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“Ask him what was in the trash as best he knows,” I say as he continues to chew out Hyde over the phone.
“He doesn’t know.” Marino looks at me as he ends the call. “He says he didn’t touch the trash yet. He didn’t take it and has no idea what was in it. That’s what he says.”
“Well it appears someone took it.”
“He says he’ll find out. Either Vogel or Lapin must have it. Goddamn it!”
Vogel is the state trooper. Lapin must be the gray-haired Cambridge cop I’ve seen writing tickets around here, the one who went to a seminar and is now a bloodstain expert by his way of thinking.
“Maybe check with Lapin?” I ask. “Make sure he did something with the trash? Because this is disturbing.”
“I can’t imagine he would take it.” But Marino calls him next.
He asks him about the kitchen trash. He meets my eyes and shakes his head as he slips a pair of sunglasses out of a pocket of his cargo pants. Vintage wire-rim military aviator Ray-Bans I got him for his birthday last month. He puts them on, blacking out his eyes. He ends the call.
“Nope,” he says to me as he walks to the door that leads outside. “He says he’s not aware of anybody doing anything with the trash yet, and he didn’t touch it. Didn’t see it even. And he sure as hell didn’t take it with him. Well somebody did because it wasn’t like this when I first got here.”
We walk out into the sultry summer morning, the wind light and hot as it stirs the old trees in the side yard.
“Maybe the housekeeper took out the trash before she left.” I suggest the only other possibility that comes to mind. “Did anybody actually see her leave and notice if she had anything in her hands?”
“That’s a good question,” he says as we go down three wooden steps that end on the old brick driveway.
To one side of them flush against the house are two supercans and Marino opens the heavy dark green plastic lids.
“Empty,” he says.
“Garbage collection is weekly, probably Wednesdays here in mid-Cambridge, and today’s Friday,” I reply. “So Chanel Gilbert hasn’t put anything in the cans in several days? That’s a bit odd. Did you notice anything that might suggest she’d been out of town and just got back?”
“Not so far.” Marino wipes his hands on his shorts. “Might make sense though. She comes home and notices a light or two out and decides to change the bulbs.”
“Or that’s not what happened at all. If we consider other evidence we’re finding the story begins to change.” I remind him of what I discovered when I sprayed a reagent in the foyer. “Let’s make sure Lucy’s okay and we’ll get back here and finish up. If Hyde and others are going to secure the perimeter you might want to suggest they hold off searching the house any further until we return.”
“Good thing I have you to tell me how to do my job.”
“I’ve sent a message to my office. We’ll get the CT scan going right away and see if it tells us anything helpful,” I reply.
Parked on the brick driveway in front of my truck is the red Land Rover registered to Chanel Gilbert. I look through the driver’s window without touching anything. On the backseat is a bag of empty glass bottles, all of them the same and unlabeled, and the dash is dusty, the SUV filthy with pollen and trash from trees. Leaves and pine needles clog the space between the hood and the windshield. Cars don’t stay whistle clean around here. If people have garages they use them for storage.
“It looks like it’s been sitting outside for a while. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driven recently,” I start to say as I detect a distant thudding that is rapidly coming closer.
“Yeah.” Marino is distracted, staring at my right leg. “Just so you know you’re walking a lot worse than you were earlier. Maybe the shittiest I’ve seen you walk in weeks.”
“Good to know.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Thanks for pointing it out with your typical diplomacy.”
“Don’t get pissed at me, Doc.”
“Why would I?”
The helicopter is a beefy black twin engine at about fifteen hundred feet and several miles west, flying along the Charles River. It’s not Lucy’s Agusta with its Ferrari blue and silver paint job. I dig my keys out of my shoulder bag and try to walk without a hitch, without stiffness or a limp as Marino’s comments sting and make me self-conscious.
“Maybe I should drive.” He watches me skeptically.
“Nope.”
“You’ve been on your feet way too much today. You need to rest.”
“That’s not happening,” I say to him.
9 (#ulink_aad8ceac-5228-55c6-a9c3-f4b191764d7a)
Fifteen miles northwest of Cambridge the road is barely wide enough for my big boxy truck.
White with dark tinted windows and built on a Chevy G 4500 chassis it’s basically an ambulance with the caduceus and scales of justice in blue on the doors. But there are no flashing lights. There’s no siren or PA system. I’m not in the business of offering emergency medical care. It’s a little late by the time I’m called, and I’m not expected to engage in high-risk aggressive driving. Certainly not here in the nation’s proud and proper birthplace where the shot was heard ’round the world during the Revolutionary War.
Concord, Massachusetts, is known for its famous former residents like Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson, and for hiking and horse trails and of course Walden Pond. The people here keep to themselves, often snobbishly so, and whelping horns, beacons, flashing red and blue strobes, and breaking the speed limit and outrunning traffic lights aren’t normal or welcome. They’re also not part of a medical examiner’s SOP.
But if I had a siren right now it would be screaming. I’d be encouraging everyone on the road to stay out of my way. It’s just a damn shame about the truck. I wish I were driving something inconspicuous. Even one of the CFC vans or SUVs. Anything but this. Everybody we pass is staring at the Grim Reapermobile, the double-wide, in Marino’s words. It’s about as common as a UFO in this low-crime part of the world where Lucy lives on her spectacular estate. Not that people don’t die around here. They have accidents, sudden cardiac catastrophes and take their own lives like anybody else. But those types of cases rarely require a mobile crime scene unit, and I wouldn’t be driving one if I weren’t coming directly from Chanel Gilbert’s house.
It would have made sense to swap out vehicles but there isn’t time. I don’t have the luxury of taking a shower and changing my clothes. I feel concern that’s fast becoming raw fear, and it ratchets me into a higher gear. Already I’m mobilizing, getting a determined iron-hard attitude edged in stoicism that will break bones. I’ve tried Lucy repeatedly and she doesn’t answer. I’ve tried her partner Janet. She’s not answering either, and their main home number continues to seem out of order.
“I hate to tell you but I smell it.” Marino cracks open his window and hot humid air seeps in.
“Smell what?” I pay attention to my driving.
“The stink you carried out of the house with you and trapped inside this damn truck.” He waves his hand in front of his face.
“I don’t smell anything.”
“You know what they say. A fox can’t smell its own.” Marino routinely butchers clichés and thinks an idiom is a stupid person.
“The saying is a fox smells its own hole first,” I reply.
He rolls down his window the rest of the way, and the sound of blowing air is soft because we’re moving slowly. I hear the helicopter. I’ve been hearing it ever since we left Cambridge and I’ve about decided we’re being followed, possibly by a TV news crew. Possibly the media has found out who the dead woman’s mother is, assuming the dead woman is really Chanel Gilbert.
“Can you tell if it’s a news chopper? It would make sense but sounds bigger than that,” I ask Marino.
“Can’t tell.” He’s craning his neck, looking up as best he can, and sweat is like dew on top of his shiny shaved head. “I can’t see it.” He stares out his side window at big trees, an overgrown hedge, a dented mailbox going by.
A red-tailed hawk circles in the distance, and I’ve always considered birds of prey a good sign, a positive messenger. They remind me to keep above the fray, to have a keen eye and follow my instincts. Another stab of pain knifes through my thigh, and no matter how many times I’ve dissected what happened I can’t figure out what I miscalculated, what I didn’t notice or could have done differently. I was a hawk that got hunted down like a dove. In fact I was a sitting duck.
“The thing is it’s not like her,” Marino is saying, and I realize I didn’t hear what he said right before it. “It’s not like you either, Doc. And I feel a need to point that out.”
“I’m sorry. Now what are we talking about?”
“Lucy and her so-called emergency. I keep wondering if you’ve misunderstood something. Because it doesn’t sound like her. I don’t like that we got up and walked out of a scene that may turn out not to be an accident.”
“It’s not like Lucy to have an emergency?” I glance over at him. “Anyone can have an emergency.”
“But I’m not understanding this and I swear I’m trying to. She texts you from her emergency line and that’s it? What did she say exactly? Hurry here now or something like that? Because like I said that doesn’t sound like her.”
I haven’t told him what the text said. Which was nothing. It was a video link. That’s all. Now it’s gone without a trace and he has no idea about any of it.
“Let me see the text.” He holds out a huge hand. “Let me see exactly what she said.”
“Not while I’m driving.” I dig myself deeper into what’s becoming a pit of lies, and I don’t like the feeling.
I resent the position I’ve been put in and I can’t find my way out. But I’m protecting people or at least that’s my intention.
“And she said what exactly? Tell me her exact words,” Marino badgers me.
“There was an indication of a problem.” I’m careful how I phrase it. “And now she’s not answering any of her phones. Janet isn’t either,” I repeat myself.
“Like I said it doesn’t sound like her. Lucy never acts like there’s a problem or that she needs anyone,” he says and it’s true. “Maybe someone stole her phone. Maybe it wasn’t her who sent the message. How do you know we’re not being set up so we get to her property and find out it’s an ambush?”
“Set up by whom?” I scrutinize my own voice.
I sound calm and in control. My tone doesn’t begin to belie my feelings.
“You know damn well who. It’s the kind of thing Carrie Grethen would do. So she can ambush us, lure us right where she wants us. If I see her I’m shooting on sight.” Marino isn’t making an empty threat. He means it 100 percent. “No questions asked.”
“I didn’t just hear you say that. You didn’t say it and don’t say it again,” I reply, and the diesel engine seems unnaturally loud.
I’m a white elephant on this road. I shouldn’t be on it, not driving a medical examiner’s truck, and I imagine if I saw it and didn’t know why it was headed to Lucy’s neighborhood …
Why isn’t she answering her phone? What has happened?
I won’t think about it. I can’t stand to think about it, and I’m bombarded by images I can’t shake from a video I never should have seen. At the same time I wonder what I really watched. How much footage did Carrie take out of context? How could she have had me in mind as a future audience? Or did she?
How could Carrie have known then what she would do almost two decades later? I don’t think it’s possible. Or maybe I just don’t want to believe she’s capable of executing her schemes so far in advance. That would be scary and she’s scary enough, and I obsessively sift through what’s happened today. I work my own morning like a crime scene, detail by detail, second by second. I dig, excavate and reconstruct as I drive with both hands on the wheel.
The video link landed on my phone at exactly 9:33 A.M., a little more than an hour ago. I recognized the alert from Lucy’s ICE line. It sounds like a C-sharp chord on an electric guitar, and immediately I pulled off my soiled gloves and stepped away from the body. I watched the recording and now it’s gone. Irretrievably gone. That’s what happened. That’s what I want to tell Marino. But I can’t and it’s making matters more difficult with him than they already were.
He doesn’t completely trust me. I’ve sensed it since my near miss in Florida.
Blame the victim.
Only I’m the victim this time, and in his mind it has to be my fault. That suggests I’m not who I used to be. At least not to him. He treats me differently. It’s difficult to pinpoint and define, subtle like a shadow that didn’t used to be there. I see it in front of me whenever he’s around, like the changing shades of blue and gray on a heaving sea. He blocks my sun. He makes reality shift when he shows up.
Doubt.
I think that’s mostly it. Marino doubts me. He hasn’t always liked me and in the beginning of my career he might have hated me and then for the longest time he loved me too much. But throughout it all he didn’t doubt my judgment. There’s plenty he criticizes and harps on but being erratic, irrational or unreliable was never on the list. Not trusting me as a professional is new and it doesn’t feel good. It feels damn terrible.
“The more I think about it the more I agree with you, Doc,” Marino continues to talk as I drive my big truck. “She hadn’t been dead all that long to be in such bad condition. I don’t know how we’re going to explain it to her mother. That and what lit up blue on the floor. A case that started out as no big deal and now there are questions, serious questions. And we can’t answer them. And why? Because for one thing we’re here in Concord and not in Cambridge getting to the bottom of things. How do I explain to Amanda Gilbert that you got a personal call and left her daughter’s body on the floor and just walked out?”
“I didn’t leave the body on the floor,” I reply.
“I meant it figuratively.”
“Literally the body is safely at my office and I didn’t just walk out. There’s nothing figurative about it. Everything has been left as is and we’ll be back soon. And it’s also not for you to explain, Marino, and at the moment I don’t intend to discuss details with Amanda Gilbert. Not to mention we need to confirm the dead woman’s identity first.”
“For the sake of the argument,” Marino replies, “let’s assume it’s Chanel Gilbert because who else would it be? Her mother is going to ask a shitload of questions.”
“My answer is simple. I’ll say we need to confirm identification. We need more details and reliable witness accounts. We need undisputed facts that tell us when her daughter was last seen alive, when she last e-mailed or made a phone call. That’s the missing link. We find that out and I have a better chance of knowing when she died. The housekeeper is important. She’s the one who may have the best information.”
I hear myself using words such as reliable, fact and undisputed. I’m being defensive because of what I sense from him. I feel his doubt. I feel it like a glowering mountain looming over me.
“I’m suspicious of the housekeeper to tell you the truth,” he says. “What if she’s involved and is the one who turned off the air-conditioning?”
“Was she asked about it?”
“Hyde said it was already like that when he got to the house. She didn’t seem to know anything about why it was so hot.”
“We need to sit down with her. What’s her name?”
“Elsa Mulligan, thirty years old, originally from New Jersey. Apparently she moved to this area when Chanel Gilbert offered her the job.”
“Why New Jersey?”
“That’s where they met.”
“When?”
“Does it matter?”
“Right now we have so many questions everything matters,” I reply.
“I got the impression Elsa Mulligan hadn’t worked for Chanel all that long. A couple years? I’m not sure. That’s about as much as I know since she wasn’t still at the house when I got there. I’m passing on what Hyde said. She told him that when she let herself in through the kitchen door she could smell this horrible odor like something had died, and yep something sure had. The house was hot as shit and she got a whiff and followed it into the foyer.”
“Did Hyde feel she was being truthful? What’s your gut tell you?”
“I’m not sure of anything or anyone,” Marino says. “Usually we can at least count on the dead body to tell us the truth. Dead people don’t lie. Just living people do. But Chanel Gilbert’s body isn’t telling us shit because the heat escalated decomp, confusing things and I wonder if a housekeeper would know something like that.”
“If she watches some of these crime shows she could.”
“I guess so,” he says. “And I don’t trust her. And I’m getting an increasingly bad feeling about the case and wish to hell we hadn’t walked out on it.”
“We didn’t walk out on it, and you’ll be the problem if you keep saying that.”
“Really?” He looks at me. “When’s the last time you did something like this?”
The answer is never. I don’t take personal calls in the middle of a scene and interrupt what I’m doing. But this was different. I heard an alert tone from Lucy’s emergency line, and she’s not the sort to overreact or cry wolf. I had no choice but to check on whether something terrible has happened.
“What about the burglar alarm being on when she arrived this morning?” I ask Marino. “You told me the housekeeper turned it off. Are we sure it was armed when she unlocked the door?”
