Dust

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I have a copy of the entire file, including call sheets,” I say to him and by now he’s openly belligerent. “And I’ve noted that the FBI called you about a matter that must have related to the Gabriela Lagos case since it’s in her file and marked with her accession number.”

  “She was of interest because she had a security clearance to work at the White House. Something to do with art exhibits and she used to be married to an ambassador or something. I need to go.”

  “The Assistant Special Agent in charge of the Washington field office, Ed Granby, called you at three minutes past ten a.m. on August second, 1996, to be exact.”

  “I fail to see what you’re getting at and it’s getting very late.”

  “Gabriela’s body wasn’t found until the next day, August third.”

  Before he can butt in or get off the phone I go on to remind him it was believed she died on the early evening of July thirty-first and on August third a concerned neighbor noticed her newspapers on the driveway and windows swarming with flies and called the police.

  “So I’m curious why Ed Granby would have contacted you about this case a day before the body was found.” I get to a point he never thought I’d make. “How would he have known about something that hadn’t happened yet?”

  “I think there was concern because the boys were missing.”

  “Boys? As in more than one?”

  “I don’t remember except there was a concern.” He raises his voice like a weapon he might strike me with.

  “I suspect the reason Granby chatted with you was to make sure there would be no concern if and when something unfortunate was discovered. And it was about to be,” I reply bluntly. “Coincidentally, the very next day.”

  “I would appreciate your not calling me again about this!”

  “It won’t be me who calls you next, Dr. Geist.”

  In 3-D and high-resolution my former colleague’s deliberate deception couldn’t be more apparent. I’m looking inside the bathroom, with its traditional old-style décor, at the open doorway now, peering in, getting the perspective from the outside in as if I’ve just arrived and haven’t been here before. Then I move inside again.

  The black lid of the white toilet is down, as if someone might have been sitting on it, and on the black-and-white tile floor in front of it a plush white mat is indented by large sneakers that were approximately an eleven or twelve in a men’s size. I imagine a male, probably a young one, perched on the toilet lid with his big sneakered feet resting on the mat while Gabriela was taking her ritualistic bath, and that’s consistent with the diary Benton went through on fifteen-year-old Martin Lagos’s computer disk, pages of it displayed on the data table.

  She smears that gross chalky white shit all over her face & calls me over & over again. “Martin! MARTIN!” Until I come in & find her staring at me the fucking scary way she stares when she’s in her sick mood, don’t know how to describe it & I shouldn’t have to & I don’t know why I’d go in there. I hate myself so bad for going in there but she’d yell & so I’d go. I hate it, hate it!

  HATE! I feel hate & I don’t want to. But that’s what human nature of people does to you after you start out relatively okay & then people do things to bring you down. I know for the rest of my life I’m going to see her white face as white as a clown face or the Joker surrounded by flames & steam that smells like the shit she rubs all over me when I have a cold & I remember it started like that when I was six & in bed & she’d come in & I’d want to die. It’s what I think of each time I walk in & she’s screaming at me. “Martin, come here! Come sit down & talk to your mother!”

  The small flames were votive candles that after Gabriela’s death were arranged on the edge of the tub and it couldn’t have escaped Dr. Geist’s attention they were streaked with spilled wax, two of them chipped and cracked, and a spatter of pinpoint waxy droplets were on the floor and floating on top of the water. I’m seeing them clearly in the photographs Lucy stitched together and projected onto the curved wall and it’s obvious that at some point the candles were knocked over. They fell on tile and into the tub and the liquid wax hardened unevenly, and then someone rearranged the candles, spacing them just right like everything else.

  I observe big white towels perfectly folded on racks and small, elaborately framed paintings perfectly straight on a gray stone wall, a robe hanging neatly from a hook next to the glass shower stall. On a washcloth spread open on the counter by the sink are a jar of white-tea face mask with a price tag from the spa store called Octopus, and next to it a bottle of eucalyptus body oil that would have permeated the humid air with the sharp, pungent aroma of a vapor rub. Items were tidied up to set the scene, to tell the story that Dr. Geist wanted told, which was of Gabriela applying her mask and pouring aromatic oil into her bath before having the misfortune of suffering some episode that caused her to lose consciousness and drown.

  While my former deputy chief was clever and competent, he wasn’t flawless in his execution. Thank God most amoral people aren’t, especially ones with no personal investment in what they’re lying about. He didn’t care what happened to Gabriela Lagos. As far as he was concerned he had nothing to do with it and in his lofty learned way he could argue the case a number of ways and almost believe his conclusions.

  Dr. Geist cared only about himself and probably assumed ASAC Granby’s interest was to avoid creating a sensation about her death because people over him in the Department of Justice, the attorney general’s office, and who knows how far up it went were worried about any political fallout. The presidential election was three months off and no point in casting a smutty shadow on the White House, where Gabriela Lagos was well known for pulling together exhibits and acquiring fine art for the First Family. It didn’t matter. Dr. Geist would have been more than happy to comply if in his mind it did no real harm and there was some benefit for him.

  What I couldn’t see in printed-out photographs I reviewed at the time were the perspectives of the two people who might have been together in that bathroom before everything went so horribly wrong. I need the PIT for that. Had Martin been sitting on the closed toilet lid with his large feet resting solidly on the mat he would have been looking directly at his mother’s stark-white face while she looked directly at herself in the large mirror on the wall next to him. He mentions it in his diary, an electronic document that Benton believes is genuine in what it implies.

  She looks at both of us in a mirror & no matter how much I don’t want to I watch her watching both of us & I want both of us dead. How did everything get this fucked up? It’s so bad for me right now (not that it’s ever good)…but I finally told Daniel, my best friend ever.

  I’m tortured by thinking I shouldn’t have but I told him the entire fucking story going back as far as I remember. We were drinking beer in his basement & I was upset because of what the shit at home is causing with my grades & everybody hates me. I don’t know what the hell’s happened, it’s like I was okay & then I hit this wall. SLAM! I feel people looking at me like I’m a freak & I’ve finally figured out existence is nothing but a punishment & what the hell do I have to look forward to?

  At least he didn’t call me sick cuz he says it’s her fucking fault & if I keep putting up with it he won’t have anything to do with me anymore. He says I need to record it cuz he needs “evidence” or he won’t believe me. So that’s what I have to do, hook up the spy camera & after he’s convinced he’ll fix “the bitch” & I felt nothing when he said it. I HATE her & that’s the truth & if he leaves I’ll be so lonely w/o a friend. I plan to go to Radio Shack tomorrow & get one of those spy video recorders & I need to get money out of the safe w/o her knowing…

  42

  I move pages of the diary, spreading them with my index fingers to make them bigger, sliding them closer to Benton, who has just walked in after spending the past few hours in Lucy’s lab. He seats himself nearby in a black mesh chair and I give him the gist of my conversation with Dr. Geist. Then I summa
rize.

  “Martin Lagos didn’t leave the shoe glove prints along the railroad tracks. He couldn’t have killed his mother and you might be right that he’s dead and has been since he disappeared and supposedly jumped from the Fourteenth Street Bridge.”

  “Reported anonymously from a pay phone,” Benton says. “It didn’t happen.”

  “He certainly sounds suicidal and extremely vulnerable.”

  “I believe he was murdered and that certain people know it, which is why it was safe to steal his genetic identity.” He peruses the introspective writings of Martin Lagos, idly moving pages on the table the way one does when something has been read many times.

  “What could be better?” Ed Granby needs to go to prison, I think angrily, and maybe no punishment is bad enough for him. “Someone missing who’s wanted and you have inside knowledge that he’s dead. The problem with taking a step like that is only a very limited number of people would have the information.”

  “Granby had to know it to instigate the DNA being altered. He had to feel it was a sure thing to take a chance like that.”

  “He’s behind all of this. He’s why at least seven more people are dead.” I check my emotions, which have moved well beyond a visceral response to raw vengeance.

  I ask about the friend named Daniel and if Martin ever made those secret video recordings he mentions in his diary.

  “We don’t have them if he did,” Benton says. “But he references them several times up until about a week before her murder. I suspect her sexually provocative bathing was recorded and would have fueled a budding killer’s violent fantasies.”

  I want to know if we have a physical description of Daniel and if we know where he is.

  “Dark hair and eyes, white, don’t know what he’d weigh now,” Benton says.

  “Thin if he’s hooked on MDPV.”

  “He’s probably about five-six or -seven, based on pictures from his high school and college yearbooks.”

  “Can you give them to Lucy?”

  “I just did.”

  “Small and dark like the young man giving the elephant the bath,” I remind him of the photograph we found in Lombardi’s bedroom.

  “Let’s see what Lucy can do with it. Why do you say Martin couldn’t have killed his mother? Not that I doubt it but I need everything solid I can get.”

  I move a photograph close, Martin puffing out fifteen candles on a chocolate birthday cake, July 27, 1996, four days before he vanished and his mother was drowned.

  “This is why,” I reply.

  A boy who’s grown too fast for his bodyweight to catch up with his limbs, he’s rawboned and awkward, with big feet and hands, in a tank top and baggy shorts, his ears cupped out from his closely shorn head, his upper lip dirty with facial hair. I zoom in on his right arm encased in its clean white plaster cast that only one person has written on: “Remember not to do what I say, bro. HA! HA! HA!” His friend Daniel wrote it boldly in red Magic Marker, and next to his flamboyant signature is a bright blue cartoon figure that looks like a fat Gumby doing a cartwheel.

  “Martin didn’t drown his mother.” I’m sure of that. “He couldn’t have gripped both of her ankles with only one good arm.”

  “He looks reasonably strong. And when his adrenaline kicked in? You don’t think he could do it with one arm?”

  “He didn’t. Two hands were used.” I hold up both of mine as if I’m gripping something hard. “Her injuries make that patently clear. He didn’t kill her but that doesn’t mean he didn’t agree to it and witness her murder from the best seat in the house.”

  As I study Martin’s forced smile and eyes that look haunted, I imagine someone taking the photograph of him on his birthday. Based on the way he’s looking at the camera as if he’s been ordered to, I suspect his mother did.

  “Do we know how he broke his arm?” I ask.

  “I know he liked to skateboard. That’s as much as I can tell you without calling his mother back, which I don’t want to do right now.”

  “Maybe skateboarding with his friend Daniel. His only friend,” I reply.

  “Daniel Mersa. He mentions him throughout his diary and that bothered me then but not nearly as much as it started bothering me a few weeks ago when I heard about the DNA results that we now know were tampered with.”

  “He must have been interviewed after she was murdered.”

  “The police couldn’t find him at first,” Benton says and I think of Dr. Geist’s comment about the boys. “When they finally did, his mother gave some convenient excuse that he’d been visiting her sister in Baltimore and the sister corroborated this of course. When Daniel eventually was questioned he claimed he had no idea what happened to Martin’s mother. He said Martin wasn’t doing well in school, the girls didn’t like him, he was depressed, getting into alcohol, and that was as far as the questioning went seventeen years ago.”

  “It went as far as somebody wanted it to go,” I reply.

  “Granby,” Benton says.

  “I strongly suspect some relatively competent and self-assured person visited the scene before her body was found and turned off the air-conditioning, filled the tub with scalding water, rearranged the bathroom, removing the hidden video camera, possibly taking Martin’s computer hard drive, not realizing there was a backup hidden in his bedroom. Kids wouldn’t think of so many details, although it wasn’t a perfect job. It’s pretty obvious.”

  “Granby’s pretty obvious,” Benton says.

  “I don’t know how you’d prove it at this stage.”

  “I probably can’t prove he did the tampering at the scene. But it probably was him especially if it was amateurish.”

  “You have the call sheet at least,” I reply. “He called Dr. Geist about Gabriela Lagos the day before anyone except those involved should have known she was dead.”

  “Let’s print a hard copy of that.”

  I text the document identification number to Lucy and ask her to print it. I don’t say what it is or give a reason and I ask her to bring it downstairs. She texts me back that we have company coming and I have an idea why Benton wants the hard copy. I have a feeling I know what he’ll do with it and while some people would enjoy it, Benton won’t.

  “After Gabriela was murdered and before her body was found somebody alerted Granby that there was a problem,” Benton then says. “Otherwise I don’t see how he could have known in advance. Someone who knew what Daniel had done, someone powerful who Granby would want to help.”

  “Then Daniel must have told whoever it is.”

  “Of course,” Benton says. “He’s a kid who’s just killed his best friend’s mother, a prominent Washington woman who collected art for the White House.” Benton continues to run information through his mental database while I run it through my own. “Daniel made a call because he would have needed help to get away with it.”

  “The person at the center of this, all roads leading to the same source.” I think of an octopus again. “How old was Daniel then?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “That surprises me. I would have assumed he was the older of the two.”

  “He was the dominant one in the relationship,” Benton says, “overly controlling and organized, a risk taker and show-off with an excessive need for stimulating his senses and a very high threshold for pain. He doesn’t feel pain or fear the way other people do.”

  I can well imagine Daniel coercing Martin into extreme feats with the skateboard that may have resulted in a broken arm and other injuries and humiliations.

  “Martin was two years older and two grades ahead of him but had very poor self-esteem, very bright but not particularly gifted athletically,” Benton explains. “He was a loner.”

  “Had they been friends for a long time?”

  “Apparently their mothers were very close.”

  “How convenient that Martin’s mother was an art expert who put together exhibits and acquired masterpieces for the First Family.” I envision the st
olen works in Lombardi’s bedroom.

  “I’m thinking the same thing you are.”

  I ask him who and what Daniel Mersa is today and where he is and Benton says he started gathering information when Granby told the BAU that DNA had identified the Capital Murderer as Martin Lagos. Benton talked to Daniel’s mother and told her it was crucial to know if anyone had heard from his childhood friend Martin, who might be in danger or he might be dangerous to others.

  She claimed she wouldn’t know because she hadn’t heard from her son Daniel since he dropped out of a college summer program in Lacoste, France, when he was twenty-one. He’d been in and out of trouble, she admitted, and in and out of different schools and sent abroad, and he never graduated and had nothing to do with her anymore.

  “Do you believe she was telling you the truth?” I ask.

  “About that, yes.” Benton moves the projected image of a file closer. “I honestly think she’s worried now.”

  “Because of the Capital Murderer cases.”

  “I didn’t mention them.”

  He slides documents out of the virtual file and begins turning virtual pages and they make a papery sound.

  “But I had a feeling she knew what I was talking about when I brought up Martin and that we need to find him,” he says. “Something about her demeanor caused me to suspect she knew damn well we weren’t going to find him because he’s dead. But that doesn’t mean Daniel isn’t out there somewhere killing people and she knows it.”

  He lines up pages of a student disciplinary record with the Savannah College of Art and Design in the headers.

  “One of many places Daniel was in and out of and his academic records are telling.” Benton taps the glass with his index finger and a page gets small and he enlarges it again. “Breaking into another student’s locker, sneaking into a girl’s dorm and stealing lingerie from the laundry room, setting fire to a guidance counselor’s garbage cans, drowning a dog and bragging about it, disruptive in class, vandalism. It’s a long list that includes his high school years.”