Dust

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Were the police ever involved?”

  “They were never called. The matters were handled privately, typical of schools, and maybe there’s another reason.”

  “What else did his mother say?”

  “She did everything she could for him, sparing no expense on counseling and therapy. As a child, Daniel was diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder, and I gathered from what she said that in his case SPD manifests not in his overresponding to sensation but not being able to get enough of it. Originally it was confused with ADHD because of his sensory-seeking behavior, his inability to sit still and obsession with touching things, his thrill seeking and high-risk activities, walking on stilts, climbing up telephone poles and water towers and out windows and down drainpipes, showing off to other kids, who would try to imitate him and hurt themselves. She said she couldn’t control him no matter what she tried.”

  “Sounds like she was making excuses for him because she suspects the worst,” I comment.

  “She wanted me to know she was a good mother, availing him of the typical home therapies for SPD. Backyard swings, obstacle courses, monkey bars, trampolines, gymnastic balls, sensory body socks, personally supervising tactile art like finger painting and working with clay.”

  “Clay,” I repeat. “What Ernie’s found.”

  “It’s entered my mind.”

  “A mineral fingerprint that might be from an art supply like paint or sculpting clay,” I think out loud to Benton.

  Lycra fibers from a stretchy material like a body sock, and I move the photograph of Martin so I can look at it closely again. I study what Daniel drew on the white plaster cast, a bright blue Gumby-like cartoon that could depict a boy zipped up head to toe in what looks like a body bag sewn of a colorful thin but sturdy fabric that can be stretched into different creative shapes in the mirror or in shadows on the wall. A therapeutic body sock is see-through, impossible to tear, and if the zipper were locked, one couldn’t escape. It’s breathable but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t suffocate someone with it if you wrapped it tightly around that person’s face.

  It would be a good way to restrain someone, the soft, silky fabric causing very little injury, and I imagine Gail Shipton paralyzed by a stun gun and zipped up inside such a thing. It would explain the blue Lycra fibers all over her body and under her nails and in her teeth. And then I see her struggling inside this stretchy bag-like prison while she’s in the killer’s car, clawing, maybe biting at the material as she panics, her damaged heart hammering against her chest.

  I hope she died quickly before he could do the rest of it and I suspect I know what the rest of it was, as if I’m watching what the bastard did, perhaps spreading open what’s no different from a body bag on the car seat and the minute he’s got her inside he’s zipping her in, assuring her that he won’t hurt her as long as she behaves, and she doesn’t want to be shocked again, does she?

  I can see him driving her somewhere in the dark, perhaps talking to her while she doesn’t resist, and then he gets her to a place he’s picked in advance and he tightens the stretchy material around her face and suffocates her. It would require about as much time as it takes to drown someone unless he was cruel enough to do it slowly and he could have, tightening and relaxing, letting her come to and doing it again, as long as he wanted, as long as her body could sustain such torture before it quit.

  Then he poses his victim, adorning her as it gratifies his sick fantasies, tightly securing a plastic bag around her neck with designer duct tape that left a faint furrow and mark postmortem and adding a decorative duct tape bow under her chin and then another victim’s panties. All symbolic. All part of his incredibly twisted mind and soul, the choreography of his evil imagination, his evil art, a deviant inspiration that goes back to the beginning of his blighted time on this earth and possibly fueled by deviant home movies of Gabriela Lagos bathing and seducing her son.

  I envision Daniel Mersa dragging the body on some type of sled or litter, displaying it by a lake near a golf course. An arm outstretched, the wrist cocked very much the way Gabriela’s left arm was positioned as it floated on the surface of the water in the tub, languidly stretched out, the wrist drooping, her other arm floating across her waist.

  Such an image would be indelibly imprinted in Daniel’s violent mind after he drowned her, watching her naked body go completely still, then limp, settling lower in the water, her arms drifting up as if she’s relaxing in her steamy, sharply fragrant bath surrounded by candles and huge plush white bath sheets. He may have recorded her murder and repeatedly watching what he did to her would have fueled what drives him and made him sicker.

  “You don’t necessarily outgrow SPD,” Benton is explaining and I look at him and try not to see what I just did. “And the worst thing someone with that disorder could do is to take designer drugs, stimulants like MDPV.”

  “And none of what you’re telling me about Daniel Mersa was taken seriously by the BAU.” I feel exhausted and chilled and I try to will my mind to clear.

  “No one’s been listening to me because they’re listening to the DNA. It’s not Daniel Mersa’s profile that got a hit in CODIS. In fact, he’s never been in CODIS or arrested and for a good reason.”

  The images of women dying are stubborn in my mind. I see their terror and suffering as they were suffocating. “HA! HA! HA!” Daniel Mersa wrote with a flourish on Martin’s cast.

  “A lot of people have disturbing backgrounds and they don’t end up becoming serial killers,” Benton is saying. “And Granby’s discredited me with the BAU.” He repeats the depressing story I know so well. “I don’t know exactly how or when it started but it’s not a hard thing to do when people worry about their jobs and are competitive.”

  “Daniel Mersa’s father. There’s been no mention of him.” I sense the direction the roads are moving in, all headed to the same source at the center of such cruelty.

  “Sperm bank,” Benton says. “His mother’s always claimed she doesn’t know who the biological father is and you have to ask how she afforded therapy, college, studying abroad. Veronica Mersa is a former beauty queen, never married, was a secretary for a New Hampshire congressman who only recently retired from politics. She wasn’t paid a lot and had no other income. She has never seemed to hurt for money.”

  “I’m not uploading anything to CODIS or any other database until I know it’s safe.” I’m adamant about that. “We’ll do any comparisons in my labs and I’m going to ask for a familial search to look for first-order relatives, siblings or parent-child relationships. If Daniel’s related to someone and we’ve got that individual’s DNA, we’re going to figure it out.”

  “It would explain it,” Benton says. “It would explain a lot of things. And Granby might have pulled it off if you’d let Geist have his way and decide Gabriela Lagos’s death was an accident.”

  “There’s no question it wasn’t. There should never have been a question.”

  “Show me how you know the killer used both hands. I need to see it for myself. I’ve got to be able to say it in no uncertain terms.”

  I touch the glass tabletop where her autopsy report and photographs are side by side.

  43

  “Medical history: none.” I read what Dr. Geist reported about Gabriela Lagos on his autopsy protocol. He included some facts and omitted other ones.

  “No history of seizures, fainting, cardiac problems, nothing, and suddenly she takes a bath and dies at age thirty-seven. Negative for drugs that were screened for, and the alcohol present in her blood was due to decomposition.” I show Benton what’s on the four-page document, going over the displayed image of it projected on the table. “White froth in her nose, mouth, and airway because it wasn’t possible to disguise the fact that she was a drowning.”

  Benton gets up from his chair and walks into the PIT, where Gabriela’s bathroom and her decomposing body are all around him, their projected light and dark shapes reflected on his face as he seats himse
lf at the small table, what Lucy calls the cockpit. The wireless keyboard and mouse allow him to reorient whatever he wants, moving the scene as if he’s moving through it, and the tub with the body, roll to the right and in closer, a little jerky at first until he gets warmed up.

  I can see her long brown hair splayed over the stagnant surface of the cloudy water, and drifting nearby is a black elastic band with a shiny black bow that held her hair up and out of the way before she was drowned. A white mask smears the outer layer of skin that has slipped, her frog-like face bright red from the chin down because that’s how she was submerged after the tub was drained and refilled with hot tap water. Dr. Geist omitted that important fact, too. He failed to record the pale areas of exposed flesh above the surface of the water, the upper face, the tops of the wrists, while the rest of the body was scalded red.

  “Had the water been scalding hot when she was being drowned,” I explain to Benton, “every inch of her upper body and head would have had full-thickness burns. And that’s a critical piece of information because it indicates the water got hotter after she was dead, and that alone tells me homicide.”

  “I’ve never understood froth.” Benton clicks the mouse and Gabriela’s face suddenly looms larger, blown up by the gases of decomposition, her eyes bulging as if in horror. “People are underwater and the froth is still there. Why doesn’t it wash away?” He moves an arrow to the white foam between her protruding lips, pointing it out.

  “It seems stubborn because it’s not really just between her lips,” I reply. “When someone is drowning and gasping violently froth builds up like dense soap suds in the lungs, the trachea. That’s where most of it is and what you’re seeing is leaking out of her mouth. It doesn’t wash away because there’s a lot of it and Dr. Geist knew he couldn’t say she didn’t drown. He knew her body wouldn’t let him get away with that lie. The best he could do was decide it was an accident.”

  I walk over to where Benton is standing and as I look at her again I’m reminded why I felt the way I did at the time and drove to the funeral home in northern Virginia. While the contusions aren’t easy to discern because of the condition she’s in, they are there, dark red areas, some slightly abraded, on her right cheek and jaw, her right hip, and on both hands and elbows. Small fingertip bruises are scattered over both ankles and lower legs, with wider, more indistinct bruises behind her knees.

  “It would take two hands to leave those bruises on her ankles, and two hands were used, not big hands like Martin’s hands, and that’s the other thing,” I tell Benton. “These circular bruises from fingertips pressing into the tissue of her lower legs and ankles are small.” I hold up my hands. “Not much bigger than mine. Someone held her firmly, grabbing her ankles with his hands and yanking up, hooking her lower legs in the bend of his arms, causing the bruises behind her knees.”

  I show him.

  “Now she’s held by her lower legs tightly against his chest and her upper body is completely underwater. The other bruises on her hip, hands, elbows, and face are from her thrashing and striking the sides of the tub. It would have been violent, with water splashing everywhere, knocking candles onto the floor and in the water, and then in minutes it was over.”

  “I can see how that wouldn’t work if one arm was in a cast,” Benton says.

  “Martin couldn’t have done it but I think he watched. Sitting on the closed toilet lid, his big feet on the white mat, where he’d probably sat for most of his life through every hellish episode of her forcing him to be an audience to her seductive bathing,” I explain. “You can’t blame him for wanting her dead, wanting to be free of her, but he wouldn’t have anticipated what it was like to actually witness such a thing.”

  I imagine him wide-eyed, paralyzed and shocked as he watched his mother cruelly and horribly die before his eyes. Once it started he couldn’t have stopped it and he may have wanted it but he didn’t.

  “It would have been appallingly awful,” I say to Benton. “I can promise you her son couldn’t have imagined how awful it would be.”

  “He wouldn’t have enjoyed it,” Benton says. “Martin Lagos wasn’t a sociopath and he wasn’t a sadist. And he didn’t need to constantly overload his senses with the next huge thrill, in this case a kill thrill.”

  “I wonder what size shoe Daniel Mersa wears.” And I envision the young man and the elephant in the photograph.

  I feel a change in the air as the door behind us opens and light from the corridor makes the room brighter. Lucy walks in holding a sheet of paper and she looks really happy, the kind of happy she gets when she’s about to nail someone or pay them back in a way that’s lasting.

  “Granby and his troops are here,” she says. “By the security desk. I said they had to wait and you’d be right out. The computer is wrapped up and ready to go. Ron has it and I’ve signed off on the paperwork, all set for you to do the honors of receipting it. There’s a lot more to go through but we’ve got everything backed up and they don’t know that. Carin and Janet are upstairs.”

  “Good,” I reply.

  Lucy glances at her phone and when she looks at me she smiles, then she hands the sheet of paper to Benton. “Well?” she asks him.

  “I was getting to it,” he says.

  “He has bad news that’s good news,” Lucy tells me cheerfully.

  I spot Bryce in the corridor heading toward us and at this late hour he looks a bit rumpled and scruffy but has that wide-eyed nervousness that we see around here when we’re in the throes of the latest tragic drama.

  “The Globe is here…,” Bryce starts to announce as he walks through the door. “Oh God!” he exclaims. “She’s so awful to look at. Can’t we take that picture down yet?” He averts his face from what’s displayed in the PIT. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If I die, please don’t let me look like that. Find me instantly or never. Sock’s upstairs in your office in his bed and I gave him a treat, there’s food in the break room, and Gavin’s in the parking lot with his lights turned off and he just saw the FBI roll up and in a minute I’ll bring him inside as if he works here. This is going to be the most amazing story. I want him to hear it for himself when they demand the computer and everything else.”

  “Bryce, you’re talking too much,” I warn him.

  “Payments of ten grand a month, supposedly for the lease of Washington, D.C., office space,” Lucy starts to tell me what Benton hasn’t gotten to yet. “Wires to a bank in New York City and from there they are broken up into different sums and wired out to another bank, broken up again and wired out again, and on and on like clockwork for the past seventeen years, literally from August of 1996, and that sure as hell can’t be a coincidence. It might never have led to Granby being the recipient of funds that clearly are laundered but he did one really stupid thing. An e-mail.” Lucy gets really happy again. “About six months ago he had lunch with an investor who mentioned it in an e-mail to Lombardi.”

  She shows it to me on her phone:

  From: JP

  To: DLombardi

  RE: “Gran Gusto”

  Thx for hooking me up, great lunch with such a grand guy (nothing small about his FBI ego & didn’t realize the pun when I picked my favorite Italian spot!). Am recommending his account be moved to Boston now that he’s taken the job there. Modest amount in cash, rest in stocks, bonds, etc. He knows someone who can help with my irritating audit problem, f’ing IRS. Cheers.

  Bending around my curved corridor that leads to the receiving area, I walk briskly, my lab coat over field clothes I’m scarcely aware of anymore. I’ve reached a zone of fatigue that broaches an out-of-body state, hyper-awake and also in slow motion.

  “I don’t guess you or Marino could arrest him on the spot,” I say to Benton.

  “He’ll deny everything.”

  “Of course he will.”

  “By daylight he’ll be lawyered up.”

  “I don’t care. He’s done, Benton.” I’ve made sure Granby’s defeat will b
e a public one.

  Benton looks at me and he’s single-minded in what he needs to do. And while it should give him pleasure, it doesn’t.

  “No lawyer is going to save him and none of his usual powerbrokers in Washington are going to touch him with a ten-foot pole,” I add and then I get quiet as we reach the receiving area.

  Ron is inside his office with the window open, and for an instant I’m knocked off guard by Granby and his entourage of agents. He looks exhausted but polite as if he knows he’s on my turf and is most appreciative of my having him here, the three agents in cargo pants and jackets standing some distance behind him. It occurs to me Ed Granby is scared and I wasn’t expecting that.

  I wonder if he’s suspicious Lucy has been inside Double S’s server and then I decide he knows what’s about to happen. He’s not naïve about who she is and what she’s capable of. And whether or not he’s cognizant of any incriminating information she might find, he has to be expecting the worst. That’s the way it works with people who are guilty of as much as he is. For every one sin uncovered they know of at least a hundred more.

  “I apologize for the inconvenience,” he says to me while he doesn’t look at Benton and has no idea about Bryce or the young bearded man next to him who is dressed in a plaid shirt, sweater-vest, and jeans and sneakers.

  Lucy walks past us and toward the elevator and I hear the door slide open.

  “Obviously this is a significant white-collar criminal investigation we’ve got going here and thank you for respecting, uh, for appreciating our need to get Double S’s computer to our labs,” Granby says to me. “Your cooperation is so appreciated,” he stumbles nervously, too polite and smiling too much.