Dust

40

“A hoof knife.” I touch the painted one the farrier holds in the mural on the wall.

“The sharp curled tip would explain the wider, shallow abraded cut that peeled the flesh in places and runs parallel to the deep incision made by the straight edge of the blade,” I describe to Benton. “The killer may have gone into the barn because he knew what was easy to grab and how it would function as a weapon. It’s impossible to imagine he’s not familiar with the grounds and that nobody saw him.”

I run my finger along the brown wooden handle gripped by the farrier and along the narrow short silvery blade to where it curls in on itself at the tip. I feel the thick layers of paint on cool tumbled marble and I imagine Lombardi in his shower or bath looking at the very tool that one day would almost sever his head from his neck.

“It’s not what you would think of unless you know about it.” I envision getting my hands on a hoof knife and trying it on ballistic gelatin to see precisely what it does. “If you saw one on a workbench, you might not realize how effective it is, sharp enough to trim a hoof but not so sharp as to cut too deeply into the sole, not straight-razor sharp, which is difficult to control if you’re frenzied or bloody. It’s quite an art how farriers sharpen their tools — not too sharp, not too dull — so you can do the job without injuring the horse or yourself.”

“An eccentric choice that on the surface seems illogical.” Benton walks behind the long, deep stone tub to study the mural. “But I didn’t see any regular knives in there and maybe that’s why he grabbed what he did and it could be related to the drugs he’s on. If he’s watched horses being taken care of and shod and seen farriers get tired and sweaty and the horses not stay still the same way people don’t stay still if you’re cutting their throats, he might have been present when someone cut himself or he might have watched the knives being sharpened.”

He looks at the hoof knife clamped in a vise on the workbench in the painting.

“And in his increasingly disordered thinking it means something to him.” Benton works his way around the edges of the killer’s mind. “He envisions himself a horse, just another one of Lombardi’s possessions he controlled and kept in a stall and treated with disrespect and indifference, and maybe this morning was reprimanded, verbally whipped. There could be symbolism like with the vapor rub, like the tools under rocks. Power. I win, you lose. It’s all about that but also at this stage a by-product of his delusions.”

“What I can say with some degree of confidence,” I reply, “is whoever did this didn’t wander into the barn randomly and happen to see an unusual tool with a long wooden grip and stubby blade that’s hooked on the end and figure it would work just fine for killing people.”

“He knows horses, this barn and this place,” Benton states. “And he’s become so preoccupied with his delusions they’re completely disrupting his life.”

“Why wouldn’t the staff want to say who it is? For fear he’d find them and hurt them if he’s not caught first?”

“Maybe the opposite. They might not fear him because he doesn’t fear them. Especially if he was in the barn with them earlier and was friendly and has been here before.”

“Now they’re accessories to murder after the fact, participants by concealment.”

“If it can be proven, yes.”

“It’s probably not a new way of life for them,” I decide as I photograph Lombardi and the farrier with his knife. And then the bicycle bell rings again, another message from Lucy landing in Benton’s phone.

“He has three children with the second wife,” he informs me. “A son who is a financial planner in Tel Aviv and two daughters who are in school in Paris and London.”

“Sounds like a lovely family,” I reply as I decide the photograph of the young man and the elephant needs to go to Lucy because I have a feeling about him, not a good one.

Then Benton and I leave the house as we found it and the night seems more raw and cold. The heavy pines we walk through seem more sodden than they were before and their wet branches grab at us as the wind shoves and shakes them. In the parking lot we find more unmarked cars and light fills the shades in every window on both floors of the office building where the dead are gone, by now autopsied and safely in my coolers.

It seems later than it is and the powerful rumble of Benton’s turbo Porsche seems louder than I remember as we follow the driveway, passing the huge red barn, stopping at the barricades where a black FBI van with dark-tinted windows is parked. A surveillance vehicle, and I know where there’s one there will be others, monitoring Concord and the roads leading in and out of it and intersections along any route the target might take. I’d find it reassuring if they were looking for the right target but they’re not.

Benton shifts the Porsche into neutral and pulls up the brake. He opens his window and waits, knowing exactly how the FBI thinks and the importance of doing nothing suddenly or nervously that might be misinterpreted. Maybe the agents inside the van are aware of his car and that it’s been parked on the property for a while but Benton is of no concern to them as they’ve held their post at the entrance of the driveway, out of sight inside their van with all of its equipment. I imagine them tracking every car, truck, or motorcycle that passes on the street, communicating with other agents in vehicles and on foot, waiting to use diversions or decoys to mobilize into what Benton calls a floating box that invisibly surrounds whoever they’re after.

Benton touches a button in the center console and my window hums down, and I look out into the foggy night, watching an agent materialize in black tactical clothes, his carbine across his waist, his index finger ready above the trigger guard. If he didn’t know whose car this is, he will have run the tag while we’ve been sitting here. He’s not aggressive but he’s not relaxed.

His unsmiling face is in my open window, young, with a buzz cut, nice-looking and lean like all of them, what Lucy calls Stepford Cops, automatons identically programmed and physically crafted, and she would know since she used to be one of them. Federal agents whose polish, power, and camera-ready presence make America look great, she says.

It’s all too easy to hero-worship and emulate and my niece couldn’t have been more enamored when she started out with them as an intern while still in college. There’s nothing more impressive and sexier than the FBI, she’ll tell you now, until you run head-on into their lack of practical experience and absence of checks and balances. Until you are confronted by an Ed Granby, who answers to Washington, I think, and I’m no friendlier than the agent when I inform him who I am and that I’m clearing the scene.

I don’t offer my credentials with its shield. I’ll make him ask and he looks past me at Benton, who says nothing and ignores him, and all of it has the intended effect. Uncertainty twitches on the agent’s face as he recognizes an impatient authority that has no fear of him and then something else is there. The agent smiles and I sense his aggression just before he puts Benton in his place.

“How you doing tonight, Mr. Wesley?” He rests an arm along the length of the carbine strapped around his shoulder, crouching down lower. “Nobody said you were still here but I figured you wouldn’t just leave a car like this and catch a ride with someone.”

“I wouldn’t,” Benton says with complete indifference to what the agent is implying.

His expensive sports car was noticed and maybe it was a given that we were still on the grounds and looking around but we’re inconsequential. We aren’t part of the huge machinery and nobody cares. We aren’t a threat and maybe even Granby doesn’t think we are and then a second agent appears from around the side of the van I can’t see from where I am, a pretty woman in fatigues with her hair in a ponytail pulled through the back of her baseball cap. She moves close to her colleague and smiles at me.

“How’s everybody doing?” she says as if it’s a fine evening.

“The weapon you’re looking for may have come from the big barn.” I look back in the direction of it but from here it’s out of sight around a bend in the driveway. “A knife used on horse hooves, a long wooden handle with a very sharp blade that’s hooked at the end.”

“The murder weapon might be in the barn?” The male agent doesn’t take his eyes off us.

“One would think he didn’t run into the barn after killing three people and return the knife.” I say it blandly. “But I would expect you’d find other hoof knives and it’s quite possible he was in there earlier. That’s the important point. You might want to pass that on to your evidence response team.”

“What are you basing this on?” the female agent asks, more curious than concerned.

“The injuries to the victims’ necks are consistent with the knife I described and unless he brought one with him to the scene he got it from the property. I don’t know what else could have caused the incisions I saw.”

“You’re sure it’s a certain type of knife?” she asks as if it matters to her and I can tell it doesn’t.

“I am.”

“So we shouldn’t be looking for a variety of knives like kitchen knives.”

“It would be a waste of your time and unnecessarily burden the labs.”

“I’ll make sure we take a look.” The male agent removes his hand from the window frame and backs away from the car. “You folks have a nice Christmas.”

The two of them move sawhorses to the side and we drive through, in first gear, then second, and Benton guns the powerful engine before shifting into third, his way of saying fuck you. It’s as close as he can get to saying it and it occurs to me that Granby may have said it first. He may be saying it to us right now.

As I reach Lucy on my cell phone I’m already uneasy about what Ed Granby may have put into place. I feel a spike of paranoia and my thoughts begin to race.

It’s more than possible if not a certainty he knows we’ve been here unauthorized for the past hour and he did nothing about it because he’s secretive and calculating. He’s a consummate politician and wouldn’t want to give the appearance that he escorted the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts from the scene of a triple homicide that’s all over the news.

He would look dirty and as if he’s hiding something. He would look exactly like what he is. And while he wouldn’t have hesitated to have Benton escorted off the grounds, Granby isn’t stupid. He’d be sneakier than that with me. He’d hold off having his evidence response team or any other agents swarm Double S until Benton and I were gone and suddenly my electronic communications don’t seem safe. Nothing does.

“We’re just leaving and I’ll make this succinct.” It’s my way of letting Lucy know I intend to be careful about what I say.

“Sure,” she answers.

“I don’t know when we’ll be home and I’m worried about Sock.” She knows I’m getting to something else because Janet picked up my dog around five when our housekeeper Rosa left and Lucy’s already assured me of that.

“He’s fine and by the way Rosa said if you’re not going to put up a tree, she will. That’s assuming Bryce doesn’t barge in and do it first.”

“I’m going to take care of it,” I reply.

“And Sock can’t go home tonight.”

What she’s saying is I can’t and Benton shouldn’t either. The killer has been on our property before and we can’t predict how deranged he is but he’s deranged enough. Right now Sock is probably napping at Lucy’s house, which isn’t far from here, and I wish there were time to drop by. I wish life were settled and safe enough to have a nice late supper with my family and my dog.

“Who’s still at the office?” I ask.

“Bryce, security, me. Marino’s out with Machado. The docs are done and have left.”

“Anne’s gone home?”

“She and Luke went to get something to eat and I don’t know where she’ll go after that but both of them said they’ll come back in if you need them.”

I’ve had my suspicions Anne might be sleeping with the handsome, womanizing Luke Zenner. I don’t care but it won’t last and that’s fine as long as she doesn’t care either.

“It won’t be necessary,” I reply, “but let them know they need to be very careful. There’s reason to be concerned about the stability of the person the FBI is looking for.”

“I guess so since he murdered four people in a twelve-hour period and no telling what’s next.”

“Are you okay?” I’m asking about what she’s doing, which is going through Double S’s server. “Any inquiries about location or status?”

“Roger that.”

The FBI knows we have the server and the CFC has been contacted.

“The usual paperwork that will take a little while,” Lucy adds.

She’s stalled them.

“But I couldn’t be better.” She continues to follow my cue, saying nothing obvious or direct.

“When I get there I’ll go straight into the PIT if it’s been set up.”

“Waiting and ready. I replaced the bad projector. Tell him to see me upstairs right away.” She doesn’t mention Benton by name. “I’ve this really cool new search engine to show him.”

She’s found more incriminating information about Ed Granby. No matter what he’s calculating, he’s not calculating this, but he’s calculating something and we need to be careful.

Most of all we need to be cunning and smart.

“Will do,” I reply.

I end the call and place my phone in my lap, looking out my window at the dark night, passing Minute Man Park, a foggy emptiness now with vague silhouettes of statues and the bowed wooden footbridge the killer fled across this morning. Through the shapes of trees the distant lights of Double S seem to flicker as we move along the deserted street.

“What you’re implying would be illegal wiretapping,” Benton says.

“I don’t recall implying anything.” He’s going to stick up for them, it occurs to me sadly, a deeply aggravated sadness that creates a space between us whenever I feel it.

“I know the way you talk, Kay.”

“And you know why I would worry, Benton.”

I’m not sure he’ll ever believe how bad it’s gotten and I feel what I’ve felt before, dismally and outrageously it gnaws at my soul. Benton idealizes the Bureau he began with in his early optimistic life when he started out a street agent, working his way up to his eventual zenith as the chief of what was then the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.

I understand his dilemma. Even Lucy does. For him to accept what the FBI and the Department of Justice that owns it are now capable of would be like my believing that when I do an autopsy it’s nothing more than a callous science project on a par with dissecting a frog.

“Whatever they can justify they will, whether it’s secretly intruding upon everyday people or journalists or even a medical examiner, and it’s not new, just worse.” It’s a truth I repeat all too often these days. “Once that gate has opened it’s a hell of a lot easier for someone like Granby to step legally out of bounds with impunity.”

“There’s no probable cause for him to spy on us. I don’t want you getting paranoid.”

“Don’t be so damn decent, Benton, because he’s not. He can violate whatever he wants and what recourse do we have? We sue the government?”

“We need to stay calm.”

“I’m quite calm, I couldn’t be calmer, and I know the cases out there and so do you, and for every one of them we hear about there are countless others we don’t. You know it better than I do. It’s your damn agency, Benton. You know what goes on. The DOJ, the FBI, decides to spy without a court order and who’s going to stop them?”

“Granby’s not the FBI I know. He’s not the FBI either of us know.”

“The FBI we used to know, yes. That’s for damn sure.” I don’t say it unkindly or with the vehemence I feel because it will only make Benton more defensive.

I don’t use the phrase police state that’s on the tip of my tongue because what neither of us need right now when we’re stressed and tired is to turn on each other. Benton and I have had our fights about the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, each of us taking different sides, and during normal times we have a peaceful understanding.

But now isn’t a normal time and it’s inevitable he’s going to have to take down his boss Ed Granby. It has to be Benton who does it and he knows it and is principled enough to regret it would come to this and the problem is he’ll insist on doing it discreetly and with dignity. That will never work, considering the snake we’re dealing with. Lucy and I need to find a way to help Benton be a little shrewder and less honorable and it’s coming to me.

“The Bureau’s far from perfect but what the hell isn’t?” Benton doesn’t look at me as he drives. “He’ll get what he deserves.”

“I intend to make sure of that.” I have an idea that’s beginning to form.

“This isn’t your battle.” He downshifts and the throaty rumble of engine drops an octave as he slows at an intersection surrounded by dense trees.

“Your office wants us to turn over Double S’s server,” I pass along what Lucy just implied. “And I’m willing to do so tonight but Granby needs to sign for it. Otherwise I’ll make sure the process is mired down and the FBI won’t get it for days. I doubt they’ll raid the CFC.”

“Of course not.” Benton glances over at me and I sense his resolve, which is tainted by the deep disappointment he feels. “What you’re suggesting is a good idea. He needs to show up in person.”

My phone glows brightly in my lap as if waiting for what I’ll do next and I know what it is. Witnesses, I think. Ones who aren’t law enforcement but are well connected to people who are powerful, lawyers who don’t give a damn about the Feds and consider them fodder as a matter of fact. Lucy’s partner used to be FBI and now is a prominent environmentalist attorney, and then there’s Carin Hegel, who’s friends with the governor and the attorney general, to name a few.

Benton turns left onto Lowell Road, rolling slowly through a pedestrian crossing, and the two-lane road crosses a dark ribbon of river, moving us back toward the center of town, where we’ll pick up Main Street and then the turnpike. I place my hand on his arm and feel the small muscles move as he moves the titanium shifter in its leather boot. Then I get Lucy on the phone again.

“If you could let the party that contacted you know we’re happy to cooperate fully as long as the chain of evidence is intact in a way that satisfies all of my protocols,” I tell her, “meaning I will personally receipt it to the head of their division, otherwise the process will be encumbered and slow. They can pick up this evidence as late as midnight because I’m headed in now. And on a different subject, I’d like Sock brought to the office right away.”

My niece is silent as she tries to figure it out.

“As skittish as he is and with a killer on the loose, I’ve decided the office is the safest place for all of us until the FBI finds who they’re looking for or gives us reassurance he’s no longer in the area,” I say for the benefit of whoever might be monitoring my call.

Maybe no one is but I’m going to act as if it’s true.

“No problem,” Lucy replies. “I’ll pass on the messages and we’ll take it to the next level.”

“That’s exactly what I have in mind. I don’t think there’s a choice in light of the circumstances.”

“I’ll get it worked out. I’ll have some food brought in.” She’ll have Janet and Carin Hegel do it, and she’ll make it clear that if the FBI wants the server, then Ed Granby will have to show up at the CFC and get it from me personally.

“I have stew and a nice minestrone in the freezer. And lasagna and a Bolognese sauce that turned out very well.” I try to think what else. “And bring a can of Sock’s food, his pills, and also one of his beds.”