“I’m not sure you’re hearing me,” she says to Win as a knock sounds on the shut door.
“Just a minute.” He gets up to answer it.
It’s Sammy, pokes his head in, quietly says, “Sorry.”
Win steps out into the corridor, pulls the door shut. Sammy hands him this morning’s Boston Globe, the local section. The headline across the top of the front page is big and bold.
ANY CRIME, ANY TIME
DA ENLISTS SPACE-AGE SCIENCE
TO SOLVE OLD MURDER
“Four things you should know,” Sammy says. “First, your name’s all over this thing, a damn road map for how you’re supposedly going to solve the governor’s whodunit. More accurate, her whodunit”—he looks at the shut door—“since he’s delegated it to her. Good luck if the killer’s still out there and reads all this shit. Second, well, the second thing’s sure as hell not good.”
“What?”
“Baptista just died. To state the obvious, now we don’t get to talk to him. Third, I went through his clothes, found a thousand bucks in hundred-dollar bills in his back pocket.”
“Loose, folded up, what?”
“Plain white envelope, no writing on it. Bills new-looking, you know, crisp. Not folded or nothing. I called Huber at home. The labs are going to process them right away, look for prints.”
“What’s the fourth thing?”
“The media’s found out about…” He again nods toward the shut door. “There’s like three TV trucks and a crowd of reporters out there in the parking lot and it isn’t even daylight yet.”
Win steps back inside the examination room, shuts the door.
Lamont is sitting in the same plastic chair. It occurs to him she’s got nothing to wear unless she can handle the warm-up suit she put on before he drove her to the hospital. After the assault, she couldn’t shower, he didn’t have to give her instructions, she knows the routine. She still hasn’t showered, and it’s not a subject he is entirely comfortable bringing up.
“The press has found out,” he says, sitting back down on the stool. “I need to get you out of here without them ambushing you. I’m sure you know you can’t go back to your house right now.”
“He was going to burn it down,” she states.
The gas can was full. It certainly wasn’t left there by her yardman.
“He was going to kill me and burn down my house.” A steady, firm voice, the DA working the case as if she’s talking about some other victim. “Why? To make my death look like an accident. To make it look like I burned up in my house. He’s no beginner.”
“Depends on whether it was his idea,” Win says. “Or if someone gave him instructions. In any event, disguising a homicide with fire isn’t very reliable. Most likely, the autopsy would have revealed soft-tissue injury, the bullet, and possible damage to cartilage, bone. Bodies don’t completely burn up in house fires. You know that.”
He thinks about the money in Baptista’s pocket, something telling him it’s not a good idea to give that detail to Lamont just yet.
“I need you to stay here,” she says, tightly gripping the blanket she holds around herself. “Forget the lady in Tennessee, what’s-her-name. We need to find out who’s behind this. Not just some little nobody piece of… maybe someone else who put him up to it.”
“Huber’s already getting the labs mobilized…”
“How does he know about it?” she blurts out. “I haven’t told—” She stops short, her eyes wide. “He’s not going to get away with this,” and she’s talking about Baptista again. “This is one case that isn’t going to be… I want you in charge of it. We’re going to bury him.”
He resists the obvious pun, says, “Monique, he’s dead.”
She doesn’t flinch.
“Justified or not, struggle or not, I killed him. It was a good shooting. But you know what happens. Your office can’t investigate it alone, will either have to transfer the case to another DA’s office or bring in the Boston Homicide Unit. Not to mention Internal Affairs doing its thing. Not to mention the autopsy and every other test known to man. I’ll be put on administrative duties for a while.”
“I want you on this right now.”
“Not even a mental-health day? That’s nice.”
“Go drink a few beers with the stress unit. I don’t want to hear about your so-called mental health.” Her face is livid now, her eyes dark holes of hate, as if he is the one who attacked her. “If I don’t get a mental-health day, I’ll be damned if you do.”
Her change in demeanor is startling, unnerving.
“Maybe you don’t grasp the magnitude of what just happened,” he says. “I see it all the time with other victims.”
“I’m not a victim. I was victimized.” Just as suddenly, she is the DA again, the strategist, the politician. “This has to be handled precisely right or you know what I’ll be known for? The gubernatorial candidate who was raped.”
He doesn’t reply
“Any crime, any time, including mine,” she says.
6
Monique stands in the middle of the examination room, the white blanket wrapped around her.
“Get us out of here,” she says to Win.
“It’s not us,” he says. “I can’t be involved….”
“I want you in charge of this. Now come with me,” she says, her face calm, masklike. “Get us out of here. Stay with me until I know I’m safe. We don’t know who’s behind this. I must be safe.”
“You’ll be safe, but I can’t be your protection.”
She stares at him.
“I’ve got to let them investigate this, Monique. I can’t be involved in a deadly-force case and go about my business as if nothing happened.”
“You can and you will.”
“You’re not really expecting me to be your bodyguard…?”
“That would be your fantasy, wouldn’t it,” she says, and she stares at him, something in her eyes he’s never seen before, not from her. “Get me out of here. There must be a basement, a fire exit, something, get me out of here. Doesn’t this goddamn hospital have a rooftop helipad?”
Win calls Sammy on the cell phone, says, “Get one of the choppers in and fly her out of here.”
“To where?” Sammy asks.
Win looks at Lamont, says, “You got some safe place to stay?”
She hesitates, then, “Boston.”
“Where in Boston? I need to know.”
“An apartment.”
“You have an apartment in Boston?” That’s news to him. Why would she have an apartment less than ten miles from her house?
She doesn’t reply, doesn’t owe him any further explanations about her life.
He tells Sammy, “Get an officer to meet her when she lands, escort her to her apartment.”
He gets off the phone, looks at her, has one of his bad feelings, says, “Words aren’t enough, Monique, but I can’t tell you how sorry…”
“You’re right, words aren’t enough.” She gives him the same disconcerting stare.
“I’m out of commission for a few days, starting now,” he says. “It’s the best thing to do.”
Her eyes bore into him as she stands in the small, white room, the white blanket wrapped around her.
“What do you mean, the best thing? I should think I’m the one who decides what the best thing is for me.”
“Maybe this isn’t only about you,” he says.
Her scary eyes don’t leave his.
“Monique, I need a few days to take care of things.”
“Right now, your job is to take care of me,” she says. “We have to do damage control, turn this into something positive. You need me.”
She stands perfectly still, her eyes staring. Behind them is a darkness seething with hatred and rage.
“I’m the only witness,” she states in a flat tone.
“Are you threatening to lie about what happened if I don’t do what you say?”
“I don’t lie.
That’s one thing people know about me,” she replies.
“You’re threatening me?” He says it again, and now he’s a cop, now he isn’t the man who saved her life. “Because there are more important witnesses than you. The silent witnesses of forensic science. His body fluids, for example. Unless you’re going to say it was consensual. Then I guess his saliva, his seminal fluid are irrelevant. Then I guess I inadvertently interrupted a tryst, some creative sex scenario. Maybe he thought he was protecting you from me, thought I was the intruder, instead of the other way around. That what you’re going to say, Monique?”
“How dare you.”
“I’m pretty good with scripts. You want a few more?”
“How dare you!”
“No. How dare you. I just saved your goddamn life.”
“You sexist pig. Typical man. Think all of us want it.”
“Stop it.”
“Think all of us have some secret fantasy about being…”
“Stop it!” Then he lowers his voice. “I’ll help you all I can. I didn’t do this to you. You know what happened. He’s dead. He got what he deserved. The best revenge, if you want to look at it that way. You won, made him pay the ultimate price, if you want to look at it that way. Now let’s repair what we can, get things on the right track as best we can. Damage control, as you put it.”
Her eyes clear. Thoughts move in them.
“I need a few days,” Win says. “I need you to refrain from taking this out on me. If you can’t do that, I’ll have no choice but to…”
“Facts,” she interrupts him. “Fingerprints on the gas can. DNA. The pistol — is it stolen? My missing keys, probably a coincidence unless they were on his person, in his residence. If so, why wasn’t he waiting inside my house?”
“Your alarm.”
“Right.” She paces, wrapped in her white blanket like an Indian chief. “How did he get to my house. Does he have a car. Did someone else drive him. His family. Who did he know.”
Past tense. Her attacker is dead and she thinks of him as dead already. It hasn’t even been an hour. Win looks at his watch. He calls Sammy. The chopper’s nine minutes out.
* * *
The Bell 430 lifts off from Mount Auburn Hospital’s rooftop helipad, hovers and noses around, flies off toward the Boston skyline. It’s a seven-million-dollar bird. Lamont had a lot to do with making sure the Massachusetts State Police has three of them.
At the moment she doesn’t take much pride in that, doesn’t take much pride in anything, isn’t sure how she feels except heavy, stony. From where she sits in back, she can see frantic journalists on the ground, their cameras pointed in her loud, dramatic direction, and she shuts her eyes and tries to ignore her desperate need for a shower and clean clothing, tries to ignore areas of her body that were invaded and violated, tries to ignore nagging fears about sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy. She tries to concentrate on who and what she is and not on what happened hours earlier.
She takes a deep breath, looks out the window, looks at the rooftops passing below her as the helicopter beats its way toward Massachusetts General Hospital, where the pilots plan to land so some state policeperson can pick her up and transport her to an apartment no one is supposed to know about. She’ll probably pay for that mistake, doesn’t know what else she could have done.
“You all right back there?” A pilot’s voice sounds through her headset.
“Fine.”
“We’ll be landing in four minutes.”
She is sinking. She stares without blinking at the partition that separates the pilots from her, and she feels herself getting heavier, sinking lower. Once when she was an undergraduate at Harvard she got drunk, really drunk, and although she never said a word about it to anyone, she knew that at least one of the men she was partying with had sex with her while she was unconscious. When she came to, the sun was up and the birds were making noise, and she was alone on a couch and it was obvious what had happened, but she didn’t accuse the suspect she had in mind, certainly didn’t consider an examination by a forensic nurse. She remembers how she felt that day — poisoned, dazed. No, not just dazed, maybe dead. That was it, she recalls as she flies into the downtown skyline. She felt dead.
Death can be liberating. There are things you don’t have to care about anymore if you’re dead. People can’t injure or maim parts of you that are dead.
“Ms. Lamont?” A pilot’s voice sounds in her headset again. “When we land, it will take us a minute to shut down and I want you to sit tight. Someone will open the door for you and get you out.”
She imagines Governor Crawley. She imagines his ugly, smirking face when he hears the news. He probably already knows. Of course he does. He’ll be sympathetic, heartbroken, and degrade and destroy her in the election.
“Then what?” she says, pushing the mic close to her lip.
“The state police officer on the ground will tell you….” one of the pilots answers.
“You’re the state police,” she says. “I’m asking you what the plan is. Is the media there?”
“You’ll be briefed, I’m sure, ma’am.”
They are hovering over the hospital’s rooftop helipad now, a blaze-orange windsock whipping around in the rotor wash, some state policewoman in a blue uniform bending her head against the wind. The helicopter sets down, goes into flight idle, and Lamont sits, staring out at the unfamiliar, plain-looking woman officer, someone low on the food chain who’s supposed to get the traumatized and besieged DA to safe asylum. A damn escort, a damn bodyguard, a damn woman to remind Lamont that she’s a woman who has just been violated by a man and therefore most likely doesn’t want to be escorted by a man. She’s damaged. A victim. She imagines Crawley, imagines what he’ll say, what he’s already saying and thinking.
The engines go silent, the blades whining quietly, winding down, then braking to a stop. She takes off her headset and shoulder harness and imagines Crawley’s smarmy, pious face looking into the camera and offering compassion from the people of Massachusetts to Monique Lamont. Victim Lamont.
Victim Lamont for governor. Any crime, any time, including mine.
Lamont opens the helicopter door herself before the officer can, climbs out herself before anybody can help her.
Any crime, any time, including mine Lamont.
“I want you to find Win Garano for me. Right now,” Lamont says to the officer. “Tell him to drop everything he’s doing and call me right now,” she orders.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m Sergeant Small.” The woman in blue offers a handshake, does everything but salute.
“An unfortunate name,” Lamont says, walking off toward a door that leads inside the hospital.
“You mean the investigator, right? The one they call Geronimo.” Sergeant Small catches up with her. “If I was fat it would be a really unfortunate name, ma’am. I get made fun of enough.” She removes her radio from her big black belt, opening the door. “I’ve got my car downstairs, hid out of view. You mind some stairs? Then where can I take you?”
“The Globe,” she says.
* * *
Jimmy Barber’s basement is dusty and mildewy with nothing but one low-wattage bare bulb to illuminate what must be a hundred cardboard cartons stacked to the rafters, some labeled, most not.
Sykes has spent the past four hours pushing aside boxes of miscellaneous crap — ancient tape recorders, scores of tapes, several empty flowerpots, fishing tackle, baseball caps, an old-style bulletproof vest, softball trophies, what must be thousands of photographs and letters and magazines, files, notepads, the handwriting horrible. Crap and more crap. The man was too lazy to organize his memorabilia so he just threw it into boxes, packed up everything short of fast-food wrappers and what was in his wastepaper basket.
So far, she’s been through plenty of cases, ones he probably thought were worth saving: a fugitive who hid in a chimney and got stuck, a deadly assault with a bowling pin, a man struck by lightning while sleeping in an ir
on bed, an intoxicated woman who stopped in the middle of a road to pee, forgot to put her car in gear, ran over herself. Cases and more cases that Barber shouldn’t have decided were his to carry home when he retired. But she has yet to find KPD893-85, not even in a box that contained a lot of papers, correspondence, and cases for 1985. She calls Win’s cell phone for the third time, leaves another message, knows he’s busy but takes it personally.
She can’t help thinking that if she were someone really important, maybe like that Harvard-educated woman DA he complains about so much, he’d call back promptly. Sykes went to a tiny Christian college in Bristol, Tennessee, flunked out her second year, hated school, didn’t see a practical reason in the world why she should learn French or calculus or go to chapel twice a week. She’s not the same caliber as Win and that DA and all those other people way up north who are part of his life. She’s practically old enough to be his mother.
Sykes sits on top of an overturned five-gallon plastic pickle bucket, staring at stacks of cardboard boxes, her throat scratchy, her eyes itchy, her lower back aching. For a moment she is overwhelmed, not merely by the task before her but by everything, sort of the way she felt when she began the Academy and on day two, the class was taken on a tour of that notorious University of Tennessee research facility known as The Body Farm, two wooded acres littered with stinking dead bodies in every condition imaginable, donated human remains rotting on the ground or under concrete slabs or in car trunks or in bodybags or out of bodybags, clothed or naked, anthropologists and entomologists wandering around day after day, taking notes.
Who could do this? I mean, what kind of person does something this disgusting for a living or graduate school or whatever? she asked Win as they crouched down, looking at maggots teeming over a partially skeletonized man whose hair had slid off his skull, looked like road-kill, about three feet away.
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