Dust ks-21

by Patricia Cornwell

  Adrenaline has banished fatigue and I’ve gone from being hungry to not feeling it anymore, and I send a text message to Bryce. I tell him Dr. Adams needs to return to the CFC immediately to confirm identifications.

  “Already on his way,” he answers before I’ve finished typing that I’m going to be tied up for a while.

  “Gavin’s only called about ten million times,” my chief of staff fires back about the Boston Globe reporter who’s a close friend of his and therefore gets preferential treatment that I’ve given up quibbling about.

  Gavin Connors is a fine journalist who goes to concerts and sporting events with Bryce and Ethan, they cook together, and when needed he takes care of their Scottish Fold cat named Shaw. I will have quite the story for Gavin Connors but it needs to wait until I’m sure what it is and am ready to hand it off in a way that won’t be traceable, and I have no doubt Barbara Fairbanks will blast it everywhere next. The news will be too sensational for the government to bury, and I let Bryce know that when I’m back we’ll deal with the media, and I’ll want to hear all about the interview with Marino’s possible replacement.

  “I rescheduled. Are U surprised?”

  “Good thinking. Don’t want visitors at CFC right now. Nobody comes in without my permission, including FBI.” I type with my thumbs, standing near the kitchen where blood has dried from bright red to a dark unpolished ruby like lights dimming before they burn out.

  I sense Benton’s tension and preoccupation as he waits for me, checking his phone, rolling through messages and going back and forth with Lucy who is rocketing through the cyberspace and databases of Double S’s tower server.

  She has very little time and I give it but a few hours before she’s backed up every byte of information. When the FBI arrives at the CFC and demands the computer there will be no sign we so much as plugged it in. My labs are jammed with a huge backlog of cases, I’ll suggest if necessary. We didn’t get around to it yet will be the implication. This is what the likes of Granby has reduced us to. Working against the FBI, working against our own people because we don’t know who our people are anymore.

  Bryce’s next text lands with a chime and I let him know that all cases need to be done tonight.

  “Do U want us to save U one?” he writes back as if an autopsy is a slice of cake or a sandwich.

  “No. But make sure Luke is the one doing post of victim tentatively ID’d as Haley Swanson.”

  “10-4 & btw. Ernie has results. Gonzo for the day but U can call him at home. He’s always up late.” As usual, Bryce is in a mood to chat.

  “Thanks.” I turn around at the sound of footsteps.

  An FBI agent in a polo shirt and khaki cargo pants passes through in tactical boots, wearing a Glock on his belt and carrying an M4 carbine, the short barrel pointed down, the black nylon strap hanging to his hip.

  He pauses to look at us with a smile that flashes brightly without a trace of warmth, and he opens the steel door and shuts it behind him, returning to the rooms where the others have been busy for hours digging through documents.

  “We should head out.” Benton stares toward the back offices, fully aware of what’s going on without him.

  While I was examining Caminska’s body, slumped over her bloody desk, I overheard a mention of the Bureau’s Eurasian Organized Crime Squad. It primarily targets criminals with ties to the Soviet Union and Central Europe and I’m aware the entire compound is now a crime scene that’s been taken over by the FBI.

  The entrance to the driveway is barricaded and guarded and soon it won’t be possible to walk anywhere without running into agents armed with assault rifles and sub-submachine guns. Benton and I will be noticed by someone before we’re done. But I have my reason, an unusual murder weapon and my right to look for it or something like it.

  “What about keys?” I ask.

  I saw Marino hand over the big set of them to the agent who just walked through. This was after Marino and Benton returned from searching the grounds without permission or telling anyone. The agent took the keys from Marino with an inquisitive look, wondering how he got them or where they were from. I remembered seeing them in blood on Lombardi’s desk, partially under his nearly decapitated body, and later the keys weren’t there anymore. Benton offered no explanation to his young FBI colleague while Marino disappeared into the night with his dog, loudly mentioning something about teaching Quincy to be friends with horses without being kicked or stepped on.

  He emphasized the words kicked and stepped on and that’s when I knew he understood what was going on and being done. In the blink of an eye Marino has gone from trying to push Benton around to being his biggest ally.

  “We don’t need keys,” Benton says to me.

  I don’t ask him how he expects to get back into the locked-up private places he and Marino explored, Lombardi’s secret rooms, his massive garage. I will see what’s there for myself in this very brief window of time. Benton and I need to be done in an hour, not much more than that, without risking an interference that we can’t afford.

  “Everything will be fine.” I retrieve gloves and a small camera from my field case and tuck them into a pocket. “There are steps that can be taken and we’re taking them.”

  Benton doesn’t answer. He continues to stare in the direction of the offices where the FBI has busied itself after instructing NEMLEC officers to clear the scene and telling him to go home and not return to work until he’s called, which will be never, he says. Only one Concord detective remains with them. I can’t imagine he’s saying much, hanging around and ignored like a cigar store wooden Indian, there for appearances, the FBI cooperating in a joint operation, as joint as it gets with an unscrupulous bastard like Ed Granby in charge.

  “We’re okay. We’re way ahead, Benton.”

  He looks at me with no expression. “We shouldn’t have to be,” he says.

  “It doesn’t matter whether we should or shouldn’t. We’re ahead of them and will stay ahead of them.” I glance back toward the offices where Granby and his team are investigating the mother of cases, as Marino put it after he and Benton had gone building to building, room to room. “They’re so busy with whatever’s locked in filing cabinets and drawers and all the bankers boxes in that back storage area I saw that they aren’t focused on the computer yet,” I add.

  “I don’t think they know it’s gone,” Benton says. “They’re still wondering what happened to the DVR or if there was one.”

  “They’ll get nothing from us. Not one glimmer of enlightenment.” I snap shut the oversized clasps of my field case, grateful Lucy left with the server before Granby and his agents showed up.

  I’ve said nothing about any evidence that’s at my labs or en route to them and the FBI can’t just roll in and take everything. There’s such a thing as chain of custody and they’ll have to work it out with the Concord and Cambridge police. And if trace or DNA evidence is in my possession already, then they’ll have to work it out with me. I can make the process as slow and weighed down by bureaucracy as they’ve ever seen. There’s no right reason for evidence from my cases in Massachusetts to go to the national labs in Quantico, only the wrong reason that has to do with what Ed Granby decides to alter, destroy, or simply hide. I won’t give him anything until I don’t need it anymore.

  Meanwhile, every minute that passes Lucy is at her keyboards surrounded by flat screens, mining for truths, and she’s already causing Granby the most trouble he’s ever had in his life. It couldn’t be more deserved. He can go to hell and he will before I’m done.

  “Ready,” I say to Benton.

  I carry my gear through the front door and onto the veranda and I’m delighted Granby isn’t the sort to take me seriously. He never has even when he’s acted like it. As many times as he’s been in my presence at his office and mine, out to dinner and over to the house, he doesn’t know me, only what he projects from his self-image and filters through his self-absorption. He doesn’t know Benton any better.
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  I don’t yet have an idea how far Granby has stepped over the line but anyone who would tamper with evidence is capable of anything and what I can’t get out of my mind is his career trajectory. I saw the press release when he was named the special agent in charge of Boston. I’ve heard him talk ad nauseam about all of the important things he’s done.

  When I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia he was the assistant special agent in charge, the ASAC, of the Washington, D.C., field office, where he worked public corruption and violent crime, among other lofty responsibilities that included the White House. For a long time after that he was a Hoover Building bureaucrat at headquarters, overseeing field office inspections and national security investigations, and then last summer he came to Boston.

  I remember Benton telling me it was a lateral move Granby requested because he’s originally from here but now I’m convinced there’s another reason, a filthy one. His transfer occurred last summer, not long after Klara Hembree left Cambridge in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. She moved to Washington, D.C., to be near her family because she didn’t feel safe and already Lucy has discovered that her estranged husband has an extensive business relationship with Double S.

  She’s found purchase and sale contracts for pricey real estate and evidence of all sorts of payments and monies moved in and out of different bank and investment accounts. She’s texting bullet summaries to Benton almost in real time and I happen to hear them land and see them glowing bright green on his phone as I did a few minutes ago.

  “I feel sure about this. It’s going to be fine,” I say to him in an upbeat way that blankets my slow-burning indignation and fury.

  38

  We load my gear and the red bag of soiled protective clothing into the trunk of Benton’s powerful turbo sports car as if we’re leaving.

  He shuts the lid and locks it with a chirp. On foot we divert away from the parking lot, pushing through a barrier of pines with low-hanging branches, veering away from the driveway toward more trees, a meadow and acres of yard in a precise direction that he determined earlier. I notice him check tall lamps glowing dull yellow, their security cameras pointed like periscopes to pick up any movement along the blacktop we avoid as we make our way carefully through the foggy dark toward the house where Lombardi lived alone.

  His grounds are deliberately planned, with the office building about a mile into the winding paved drive. Then a glass-enclosed walkway connects that building to a larger one, what Benton tells me is a spa, gym, and indoor pool, that in turn is connected by another enclosed walkway to a generous guest quarters. From there an additional walkway leads to the house painted dark green with dark brown shutters and a dark green metal roof, tucked in pines and not easily spotted from the air. Benton describes the dead billionaire’s lair as architecturally camouflaged.

  Doors leading into Lombardi’s personal spaces are secured with anti-drill dead bolt lever locks, each with a key that can’t be duplicated, and every area of the compound, with the exception of barns, maintenance sheds, and the sunporch, is connected by these glass and stone walkways that remind me of covered bridges, unusually long ones. As we skirt the soggy perimeter in the inky dark and Benton explains the layout and security to me, I can’t help but think of an octopus reaching out its tentacles across the property, beyond a dark horizon obscured by black clouds and into other cities, states, countries, and continents.

  “You’ll judge it for yourself,” Benton says. “You’d never imagine this is going on around here but it shouldn’t be the priority. It can wait, goddamn it. He’s going to kill someone else. And nobody’s looking for him.”

  “We are. But he’ll never be caught if we don’t catch Granby first. I believe he knows damn well who this guy is.”

  “You have to wonder why he’d help protect him if he has no idea,” Benton replies. “It’s not just about clearing cases in D.C. that are bad for politics and tourism. Granby wants them blamed on someone else for a reason, possibly because Lombardi wanted it. Hang three murders around the neck of a missing man who’s probably dead and no harm done unless the Capital Murderer kills again somewhere else where the DNA can’t be tampered with. And he did and here we are and Granby must be secretly panicking.”

  He doesn’t say it as if he’s happy about it. Benton isn’t heavy-handed or vindictive and maybe I can be both. He steers me around low-hanging branches I can barely see and when my shoulder grazes them cold rainwater showers me. I put my coat on and button it up.

  “If we walked on the driveway, who’s going to see us and what would happen?” I comb my fingers through my damp hair.

  “The cameras would pick us up and we’d show up on monitors. They’d be here in two seconds and Granby would have us escorted off the property immediately.”

  “You really think so?”

  “It wouldn’t be pretty,” he says.

  “That’s assuming they aren’t too busy to notice.”

  “They probably are at the moment. When more backup arrives we’ll be out of luck and out of time. I’m surprised they aren’t here already.”

  “What happens when we get to the house?” I ask.

  “The door near the garage has an alarm but the system’s off. The chef disarmed it earlier and didn’t reset it. There’s no camera at that entrance probably because Lombardi wanted to come and go with various acquaintances, colleagues, mobsters, or his women and not be seen or recorded.”

  “Colleagues such as friends in high places,” I suggest.

  “I think that’s the picture we’re getting.”

  “And his women like Gail Shipton.”

  “To control her. To overpower. To bend her to his will.”

  “It wasn’t just about sex.”

  “Power,” Benton says. “He made her do it because she didn’t want it. And to put her in her place. Carin Hegel thought she was a match for these people at first because she had no idea. She thought it was just a lawsuit. And Lombardi was putting her in her place, too.”

  “She doesn’t think it’s just a lawsuit now as she hides out at Lucy’s house. And I wonder how many other former clients Lombardi did this to. Took everything they had in a way that couldn’t be proven, then settled with insurance money that he got a cut of — the biggest cut, I’m sure. Or maybe he simply got them to bend to his will because they felt they had no choice or might be killed.”

  “What he did with Gail would have been a small transaction for him,” Benton says.

  “A hundred million is small?”

  “Whatever the settlement would have been, a payout from insurance companies, pocket change to him but an amusement because a big trial lawyer like Hegel dared to sue him. Gail was weak and got desperate and then he owned her and any technology she might help him with.” Every other minute he’s looking at his phone, getting information from Lucy. “If she wasn’t dead, she’d be charged with fraud. She’d be out of MIT and life would be over for her.”

  “Does Granby know about that part of it? That she was in collusion?”

  “I don’t know what he knows on his own but you heard what I told him.” Benton’s voice is as hard as iron. “I laid out what was important and I’m not telling him another damn thing. I’m home for the holidays, remember? And we’re not here unless they’ve noticed my car.”

  “Some investigators they are if they haven’t.”

  “They’re not noticing anything except what’s in the documents they’re rooting through,” Benton replies. “They’ve probably gotten the safe open by now and no telling what’s in it — I’m guessing millions in cash, gold, foreign currency, and account numbers for offshore banks — and he’s on the phone with headquarters every other minute, plotting, planning, cracking another big case. He’s predictable and he’s got it all figured out and the person we should worry about isn’t on their radar. No one’s looking for a reason. Granby’s diverted them.”

  “He cheated the DNA. He solved a case that isn’t solved and now what
’s he going to do about it?” We walk through bunchgrass that would be bright with wildflowers in warmer months. “He’ll clear the D.C. cases, blame the murders on Martin Lagos, and make what’s happened here a separate investigation into organized crime and professional hits,” I suppose.

  “Which is totally illogical and someone will point that out eventually. Not everybody in the FBI is incompetent and corrupt,” Benton says. But what he’s really saying is he doesn’t want to believe anybody is.

  “We don’t have the luxury for what will happen eventually.”

  “A contract killer brings his own weapon to a job,” Benton says. “He doesn’t leave clothing at the scene, take a blood-soaked hooded sweatshirt from one of his victims so he can disguise himself as he runs like hell through a crowd of schoolchildren on his way back to wherever he left his car. He doesn’t grab an envelope full of cash and then accidentally drop it in a public park, an envelope with blood and a return address on it.”

  Benton watches where he steps, his borrowed sneakers drenched. The wind is more frigid than I thought and everything we brush against is waterlogged.

  “This is someone out of control who didn’t kill the people of Double S for money,” he says. “Maybe he wanted a reward and the ego gratification of being thanked for getting rid of Gail Shipton but the others were personal. They had it coming. Maybe not in Swanson’s case. He may have been in the way and that’s it.”

  “The killer is someone they knew and underestimated or ignored.” The legs of my pants are soaked and my hands are cold. “People like this don’t unlock a door or turn their back on someone they have even the slightest hesitation about.”

  “Rage,” Benton says. “Lombardi hit this person where it hurts. He insulted and humiliated him and I have a feeling Lombardi had done it before. We’re going to find there’s a history. He knew him and I maintain no one at Double S asked him to murder Gail and wouldn’t have because of the scam she was involved in, and that’s not why he killed her anyway.”