Dust

10

I dig the tactical flashlight out of my bag and shine the diamond-bright beam along the chain-link fence.

For as far as I can see, other gates are secured with padlocks and I don’t know why this one wouldn’t be unless it’s as Marino suggested. Someone used bolt cutters or a key. I paint light over galvanized steel posts, noting multiple scratches where the fork latch would be if the gate were closed.

“Possibly from the chain and padlock.” I point out the damage to Marino. “But this gouge right here?” I move the light closer and a deep scrape lights up like polished platinum. “It looks recently made, possibly by whatever was used to cut off the lock, if that’s what happened.”

“It’s fresh.” Marino has his own flashlight out. “MIT won’t be happy but I’ll make sure we dig up the fence post and get it to the labs in case anything’s ever recovered for tool-marks comparison.”

“I would,” I agree.

“I’ll wait until we’re done out here.” His eyes haven’t stopped moving, taking in everything around us, and he lifts his portable radio close to his mouth.

“Delta Thirteen,” he calls Machado and requests a backup to secure the gate and the parking lot. “We need someone here right now so nobody else enters the scene or tampers with anything,” Marino emphasizes loudly. “And what we don’t need is cops crawling all over either. Why we got so many uniforms where you’re at?”

“Just two.” Machado’s radio obscures the lower part of his face.

“I can count. They the only two? Because I don’t think so. We need a record of whoever accesses or attempts. Is someone keeping a log?”

“Ten-four.”

“How many reporters so far?”

“A TV crew about an hour ago, Channel Five, and they keep circling, waiting for the Doc to get here.” Machado stares at us from the muddy infield with its incongruous yellow tarp anchored by cheery orange flags. “Then Channel Seven was here maybe twenty ago. The minute anything they’re filming streams live we can expect more drop-ins.”

“It’s already on the Internet,” I remind Marino.

“Too late, thanks to the little spot you did on Fox,” he says over the air for the benefit of whoever’s listening. “You trying out for a reality show?”

Marino repeats that they must keep a record of everyone who enters and leaves and to watch the area for “nonessentials,” by which he means voyeurs, possibly whoever’s involved in the body being left out here. I envision the Marino from our early years, chain-smoking, chronically in a sour mood, acting like a male chauvinist ass. But he knew what to do. He was a damn good detective and I’d almost forgotten that.

Marino squats close to the opening in the fence and shines his flashlight through, the crisscrossed tape blazing neon yellow. The intense beam of light illuminates where the pavement ends at an area of soaked brown grass that is flattened and gouged as if something hard and heavy was dragged over it. Then the churned-up area recedes into the distance, to the infield, fading into a barely perceptible intermittent trail, a remnant that seems more imagined than real as if left by a phantom snail.

“She was dragged.” Marino stands up.

“I’d say so,” Harold agrees.

“He got her inside this gate,” Marino adds, “and had to have a way to do that unless it just happened to be unlocked or the lock and chain conveniently were already cut off.”

“Unlikely,” Harold says. “MIT campus police patrol everything around here like it’s Vatican City.”

“They’d notice if one of these gates was busted into or a lock was missing,” Rusty pipes up.

“Did I hear an echo?” Marino says as if Rusty and Harold are invisible. “Oh no. I’m sorry. It’s the peanut gallery. My point being,” he says to me, “whoever’s involved had a plan for disposing of her body.” He stares at the square of bright yellow plasticized paper in a sea of red some fifty yards from us.

The wind shakes and snatches at the tarp as if what’s underneath it is fighting to get out.

“Someone who knew he didn’t need a swipe to get into this back lot,” Marino continues. “Someone who knew he could drive over the curb through that pedestrian gate, that it happens to be a wide one and a vehicle could fit through it. Someone who knew that all the gates leading into the playing fields would be locked and he’d have to have a way inside the fence.”

“Unless you’re talking about an individual who in fact does have a swipe, keys, access. Like a student or someone who works here,” Rusty points out and Marino ignores him.

He scans the lit-up apartment windows, a misty rain slick like sweat on his face, which is hard and angry as if whatever happened to this dead woman is personal and he might just hurt whoever’s to blame. He takes his time glaring at a Channel 5 TV van with a satellite dish on the roof and a microwave antenna on the back as it pulls into the lot and stops. The front doors swing open.

“Don’t even think of coming inside the fence!” Marino barks at the news correspondent stepping out, a striking-looking woman I recognize. “Nobody beyond the tape. Stay the hell out.”

“If I wait right here and behave myself, can I get a statement, pretty please?” The correspondent’s name is Barbara Fairbanks, and I’ve had my rounds with her, unpleasant ones.

“I got nothing to say,” Marino answers.

“I was talking to Dr. Scarpetta,” Barbara Fairbanks says as she smiles at me and moves closer with her microphone, a cameraman on her heels. “Do you know anything yet? Can you confirm if it’s the woman reported missing?”

The camera light turns on, following Barbara Fairbanks like a full moon, and I know better than to give even one simple answer. If I reply I just got here or don’t know or I haven’t examined the body yet, somehow it ends up an out-of-context slanted quote that goes viral on the Internet.

“Can you give me a statement about Newtown? Do you think it will do any good to study the killer’s brain…?”

“Let’s go,” I tell Rusty and Harold.

“Stay away from the disturbed grassy area, keep way off to the side of it,” Marino says to us. “I got to get it photographed if they haven’t done it already. I’ll probably get some soil samples, too. See if there’s fibers from the sheet that’s over her, see if we can reconstruct what the hell happened out here.”

We pick our way through sopping-wet grass and mud that sucks at our feet, headed toward Machado and the two officers, one with Cambridge, the other with MIT.

Having stood sentry over the body for more than an hour, they look wet and chilled, their boots chunked with red clay. Machado’s boyish face is tired and tense, with a shadow of stubble, and I can sense his worries. He has legitimate ones.

Cambridge is a powerhouse, with Harvard and MIT and multibillion-dollar technology companies, not to mention a constant stream of visitors that includes celebrities, royalty, and sitting heads of state. The DA and the mayor will be breathing fire down the investigative unit’s neck if this case isn’t solved quickly and quietly.

“I don’t see anybody guarding the gate,” Marino says right off. “There’s a news crew hovering like vultures. Barbara Unfairbanks, it just so happens. Where’s the backup I asked for?”

“We’ve got another car coming.” Machado turns his attention to the parking lot where the news van is waiting with headlights on, engine rumbling.

For an instant I hold Barbara Fairbanks’s stare. A tall lithe woman with bottomless dark eyes and short raven-black hair, she’s remarkably pretty in a hard way, like a gemstone, like a perfectly shaped figure carved of Thai spinel or tourmaline. She turns away and climbs back inside the van, and she’s not the sort to give up on a scoop.

“The body may have been placed on top of something and dragged,” Marino says to Machado. “The grass just inside the gate looks disturbed and pressed down in places with divots where it got dug up in spots.”

“There are a lot of divots and churned-up areas,” Machado replies, and it doesn’t seem to bother him that Marino has a way of acting as if he’s in charge. “The problem is knowing for sure when any of them happened. It’s hard to tell because of the conditions.”

After setting scene cases in the mud, Harold and Rusty place the spine board and sheets on top of them, awaiting my instruction as Marino digs a pair of examination gloves out of a pocket and asks for a camera. I silently make plans, calculating how to handle what I expect will happen next as I watch the news van drive out of the parking lot. I have no doubt that Barbara Fairbanks hasn’t given up. I expect she’ll circle around to the other side of the field, the one nearest us, and try to film through the fence. I’m not going to examine the body until I know exactly what she intends to do.

“I’ll walk around, get some photos.” Marino turns on his flashlight and is careful stepping in the muck, sweeping the beam of light over puddles and red mud.

The MIT officer says to me, “I’m pretty sure he didn’t do anything to her out here, just left her so she’d be found really fast.”

I set down my scene case as he continues to offer his opinions, and with his strong jaw and perfect build he’s probably used to commanding attention. I remember him well from a case several weeks ago. An MIT freshman died suddenly and unexpectedly during wrestling practice.

“Drugs,” he adds. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

I don’t recall his name but I won’t forget Bryce following him and gawking when the officer appeared inside the large-scale x-ray room while I was using an embalming machine to inject contrast dye into the dead wrestler’s femoral artery, a procedure that would seem bizarre to someone unfamiliar with postmortem angiography. Three-dimensional computed tomography images revealed the cause of death before I touched the body with a blade.

“We’ve met before,” I say to him as I crouch down by my field case. “Earlier this month.”

“Yeah, that was pretty crazy. I thought for a minute you were a mad scientist pumping in fluids like you were trying to raise him from the dead. Andy Hunter,” he reintroduces himself, his gray eyes penetrating. “It turns out the kid’s father is a Nobel Prize winner. You’d think people that smart could have prevented their kid’s death with routine tests.”

“Abdominal aortic aneurysms are called a silent killer for a reason. Often there are no warnings or symptoms.” I snap open heavy plastic clasps.

“My grandfather died from a blown aneurysm.” Hunter stares at me, and when he was at the CFC several weeks ago he openly flirted. “Blue collar, no insurance, never went to the doctor. He had a bad headache one minute, was dead the next. I’ve thought about being screened but I’m phobic of radiation.”

“An MRI with contrast dye doesn’t emit radiation.” I settle closer to the anchored yellow tarp with its ominous shape underneath. “You’d be fine unless you have kidney damage.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Talk to your doctor,” Machado kids him. “You know, the one you pay?”

“Gail Shipton was last seen possibly between five-thirty and six last night at the Psi Bar. Is that still the story?” I ask him.

“Right, and we have a preliminary ID. A visual,” Machado says. “The photo that’s all over the news, it looks like her anyway. I realize we need to verify officially but in my mind this is Gail Shipton. She left the bar to talk on her phone around five-thirty, six p.m. Supposedly. That’s what we know.”

“I doubt it was raining when she stepped outside.” I tear off the perforated top from a box of exam gloves, the kind I like, latex-free, with textured fingertips. “She was out there for a while, at least seventeen minutes, based on the duration of the first call with someone who has a blocked number.”

“It wasn’t raining at the time she disappeared.” Machado’s deep-set eyes are curious as if he wonders what I’m getting at with my comments about the weather. “It didn’t start raining until later.”

“Do we know exactly when? What do you mean by ‘later’? I went to sleep around eleven and it wasn’t raining then but it looked like it was going to any minute.”

I notice Barbara Fairbanks’s crew is now in front of Simmons Hall, on Vassar Street, exactly as I expected.

“When I uncover her you’re going to need to hold something up as a barrier,” I say to Rusty and Harold. “We don’t want her on TV.”

“We’ve got plenty of sheets.”

“We’ll be ready if they head this way.”

“The storm started around midnight,” Machado answers my question. “Rain mixed with freezing rain and then just rain. But a monsoon.”

“If we consider the possibility that she was abducted at around six p.m., then whoever’s responsible knew the weather conditions or could guess what they might be by the time he disposed of her body out here.” I find two thermometers and a sterile retractable scalpel. “It would seem bad weather didn’t matter, that this person was comfortable in wet, nasty conditions.”

“When the mood strikes,” Andy Hunter says. “People used to these parts are used to the weather.”

I watch Barbara Fairbanks as she follows the fence, her camera crew behind her. They’ll have to film through chain-link but I’m not going to let them get even that. Marino’s not going to allow it either. He slogs through the mud in a hurry, back in our direction, while Rusty and Harold get sheets ready for a barricade.

“Toss me one,” Marino calls out and Rusty hurls a folded disposable sheet as if it’s a Frisbee.

Marino catches it in one hand. He rips off the cellophane wrapping as he sloshes through mud and puddles toward the TV crew. Shaking open the sheet, he holds it up against the fence, blocking the camera.

“Ah come on, man!” a crew member yells.

“I’m sure you already know this,” I say to Machado, “but Gail Shipton was involved in a lawsuit that’s due to go to trial in less than two weeks.”

I’m tempted to check my phone again but I don’t. It continues to nag at me that Lucy might have some connection to Gail Shipton, a computer engineer with a military-grade smartphone case. The fact that Lucy isn’t answering me is why I’m increasingly suspicious, and in fact I’ve about decided it’s true. Janet said she’d tell Lucy I was trying to contact her. When my niece ignores me something is up. It’s almost never good.

“I didn’t know anything about a lawsuit,” Machado says.

“Are you familiar with a financial company called Double S?” I ask him as Marino moves along the fence.

He’s holding up the sheet, moving as the crew moves, blocking their view.

“I can’t say that I am or know anything about a trial,” Machado answers and I can tell by the look on his face that I’ve given him something new to think about.

Maybe he’ll stop stubbornly assuming this young woman’s death is an accidental drug overdose. Maybe he’ll quit worrying about public relations and potentially bad press.

“Harold, if you and Rusty will stand right there,” I say to them, “I think we’ll be okay.”

Their disposable-sheet barricade goes up loudly like a sailboat tacking into the wind. Plastic rustles as I pull back the yellow tarp.