Dust

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Of course,” I reply and I’m not smiling at all or remotely friendly. “We have it ready for you.” I meet Ron’s eyes and he nods at me through his open window.

  “Yes, ma’am – Chief,” he says and maybe I’m sleep deprived but I catch a trace of a grin. “I’ve got it right here and all the paperwork’s in order.”

  “And then there are the homicides.” I look Granby in the eye as he uses both hands to smooth his perfect hair at his perfectly graying temples. “We’ll continue working those up and get the FBI any information needed.”

  “As always, much appreciated.” He continues smoothing his hair as he watches Ron open his door and push out a cart that has the computer server on it, upright and shrouded in plastic. As if to make a point, Lucy has overwrapped it with bright red tape that boldly warns in black: SEALED EVIDENCE – Do Not Tamper.

  I pull a Sharpie out of a pocket of my lab coat and slide the evidence submission form out of its transparent plastic window that’s taped to the computer. I initial and date it in front of everyone and then I hand it to Granby, doing things the proper way, officially receipting evidence to the FBI for analysis that we sure as hell don’t need. I wonder when the last time was that the head of a division actually received evidence or bothered to show up at a medical examiner’s facility. I wouldn’t be surprised if Granby’s never seen an autopsy.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” he says to Benton. “And why are you here?” he asks as he touches his hair again.

  “Enjoying time off. Probably more than you will.”

  Granby’s eyes seem to get smaller when he’s nakedly aggressive but he smiles again. “Not me. Too much to do.”

  “I think you’re about to have a lot of time on your hands, Ed.”

  I hear energetic footsteps from the direction of the elevator and then Lucy, Janet, and Carin Hegel appear. They stand next to Bryce and Gavin Connors, a crowd of witnesses gathered according to plan.

  “What’s this?” Granby’s attention fixes on Hegel like the darts from a stun gun, his eyes seem to anchor right into her skin.

  He would know who she is for every reason imaginable. She’s often in the news because of high-profile trials and is almost as recognizable around here as a professional athlete. But more to the point she was Gail Shipton’s lawyer and pitted against a firm that as it turns out has been paying off Granby for years. Enough monthly cash and who knows what other favors and he must have assumed he had little to worry about as long as he didn’t get ensnared by his own deceptions. And he has. The life he’s enjoyed is about to be over.

  “If you know who this is really about, Ed, now’s a good time to say something.” Benton hasn’t taken his eyes off him. “It’s not Martin Lagos we’re looking for. I know what you’ve done. All of us know.”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about but I take umbrage at the implication.”

  “You’re about to pin the Capital Murderer cases on a kid who disappeared seventeen years ago based on DNA that to put it diplomatically must be a mistake. A lab error, I’m sure you’ll say.”

  “This isn’t the time or the place!” Granby fires back at him. “We’ll discuss this in private.”

  “You won’t,” Carin Hegel says and I just now noticed she must have taken time to dress in power clothes at this hour.

  A small, fiery woman with short chestnut hair and an attractive face that doesn’t look remotely threatening until she talks, she bothered to put on a dark cashmere jacket with a dramatic collar and large silver buttons and black slacks and boots.

  “Everything said is going to be said right here in front of all of us.” She sounds more like a judge than a lawyer.

  “This is a joke.” But Granby doesn’t think it’s funny and his nervousness transitions to fear that’s palpable.

  I watch him get wound tighter like a spring about to snap and it occurs to me he might run.

  “I thought you might like to see this.” Benton hands him the printout of the call sheet. “I know it was a long time ago but you might remember giving Dr. Geist a telephone call. He was the medical examiner in Gabriela Lagos’s drowning, a homicide that you wanted him to decide was an accident.”

  Granby stares at the sheet of paper he holds, staring at it as if he doesn’t know how to read.

  “We have evidence her crime scene was tampered with,” Benton says and he illustrates what he means, mentioning the air conditioner turned off, the scalding-hot water in the tub, the spilled wax, the tidying up.

  “And her son Martin had a broken arm so it wasn’t him gripping both of her ankles to drown her,” Benton adds. “I can show you the contusions on her lower legs, the two sets of fingertip bruises, if you’d like to see them.”

  Granby is so dumbfounded he doesn’t notice that the young bearded man in the plaid shirt and sweater-vest is furiously taking notes and that the very pretty blond young woman next to Lucy is holding a digital recorder that she makes a point to say is running. Janet has made this point several times by announcing that she’s recording our conversation and if any party present refuses consent, speak up now or consent is implied. Granby doesn’t speak up but I do. I tell Ed Granby who Janet and Carin are, that both of them are lawyers, and then I make it clear why they’re here right now.

  “Forensic evidence links the murders of Gail Shipton, Haley Swanson, Dominic Lombardi, and Jadwiga Caminska with those in D.C., despite your protestations to the contrary,” I say, to his visible shock. “Fibers, a mineral fingerprint, and we’ve only just begun, and I happen to know for a fact that a DNA profile in CODIS was tampered with. The sample you got a profile from and then changed to Martin Lagos came from a female, from a mixture of fluids including menstrual blood.”

  “This will be dealt with through the proper channels, my channels. I certainly don’t trust your channels or anything about you, for that matter.” Carin Hegel looks at him and the agents standing behind him. “I’ve already left a message for the attorney general,” she starts to say and this is when Granby runs.

  The call sheet he was holding flutters to the floor as he bolts through the door leading into the open bay, flinging it open so hard it bangs against the wall, and he gets as far as the parking lot, where Marino is climbing out of his SUV. When he sees all of us emerging from the building he does what he used to do when he was a Richmond cop.

  “Whoa! Where are we going in such a hurry?” Marino says loudly as Granby runs toward his car.

  In several big strides Marino intercepts him, grabbing him by the back of his belt and lifting him off the asphalt so that only his toes touch. Granby flails powerlessly as Marino uses his other hand to pat him down for a weapon, a pistol he finds in a shoulder holster under Granby’s suit jacket. Marino hands the gun to Benton.

  “I’ll put you down when you quit tussling,” Marino lets Granby know sweetly.

  “Get your fucking hands off me!” he screams, and his agents do nothing to intercede.

  They stand back watching their boss’s humiliation with blank expressions on their faces, smart enough to know which side to take, which isn’t his anymore.

  “Tell us who and where he is, Ed.” Benton gets close to him in my well-lit parking lot filled with white crime scene trucks. “It’s not Martin Lagos or you wouldn’t be trying to get him indicted for murder and I suspect he’s not around to defend himself and hasn’t been since he disappeared. Did you help get rid of him or did his friend Daniel Mersa do it?”

  Granby stares mutely at him from his tiptoe position. His arms and legs go completely still as if he’s wilted and Marino sets him down squarely on his feet but keeps a grip on the back of his belt.

  “Where is he?” Benton asks. “Do you want him to murder someone else?”

  Granby stares at him with dead eyes.

  “You really don’t give a shit, do you,” Benton says and I hear his disappointment again.

  “Go to hell,” Granby says quietly, dully.

  “You
have a chance to make this right,” Benton says what I already know won’t move any part of Ed Granby.

  I know about desperation that turns hard and empty, then as cold as outer space. I know where it leads and I know where it ends.

  44

  FIVE DAYS LATER

  MIAMI, FLORIDA

  A train whistle makes a mournful sound, dissonance in a minor key, somewhere to the west of me.

  It’s a different train I hear on a distant rail line, not the candy-apple-red circus train with gold lettering that bakes brightly in a wintry Florida sun on a switch of railroad tracks flanking parking lots that as recently as last night were crowded with people eager to be thrilled and entertained by aerialists, acrobats, clowns, animal trainers, and of course the lions, tigers, camels, and most of all the elephants, smaller than African ones but big, gray, and sad.

  A homeless man named Jake who parks himself behind the arena most days tells Lucy and me the reason elephants sway from side to side is they’re trying to touch each other because they’re lonely and when granted wide-open spaces they bark, growl, rumble, and trumpet as they bump and nudge each other playfully like children. They are good to their mothers and take care of one another and can signal members of their pack from great distances with vibrations and odors that humans can’t hear or smell. Elephants are very intelligent and sensitive and he’s seen them cry.

  If we allowed them to live freely the way Jake lives freely, our new friend says, we could utilize them to find water in the desert and detect sinkholes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and all sorts of danger, including evil people, and by following the example of the elephant we’d do better dealing with death. I’ve commented that it would be a very good thing if humans were more respectful of death and less afraid of it but I haven’t mentioned to Jake what I do for a living or that I have good reason to know what I’m talking about.

  I have yet to hint that my niece and I are loitering behind the arena near the circus train because we’re waiting for a detective friend and my FBI profiler husband to clear a rather ghastly scene, a killer’s lair, which like the elephant’s is a train car only elephants don’t hurt anyone. Jake hasn’t a clue that his two new snowbird acquaintances aren’t in Miami simply to spend the holidays with family but are involved in the very homicide investigation that relates to the very circus he’s had his eye on since he was born, according to him. I’ve said nothing and I won’t.

  I’d rather chat about elephants and he considers himself the keeper of them, claiming he’s studied them when the circus is in town for as long as he’s been disabled, which was 1985, when his charter boat was hit by a tanker in the middle of the night, breaking almost every bone in his body and requiring countless surgeries. The arena wasn’t here in 1985 so I don’t know if the story is true or if any of his stories are. But I believe what he says about elephants and the cold-blooded young man who performed acrobatic tricks on the backs of them until just yesterday when he was led away in handcuffs, escorted from the bright red train by a plainclothes posse that included Benton and Marino, whose pictures were in The Boston Globe and all over television this morning.

  Quite small, almost as small as a child, and you’d think Daniel Mersa was one from the back until he turns around and you see his hard, narrow face and cruel gray eyes, as Jake has described the demented spectacle killer whose name he didn’t know until Lucy showed him the Globe story that she displayed on her phone. Gavin Connors was honorable and didn’t run his big scoop until Mersa was arrested and it’s a stunning story, I have to say, and it’s “everywhere on the planet,” to quote Bryce, who has decided his reporter pal will “win a Pulitzer” and Santa will bring Ed Granby “an orange jumpsuit for Christmas” and Daniel Mersa “will be extradited to Virginia so he can get the needle.”

  “Never did like him,” Jake has continued to mutter with a shake of his head since we first started talking this morning. “So that’s his name, Mersa, like the staph infection. How’d they find him?”

  “Computer software,” Lucy replies as if she had nothing to do with it while she hands out café con leches with extra shots. “They have programs that can recognize people by their facial features. For example, if there’s a photo in a college yearbook and the same person has recent ones out there because he’s a performer with a circus. And then of course you can confirm with DNA and other evidence.”

  “I don’t use a computer. Never have.”

  “It doesn’t look like you need one.”

  “I’m telling you I hated the little bastard the first time I laid eyes on him.” Jake says what he’s said at least half a dozen times, sitting on the seawall where his old bicycle is parked. “I’d see him out there with the elephant hook grabbing a back leg just right to get the tendon so it hurts like hell. And for no reason he’d slap them like this.” He slaps the air with a leathery hand. “And squirt them right in the face with the hose, making the pressure really hard, and laughing.” He imitates that, too, spraying an imaginary hose.

  “I wish I’d seen it,” Lucy says.

  “I’d want to go right over the damn fence,” he points at the fenced-in area beyond us at the edge of the water, “and go after him with the hook and see how he liked being gaffed in the back of the leg.”

  “I would have helped you but I would have used more than the hook,” Lucy says and Jake is very pleased with her. And if it’s possible to keep in touch with a man whose home is his bicycle and all that he carries on it, I suspect she will.

  My niece and I need to be here right now for a lot of reasons, and as I wait for Benton this is the view I’m most comfortable with, shiny red train cars stretching for a mile between parking lots and the white pavement of Northeast 6th Street as it curves from the mainland and over the water to Watson Island and beyond. The red train I’ve seen so many times some fifteen hundred miles north of here in Cambridge is quiet for now with wide, sturdy metal ramps extended from open doors as workers finish loading up the Cirque d’Orleans.

  All of its people and exotic creatures are headed out of Miami to the next stop in Orlando, then Atlanta, making their way back north again as if nothing has happened, as if there’s nothing unusual about an FBI profiler and a Cambridge detective helping local law enforcement collect evidence inside the eighth train car from the end and from the big black SUV on a flatbed, which is how a lot of circus performers and staff haul their vehicles around from city to city, living on the rails.

  Daniel Mersa’s arrest was without his usual drama and that seemed poetic justice for a spectacle killer who most recently starred in a horror show in the Massachusetts countryside, slashing the throats of three people, including his biological father Dominic Lombardi. There was no need for the FBI agents from the Miami field office, no need for the Dade County cops in tactical gear who surrounded Daniel Mersa’s train car. Benton and Marino would have been fine on their own.

  I didn’t see it happen. I heard the details later when Benton called me from the Federal Detention Center at the corner of Northeast 4th Street and North Miami Avenue just a few blocks from here. He said that Mersa was dazed and disoriented, rambling that he didn’t want to be kidnapped by aliens before the Apocalypse. He wished to be left in peace to make his pilgrimage to the Pyrenean village of Bugarach in southern France, known for its upside-down mountain and wooden tools and hats. His father had died suddenly several days before the world would end, bled to death by these same aliens who can’t survive on earth if they don’t steal blood, and Daniel had plenty of money to take anybody to Bugarach who wanted to go before it was too late.

  And Marino, mixing up the Mayan end of the world with the Christian Rapture, said to him, “Guess what, you fucking little piece of shit, it’s already too late. December twenty-first was three days ago and you’ve been left behind.” He said he was turning Daniel over to these same aliens, who were waiting for him, hovering over Miami and ready to steal his blood and do even worse things to him, or words to that effect.


  Benton cautioned Marino about making such statements to someone delusional – at least this was what Benton reported to me over the phone while Lucy and I dealt with my mother and my sister Dorothy in Coral Gables, where we stayed last night. Benton and I talked on and off while I did what I’ve always done in the land of my birth. I cooked and cleaned, decorated for the holidays, and made sure everyone was all right, and I slept alone in the second bedroom while Lucy took the couch. I will see Benton soon enough. All of us will be together and we’ll work our way through the awful things that have happened, all of them beginning with Connecticut and ending here, as much as anything ends.

  Lucy and I wait by the seawall behind the arena, what’s been called the American Airlines Arena for as long as I can recall. But it wasn’t here when I was growing up and the Cirque d’Orleans would pitch a huge tent in the same spot near the switch of tracks where the long red train would park.

  Behind us is the Bongos Cuban Café, with its glass dome on top that’s shaped like a pineapple, and at close to three p.m. we’ve just now feasted on stuffed green plantains, roasted pork, and vegetarian rice while Jake was happy with a grilled fish sandwich. To our left the variegated blue water of the Biscayne Bay surrounds the Miami port, where cruise ships are lined up like small white cities, and directly in front of us on the other side of a fence is the circus’s tent city, which really isn’t a tent city but that’s what it’s called because it was called that in the old days when there really was a tent.

  I calculate it’s about ten acres of grass and coconut palms, and white trailers and trucks are arranged like a city of sorts whenever the circus sets up camp here for a few days and then moves on. There is a penned-in area for the elephants to be “let out,” Jake has explained, but I can’t see them now and I find myself looking even though I know I won’t see them anymore.