Depraved Heart

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“Everything I have is legal and has nothing to do with the Copperhead shootings,” Lucy says, “which they damn well know were committed with the Precision Guided Firearm recovered from Bob Rosado’s yacht. They confirmed it’s the weapon two months ago so why are they still looking? If they’re looking for anyone it should be his rotten little shit of a son, Troy. He’s at large. Carrie’s at large. He’s probably the latest Clyde to her Bonnie, and where’s the FBI? Here on my property. This is harassment. It’s about something else.”

“I got a couple shotguns you can borrow,” Marino offers. “And a thumpin’ four-fifty Bushmaster.”

“That’s all right. I’ve got more than they’re bargaining for,” she says. “They have no idea what they’re missing, what they’re walking right past.”

“Please don’t poke a stick at them,” I warn her. “Don’t give them cause to hurt you.”

“Hurt? I think hurt is the point and it’s already started.” Her bright green eyes look at me. “They want me hurt. They intend to leave me unprotected so I can’t take care of my family, my home. They’re hoping all of us will end up defeated, annihilated, at each other’s throats. Better yet, dead. They want all of us murdered.”

“You need something all you gotta do is ask,” Marino says. “With the likes of Carrie on the loose you should have more firepower than just your handguns.”

“They’ll take those next if they haven’t already,” she replies, and it really is outrageous that they listed handguns on the warrant. “Plus they’re bagging up all of my kitchen cutlery, the Shun Fuji santoku knives you gave to us,” she says to me, adding yet another outrage.

As far as we know, Carrie Grethen’s recent deadly rampage includes a stabbing with a tactical knife. There’s no evidence, not even a hint that Lucy had anything to do with it, and her guns and the cutlery are completely inconsistent with the characteristics of the murder weapons. To clean out her gun vault, her kitchen is absurd.

For an instant Carrie’s recent victims parade through my mind, seemingly random people until I realized each of them had a connection to me, even if remotely. They never knew what hit them, except for Rand Bloom, the sleazy insurance investigator she stabbed and left on the bottom of a swimming pool. He would have had a moment if not several of terror, panic and pain.

But Julie Eastman, Jack Segal, Jamal Nari and Congressman Rosado didn’t suffer. They were going about their business one second and then nothingness, annihilation, and I envision the Carrie I saw on video touching the back of her neck between the first and second cervical vertebrae. Even then she knew about the sweet spot for a hangman’s fracture and that such a catastrophic injury literally causes instant death.

She’s back. She’s alive and more dangerous than she ever was and even as I’m thinking this I’m washed over by doubt. What if all of us are being tricked? I can’t prove I’ve seen or heard from Carrie Grethen since the 1990s. She’s left no real evidence that connects her with a crime spree that began late last year. What if it’s not her who sent the video to me from Lucy’s phone?

I look at my niece.

“From the beginning,” I say to her. “What happened?”

Lucy sits on her big rock and explains that this morning at exactly 9:05 her house phone rang.

The number is unlisted and unpublished but that wouldn’t stop the FBI from getting it, and it doesn’t stop her from foiling their efforts and then some. She has communication technology that can easily outsmart anyone attempting to catch her by surprise, and in a matter of seconds she knew the identity of the caller was Special Agent Erin Loria, a recent transfer to the FBI’s Boston Division, thirty-eight years old, born in Nashville, Tennessee, black hair, brown eyes, five-ten, 139 pounds—and as I hear Lucy say this I don’t show my shock.

I don’t let on that I know who Erin Loria is. I don’t react as Lucy goes on to explain that when Erin was in range of the security cameras, facial recognition software verified that she is indeed Erin Loria, a former beauty queen, a graduate of Duke University and its law school before she signed on with the Bureau in 1997. She was a street agent for a while, married to a hostage negotiator who left the Bureau and joined a law firm. They lived in Northern Virginia, had no kids, divorced in 2010, and soon after she married a federal judge twenty-one years her senior.

“Which one?” Marino asks.

“Zeb Chase,” Lucy says.

“No way. Judge NoDoz?”

He’s called that for the opposite reason people might expect, and I remember his small predatory eyes beneath heavy lids as he slumped on the bench, his chin almost on his chest like a black-robed vulture waiting for something to die. It was easy to misconstrue his posture as relaxed or half asleep when in fact he couldn’t have been more alert or aggressive, waiting for attorneys, for expert witnesses to make a miscalculated move. Then he would dive-bomb, snatching them up to swallow alive.

In my earliest years in Virginia when he was still a U.S. attorney, we worked many cases together. Even though my findings usually supported the prosecution, Zeb Chase and I often clashed. I seemed to annoy him and he got only more hostile once he was on the bench. To this day I have no idea why, and I distantly recall that he might just hold the record for the judge who most frequently threatened to hold me in contempt. Now he’s married to Erin Loria who has her own history with Lucy and therefore de facto has one with me. My internal weather vane moves. It points. I can’t tell at what. Maybe I don’t want to know.

“So Special Agent Loria moved to Boston and her husband the judge is still in Virginia,” Marino assumes.

“It’s not like he can pick up and come after her,” Lucy replies and she’s right.

Judge Chase’s duty station would be the Eastern District of Virginia, where he will hold his seat until he resigns, dies or is removed from office. He can’t pick up and relocate to Massachusetts even though his wife did. At least I can be grateful for that.

“Are you certain of the year Erin Loria started with the FBI?” I ask Lucy. “Nineteen-ninety-seven? As in the year you were there?”

“Not the only year I was there,” she says as I think about Erin Loria being married to a federal official who was appointed by the White House.

That’s not good. It’s not good at all. She’ll claim that he has no more influence in her cases than Benton has in mine. She’ll swear His Honor has no professional involvement with her, that both of them stay completely within the legal boundaries and guidelines. Of course it isn’t true. It never is.

“I realize you were at Quantico before and after 1997,” I’m commenting to Lucy as my thoughts continue to slam into each other like billiard balls. “That once you got started with the FBI you never really left.”

“Until they ran me out of Dodge,” she says as if it’s nothing that for all practical intents and purposes she was fired. “Even before I was an agent I was there summers, holidays, most weekends, every spare minute I had. You probably remember. I’d start arranging my classes so I could leave Charlottesville early Thursday morning and not come back until late Sunday. I was at Quantico more than I was in college.”

“Jesus,” Marino mutters. “Erin Loria was there when you were. And it’s not exactly a big place.”

“That’s right,” Lucy says.

“Another blast from the past just like Carrie. What did you step in during that informative time in your life, huh? Some Super Glue-like dog shit that you can’t clean off?”

He means formative, but Lucy and I ignore it. We don’t crack a smile. Not now as we perch on our hard, unforgiving seats in Lucy’s place of meditation, her church, her Stonehenge.

“You step in some special brand of it?” he’s saying. “And you not only still have it on your damn shoes but you’re tracking it everywhere for the rest of us to step in.”

“Which session?” I can’t believe this is happening.

“We overlapped,” she says. “Erin was at Quantico while I was an intern at ERF, while Carrie was there, yes. That’s true. And they were familiar with each other.”

“How familiar?” I ask it blandly.

“Familiar enough.” Lucy doesn’t flinch. “They got pretty friendly.”

“Jesus Christ.” Marino reaches around to his back and scratches another itch, real or perceived. “It’s hard to imagine that’s a coincidence in light of everything else. Whatever you sprayed out here doesn’t work, just so you know. I’ve got bites, big ones. You can see them from friggin’ outer space.”

“Erin and I were on the same floor in Washington Dorm but I don’t remember her very well except she was dismissive of me.” Lucy is talking as Marino continues to claw and swat and bitch. “I didn’t know her firsthand. I didn’t make friends with any of the new agents in training, not in that session, only in my own, which wasn’t until two years later. Mostly I recall that she was Miss Tennessee. It’s as far as she got in her beauty queen career, totally bombed the talent portion of the Miss America pageant, then went to law school, then applied to the FBI Academy. Great for undercover when you look like a Barbie doll, I guess. Well, hey. It gets you married to a judge, I guess. It gets you invitations to White House Christmas parties.”

“You were at Quantico at the same time. Meaning Erin would be familiar with your background beyond what would be in your personnel file.” I allude to the specter of Carrie.

Lucy doesn’t say a word.

“Carrie Grethen,” I’m out with it. “Erin would know about her for a number of reasons. Erin would know exactly who and what Carrie is.”

“Now she would,” Lucy says. “That’s for sure. But in 1997 no one had any idea what they were dealing with. Including me.”

As far as we know, Carrie hadn’t committed murder back then. She wasn’t a Ten Most Wanted criminal. She wasn’t locked up in a forensic psychiatric facility for the criminally insane and hadn’t escaped from it yet, and she hadn’t allegedly been killed in a helicopter crash off the coast of North Carolina. Certainly when she worked at the ERF she wasn’t a known felon or presumed dead, and she and Erin Loria might have been allies. They might have been friends. They might have had an affair and still be in communication, and what a bizarre notion that is to contemplate.

One of the most dangerous fugitives on the planet might be on amicable terms with an FBI agent married to a federal judge who was appointed by the president of the United States. My mind speeds through possible connections, adding two plus two and maybe getting four. Maybe getting five or some other wrong answer. Or maybe there’s no answer period.

But it bothers me considerably that even as Erin Loria was making her way to Lucy’s property barely two hours ago, I was sent a text message that included a link to a covert video recording Carrie made in Lucy’s dorm room while the former Miss Tennessee-turned-FBI-agent was living right down the hall. Worse, Carrie and Lucy argued about her in the recording.

“Hold up a second,” Marino says to Lucy. “Before we drink the Kool-Aid and start imagining all sorts of crazy crap let’s go back to when your house phone rang. Your software collected data on who it was. You discovered Special Agent Loria was leading the charge and then what?”

“Literally?”

“Blow by blow.”

“I knew she was in a vehicle moving fourteen miles per hour along the same road you were just on.” Lucy pulls up her legs, planting her feet on the boulder, wrapping her arms around her bent knees.

None of us can get comfortable in her outdoor church. Except the sun feels good even if the humidity is oppressive, and the stirring air is sluggish but pleasant when it touches my damp skin. It’s the kind of hot heavy weather that promises a violent storm, and one is predicted for this afternoon. I look up at thick dark clouds advancing from the south, and I fix on the helicopter loudly hovering near the water, hanging in the air like a huge black Orca float in a Macy’s parade.

“I knew when she placed the call she was about fifty yards from my gate,” Lucy describes, “and when I asked her what I could help her with she informed me the FBI had a warrant to search my house and any outbuildings associated with it. She ordered me to open the gate and leave it open, and within minutes five Bureau cars including a K-nine were in front of the house.”

“What time did you notice the helicopter?” I continue to watch it hover rock solid, now over dense woods to the left of Lucy’s house, which we can’t see from where we’re sitting.

“About the same time you rolled up.”

“Let me get this straight.” Marino frowns. “For some reason an FBI chopper just happened to be in Cambridge where we were working a case? And next it just happened to follow us here? Okay. Now I’m getting really hinky, you know, one of those really bad feelings that makes my hair stand up …”

“You don’t have any hair,” Lucy says.

“What bullshit are they pulling?” Marino glares up at the sky as if the FBI is God.

“Well they sure as hell aren’t going to tell me,” she says. “I don’t know where they’ve been flying or for what reason, and there hasn’t been time for me to check. After their cars showed up I no longer had privacy. It wasn’t a smart idea for me to check with ATC or tune into their freq to hear who was buzzing around and maybe why. Plus I had a lot of other things to attend to. The K-nine in particular is upsetting—intentionally. What I call being a real asshole.”

“Who?”

“Erin, I can only conclude. If she’s gathered any information about me she realizes that I have an English bulldog named Jet Ranger who’s so old he can hardly walk or see, and to have a Belgian Malinois searching the house would scare the hell out of him. Not to mention scaring Desi. Not to mention hassling Janet to the point she was about to deck someone. This is personal.”

Her green eyes are intense. She holds my stare.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that.” I’m cautious about what I say. “I wouldn’t take any of this personally,” I advise my niece even as I wonder about her. “All of us need to be coldly objective and think clearly right now.”

“It feels like someone is settling a score.”

“I admit I’m wondering the same thing,” Marino says.

“This is planned.” Lucy seems convinced. “It’s been planned for a while.”

“What score and who?” I inquire. “Not Carrie.”