Dust

9

The portable light tower I saw on the news illuminates a muddy red infield where a yellow tarp is staked down by blaze-orange crime scene flags that flutter in the wind. The body is protected from the elements and the curious, the scene secured by Sil Machado and two uniformed officers. They restlessly pace, waiting for me.

“You got any idea why she’d want to talk to you?” Marino asks me about what Carin Hegel just said.

“Probably for the same reason other people do,” I reply. “But beyond the obvious questions I’m always asked? No, except I ran into her at the federal courthouse last month and she alluded to a case she has that involves very bad people. Thugs, she called them, and I got the impression she was worried about her safety. So I’m assuming that might be what she was just referring to. It’s possible she’s done a lot of digging and has discovered that Double S is involved in a number of unsavory things.”

“What does she expect you to do about it?”

“People vent. They know they can say anything to me.”

“Crooks. I pretty much can’t stand rich people anymore.”

“Lucy’s okay. And Benton. Not everybody who’s wealthy is bad.”

“At least Lucy earned what she’s got.” Marino has to get in a dig about Benton’s old family money.

“I have no idea how she could have found out you don’t work for me anymore.”

“Obviously someone told her.”

“I can’t imagine why it would be a topic of conversation.”

“Someone with Cambridge PD might have said something to her,” Marino says. “Or someone at the CFC.”

“I can’t imagine why,” I repeat.

On the other side of the fenced-in fields and across Vassar Street, the dormitory called Simmons Hall is a massive aluminum-clad construction of cubed solids and voids that shines like a silvery space station. I note two more uniformed officers on the sidewalk in front of it, and a jogger not slowing his pace while a bicyclist in reflective clothing disappears toward the football stadium.

“Sounds to me like she’s got good reason to worry Gail’s been murdered,” Marino then says.

“She very well may be worrying exactly that. And she may have good reason, considering the details she’d know about Double S.”

“In other words, what Carin Hegel’s really worried about is herself, worried about her case. A case she’s making a fortune from,” Marino says cynically. “Did I tell you how much I hate lawyers?”

“It will be getting light in about an hour.” I’m not interested in hearing another diatribe about litigation lawyers, or “bottom feeders,” as Marino calls them. “We need to get the body out of here soon.”

I watch the jogger, a distant figure in black, barely visible. For some reason he’s caught my eye, graceful and lean and light on his feet in running tights, a small person, possibly a young student. MIT gets them before they’re old enough to leave home, fourteen or fifteen and stunningly gifted. He jogs through a parking lot and is swallowed by the darkness in the direction of Albany Street.

“Dumping a body in the wide open for all the world to see under normal circumstances. But this isn’t exactly Normalville.” Marino looks around as he drives slowly. “He probably came down this same alley unless he accessed the area from the other side, from Vassar Street, which would have put him practically on top of the MIT Police Department in order to get back here. Those are the only two ways if you’re driving. And he had to have a vehicle to transport her unless he carried her out of one of the dorms or apartment buildings. Whatever he did, he dumped her right in the middle of everything. Crazy as shit.”

“Not crazy but deliberate,” I reply. “He was surrounded by an audience of people who don’t look.”

“You got that right. And MIT’s even worse than Harvard, a hundred times worse,” Marino says as if he’s an expert in academia. “They have to hand out deodorant and toothpaste in the library because the kids live in there like it’s a homeless shelter, especially this time of year. Final exams week. You get a B, you kill yourself.”

“Your comrades have done a good job being low-key,” I point out, figuring he’ll take credit for that, too. “It’s not obvious what’s going on unless you happen to see news feeds on the Internet.”

“Nothing’s obvious to the Einsteins around here. I’m telling you, they’re not in the same world as you and me.”

“I’m not sure I want them in the same world as you and me.”

We reach a sprawling red brick residential complex called Next House, where garden plots are dead and bare branches reach over the narrow pavement and shiver in the wind. Then the alley takes a hard right past a red steel tetrahedral sculpture, and we drive toward the parking lot, fenced-in and bordered by trees. The security arm has been raised, frozen in the open position.

The only vehicles inside are police cars and one of my CFC windowless vans, white with our crest on the doors, the caduceus and scales of justice in blue. My transport team has arrived. Rusty and Harold see us and climb out of the van’s front seat.

“This is where I’d come in if it was me,” Marino summarizes as we drive in.

“Assuming you had a way to access this parking lot. It’s not open to the public.”

“It is if you drive through over there.”

He indicates the far side of the lot flanking Vassar Street, where a chain-link pedestrian gate is wide open and moving in the wind. A car could fit through easily but it would require driving over the sidewalk and the curb directly across the street from the MIT red brick and blue tile police station.

“If that’s what he did, it was brazen.” Everywhere I look I see fencing, gates, and parking that are off-limits to people who don’t have magnetic swipes and keys.

There is nothing welcoming if you don’t belong here. Like Harvard, MIT is a private, exclusive club, about as private and exclusive as it gets.

“Maybe not all that brazen at two or three o’clock in the morning when it’s pouring rain,” Marino says. “There’s no other way to get in here unless you have a swipe to raise the gate.”

“Was the arm up like it is now when the police got here?”

“Nope. The lot was secure and empty except the gate for foot traffic over there. It was open like it is right now.”

“Is it possible the couple who found the body opened it?”

“I asked Machado that. He says it was already open.” Marino stops the SUV and shifts it into park. “Apparently it’s never locked. Don’t ask me why because it sure as hell wouldn’t stop someone unauthorized from parking in here.”

“Maybe not,” I observe. “But most people aren’t going to drive over a sidewalk and a curb in view of the campus police headquarters. I also expect that cars authorized to park here have stickers. So if you manage to get in without a swipe, you still might get towed.”

Marino kills the engine, switching on his high beams to annoy Rusty and Harold as they open the back of the van. They exaggerate shielding their eyes with their hands, yelling at him.

“Jesus!”

“You trying to blind us?”

“Turn those damn things off!”

“Po-lice brutality!”

“Under one of these trees in the rain and dark, and no one’s going to see anything even if they’re paying attention.” Marino continues telling me what his thinking would have been were he a deranged killer.

Clearly he’s decided that’s what we’re up against and I have my own reasons to worry he might be right. I think of Benton’s cases and I wonder where he is and what he’s doing.

Marino lowers the windows several inches.

“Will he be okay in here?” I ask about his dog.

Quincy is awake, sitting up in his crate and making his usual crying sounds when Marino leaves him.

“I’m not sure what the utility is hauling him around everywhere if he’s just going to stay in the car,” I add.

“He’s in training.” Marino opens his door. “He’s got to get used to things like crime scenes and riding around in a cop car.”

“I think what he’s used to is exactly that — riding around.” I climb out as Rusty and Harold clack open the folded aluminum legs of a stretcher and I’m again reminded that I’ve lost my lead investigator.

A stretcher isn’t going to work in these conditions. But it won’t be Marino giving that instruction. The rain is on and off, barely spitting, the overcast ceiling lifting. I don’t bother pulling up my hood or zipping my jacket as I study the fence separating the parking lot from Briggs Field. An open gate is crisscrossed with yellow ribbons of reflective scene tape.

I imagine someone parking in this lot and having a way to open a gate, perhaps by cutting off the lock. This person then moved the dead body inside the fence, transporting it some fifty yards across grass and mud, leaving it in the middle of a red infield that during baseball season might be a pitcher’s mound. As I look at the scene in the context of its surroundings I think of what Marino said: Some sick fuck out there just getting started. Already I don’t agree with the just getting started part of it.

My intuition picks up on a calculating intelligence, an individual with a decided purpose. He’s not a novice. What he did wasn’t a reaction to the unexpected. It wasn’t an act of panic. He has a method that works for him. Bringing the dead woman here and leaving her the way he did has meaning. That’s what I feel. I could be wrong, and I hope I am as I continue to think about the Washington, D.C., cases I’ve reviewed. What I’m not wrong about is whoever is responsible left evidence out here. They all do. Locard’s exchange principle. You bring something to the scene and you take something away.

“The grass is soaked and the area she’s in is thick mud so you can forget a stretcher,” I tell Rusty and Harold, or Cheech and Chong as Marino rudely refers to them behind their backs. “Use a spine board. You’re going to have to carry her. And bring extra sheets and plenty of tape.”

“What about a body bag?” Rusty asks me.

“We’re going to carefully preserve the position of the body and the way it’s draped, transporting her exactly as she is. I don’t want to pouch her. We’ll have to be creative.”

“You got it, Chief.”

Rusty looks like a refugee from the sixties with his long graying hair and preference for baggy pants and knit beanies, what Marino calls surfer clothes. This early morning he’s outfitted for the weather in a rain jacket with a lightning bolt on the front, faded jeans, tall rubber boots, and a tie-dyed bandanna around his head.

“I guess from now on we don’t have to do what you tell us,” he zings Marino, his former supervisor.

“And I don’t have to bother telling you shit or pretend I like you,” Marino retorts as if he means it.

“Do you have a gun under that jacket or are you just happy to see us?” Harold needles him back, looking like the former undertaker he is, in a suit and tie and double-breasted raincoat, the legs of his creased trousers rolled up to the top of his boots. “I see you brought your K-nine just in case we can’t find the body that’s out there in plain view.”

“The only thing Quincy can find is his doggie bowl.”

“Watch out. Better not piss off De-tect-ive Marino. He’ll write you a parking ticket.”

Rusty and Harold continue with the banter and snipes. They return the stretcher to the van and collect sheets, the spine board, and other equipment as I get my field case out of the backseat and Quincy cries.

“We won’t be very far away. You be a good boy and take a nap.” I find myself talking to a dog again, this one vocal, unlike mine. “We’ll be right over there, just a stone’s throw away.”

I stare up at lighted windows in apartments around us, counting at least twenty people watching what’s going on. Most of them look young and dressed for bed or maybe they’re up studying, pulling all-nighters. I don’t notice anyone on foot loitering nearby, only the officers on the other side of the playing fields patrolling the sidewalk near the fence.

I imagine looking out a dormitory or apartment window at the exact moment someone was moving a dead body through the rain and mud of Briggs Field, virtually right under everybody’s nose. It would have been too dark to discern what was happening except that something out of the ordinary was. But students around here don’t pay attention. Marino’s right about that. They don’t even look when they cross a busy street, their situational awareness almost nonexistent, especially this time of year.

In several days undergraduate students will be numb with exhaustion and headed home for the holidays. The campus will be largely deserted and I can’t stop thinking about the timing, during final exams not even a week before Christmas. And the proximity bothers me, too. Across the street from the MIT police station and within walking distance from the CFC, not even a mile from here.