Dust

21

I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia then but I didn’t do her autopsy. My northern district office took care of Gabriela Lagos and I didn’t realize there was a significant problem until her body had been autopsied and released.

I remember driving to a Fairfax, Virginia, funeral home and the displeasure of the people who worked there when I showed up with a crime scene case. The body wasn’t viewable but that didn’t mean I should further mutilate it by incising reddish areas that I suspected were bruises.

I spent long hours with Gabriela Lagos, looking at her body after reviewing the reports and photographs of what was a sensational death, an incredibly troubling one, and I felt the way Benton does right now. I was the odd person out. I was convinced she was a homicide disguised to look like a natural death or an accident.

“She was a Washington insider, divorced from a former minister of culture at the Argentinian embassy, an art historian who was vibrant and quite beautiful,” Benton says. “A curator at the National Gallery, and she also oversaw exhibits at the White House, authenticating new acquisitions for the First Family, which at the time was the Clintons.”

“I recall a suggestion of scandal that never surfaced publicly.” I sensed someone was trying to manipulate my office from the moment I informed the police that Gabriela Lagos was a homicidal drowning and the focus became her only child, the son she was raising alone.

The fifteen-year-old boy had vanished. When a warrant was issued for his arrest I got aggressive phone calls from the mayor’s office and my longtime friend Senator Frank Lord warned me to watch my back.

“Clearly she’d been dead for three or four days in the middle of summer, the air-conditioning turned off, possibly deliberately to escalate decomposition,” I tell Benton. “Suffice it to say she was in very grim shape. Fresh contusions weren’t readily apparent but they were there, and the typical fingermark pattern I expect in homicidal bathtub drownings when victims are lifted by the ankles, causing their heads to submerge. Almost always there’s significant bruising around the lower legs and also over the hands and arms from violently striking the sides of the tub as the victim flails helplessly.”

“Christ, remind me not to go that way,” Benton says from his position against the fence, sitting on his heels, his forearms on his knees, while we wait for Marino.

“The pattern was harder to see because of the advanced decomposition.” The details rush back at me like remembered bad dreams. “And my deputy chief had neglected to incise those areas of discoloration to look for hemorrhage and he misinterpreted contusions as postmortem artifacts.”

“I know all about his negligence.” Benton flicks more bits of broken stick.

“Jerry Geist.” My tone turns disparaging.

“It’s hard to forget a pompous old fart like that.”

“For a number of reasons she easily could have been signed out as an accident.”

“If you hadn’t been involved, she would have been.” Benton reminds me I had quite a fight on my hands.

The prosecutor was adamant that a jury would never convict Martin Lagos, a juvenile, assuming he was ever found and taken into custody. The physical evidence wasn’t strong and I disagreed. It was plenty strong. A healthy young woman who wasn’t impaired with drugs or alcohol didn’t accidentally drown in a tub filled with water so hot that her entire body was scalded. There was no sign of a seizure, stroke, aneurysm, or myocardial infarct, and she shouldn’t have had fresh bruises. She was murdered and it was my belief that whoever was involved had attempted to obscure the crime.

“Dr. Geist wanted the death signed out as an accidental drowning and I wouldn’t let him.” I haven’t thought of him in years.

He was in his sixties at the time, an old-school pathologist, blatantly misogynistic and quite happy when I resigned and he didn’t have to answer to me anymore. I remember feeling he was inappropriately influenced by anyone who was powerfully connected and I strongly suspected he maneuvered behind the scenes to force me out of office.

“He maintained the skin slippage and blistering were due solely to the bad condition she was in when in fact her entire body was covered with full-thickness burns,” I explain. “It was apparent to me that after she was dead someone refilled the tub with scalding tap water, probably to hasten decomposition and obscure injuries. That and turning off the air-conditioning in July made for a tough case that Dr. Geist debated with me disrespectfully and inappropriately.”

“He was an arrogant little bastard.” Benton runs his fingers through his unruly hair as the wind kicks up.

A high-pressure front has followed the retreating storm and sharp gusts blast along miles of tracks stretching out like sutures. In the distance I make out the figure of Marino walking his dog.

“Why would Martin Lagos’s name come up now?” I ask.

“His DNA was supposedly recovered in the third case, Julianne Goulet, on the panties the killer dressed her in, which were identified as belonging to the victim from the week before, Sally Carson.” Benton gets to his feet, shaking out his legs the way he does when his knees are bothering him.

“Identified how?”

“Visually. Her husband recognized them, lingerie he’d bought for her that he recalled she had on when she left the house, when he saw her last. We never got her DNA from them.”

“That’s unusual if she had them on when she was abducted and murdered.”

“Maybe you’re beginning to see it from my point of view. We didn’t get Sally Carson’s DNA but we got Martin Lagos’s. Supposedly.”

“Yes, you’ve said that twice now. Supposedly.”

“The killer dresses his most recent victim in the panties of the last one,” Benton says. “Totally textbook. I’ve written about it.”

“And for some reason in the third case, Julianne Goulet, he left his DNA.”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to look.”

“Are you thinking it was left deliberately?”

“I’m thinking someone did,” he says.

Benton puts his coat on as he stares off in the direction of Marino, whose advance is in fits and starts. Quincy tugs him like a sled dog, following the scents of God knows what, finding clumps of weeds to mark.

“We can’t locate Martin Lagos,” Benton continues to explain. “The theory is he created a new identity, possibly as long ago as when he vanished. He had one close friend who I strongly feel helped him disappear or was involved in Gabriela’s murder and we don’t know where this friend is either. But nobody’s listening to me.”

“What about forensic age progression to predict what Martin might look like now?”

“Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“You have? By yourself?” I continue to be dismayed by the way he refers to himself now as if he’s completely alone in this investigation.

“We’ve searched mug shots that include police departments, prisons, plus the Bureau’s national repository of surveillance, passports, driver’s license photos, you name it, and also whatever else Interpol might have. Black notices, for example, the unidentified dead,” he says. “Nothing, not even remotely.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

Benton doesn’t answer me, and Marino is nearing the other side of the tunnel now.

“You don’t think he’s alive,” I say in a quieter voice because I don’t want Marino to overhear a word.

“I don’t,” Benton replies. “No matter what name Martin Lagos might go by or how he might have tried to alter his appearance, his facial landmarks should be the same. The spacing between his mouth and nose, the width of his eyes, measurements like that.”

It sounds like something Lucy would say.

“Everything makes me suspect he’s not been around for the past seventeen years, which is why we can’t find him,” Benton adds. “It’s possible he’s dead. He may have committed suicide or he may have been murdered.”

“Maybe Lucy can help.” I suggest what I’m beginning to suspect has happened already. “The computer programs she’s created using neural networking recognize objects and images much the way the brain does. I know that she’s been doing research with irises, facial features, and other biometric technology. Of course I’m sure you know what she’s been doing; maybe know more than I do,” I add pointedly.

“A forensic app.” He stares down the tracks, watching Marino get closer. “With a potential of being used in vehicles manned and unmanned. In other words, possibly drones targeting people of interest, a handheld way of searching almost anything you can think of, assuming you have access to databases that are off-limits to most people.”

“If you can give Lucy the most recent photograph. Or a video or a recording of his, whatever you’ve got.” The forensic app may have been on Gail Shipton’s phone.

It may be a project the two of them were working on and Benton may be suggesting that Lucy has been helping him by searching databases she isn’t legally allowed to access. Government databases, for example.

“The most recent photo is when he was fifteen, his birthday,” Benton says. “Just four days before his mother died. Age progression, facial recognition, came up with nothing. There’s no match to be made because he’s dead. That’s what I believe even if I can’t prove it yet.”

If Lucy has been helping him, it not only would be in direct violation of FBI regulations but it would be a violation far more serious. She’s not supposed to know what Benton is doing, much less assist, unless it’s been approved by his division, specifically by Granby, but then I’m not supposed to know about the Capital Murderer cases either.

Lucy conducting clandestine data searches for Benton reinforces just how much he doesn’t trust those around him. It would explain why she scrubbed Gail Shipton’s phone. If this forensic app he just mentioned was discovered, someone might question what it was being used for. Any hint that it was capable of searching classified law enforcement repositories could lead right to Lucy and also to Benton and to very big trouble. Both of them could face criminal prosecution. Benton would never encourage such a thing with her unless he was certain he had no choice.

“Do we have a clue about why Martin Lagos might have killed his mother?” I don’t recall being told a motive at the time and I don’t want to ask him for further details about what he and Lucy have done.

“We have a purported one. Supposedly she began sexually abusing him when he was six.” The sun is directly in Benton’s face as he turns toward the river, which we can’t see from here, then his eyes are back on Marino, who’s entering the tunnel now.

“Where did the information come from if she’s dead and he’s vanished?”

“A computer disk. At the time of his mother’s murder we got information off a disk the police discovered hidden in his bedroom. His computer’s hard drive was missing. Presumably removed by him,” Benton says. “A spy video camera may also have been missing, used to film his mother bathing, based on what Martin wrote in his diary.”

“Wasn’t Granby in Washington back then?” I have an instinct, an unpleasant one of how this is looping around.

Granby can’t resist reminding anyone who will listen that he was an assistant special agent in charge in D.C. and what an exciting time it was when everything wasn’t about 9/11 and the war in the Middle East. During a dinner not long after he moved here he asked what I remembered about him from when I was the chief of Virginia and I told him I was sorry if we’d met then and I didn’t recall it. I could tell I offended him. Then he seemed relieved.

“He was an inspector in place and on the White House’s National Security Staff,” Benton says. “The details about Martin Lagos’s abuse were never in your office records.” He changes the subject back to that. “There was never anything in the police report. The medical examiner didn’t need to know and it would have served no useful purpose for the media to get its hands on such an accusation. That was the decision.” Not Benton’s decision but someone else’s.

“Do you believe the abuse happened?”

“From what I’ve read in the diary, yes.”

Marino is midway in the shadowy tunnel now, Quincy straining toward us with his tongue hanging out. It looks like he’s grinning.

“I’d like to review the Gabriela Lagos case to refresh my memory,” I say to Benton. “Everything you have on it. I’d rather not go through Virginia. Nobody wants a former chief meddling. My input wouldn’t be welcome.” I have more than one reason.

If there’s a problem with Martin Lagos’s DNA, I’m certainly not tipping my hand by calling the office that handled the original analysis even though I was in charge of it at the time, in 1996. If something has happened, it’s happened since I was chief, possibly very recently, as recently as the third victim’s murder, which wasn’t even a month ago.

“I can get you a lot more than your former office can as long as I don’t clear it with Granby,” Benton says. “He won’t say no. It just won’t happen and then other things will.”

“As soon as I can get anything that might relate to what’s going on,” I reply. “You think my case here is connected to the ones in D.C., so let me look at the evidence. I have that right and jurisdiction. Let’s compare the DNA, let’s compare the fibers to what I’ve recovered from this morning. Give me everything you’ve got as quickly as you can.”

“Leave it!” Marino orders his dog.

“The DNA is harder,” Benton says.

“Heel!” Marino’s voice echoes inside the tunnel, where Quincy is pulling him around. “Shit!”

“I can e-mail the microscopic images of the fibers,” Benton says. “But the DNA profiles have to come from CODIS and I can’t access that directly. I’d have to put in a formal request.”

“Who did the original analysis in Julianne Goulet’s case?”

“The Maryland medical examiner’s office. Baltimore.”

“I know the chief very well.”

“You can trust him without reservation?”

“Absolutely.”

Quincy sloshes into a puddle and drinks from it and Marino yells, “No! Leave it! Dammit!”

“About the time it’s believed Gabriela Lagos died an anonymous caller reported witnessing a young male jumping from the Fourteenth Street Bridge into the Potomac at night,” Benton tells me. “The body was never found.”

“Never?” I question. “That strikes me as strange.”

“No drinking puddles!” Marino is the one barking.

“Were you the profiler on her case?” I don’t remember Benton ever telling me at the time that he was involved in Gabriela Lagos’s homicide.

“I was consulted, yes. Not about her but about Martin and what was in his diary” is all Benton says, and Marino has reached us.

Benton holds out his hand to encourage Quincy to come. “That’s a good boy.” He ruffles the German shepherd’s neck. “I can see you’re very well trained,” he says with quiet sarcasm.

“He’s sure as hell not being good,” Marino is grumpy and out of breath. “Don’t be a bad boy.” He pats his dog, thumping him on the sides. “You know what to do. Now, sit.”

Quincy doesn’t.