Dust

42

I move pages of the diary, spreading them with my index fingers to make them bigger, sliding them closer to Benton, who has just walked in after spending the past few hours in Lucy’s lab. He seats himself nearby in a black mesh chair and I give him the gist of my conversation with Dr. Geist. Then I summarize.

“Martin Lagos didn’t leave the shoe glove prints along the railroad tracks. He couldn’t have killed his mother and you might be right that he’s dead and has been since he disappeared and supposedly jumped from the Fourteenth Street Bridge.”

“Reported anonymously from a pay phone,” Benton says. “It didn’t happen.”

“He certainly sounds suicidal and extremely vulnerable.”

“I believe he was murdered and that certain people know it, which is why it was safe to steal his genetic identity.” He peruses the introspective writings of Martin Lagos, idly moving pages on the table the way one does when something has been read many times.

“What could be better?” Ed Granby needs to go to prison, I think angrily, and maybe no punishment is bad enough for him. “Someone missing who’s wanted and you have inside knowledge that he’s dead. The problem with taking a step like that is only a very limited number of people would have the information.”

“Granby had to know it to instigate the DNA being altered. He had to feel it was a sure thing to take a chance like that.”

“He’s behind all of this. He’s why at least seven more people are dead.” I check my emotions, which have moved well beyond a visceral response to raw vengeance.

I ask about the friend named Daniel and if Martin ever made those secret video recordings he mentions in his diary.

“We don’t have them if he did,” Benton says. “But he references them several times up until about a week before her murder. I suspect her sexually provocative bathing was recorded and would have fueled a budding killer’s violent fantasies.”

I want to know if we have a physical description of Daniel and if we know where he is.

“Dark hair and eyes, white, don’t know what he’d weigh now,” Benton says.

“Thin if he’s hooked on MDPV.”

“He’s probably about five-six or — seven, based on pictures from his high school and college yearbooks.”

“Can you give them to Lucy?”

“I just did.”

“Small and dark like the young man giving the elephant the bath,” I remind him of the photograph we found in Lombardi’s bedroom.

“Let’s see what Lucy can do with it. Why do you say Martin couldn’t have killed his mother? Not that I doubt it but I need everything solid I can get.”

I move a photograph close, Martin puffing out fifteen candles on a chocolate birthday cake, July 27, 1996, four days before he vanished and his mother was drowned.

“This is why,” I reply.

A boy who’s grown too fast for his bodyweight to catch up with his limbs, he’s rawboned and awkward, with big feet and hands, in a tank top and baggy shorts, his ears cupped out from his closely shorn head, his upper lip dirty with facial hair. I zoom in on his right arm encased in its clean white plaster cast that only one person has written on: “Remember not to do what I say, bro. HA! HA! HA!” His friend Daniel wrote it boldly in red Magic Marker, and next to his flamboyant signature is a bright blue cartoon figure that looks like a fat Gumby doing a cartwheel.

“Martin didn’t drown his mother.” I’m sure of that. “He couldn’t have gripped both of her ankles with only one good arm.”

“He looks reasonably strong. And when his adrenaline kicked in? You don’t think he could do it with one arm?”

“He didn’t. Two hands were used.” I hold up both of mine as if I’m gripping something hard. “Her injuries make that patently clear. He didn’t kill her but that doesn’t mean he didn’t agree to it and witness her murder from the best seat in the house.”

As I study Martin’s forced smile and eyes that look haunted, I imagine someone taking the photograph of him on his birthday. Based on the way he’s looking at the camera as if he’s been ordered to, I suspect his mother did.

“Do we know how he broke his arm?” I ask.

“I know he liked to skateboard. That’s as much as I can tell you without calling his mother back, which I don’t want to do right now.”

“Maybe skateboarding with his friend Daniel. His only friend,” I reply.

“Daniel Mersa. He mentions him throughout his diary and that bothered me then but not nearly as much as it started bothering me a few weeks ago when I heard about the DNA results that we now know were tampered with.”

“He must have been interviewed after she was murdered.”

“The police couldn’t find him at first,” Benton says and I think of Dr. Geist’s comment about the boys. “When they finally did, his mother gave some convenient excuse that he’d been visiting her sister in Baltimore and the sister corroborated this of course. When Daniel eventually was questioned he claimed he had no idea what happened to Martin’s mother. He said Martin wasn’t doing well in school, the girls didn’t like him, he was depressed, getting into alcohol, and that was as far as the questioning went seventeen years ago.”

“It went as far as somebody wanted it to go,” I reply.

“Granby,” Benton says.

“I strongly suspect some relatively competent and self-assured person visited the scene before her body was found and turned off the air-conditioning, filled the tub with scalding water, rearranged the bathroom, removing the hidden video camera, possibly taking Martin’s computer hard drive, not realizing there was a backup hidden in his bedroom. Kids wouldn’t think of so many details, although it wasn’t a perfect job. It’s pretty obvious.”

“Granby’s pretty obvious,” Benton says.

“I don’t know how you’d prove it at this stage.”

“I probably can’t prove he did the tampering at the scene. But it probably was him especially if it was amateurish.”

“You have the call sheet at least,” I reply. “He called Dr. Geist about Gabriela Lagos the day before anyone except those involved should have known she was dead.”

“Let’s print a hard copy of that.”

I text the document identification number to Lucy and ask her to print it. I don’t say what it is or give a reason and I ask her to bring it downstairs. She texts me back that we have company coming and I have an idea why Benton wants the hard copy. I have a feeling I know what he’ll do with it and while some people would enjoy it, Benton won’t.

“After Gabriela was murdered and before her body was found somebody alerted Granby that there was a problem,” Benton then says. “Otherwise I don’t see how he could have known in advance. Someone who knew what Daniel had done, someone powerful who Granby would want to help.”

“Then Daniel must have told whoever it is.”

“Of course,” Benton says. “He’s a kid who’s just killed his best friend’s mother, a prominent Washington woman who collected art for the White House.” Benton continues to run information through his mental database while I run it through my own. “Daniel made a call because he would have needed help to get away with it.”

“The person at the center of this, all roads leading to the same source.” I think of an octopus again. “How old was Daniel then?”

“Thirteen.”

“That surprises me. I would have assumed he was the older of the two.”

“He was the dominant one in the relationship,” Benton says, “overly controlling and organized, a risk taker and show-off with an excessive need for stimulating his senses and a very high threshold for pain. He doesn’t feel pain or fear the way other people do.”

I can well imagine Daniel coercing Martin into extreme feats with the skateboard that may have resulted in a broken arm and other injuries and humiliations.

“Martin was two years older and two grades ahead of him but had very poor self-esteem, very bright but not particularly gifted athletically,” Benton explains. “He was a loner.”

“Had they been friends for a long time?”

“Apparently their mothers were very close.”

“How convenient that Martin’s mother was an art expert who put together exhibits and acquired masterpieces for the First Family.” I envision the stolen works in Lombardi’s bedroom.

“I’m thinking the same thing you are.”

I ask him who and what Daniel Mersa is today and where he is and Benton says he started gathering information when Granby told the BAU that DNA had identified the Capital Murderer as Martin Lagos. Benton talked to Daniel’s mother and told her it was crucial to know if anyone had heard from his childhood friend Martin, who might be in danger or he might be dangerous to others.

She claimed she wouldn’t know because she hadn’t heard from her son Daniel since he dropped out of a college summer program in Lacoste, France, when he was twenty-one. He’d been in and out of trouble, she admitted, and in and out of different schools and sent abroad, and he never graduated and had nothing to do with her anymore.

“Do you believe she was telling you the truth?” I ask.

“About that, yes.” Benton moves the projected image of a file closer. “I honestly think she’s worried now.”

“Because of the Capital Murderer cases.”

“I didn’t mention them.”

He slides documents out of the virtual file and begins turning virtual pages and they make a papery sound.

“But I had a feeling she knew what I was talking about when I brought up Martin and that we need to find him,” he says. “Something about her demeanor caused me to suspect she knew damn well we weren’t going to find him because he’s dead. But that doesn’t mean Daniel isn’t out there somewhere killing people and she knows it.”

He lines up pages of a student disciplinary record with the Savannah College of Art and Design in the headers.

“One of many places Daniel was in and out of and his academic records are telling.” Benton taps the glass with his index finger and a page gets small and he enlarges it again. “Breaking into another student’s locker, sneaking into a girl’s dorm and stealing lingerie from the laundry room, setting fire to a guidance counselor’s garbage cans, drowning a dog and bragging about it, disruptive in class, vandalism. It’s a long list that includes his high school years.”

“Were the police ever involved?”

“They were never called. The matters were handled privately, typical of schools, and maybe there’s another reason.”

“What else did his mother say?”

“She did everything she could for him, sparing no expense on counseling and therapy. As a child, Daniel was diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder, and I gathered from what she said that in his case SPD manifests not in his overresponding to sensation but not being able to get enough of it. Originally it was confused with ADHD because of his sensory-seeking behavior, his inability to sit still and obsession with touching things, his thrill seeking and high-risk activities, walking on stilts, climbing up telephone poles and water towers and out windows and down drainpipes, showing off to other kids, who would try to imitate him and hurt themselves. She said she couldn’t control him no matter what she tried.”

“Sounds like she was making excuses for him because she suspects the worst,” I comment.

“She wanted me to know she was a good mother, availing him of the typical home therapies for SPD. Backyard swings, obstacle courses, monkey bars, trampolines, gymnastic balls, sensory body socks, personally supervising tactile art like finger painting and working with clay.”

“Clay,” I repeat. “What Ernie’s found.”

“It’s entered my mind.”

“A mineral fingerprint that might be from an art supply like paint or sculpting clay,” I think out loud to Benton.

Lycra fibers from a stretchy material like a body sock, and I move the photograph of Martin so I can look at it closely again. I study what Daniel drew on the white plaster cast, a bright blue Gumby-like cartoon that could depict a boy zipped up head to toe in what looks like a body bag sewn of a colorful thin but sturdy fabric that can be stretched into different creative shapes in the mirror or in shadows on the wall. A therapeutic body sock is see-through, impossible to tear, and if the zipper were locked, one couldn’t escape. It’s breathable but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t suffocate someone with it if you wrapped it tightly around that person’s face.

It would be a good way to restrain someone, the soft, silky fabric causing very little injury, and I imagine Gail Shipton paralyzed by a stun gun and zipped up inside such a thing. It would explain the blue Lycra fibers all over her body and under her nails and in her teeth. And then I see her struggling inside this stretchy bag-like prison while she’s in the killer’s car, clawing, maybe biting at the material as she panics, her damaged heart hammering against her chest.

I hope she died quickly before he could do the rest of it and I suspect I know what the rest of it was, as if I’m watching what the bastard did, perhaps spreading open what’s no different from a body bag on the car seat and the minute he’s got her inside he’s zipping her in, assuring her that he won’t hurt her as long as she behaves, and she doesn’t want to be shocked again, does she?

I can see him driving her somewhere in the dark, perhaps talking to her while she doesn’t resist, and then he gets her to a place he’s picked in advance and he tightens the stretchy material around her face and suffocates her. It would require about as much time as it takes to drown someone unless he was cruel enough to do it slowly and he could have, tightening and relaxing, letting her come to and doing it again, as long as he wanted, as long as her body could sustain such torture before it quit.

Then he poses his victim, adorning her as it gratifies his sick fantasies, tightly securing a plastic bag around her neck with designer duct tape that left a faint furrow and mark postmortem and adding a decorative duct tape bow under her chin and then another victim’s panties. All symbolic. All part of his incredibly twisted mind and soul, the choreography of his evil imagination, his evil art, a deviant inspiration that goes back to the beginning of his blighted time on this earth and possibly fueled by deviant home movies of Gabriela Lagos bathing and seducing her son.

I envision Daniel Mersa dragging the body on some type of sled or litter, displaying it by a lake near a golf course. An arm outstretched, the wrist cocked very much the way Gabriela’s left arm was positioned as it floated on the surface of the water in the tub, languidly stretched out, the wrist drooping, her other arm floating across her waist.

Such an image would be indelibly imprinted in Daniel’s violent mind after he drowned her, watching her naked body go completely still, then limp, settling lower in the water, her arms drifting up as if she’s relaxing in her steamy, sharply fragrant bath surrounded by candles and huge plush white bath sheets. He may have recorded her murder and repeatedly watching what he did to her would have fueled what drives him and made him sicker.

“You don’t necessarily outgrow SPD,” Benton is explaining and I look at him and try not to see what I just did. “And the worst thing someone with that disorder could do is to take designer drugs, stimulants like MDPV.”

“And none of what you’re telling me about Daniel Mersa was taken seriously by the BAU.” I feel exhausted and chilled and I try to will my mind to clear.

“No one’s been listening to me because they’re listening to the DNA. It’s not Daniel Mersa’s profile that got a hit in CODIS. In fact, he’s never been in CODIS or arrested and for a good reason.”

The images of women dying are stubborn in my mind. I see their terror and suffering as they were suffocating. “HA! HA! HA!” Daniel Mersa wrote with a flourish on Martin’s cast.

“A lot of people have disturbing backgrounds and they don’t end up becoming serial killers,” Benton is saying. “And Granby’s discredited me with the BAU.” He repeats the depressing story I know so well. “I don’t know exactly how or when it started but it’s not a hard thing to do when people worry about their jobs and are competitive.”

“Daniel Mersa’s father. There’s been no mention of him.” I sense the direction the roads are moving in, all headed to the same source at the center of such cruelty.

“Sperm bank,” Benton says. “His mother’s always claimed she doesn’t know who the biological father is and you have to ask how she afforded therapy, college, studying abroad. Veronica Mersa is a former beauty queen, never married, was a secretary for a New Hampshire congressman who only recently retired from politics. She wasn’t paid a lot and had no other income. She has never seemed to hurt for money.”

“I’m not uploading anything to CODIS or any other database until I know it’s safe.” I’m adamant about that. “We’ll do any comparisons in my labs and I’m going to ask for a familial search to look for first-order relatives, siblings or parent-child relationships. If Daniel’s related to someone and we’ve got that individual’s DNA, we’re going to figure it out.”

“It would explain it,” Benton says. “It would explain a lot of things. And Granby might have pulled it off if you’d let Geist have his way and decide Gabriela Lagos’s death was an accident.”

“There’s no question it wasn’t. There should never have been a question.”

“Show me how you know the killer used both hands. I need to see it for myself. I’ve got to be able to say it in no uncertain terms.”

I touch the glass tabletop where her autopsy report and photographs are side by side.