Dust ks-21

by Patricia Cornwell

  “We can’t exactly have an open house,” he says. “A ranch hand or the housekeeper comes in and leaves DNA everywhere or starts touching things or puking.”

  “Their DNA would be in here anyway,” Lucy says.

  “I also don’t intend to walk around showing the staff photographs of dead people with their necks sawed through,” Marino retorts.

  “But you’ve checked with them to see who should have been inside the house,” Lucy says.

  “Jesus. Now I’ve got two of you on my ass.”

  “I know who works here,” Lucy states in a way that conveys she’s not being difficult or even personal with him. “Names, ages, addresses. I know a lot more than I wish I did about these assholes. Describe the unidentified victim.”

  “About your size, about your age,” he says. “Early thirties, I’m guessing as best I can because she doesn’t look so hot with her head practically cut off. Short dark hair. White. Scrawny and bony. Looks like she worked out a lot and might have had an attitude and wasn’t into men.”

  Lucy ignores him. “There’s no one here who fits that description or is that young. The three ranch hands and groundskeeper are forty-four, fifty-two, and one just turned sixty, originally from Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. The chef is French. He’s forty-nine. The housekeeper’s South American, forty-three, and claims to speak very little English. The partners in the business are two Americans and two Brits, men over forty, and then there was Lombardi and Caminska, who are rumored to have had more than a professional relationship. And, yes, they called her Ika, as in Eeeka, not Icka.” She mocks the way Marino pronounces it.

  “Assailant entered the house the way you are, past the stone columns, on this porch, and he opened this door,” Marino says and he’s backing away from assuming it’s Haley Swanson we’re looking for.

  “What about the lock?” Lucy indicates the brushed-nickel biometric lock as she pulls on gloves.

  “It was blue skies until a couple hours ago and it’s possible when the weather was decent they’d leave the front door open with just this one shut.” He opens the inner storm door, a push-button lock all that separated the people of Double S from someone who cut their throats.

  “Who says they kept the front door open?” Lucy doesn’t believe it and as I watch her I’m reminded of what it used to be like when she did this for a living.

  When she was with the FBI and later with ATF she was so amazing they got rid of her. Maybe it’s in the Scarpetta DNA that we can’t work for anyone. We’re Lone Rangers and have to be in charge and walk right into trouble.

  “I was told it could be an explanation,” Marino says. “A ranch hand I talked to said he’s seen it like that when it’s decent weather and a lot of people are in and out.”

  “They’re lying,” Lucy says. “They know who it is.”

  “It’s a good thing you got here. Now I can go home and forget about it.”

  “The four partners are out of town so who was around to be in and out?” Lucy asks. “And it wasn’t toasty warm this morning even with the sun out.”

  “There’s a back door and a basement door, both of them locked and dead-bolted. This is the way he came in, just like you are,” Marino says. “Maybe he had access because his fingerprint is scanned into the lock and he got in that way. In other words, it’s someone they knew.”

  “That would be good if we have his fingerprint. You’re right,” Lucy says. “You can go home and forget about it.”

  Marino tries not to smile. He works so hard to look severe he looks ridiculous.

  “As security minded as they seem to be it’s hard for me to believe they’d leave the front doors open and unlocked,” I agree with Lucy.

  “No way,” she says. “Have you checked what was picked up by the cameras?”

  “Hell no. I’m stupid,” Marino says.

  The open room has four offices in a row that are horseshoe-shaped consoles with built-in desks and drawers.

  Each work area has a multilined phone and several video displays as if one is supposed to imagine financial experts constantly monitoring stock markets and investment accounts. I don’t notice a scrap of paper, not a single pencil or pen or hint that whoever works here has hobbies or family. The appearance is of a business that’s transparent, with partners engaged in open communication and camaraderie, yet there’s an empty, fake feeling as if I’m walking into a design showroom or a movie set. I don’t sense that anybody lived here even before people were dead.

  On the far right side is a floating staircase with cables and plate-steel treads, the wall next to it old brick hung with modern art prints and across from it is a wall of light ash cabinetry. It’s a masculine space lacking warmth or creativity and at least four thousand square feet, I estimate. It adjoins a room that I can’t see into but I hear voices through the open door, a steel door with no window that’s been propped open with a magnetic stop. The two Concord detectives are inside what must be another office, the CEO’s private suite on the left wing of the building where Lombardi and his assistant are dead.

  In the front office, at the back of it, is an open kitchen with exotic deep red wooden cabinetry, what looks like the Bois de Rose used to make musical instruments. From where I stand I can see the blood-streaked dark trousers, the white pockets turned inside out, and the bloody sneakers of the victim who remains unidentified. Her coagulating blood is spread over the wide-plank flooring behind a dramatic sculpture in zebrawood folded around a corner of a whitewashed wall to the left of the granite counter that blocks most of my view. I ask Marino about the pockets.

  “Did the police go into them looking for identification?” I want to know.

  “They were already inside out. Remember, he took their wallets, IDs, cash.”

  “Cleaned out the cash and whatever else he wanted and probably threw the wallets into the pond on his way out of here.” Lucy starts walking around. “A perfect place to dump stuff, across from the barn, you’d go right past it if you’re heading into the woods on foot, getting the hell out of here.”

  I scan work areas with their ergonomic chairs, all exactly arranged with no sign of violence, and again I’m struck by the vacant feeling. During office hours on a Wednesday morning and only three people were inside except for their killer.

  “The DVR’s gone,” Marino then tells Lucy — reluctantly, it seems, as if he hates to admit she’s right about something.

  “Check off a second point for unpremeditated,” she replies.

  “You’d have to know where to look and what for.” Marino hunches a shoulder, wiping his sweaty face on his shirt. He tends to overheat anyway and now his blood pressure is up because he’s a cop again who smokes again.

  “How hard would that be?” Lucy asks.

  We’re having this discussion in the entryway near the officer at his laser-mapping station, where black hard cases are open on the floor. A yellow power cord connected to a charging station is plugged into a wall, and the officer and his scanner are in sleep mode, waiting. He doesn’t look at us. He doesn’t want to appear he’s listening to people who aren’t talking to him.

  “There’s a closet in the other room with all the components for surround sound, the server and wireless networks, their phone system and security stuff.” Marino walks over to my scene case near the stairs and picks it up.

  “The server.” Lucy’s like a snake spying a lizard and she strikes. “Double S’s server. Now we’re talking.”

  She walks over to the desks against a wall, four of them in a row. Nudging a chair with her knees, she rolls it out of the way and picks up the phone.

  “But you’d have to know what a DVR is.” Marino hands my field case to me. “Most people wouldn’t think of it unless they’re familiar with security cameras.”

  “It’s not rocket science and it may be someone who’s been here before. We need to get the server to my lab.” Lucy looks at the display on the desk phone and pushes a key. “Concord PD can receipt it here and I can
take it in.”

  She walks to each desk and does the same thing, checking the phones. Then she returns to the first one and picks it up again.

  “You might want to write this down,” she says to Marino. “None of these phones have made any outgoing calls since last Friday as if nobody’s been working in the front office. With the exception of this one.” She indicates the phone she’s holding and she gives him a number. “Lambant and Associates,” she reads the display.

  “What?” Marino walks over and looks. “Well, big surprise. So I’m right. Haley Swanson was here and he called his office.”

  “Someone did,” Lucy says. “Someone made an outgoing call from here to that number at nine fifty-six this morning and was on the phone for twenty-seven minutes. If the guy running through the park was spotted around eleven then whoever was on the phone here probably hung up right about the time everybody got killed.”

  “We know who that guy is, the one in the hoodie with Marilyn Monroe on it and now we know he was in here using the phone.” Marino has it all figured out again. “Haley Swanson.” He’s latched on to that conviction all over again. “Lambant’s the crisis management firm where Gail Shipton’s gender-bender friend works,” Marino says and Lucy just looks at him.

  “One might conclude they’ve been handling Double S’s PR,” I suggest. “Possibly Swanson is who Lombardi picked up at the train station this morning.”

  “Exactly,” Marino says.

  “I guess we know how Gail met him, at any rate, both of them in thick with Double S,” Lucy says with nothing in her tone. “Did you confirm who she was with at the Psi last night?”

  “She was there talking to someone who wasn’t a regular. It could have been Swanson and that would make sense since he’s the one who reported her missing. It was really crowded and Gail was jammed at the bar with a lot of other people. That’s what witnesses have said and it’s as good as we’re going to get.”

  “Why would someone take the commuter train here instead of driving?” I point out. “Why would a PR person do that?”

  “Haley Swanson,” Lucy says dubiously. “And I guess we’re to conclude that about an hour, an hour and a half later, he killed everyone and fled.”

  “It’s not for you to conclude anything,” Marino says rudely.

  “Earlier today we were told he was driving an Audi SUV,” I remind him.

  “We’re looking for it. It’s not at his apartment in Somerville and not at his business in Boston,” Marino says. “The people who work at his PR firm haven’t seen him or his SUV today but he called them.”

  “The call made from here,” Lucy says. “Someone made it.”

  “Why wouldn’t Swanson drive himself?” I ask.

  “When we find him he’s got a hell of a lot of explaining to do, but my answer is he didn’t want his car spotted at Double S because he was planning to commit murder,” Marino says. “That’s a good reason not to drive your own damn car.”

  “I’m guessing that isn’t it at all,” Lucy disagrees. “These murders don’t appear to be planned.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to guess,” Marino says just as rudely.

  Lucy isn’t slowed down by Marino’s attitude. It doesn’t even seem to register.

  “Has anybody checked with his uncle in the projects?” I ask.

  “I got Machado doing that and haven’t heard back.”

  Lucy unzips her white coveralls halfway and pulls her gloves off as if she’s hot and has her own idea about what needs to be done.

  “I have to get the server out of here,” she says to him, “before it’s not possible.”

  “I hear you.” Marino knows what she’s thinking and he’s conflicted, the way he is about Gail Shipton’s phone.

  He wants Lucy’s help but he’s afraid of it. He knows if the FBI gets its hands on the server before we do that will be the last we hear of it. Granby will hold a press conference and talk decisively about joining forces with local agencies and a joint effort but the reality is when evidence goes to the national labs in Quantico and the prosecutor is the U.S. attorney there’s no such thing as a joint anything.

  That’s under the best of circumstances. Marino doesn’t know about evidence tampering. He doesn’t know about Gabriela Lagos or her missing son Martin who supposedly left a stain on a pair of panties in the most recent Washington, D.C., case. Marino has no idea just how impossible it will be for us to work these murders here unless we’re proactive now, ruthlessly so. I decide to blame it on the media, something that Marino will accept as an inevitable obstacle to avoid.

  “It depends on how big this gets. A huge case and it’s similar to what I just faced in Connecticut. TV trucks everywhere and those of us trying to do our jobs are stepped on.” I look at him and he understands.

  “No shit,” he says.

  “Have you talked to Benton?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Then you know what’s going to happen,” I pile it on. “He had to pass along certain information to Granby, who’s already releasing statements to the press.”

  “Bogus ones,” Lucy says. “The Feebs already have taken over and they’re coming.”

  “Yeah, Santa Claus is coming to town,” Marino says angrily. “I can hear him on his sleigh heading this way. He’s going to land on the roof any minute, dammit. This is fucking bullshit. Whatever happened to just taking care of things and protecting the public like we’re supposedly paid to do?”

  “You used to say that twenty years ago,” I reply.

  “People still suck.”

  “We don’t have much time before we have no control over anything,” I bring up again.

  “The DVR is where you’d go in the aftermath unless you’re not very bright.” Lucy is back to that. “You show up here and you’re on camera and you don’t care because at that time whatever your reason for showing up is normal. You didn’t drop by to commit a crime. Then something goes wrong and now you’ve got to fix it after the fact. So you find the closet because it’s too damn late to cut the cables to the cameras.”

  “It could be how it went down.” Marino is getting prickly with her. “But you’d have to know what a DVR is to look for one,” he repeats.

  “He must have pitched it. I doubt he ran through the park with a video recorder tucked under his arm. He wouldn’t have tossed it in the woods, not anywhere it would be found. You might want to get some divers to search the pond.”

  “It wouldn’t still work if it’s been in the water.” Marino wants to at least appear he’s fighting with her but he’s not.

  It’s just the three of us in this together, no different from how it’s always been.

  “I’m not sure what you’d be able to recover,” she says. “It depends on the brand and model and how protected the recorded data is on the digital storage device. My bigger question is whether video and audio might have been transferred over a network for remote monitoring on a computer, maybe on some other area of the property. If other people were looking, they could have seen at least some of what was going on.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to check everywhere.” Marino doesn’t look at Lucy now.

  He hates what he feels about her and thinks he can hide it. He can’t, not about either of us.

  “The barn and the outbuildings, the bedrooms,” Lucy says. “Wherever there might be workstations or even laptops and iPads, someone might have seen something they didn’t think to mention to you.” She’s diplomatic about it. “You mind if I check?”

  “Don’t touch nothing,” Marino says.

  “And I’ve got to take the server in.”

  “Stay out of that closet in the other room and don’t touch nothing.”

  “Then who’s going to make sure data’s not being deleted remotely, maybe from New York or Grand Cayman or anywhere even as we speak?” she says to him.

  “You should know all about deleting things remotely.”

  “Who’s going to get through the layers of secu
rity? I guess you could ask around for the system admin password. Maybe somebody will hand it over.”

  “I didn’t ask for your help.”

  “Well, Merry Christmas, Marino. The FBI will be here landing on the roof before you know it,” Lucy says. “I guess you can turn the server over to them. Maybe before you retire they’ll tell you what’s on it. But probably not.”

  She walks back out the front door, her retreating footsteps light on the veranda and the steps, and then I can’t hear her anymore.

  “You should get it out of here and you know it,” I tell him quietly. “I have a feeling even Benton would suggest that.” I’m careful what else I say with other people around but the way I look at Marino he understands there’s a problem that’s much bigger than he imagines.

  “Jesus.” His face is deep red and he stares at the cop with the laser station on the other side of the room.

  If he hears us, he makes no indication of it, but no cop with NEMLEC would snitch to the FBI anyway.

  “She knows what she’s doing. And so do I. And you’re about to know a lot.” I hold Marino’s stare and he doesn’t know what I’m talking about but he gets that it’s a severe problem.

  “What the fuck.” He enters a number on his phone. “Do it,” he says when Lucy answers. “Don’t disturb nothing or talk to anyone. Pack it up and get it to the CFC, get it the hell out of here and you’d better not screw anything up. I’m trusting you.”

  He ends the call and turns his attention to me. “I’m going to walk you through it. Show you exactly what I think he did.”

  “Not now.” I move deeper inside in my latex boots. “I’ll let his victims tell me what he did.”

  36

  I want to be alone with the dead and alone with my thoughts.

  I walk over to the officer in charge of the mapping station set up on a sturdy bright yellow tripod. He’s packing a laptop computer and an Ethernet cable, the system on pause, its oscillating mirror and rapidly pulsing laser beam quiet and still.