberg.”

He says he can’t get into the details but Briggs was an important target in more ways than I know.

“It’s been rumored on the Hill for a while that he’s in line for an appointment to a cabinet-level position, something the new administration has in mind,” Benton says. “I think Carrie is reminding us she can slay any dragon she likes and rob us of what we care about most. She can destroy our dreams. She can rob us of our family, and Briggs was exactly that, especially to you.”

“I don’t know if she’s reminding us of that or anything.” I take a deep breath as I feel angry and sad at the same time. “And rumors don’t always have anything to do with fact. We should be careful what we infer and believe when there’s so little we know,” I add as the windowless bay door begins to retract.

The illuminated parking lot fills the opening as the massive rolling door lifts with metallic clanks, and headlights burn as the white van glides inside. Then the door begins to shudder down again loudly as Harold and Rusty climb out the front seat, walking around to the back, opening the tailgate, all of it amplified in here.

“I’ll call you on a fuel stop.” Benton hugs me, and the hard shape of the pistol on his hip reminds me that we never really know when we’ll see each other again.

We don’t live normal lives or have a normal relationship, and I’m not sure what it is to feel safe anymore. For a moment he holds me close, his nose and mouth buried in my hair as more headlights glare in the parking lot beyond. I swallow hard. This feels terrible.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d have Janet, Desi and Dorothy move into our place until I’m back. I know I’ve mentioned it but I mean it, Kay. Everybody’s safer together,” Benton faces me, his eyes unyielding. “I’ve already talked to Janet about it in case you decided to stay home, and I was pretty sure you would. Page can help as needed with the dogs,” he adds as I catch Luke Zenner out of the corner of my eye.

My blond Austrian assistant chief walks up to us, and I suspect he was sleeping when Anne summoned him. Possibly sleeping with her, it also occurs to me, as Luke is impossibly attractive and quite the ladies’ man. I can see the wrinkles from his pillowcase imprinted on the right side of his face. He hasn’t shaved, and it couldn’t have taken long to throw on a Patriots T-shirt, baggy Bermuda shorts, and a pair of moccasins.

“I’ll be upstairs for a while and will fill you in later,” I say to him, and it’s my way of signaling that we can’t talk openly in front of Benton right now. “I’m thinking we should put her in the decomp room. She’s getting into rough shape really fast.”

“I can imagine and it sounds like a plan,” Luke says with his German accent as his blue eyes meet mine. “We’ll get going on that, then,” and Harold and Rusty are wheeling the stretcher through the bay.

They push it up the ramp, and through the door leading inside as Benton and I say good-bye, although we don’t really use that word. We try not to speak in terms of endings but to leave our separations light and airy with a See you later or I’ll call in a bit. As if everything is fine when it’s not.

I wait at the top of the ramp, my messenger bag slung over a shoulder of my sweat-stained scrubs. I watch my tall husband with his wide shoulders, his long stride and straight proud posture as he walks away. He reaches the huge square opening, and it frames him like a painting as he turns to smile at me.