Dust

26

“A V-eight,” Lucy says to me. “Decent horsepower, four hundred maybe, a sizable sedan or SUV.”

SUV mud tires for off-roading, I remember Benton said. Someone involved in high-risk activities and sports who doesn’t hesitate to break into a pickup truck or drive through a golf course.

“Not a performance car, definitely not that kind of high-rev sound,” Lucy says. “It was there the entire time she was talking to me which means it was out back when she left the bar to take my call. She has no interest, possibly little or no awareness until this.”

Lucy clicks on a file, playing the same sound byte I’ve heard before.

“I’m sorry? Can I help you?”

“She’s not saying this to Carin. She’s saying it to someone else,” Lucy explains decisively. “You can tell. Her tone changes. It’s very subtle as if someone has walked up to her, someone who intends to speak to her, someone doing so comfortably, calmly.”

“This person is approaching her even though she’s on the phone. He doesn’t hesitate to interrupt her,” I consider. “And she doesn’t sound alarmed or guarded.”

“She doesn’t sound friendly either,” Lucy replies. “I don’t think the person was familiar to her but she’s not afraid of whoever it is. She sounds polite but not threatened. And here’s the other thing, if I enhance the background noise at the beginning of the conversation with Carin? I’ve separated everything out except the car.”

She plays a clip and I hear the rumble of an engine. That’s all I hear, just that low steady noise of a large gas-powered engine idling.

“Then she speaks to someone,” Lucy says.

“I’m sorry? Can I help you?”

“But what you didn’t hear is a car door shutting,” Lucy explains. “Whoever was back there must have gotten out of his vehicle and approached her but he left his car door open or at least didn’t shut it all the way or we’d pick it up as an audio event. There’s absolutely no fluctuation in the sound measurement. Whoever he is he’s quiet as hell and she doesn’t seem the least bit startled, just politely curious but cool.”

Lucy plays the sound byte again.

“I’m sorry? Can I help you?”

“He masquerades as something that causes no suspicion at first.” I can see it.

Dressed a certain way with an impeccable rehearsed approach that’s worked for him on at least three other murderous occasions, and also many more times than that when someone stalked had no clue what a close call it was. Offenders like this thrive on dry runs. They encounter potential victims and get off on the fantasy until they finally consummate the act by abducting and killing someone.

“You’re thinking her death isn’t isolated.” Lucy watches me intensely. “Is that what Benton thinks after prowling around Briggs Field? You examined her at the scene. She was murdered, not just possibly but definitely? Is what happened to her something you recognize? Or Benton does?”

“Who else might have known about these capabilities, about the technology you and Gail had been working on?”

“Whoever attacked her didn’t have the slightest idea.” Lucy stares intensely at me. “It’s got nothing to do with what happened to her and I repeat that emphatically. Would you grab somebody carrying a device like this? If you knew?” She indicates her phone on the table.

“If I knew, I’d be wary,” I agree. “I’d worry about being recorded.”

“And if the point was to steal the technology, the phone wouldn’t have been left on the pavement,” Lucy says. “Whoever grabbed her wasn’t interested in it, didn’t have a clue about a drone phone.”

“I have no idea what that is.”

“It’s basically a handheld robotic device and not evidence in this case.”

“Marino has decided it is.”

“He’s full of shit.”

“It appears you surreptitiously made recordings —”

“Because I couldn’t trust Gail and was trying to get to the bottom of it. I was almost there.”

“And now Marino doesn’t trust you and you don’t trust him. I don’t want you having a problem with him,” I say it again.

“He can’t prove a damn thing. I saw everything he did. By the time he so cleverly bypassed the password with the analyzer I programmed and taught him how to use, I was ten steps ahead of him. I was seeing him and he wasn’t seeing a damn thing I didn’t want him to.”

“He says apps, e-mails, voice mails that were on the phone earlier are gone.”

“Once he picked it up, there were certain precautions to take.”

“I don’t believe he’ll cut you any slack, Lucy. It might be the opposite, in fact. He’ll want to show everyone he doesn’t have favorites and the past is past.”

“The phone can go to the CIA, I don’t care. No one can prove anything. And I don’t have to worry about her sick shit or anything else getting into the wrong hands. It won’t now.”

“Sick shit that could be motive for murder?” I ask.

“No way. Whoever killed her didn’t realize the importance of the device she was talking on when he approached her. It was just a phone.”

Lucy looks at me and beneath her indignation I detect disappointment and hurt.

“She wasn’t a good person, Aunt Kay. She tried to screw me. She tried to screw Carin. At the end of the day Gail didn’t care about anybody but herself and she had even less than she did before. I don’t mean money.”

“What exactly is a drone phone?” I ask.

The bay’s buzzer sounds and its intrusion is loud and grating.

“My idea was domestic usage that actually could help people,” Lucy explains. “It could save lives. Imagine controlling drones with your phone, not military unmanned aircraft but smaller ones. For aerial filming of real estate, sports events, highway and weather monitoring, wildlife research, activities that aren’t safe for pilots.”

She becomes animated as she talks about what gives her joy and it is always inventions and machines that she finds more compelling than a sunset or a storm.

“That was the point and then she headed off in a bad direction or maybe that was her intention all along.” Her mood goes back to dark. “Paparazzi photos, violating privacy in the worst way. Hunting animals. Hunting people. Spying. Acts of aggression committed by civilians for the worst of reasons.”

I watch the bay door begin to crank up and the narrow bar of daylight in the opening space beneath it isn’t as bright as it was earlier.

“Something happened to her.” Lucy sounds hard and unforgiving. “It may have happened to her before we met but eventually it owned her. That I know for a fact. I would have helped her if she’d asked but instead she tried to hurt me.”

I feel the damp chill of the late-morning air seeping in as my phone rings and I look to see who it is. The Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Henri Venter, and I answer.

“It’s not a great signal in here,” I say to him right off. “Let me call you back on a landline.” I get up and go to a phone on the wall next to the coffee cart.

I dial his number. “How are you, Henri?”

“Fighting over grant money, short half my staff it seems because of the flu and the holidays, and they sent us the wrong HEPA filters in this big order that just came in. I’m fine. What can I do for you, Kay?”

I start by telling him there is a sensitive situation with the DNA in the three D.C. cases and that we have what appears to be a related homicide in Cambridge. The Capital Murderer may now be in Massachusetts.

“This is extremely confidential on multiple fronts. And there may be a problem at the federal level,” I add in a way that conveys my meaning.

“I saw on the news there was a body at MIT,” Dr. Venter says. “No details other than that. A bag from that spa shop was over her head, I presume? And fancy duct tape?”

“No bag or duct tape but she was wrapped in an unusual white cloth and asphyxia is in my differential.”

“That’s interesting,” he replies. “Because in the case here, Julianne Goulet, I believe she was suffocated but not necessarily with the plastic bag that was taped around her neck. Her postmortem artifacts were perplexing and I found bluish fibers in her airway, her lungs. What I’m wondering is if he had some sort of cloth over her.”

“Lycra.”

“Yes.”

“And while she violently struggled to breathe, she inhaled fibers and clawed and these same fibers ended up under her nails,” I suggest.

“Precisely. I believe the bag and fancy tape were added as some sort of creepy adornment after the fact. Just like the white cloth and the way the body was posed. That’s just my opinion of course.”

“Henri, when our DNA analysis is done I’d like to compare it with your initial results in the Goulet case and not with what’s in CODIS.” I get to the most important point. “Or maybe a better way to put it is I don’t want to compare any DNA profile we get with what’s in CODIS now.”

“In it now?”

“I’m not questioning the integrity of CODIS overall, just this one sample in the case your office handled, Julianne Goulet and the DNA profile your labs recovered from panties she had on. I’m wondering if there was some sort of entry error when the profile was uploaded into CODIS,” I explain, and Lucy’s eyes are riveted to me.

“My Lord.” He understands what I’m implying. “This is quite disturbing.”

The bay door is annoyingly loud, and in the widening space I see the hearse rumbling on the other side, a Cadillac with a Christmas wreath attached to the front grille.

“As I understand it this DNA profile from the panties on Goulet’s body has been matched with a suspect, someone who’s been missing for seventeen years and is believed at least by some to have been dead that long.” I continue to give him enough to illustrate the ugly picture of tampering.

“I know nothing about a suspect,” Dr. Venter says.

“The FBI has one.”

“No one has told me that or attempted verification with our records. And that would be mandatory when there’s a match in CODIS. The lab that did the original analysis has to confirm and what you’re suggesting is outrageous.”

“I understand the stain in question was blood?” I inquire.

“That’s not exactly right. We analyzed a mixture of fluids comprising a stain on the panties Julianne Goulet had on,” he recalls. “These panties are believed to have come from the previous victim, a woman whose body was found in Virginia a week earlier. I’m trying to think of the name.”

“Sally Carson.”

“Yes.”

“But the profile on the panties didn’t turn out to be hers,” I inform him, “which is odd since they were identified as having been worn by her when she left the house before she vanished. Apparently her DNA wasn’t recovered at all.”

“I don’t know anything about the Carson case. It was Virginia’s and nobody’s talking.”

“For a reason that’s not a good one, I fear.”

“I’m pulling up the actual report from the Goulet case but I’m quite sure the DNA wasn’t hers either because of course we have her blood card, her profile. So we’d know if it was her DNA on the panties she was dressed in, probably postmortem. As you’re aware, we routinely use certain biospectroscopic methods for different body fluids, mainly looking for ribonucleic acid markers, the same techniques you use. So I can tell you exactly what those fluids were and if there was more than one profile mixed in but I’m fairly sure there wasn’t. What I remember is it all came from a single source, the same person.”

I wait as he finds what he needs in his database and the motor of the bay door completely stops. In the big square opening I see feathering clouds and farther-off ones that are building. The long black hearse noses forward slowly, propelled by its quiet engine, new and sleek, what funeral workers proudly call a landau coach.

“I have the report in front of me.” Dr. Venter is back. “Vaginal fluid, urine, and menstrual blood all from the same individual. We have only the identifier we assigned when we uploaded the profile into CODIS. As you would expect, we don’t know who it is.”

I’m surprised by the information and unfortunately I’m not. I inform him that Sally Carson’s autopsy report indicates that she was having her period when she was abducted and murdered. It’s possible if not probable that the stain on the panties Julianne Goulet’s body had on should have matched Carson’s DNA. But it didn’t, most likely because somebody tampered with a profile in the FBI’s database CODIS. I suspect but don’t say it openly that Carson’s profile was substituted for Martin Lagos’s, which would explain why it appears he left “blood,” as Benton referred to it, on the panties Julianne Goulet’s dead body had on.

“I’m looking at what we have and we definitely weren’t notified about a DNA match,” Dr. Venter says darkly. “We should have been sent the suspect’s profile to compare with our records and we weren’t.”

“A suspect’s profile from DNA analysis that I have reason to suspect was originally done in Virginia seventeen years ago,” I say. “A male who hasn’t been seen since, I’m told.”

“A male?” he exclaims. “A male certainly didn’t leave vaginal fluid and menstrual blood.”

“Exactly. Now you see the problem.”

“Virginia also should have been notified for a verification,” Dr. Venter says.

“I’m not checking with Virginia. Last summer their former lab director was hired as the new director of the FBI’s national labs. She got quite a promotion. I don’t know her personally.”

“This is extraordinarily disturbing,” Dr. Venter says. “I did the Goulet autopsy myself and frankly have had some concerns about the way it’s being handled even before knowing any of this. The one who used to be with the D.C. division back in your Virginia days and now is in Boston…Well, you might not have encountered him back then.”

“Ed Granby.”

Lucy hasn’t taken her eyes off me.

“In not so uncertain terms he threatened me,” Dr. Venter replies. “He said I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the DOJ and I would be if I leaked a word about the Goulet case, that he was taking extreme measures to prevent copycat crimes.”

“So he continues to say.” Then I bring up the fluorescing residue in Gail Shipton’s case that doesn’t seem to have been found in the others. “I’m just making certain you didn’t see anything like that,” I add.

“A grayish viscous material I found in her mouth and nose.” He opens that report next. “A mineral fingerprint on SEM, halite, calcite, and argonite that lit up a rather spectacular vivid red, a deep bluish purple, and emerald green when exposed to ultraviolet light.”

“I remember a mention of this viscous material in records I’ve reviewed. Something grayish in Goulet’s teeth and on her tongue.” I don’t go into more detail than that.

But he knows who I’m married to and can well imagine where I got the information. Lucy gets up from her chair and stands closer to me, staring, making no attempt to hide what she’s overhearing.

“There was no mention of these minerals fluorescing in UV. But that wouldn’t necessarily be included in the elemental report,” I add.

“It wouldn’t be.”

“I found a residue that lights up like that all over the body in my case from this morning.” I watch the two funeral home attendants in formal suits open the tailgate of the hearse.

They smile and wave as if their business is happy.

“It showed up fairly dense on CT,” Dr. Venter says. “But there was no evidence she aspirated whatever it is. I didn’t find this material in her sinuses, airway or lungs.”

“In the Virginia case, Sally Carson, there’s no reference to a material like this. But they don’t have a CT scanner.”

“Few facilities do. So it wouldn’t have been seen readily and very well may have been overlooked during the autopsy,” Dr. Venter says.

“If you can send me whatever you can electronically. Time is of the essence.”

“I’m doing it as we speak.”

I thank him and end the call.

“Is everything all right?” Based on what Lucy listened to she knows it couldn’t possibly be.

“Reports will be coming in from the chief in Maryland, Dr. Venter,” I say to her. “Maybe you can help by checking my e-mail and making sure they get routed to the proper labs as quickly as possible. And I’m expecting a case from Benton.” I don’t mention the name Gabriela Lagos in front of the two funeral home attendants. I’m not going to say another word and Lucy knows not to either.

She’s already checking e-mails with her phone to see if any reports are landing as we head up a ramp to the door leading inside. I scan my thumb in the lock and the attendants roll the stretcher up to us, small wheels clattering.

“How you doing, Chief? I heard you had the weekend from hell.”

“Doing fine.” I hold the door for them.

“The world’s gone to hell in a handbasket.”

“You might be right.” I shut the door behind us.

“That was quite a storm we had. We may get snow in another day or two.”

They push the stretcher inside the receiving area, where massive shiny steel walk-in refrigerators and freezers fill the far wall.

“The temperature’s dropped ten degrees in the past hour. Blowing off the water on the South Shore, it was pretty frigid but not so bad here, sort of in between needing a winter coat and not. A sad one we got. It seems like a lot of people kill themselves this time of year.”

“It seems that way because nobody should.” I check the tag attached to the outer body bag, fake blue leather with the name of the funeral home embroidered on it. “You can have this back.” I unzip it, revealing the flimsy white pouch underneath, the dead woman’s rigorous arms pushing against it, raised and bent at the elbows like a pugilistic boxer.

“Only thirty-two years old,” an attendant tells me as we remove the pleather-like outer bag. “Dressed for church with makeup on and dead in bed. Empty pill bottles on the table. Ativan and Zoloft. No note.”

“Often they don’t,” I reply. “Their actions speak louder.”