Dust

by Patricia Cornwell

  I feel better inside an armored vehicle that brings to mind Darth Vader or Middle Eastern potentates who have galactic wars and bombs and bullets to worry about. I’m relieved to be in Lucy’s SUV. I’m relieved to be with her. The information Marino relayed to me over the phone as we were pulling out of the bay is scant. But it’s ghastly, almost unbelievably so. The 911 call this morning about an active shooter wasn’t completely wrong in its implications that a madman in Concord may have just gone on a killing spree.

  But the suspicious person seen running through Minute Man Park late this morning wasn’t there to spray bullets at schoolchildren on an outing. It’s unlikely he knew the children would be there when he fled through acres of forest separating the Revolutionary War battleground from the rolling pastureland, outbuildings and main office and house of Double S, a horse farm and financial firm where at least three people are dead in what Marino described to me as a “Jack the Ripper bloodbath.”

  The victims didn’t know what hit them, Marino said, their throats cut while they were getting something to eat or sitting in their chairs. The suspect, who witnesses describe as a young male dressed in jeans and a dark hoodie with an Andy Warhol–like image of Marilyn Monroe on it, burst out of the woods and flew over a wooden footbridge. He leapt through a swarm of fourth graders on a path “scattering them like bowling pins,” in Marino’s words. The man raced across Liberty Street and into a public parking lot thick with cars.

  There was so much panic and confusion, no one seemed to know what happened to him after backfires that sounded like gunshots, with children and teachers grabbing one another and running and diving to the ground. When police units and SWAT showed up the man wasn’t to be found. No one recalled a vehicle speeding away or even noticing one shortly after the incident. The Medflight helicopter was turned around and the police probably would have assumed the entire incident was a false alarm were it not for one important detail.

  Concord detectives searching the park in the area where the man had been spotted discovered a thick envelope with blood on it and the printed return address of Double S Financial Management. Inside it was ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. The envelope was below the footbridge the man had sprinted across and it’s conjectured he was startled by the crowd of children and teachers blocking the path and in his alarmed confusion dropped what Marino calls getaway cash.

  “Three people so far died for ten measly grand, a little over three thousand bucks per, a cheap price for your life but I’ve seen cheaper,” Marino said to me over the phone. “A hoodie with Marilyn Monroe on it and, bingo, Haley Swanson, who’s vanished into thin air, and now he’s been spotted and we know what he is. Jesus, it’s just a damn good thing I was at your house when he was spying behind your wall. Imagine? He kills Gail Shipton and then comes back for more, stalking you, about to grab you from your damn yard. He would have seen me and Quincy getting out of my car.”

  Marino wants to believe he’s saved me, and I don’t argue. It doesn’t matter.

  “He wouldn’t have had a way to know I was going to show up as opposed to you driving yourself to the scene,” he said, “so that screwed it up for him.”

  I didn’t tell him it doesn’t feel right. Marino has his mind made up and he wasn’t going to listen. But I don’t believe the person I saw early this morning intended to harm me while I was outside with my dog. I don’t know what he wanted but he’d had plenty of opportunities during the days and nights I was home alone sick with the flu. And as I think of my feverish dreams and the hooded man in them I wonder if I was having moments of clairvoyance. I was under intense scrutiny. I was obsessively on the mind of a stranger and a part of me knew it.

  For sure I’d had the sensation of being watched when I was taking Sock out into the backyard after dark. And if it’s true that Haley Swanson was stalking me or casing my house because he wanted to rob me or worse, why didn’t he? Possibly because he saw I had a gun, I suppose. But I don’t think that’s it either. It may be what Lucy has suggested, that the Capital Murderer had gotten interested in me because of what’s been all over the news, and, yes, one thing could lead to another. Sexual violence begins with fantasy, and what a demented killer might imagine would be fueled by what he sees.

  I envision the footprints along the railroad tracks, leading into the MIT campus while it was still raining and away from campus some time later. Our house is barely two miles from where Gail Shipton’s body was left and if her killer is even mildly well informed, he would have known there was a good chance I would respond to the scene. He may have been watching. He may have been behind the wall, observing lights go on inside my house, and he may have seen Marino pull up, and then he would have seen me taking Sock out.

  I felt the presence of what very well may be the killer. I heard him back there, and then I saw him and he ran. Fleet of foot, with running gloves on, he returned to MIT to watch the rest of it. My arrival, the helicopter landing, his spectacle being worked, and as Benton has suggested, the killer left a final time before dawn along the train tracks to retrieve his car.

  “The simplest of motives, the oldest on the planet. Money,” Marino said to me moments ago. “We know who it is and he’s probably not gotten far, maybe is hiding out on someone’s farm in a shed or a barn, and we’re calling out cops from area departments and will do door-to-door searches until we find him.”

  When he said we he meant NEMLEC.

  “Haley Swanson robbed Double S and something got out of hand and he killed everyone,” Marino said and I know damn well that’s not the whole story or even part of it, maybe not any of it.

  This isn’t a robbery gone as badly as one could. I’m convinced the police are wrong about what they suspect very early into an investigation that will be taken over by the FBI if it hasn’t been already. Minute Man is a national park and therefore the jurisdiction of the Feds, who will use that one location as justification for horning in, and it’s hard for me to imagine that Benton isn’t mobilizing. He won’t wait for an invitation by Concord PD or Marino and NEMLEC or anyone including his boss, who won’t want Benton around, but that won’t stop him. Gail Shipton was suing Double S and she’s dead and now people at Double S are dead. Benton will be thinking about the Capital Murderer while what I continue to see is the hologram of an octopus on plastic bags over the heads of those women in D.C.

  I envision powerful tentacles shimmering in rainbow hues, a sea creature known as a bottom dweller, with rubbery flexibility and grace, and a master of camouflage, squeezing into impossible spaces, four pairs of arms leading to an intelligent beaked head. The invertebrate has been used as a symbol for evil empires that abuse power and take over. Fascist governments, conspiracists, imperialists, Wall Street. Dr. Seuss depicted the Nazis as an octopus.

  The metaphor may be a coincidence or maybe it’s not. The killer may view himself as a far-reaching superhuman with a stranglehold on whatever he decides to dominate, but I’m seeing him as something far more banal and poorly designed, like multiple devices hooked up to a single electrical source that leads to an overload, to sparks, to fire and an explosion.

  An octopus connection, a dangerous way to plug too many cords into one outlet, and a circuit blows, which is what I think has happened. I feel the rage and arrogance of someone silent and swift as I’m reminded of the railroad tracks and the killer who fled along them in running gloves, leaping from tie to tie in the slippery dark, a Nijinsky from hell who’s a prima donna but not necessarily as masterfully balanced as he believes, not emotionally, not mentally.

  “Supposedly the suspect showed up at the office building,” I continue relaying to Lucy what Marino summarized for me. “It’s believed the door was unlocked and he slipped in and killed the first three people he saw.”

  “Who are they?” Lucy asks as we follow Massachusetts Avenue, a Christian Science church on one side, the dark brick buildings of Harvard Law School on the other.

  I’m noticing a lot of police cars.r />
  “So far they’re unidentified.” I check my e-mail for emergency-response-system alerts.

  “If they’re Double S employees, how can we not have names?”

  “Marino says the bodies don’t have any form of identification on them, that apparently the killer stole their wallets. The police may have an idea but nothing’s verified.”

  “But other people work there.” Lucy says it as if she knows and she would.

  She’s a witness in the lawsuit against Double S. She’s been deposed and as recently as this past Sunday spent hours going over the case with Gail Shipton and Carin Hegel. Lucy has a grasp of the details. She probably knows more about Double S than most. She would make sure of it.

  “Three people is what I’ve been told unless there are other bodies they’ve not found yet,” I reply. “And Public Safety’s alerting area police departments and schools that there’s a manhunt.”

  “Great,” Lucy says. “Everyone will think it’s a damn terrorist attack.”

  “At least three dead in what appear to be planned executions,” I read what’s been publicized so far.

  “Where the hell did that come from? Who’s handing out press releases? Let me guess.”

  “Harvard, MIT, BU, and all grad schools are shutting down. Essential personnel only at McLean Hospital.” I scan through alerts landing in my e-mail. “The FBI —”

  “Here we go,” Lucy cuts me off in disgust. “They’re not wasting any time, meaning pretty soon they’ll be crawling all over everything.”

  “Special Agent in Charge of the Boston Division, Ed Granby —”

  “More of his propaganda,” Lucy interrupts.

  “He’s asking the public for information about the young male seen fleeing Minute Man Park and to review any photos or video anyone might have taken,” I relate.

  “Good luck. Concord people aren’t exactly into community policing unless you’re driving your ATV over wetlands or stepping on protected plantings.” She makes a typical acerbic snipe about where she lives.

  “The victims are a man and two women. That’s all Marino had,” I add. “We’re going to have to dig into whatever information Carin Hegel’s got. Her client Gail Shipton’s dead and now people from the firm she was suing are dead.”

  “Carin’s not going to have anything that will help,” Lucy says.

  We roar through Porter Square, its shopping center off to our right, and then the post office, churches, and a funeral home.

  “She was working a straightforward case that’s anything but,” Lucy adds.

  More police cars pass us with no flashing lights or sirens. Cambridge, Somerville, Quincy. NEMLEC, I think.

  “If she wasn’t scared before, now she’s got to be,” Lucy says.

  I mention I ran into Hegel at Boston’s federal courthouse last month. She told me she was sequestered in an undisclosed location until the trial was over and she referred to Double S as a gang of thugs.

  “Do you know where she is?” I catch a glint of a smile playing across Lucy’s face as if what I’ve been saying is somehow amusing.

  Maybe it’s shifts of light in an afternoon that’s turned volatile, gray clouds, churning and flat on top like anvils, far off over the ocean and outer harbor. It’s stopped raining along the South Shore and South Boston and I look up at the clouds closest to us, the wind continuing to shift around crazily like a compass in a store selling magnets. Building storm cells are ragged underneath, trailing down like ripped gauze, more heavy rains coming. Thank God the scene we’re headed to is indoors.

  “Is it possible she’s in danger?” I push my point.

  “Her case isn’t safe but she is,” Lucy says and it occurs to me where Carin Hegel may be staying.

  “She’s at your place.”

  “She’s safe,” Lucy repeats with the same grim smile playing on her lips, her face in profile, angular and strong, her short rose-gold hair tucked behind her ears. “She’s at the house with Janet. If anybody unwelcome shows up, you’ll be even busier than you are.”

  Lucy is openly in touch with the part of her that can kill and has before. It’s not even a deep or unhappy place for her or difficult to reach, and at times I envy her being comfortable with who she is. I follow the firm shape of her right leg down to her booted foot on the accelerator, looking for an ankle holster and not seeing one. She wears a black flight jacket over her black flight suit, lots of pockets for whatever she needs. I have no doubt she’s armed.

  In North Cambridge now traffic is typically heavy, eighteen-wheelers and buses in the opposite lane headed toward Boston, where the sky is misty and overcast but not ominous like it is to the west. Directly overhead building white clouds are carried along by patchy gray ones, and where blue shows through it’s glaring, the light strange, the way it gets before violent thunderstorms and hurricanes, what I remember from growing up in Miami.

  Nobody gives Lucy’s handcrafted, military-looking SUV a thumbs-up or the finger. They stare at it with an expression that is a mixture of fascinated and puzzled, awed and baffled. Nobody tailgates or tries to cut in front of her. Only oblivious people texting or talking on their phones come anywhere near the big black machine that growls like a jungle cat on paws as huge as a dinosaur’s. She’s careful not to speed. Given an excuse, cops would pull her over because they’re curious.

  “The door wouldn’t have been unlocked.” Lucy states this as if there can be no disputing it. “Every exterior door on the property has dead bolt locks and the front door of the office building has a biometric one for fingerprint scans like we have at the CFC. Some stranger didn’t just walk in and kill people at their desks.”

  I consider whether I should ask how she knows about the locks at Double S. As usual, I have to weigh my options. They’re always the same. Is my need to know greater than the conflict it could create if Lucy has done something she shouldn’t?

  “We’ll see what it looks like when we get there” is what I say.

  “Someone let him in. Someone opened the door for him and, if so, it means nobody at Double S was worried about whoever it is.”

  “Maybe it’s someone who works there,” I suggest.

  “That doesn’t fit with a young guy in a hoodie running through a park with an envelope of cash. It’s not a regular member of the staff and the description isn’t right. Nobody who works at Double S is under the age of forty. Did Marino mention that? Is anybody unaccounted for?”

  “He said the partners are out of town for the holidays.”

  “There are four. Accountants, investors, lawyers, thieves one and all,” Lucy says. “And they don’t exactly keep regular hours and are hardly ever here. It wouldn’t be unusual if they’re out of town in Grand Cayman, the Virgin Islands, greased up like pigs in the sun, spending their hard-earned money,” she adds as if she despises them.

  “Marino didn’t mention anybody missing. And running through a public park with an envelope of cash strikes me as desperate. It strikes me as panicked and unplanned.”

  “Ten grand in hundred-dollar bills feels like a payment of some sort.” Lucy tries to figure out the problem of where the money came from and what it was for. “A circumscribed amount that was intended for some purpose.”

  On Alewife Brook Parkway we curve through hardwood trees that this time of year are bare. An empty bike path cuts starkly through them like a scar.

  “They have an alarm system and cameras everywhere,” Lucy then says. “They could see anybody on the grounds on monitors, tablets, smartphones, whatever was handy. He didn’t worry anyone and that’s why he was able to pull it off. But there’s not going to be a recording of what the cameras picked up.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They’d already know who it is if the DVR recorded it and is still on-site and I’m betting it’s not. Multiple cameras, an IP based surveillance system, and it’s worthless if there’s no recording. Whoever we’re talking about may be desperate or deranged at this point but he isn’t
stupid.”

  “Have you been there?” I go ahead and ask.

  “I’ve never been invited.”

  “If you’ve done anything that can be traced,” I say to her, “now might be a good time to think about it. You don’t want to become an issue if there are security camera recordings and you’re on them. Especially with the FBI involved.” I think of Granby and wonder what else this day holds.

  What has been unleashed around here and how much of it is his fault even indirectly? He’ll show up at some point and I’d better think fast about appropriating what evidence is mine and making sure he can’t touch it.

  “I wouldn’t be on any recordings,” Lucy says. “And if the DVR hasn’t been removed, it would be me looking at it unless the Feebs get there first.” Her snide slang for the FBI that ran her off the job when she was in her twenties, for all practical purposes firing her.

  “Good God, Lucy. It’s not a phone you can scrub.”

  “The phone is mine. It’s a different situation.”

  Her ethics again, I think.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” she says. “But when you look at the way Double S has set things up it will tell you quite a lot about them, a consciousness of dishonesty, of big crime, of huge business where hardly anybody works regular hours, if at all, because their commerce isn’t on the surface. The rumors aren’t new but it’s never been proven. The FBI has dropped the ball repeatedly over the years and I wonder why. Now that people are dead, you wait and see what comes out. And not just about the victims.”

  “Who else, then?”

  “I feel sorry for Carin,” Lucy says. “It’s not her fault but she’ll have some explaining to do.”