Dust

34

Past outbuildings and a small natural pond, the two-story timbered headquarters is set on the highest point of immaculate grounds. It fronts paddocks and pastureland and is connected by covered walkways to the rest of a compound that’s not visible from the long paved drive unless one follows it to the end where it bends around. Lucy explains the layout to me. I no longer ask her how she knows.

The steeply pitched roof is copper tarnished like an old penny and there are thick stone columns on either side of the veranda. Beveled leaded transom windows are over the heavy front door, with big windows across both floors and I imagine a clear view of rolling fields, sheds, barns, and people on the grounds if the shades aren’t drawn like they are right now. I think of security cameras that would detect an uninvited guest.

It’s no longer raining, as if Double S can buy its own weather, and I tilt my head back and feel the chilled moist air on my cheeks and pushing through my hair. I can see my breath just barely. The sky is turgid and dark as if it’s dusk instead of almost two p.m., and I imagine what Benton is doing and what he knows. He’ll be here soon. There’s no way he won’t be and already I’m looking for him.

I follow the rows of silvery birch trees that in warmer months meet in a canopy over the long black driveway, my eyes moving past the quiet muddy-green pond, then the empty brown paddocks behind gray split-rail palings. Horses will be in the main barn because of the weather, an angry colliding of warm and cold fronts that could hammer down sleet or hail. Beyond the fencing and a meadow fringed in switchgrass are heavy woods that lead to the park where a fleeing man in a hoodie frightened children and teachers hours earlier. I estimate it’s not even a mile as a crow flies. Already I suspect that Double S’s intruder wasn’t one.

A half dozen Concord police cruisers and unmarked cars are parked on a spacious tarmac and I notice an expensive white Lincoln Navigator and a white Land Rover that I suspect belong to Double S. Marino’s SUV has the windows cracked, his rowdy German shepherd crated in back whining and pawing frantically like a jailbreak because he knows it’s us.

“Marino lets him sleep in his bed, too,” Lucy says. “The dog’s totally worthless.”

“Not to him,” I reply. “And you’re one to talk. You and Janet cook fresh fish for Jet Ranger and dehydrate vegetables for his treats, the most spoiled bulldog on the planet.”

“We won’t get into who spoils her dog.”

We walk around to the tailgate of Lucy’s SUV, backed in close to a glass and stone sunporch that’s detached from the main building and set alone in the midst of evergreens like a palaver hut. Through its open blinds I see modern leather furniture, a sofa and two side chairs, and a slate table with magazines loosely stacked. There are two coffee mugs and one small plate with three or four brown cupcake liners and a crumpled blue paper napkin on top. I notice what look like chocolate crumbs on the table near the plate and it doesn’t appear the other person drinking coffee was eating. The housekeeper didn’t clean up after whoever it was.

Lucy continues to describe the ranch to me, telling me the detached sunporch isn’t original to the property.

“The office building is red oak,” she explains, “and this is new pine lumber painted to match it, built in the spring, coincidentally about the time the murders in Washington, D.C., began. There are cameras everywhere but not here.”

“Coincidentally?” I repeat.

I scan the roof, the entrance, the single glass-paned door leading inside the small outbuilding and see no sign of a security system. There’s no alarm keypad visible inside a small space with a sitting area and what looks like a half bath.

“I’m simply pointing out the timing.” Lucy opens up the back and we collect coveralls, safety glasses, sleeve guards, and nitrile gloves with extended cuffs.

Then she checks her phone again as I pull out personal protection kits that include HEPA respirators, antimicrobial towelettes, and biohazard trash bags because I have no idea exactly what to expect.

“It’s on Twitter.” She scrolls with her thumb. “A massacre in Concord.”

“I hope that word didn’t come from Bryce, for God’s sake.” I worry about reporters calling him and he blurts out to them what he did to me.

“I suspect he came up with the word because he got it from the Internet. Let’s see, rumors and misinformation posted as news feeds.” Lucy continues to scroll. “It’s all over and has been for the better part of an hour, USA Today, Piers Morgan, Reuters, and everybody and their brother retweeting. Multiple fatalities at international financial company, at least three homicides, possibly robbery related. Now, I wonder who released that. Well, it gets worse. FBI denies link to MIT death from earlier today, Gail Shipton, who was suing Double S. No evidence there’s any connection, Boston Division Chief Ed Granby states, and hello? Who’s suggested a connection? ‘At this point her cause of death is unknown and hasn’t been ruled a homicide,’ Granby says.”

“I don’t know what it is he thinks he can deny since he knows nothing about her case,” I reply as my bad feeling returns like a muscle spasm. “Benton wouldn’t have passed on something he shouldn’t when he knows I’ve not officially released anything about Gail Shipton and won’t until certain test results are in.”

“It’s not Benton,” Lucy says. “It’s his douchebag boss who’s scripting what he wants people to think.”

CODIS has been tampered with and Granby threatened the chief medical examiner of Maryland and now he’s manipulating the media about my cases here. I feel a flare of anger and a growing sense of alarm.

“He’s basically speaking for you and our office. So why do you think that is?” She looks at me and I know what she overheard in the bay when I was talking to Dr. Venter, and Benton has given her information, too.

We lean against the bumper to pull on latex boot covers with a heavy-duty tread, what I prefer when a scene is extremely bloody.

“To manipulate,” Lucy then says. “It’s got to do with the DNA screwup, doesn’t it?”

“I’m afraid it may be more than a screwup.”

“Granby’s got a special interest. Maybe he’s protecting people with money so he can make sure he doesn’t sail off into the sunset with nothing but a government pension.”

“Be very careful what you say, Lucy.”

“He came up with Martin Lagos for a reason,” she says. “If you’re going to tamper with DNA and need a profile to swap, why this kid who disappeared seventeen years ago? Why would Granby think of him?”

“We don’t know for a fact who thought of him.”

“Saying it was Granby, why would he? Let me answer for you. He probably knows Lagos is dead, which is why he’s never shown up and why I can’t find him in any database. If you’re going to steal someone’s identity, it’s helpful if that person never shows up to complain about it.”

“Granby was with the Washington field office at the time,” I reply. “He may remember Gabriela Lagos. It was a sensational case.”

“No kidding he’d remember it. The question is, was he involved in some way? Is there a reason it would suit his purposes to make people think her missing son is the Capital Murderer?”

“What I know for a fact is something is profoundly wrong with the DNA analysis in Dr. Venter’s case, Julianne Goulet. The stain on the panties she was wearing couldn’t have been left by a man. Martin Lagos didn’t deposit vaginal fluid and menstrual blood and what this suggests to me is someone tampered with the DNA in CODIS and didn’t bother to check what the stain was comprised of or it would have been apparent the profile wasn’t going to work for a male.”

“That sounds like the stupid mistake a macho FBI dick like Granby would make. You’ll know for sure he’s got a special interest if he shows up here. A division chief doesn’t bother with a crime scene or get his hands dirty,” Lucy says. “And he’ll be here, you watch. I’m sure he considers it his turf and he needs to control it because he’s got an agenda, a rotten one.”

“At the moment it’s my turf.”

Lucy stares at the outbuilding with the coffee cups inside where somebody was having a private conversation before three people died.

“A handy little place to chat.” She peers through a window. “If you want to come out here and talk about incriminating activities, criminal activities” — she moves to another window, cupping her hands around her eyes — “there’s no telephone inside to bug. And it looks like we have commercial-grade sound masking. See the small white speakers in the ceilings? They’re probably in the ductwork, too. Similar systems are installed in courtrooms these days so when lawyers approach the bench no one can hear what’s being said.”

She begins pointing out cameras on the roof, over the mahogany front door of the office building, and on copper lampposts along the sidewalk and the driveway.

“Weatherproof, infrared high-res that automatically switch from color to black-and-white in low light like what we’ve got now,” she says. “Not wireless though. See the cables? You know what the problem with cables is? They can be cut. What’s interesting though is it doesn’t look like they were.”

“You’d have to know where they are to cut them,” I reply. “You’d have to think of it first, from the moment you decide to step foot on the property.”

“He didn’t,” she says as the front door opens. “Score one point for unpremeditated.”

Then Marino fills the doorway, his foot propping open the storm door behind him. His face is stubbly and keyed-up, his big hands gloved in latex that I can see the dark hair of his wrists through.

Behind him through the space in the door he wedges open, I notice crime scene investigators in BDUs, one of them taking photographs, another working a laser-mapping station.

One woman, one man — NEMLEC, I suspect. I don’t know them at a glance. A number of the small neighboring jurisdictions have experts and special equipment, the training and purchases funded by grant money, but there’s little violent crime. Some police in the area have never been to my headquarters.

“All ready and waiting for you, Doc.” Marino slides a pack of cigarettes from a pocket and shakes one out. “Two Concord detectives plus a crime scene guy from Watertown and me. Everybody else I ran out. It’s not a spectator sport.”

“It will be,” Lucy says. “The FBI is on its way.”

“I said no to calling them yet, not when the Doc hadn’t even gotten here.” He flips open a lighter and a flame spurts up. “They’ll just make things worse right now and my main interest has been to protect the scene.”

“They don’t need you to call and they don’t need your permission. Granby’s already making statements to the press and there may have been a couple Feebs at Minute Man Park when we drove past. They’ll be closing in whether you’ve invited them or not.” Lucy checks to make sure her SUV is locked. “I give it a couple hours before they’re here taking over.”

“The kind of money and suspicious shit we’re already seeing is going to hand this to them on a silver platter anyway.” He sucks in as much smoke as he can. “The murders will be small potatoes to them.”

The tip of the cigarette glows bright orange as he holds it the way he always has, midway, with the lit end tucked in toward his palm. Downwind of him I pick up the acrid toasted smell of burning tobacco. It’s a ritual hard for me to watch.

“I think we’re talking about some really serious white-collar crime.” He flicks the filtered butt with his thumb to knock free the ash. “And that’s without seeing the half of it yet. Some areas are locked up behind steel doors like a friggin’ bank vault.”

“So you’ve not gotten into those,” Lucy says.

“Some things I wasn’t going to disturb until the Doc got here. Anything to do with the bodies we haven’t touched.” He’s starting to show his irritation with her, what was already there and it’s rapidly breaking the surface. “But you’ll see when you get inside. The place looks like a front for something.”

“Since when are we smoking?” I ask him. “I thought you quit for good after the last time you quit for good.”

“Don’t start.”

“That’s what I should be saying to you.”

“A couple drags and I put it out.” He talks as he blows smoke sideways out of his mouth.

Like the old days, I can’t help but think. Smoking at a crime scene, holding a cigarette with gloves on, bloody gloves, it didn’t matter back then. What I wouldn’t give for a lungful of my favorite poison and if I knew I had only an hour left to live I’d light up. I’d sit on the steps with Marino and drink beer and smoke the way we did during tough times and tragedies.

“How many?” I ask him. “You told me three. Have you found any others?”

Lucy and I step up on the stone veranda, where I notice small rustic tables and rocking chairs, a place to relax with no evidence anybody does. The furniture is neatly arranged and glazed with rainwater and I have a feeling that private discussions don’t occur at Double S unless they’re behind closed doors and thick glass with sound masking. I can’t shake what Lucy implied about the sunporch being built as recently as last spring about the time the D.C. murders began, serial crimes that now involve DNA tampering and an FBI division chief who may have directed it and has threatened at least one colleague of mine.

“We’re going to hang for a minute so I can fill you in. One male, two females.” The cigarette wags as Marino talks and he plucks it out, squinting as he exhales a stream of smoke. “We were worried at first there might be more victims in other parts of the building or on other areas of the property since we haven’t been able to search some of the locked-up spaces. Plus it’s a huge place, with all these walkways connecting everything like spokes on a wagon wheel. Friggin’ unbelievable. If you put them end to end, they’re probably a mile long. And there’s golf carts so a fat load like Dominic Lombardi never had to walk,” he adds and I notice he uses the past tense.

“Nobody has keys?” Lucy asks.

“Yeah, and I wasn’t going to touch them until you do your thing since they’re in a puddle of blood under a dead body.” He says this to me, not her. “But based on conversations with a couple of the ranch hands, it’s three fatalities total. Everybody else is accounted for except the asshole who did it.”

“And nobody saw anything,” I suppose.

“That’s what they’re saying. Of course it’s bullshit.”

“IDs?” I notice Marino is in the same clothes he had on before dawn this morning when he showed up at my house in the pouring rain.

I can smell his excitement and stress, his musky male odor that turns rancid if he goes without sleeping or bathing and works nonstop. In another eight or twelve more hours he’ll stink so strongly of sour sweat and stale cigarettes, one will pick him up at ten paces.

“Dominic Lombardi. Or Dom, as he goes by, like the champagne. I guess this will be a bad year for Dom,” Marino says. “And hold on about the other one.”

He digs into a pocket, the latex glove resistant against the fabric, the cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, one eye screwed shut. He flips pages in a notepad, holds it some distance from his face because he doesn’t have reading glasses on.

“I can’t pronounce this worth shit. Jadwiga Caminska. They call her Ika. His administrative assistant. That’s their expensive white SUVs here in the lot. Dom and Ika were visually identified preliminarily by the investigators from Concord PD, who you’ll meet,” he says to me. “They’ve been here before, this past Friday night late when Lombardi reported a possible intruder.”

“Was there one?” Lucy asks.

“Maybe.” He looks at her. “They searched every nook and cranny, spotted a shadow on a video recording picked up by a security camera at the main barn. Like somebody careful about the cameras because he knew what to look for and then cut the wires. Those quadrants on the video displays went black while Lombardi was at his desk at around midnight.” Marino doesn’t take his eyes off her. “He was so appreciative he promised to donate ten grand to the Concord PD Christmas fund, cash withdrawn from his bank two days ago, the withdrawal slip in his desk drawer but no sign of the money and Concord PD never got it.”

“The same amount found in the envelope under the footbridge,” Lucy says.

“You’d make a good cop.”

“Been there, done that.” Lucy stares back at him as if they’re in a standoff.

“So the killer probably stole it and any other cash he could grab.”

“Sounds like a reasonable deduction.” Lucy crosses her arms staring at him, goading him into confronting her about what I suspect she did.

Marino crushes the cigarette against a stone column and sparks go out as ashes drift down. He tucks the butt in a pocket, blowing one last stream of smoke off to the side away from us. Maybe Lucy was never invited to visit Double S but that doesn’t mean she’s never been here.

“I guess they didn’t catch the intruder,” Lucy then says and Marino glares at her.

“If you did what I think, just tell me why,” he says loudly.

“I can suggest why someone would,” she replies. “If you want to walk around and to see what’s going on, you have to take out those cameras. The ones along the driveway you can dodge but not until you’ve gotten past the barn unless you want to swim across the pond.”

“Two detectives show up and this intruder’s still walking around?” Marino is getting louder, almost yelling at her.

“They’d be looking in the barn where all the expensive horses are. Then they’d check the locks of everything else to make sure there wasn’t a problem. Then they’d call it a night.”

“Why would someone want to see what’s here?” Marino’s demeanor has gone from cocky and angry to incredulous.

“Maybe not to see what but who. Who he was sleeping with.”

“And was that determined?” Marino’s look turns to disbelief.

“You could ask the two detectives who showed up.” Lucy gestures toward the house. “But by the time they got here twenty-three minutes after Lombardi called nine-one-one Gail was long gone,” she says.

“Jesus Christ, it would have been nice if you’d fucking told me that earlier!” Marino’s frustration erupts. “Gail Shipton’s here Friday night and now she’s been murdered and you just mention it as a by the way?”

“I’ve known for a while she’s in collusion with the enemy, probably involved in insurance fraud and who knows what else,” Lucy says. “I’ve been trying to find an answer that’s provable.”

“Sleeping with the guy she’s suing,” Marino exclaims in disgust.

“Not because she wanted to,” Lucy says. “She needed money.”