“Ruthie tried to get hold of me and sounded upset.” Blood pounds in my head. “That’s what I thought she was calling about.” But it wasn’t, and I should have put more effort into finding out what she really wanted.
“He’s gone,” Benton says. “I’m sorry, Kay.”
“FUCK!” MARINO VIOLENTLY TWISTS the cap off a bottle of water, handing it to me as his face turns a deeper shade of red. “What the hell are you talking about?” He glares at Benton. “He’s gone? General Briggs is dead?”
“I’m really sorry,” Benton says to me, and how ironic that he would resort to a euphemism.
Gone. As in passed away. No longer with us. Not here anymore.
That can’t be right. That’s not what he means. But it is, and dread nudges harder. It throws an elbow into my solar plexus, knocking denial right out of me.
Dead.
Briggs went swimming at six P.M., and forty-five minutes later was found facedown in the pool, and I try to comprehend it.
Dead.
The stagnant foul air seems smoky as if I’m looking through a veil. I take another sip of water warm enough to bathe in. I pour it into my hands. I splash it on my face. I dribble it over my bare arms. I dig my fingertips into my temples as my head aches miserably, looking up and down, blinking several times.
I get back on my feet as Marino machine-guns questions, demanding to know if the FBI is thinking that what happened to Briggs is connected to the dead lady here in the park. It’s unwise for Marino to ask that. He just made it easier for the rug to be pulled out from under him, and he does that a lot.
“Kay? You should sit.” Benton’s face is blurry. “Please take it easy. I want to make sure you can walk back. We probably should have you transported. What about a wheelchair?”
“Good God no. Just give me a few minutes.” I’m a little queasy.
“Sit and drink water please.”
“I’m fine.” But I’m wobbly on the way to worse if I’m not careful.
I don’t want to be sick, and I look away from him, from Marino. Don’t stare. Fixating is a recipe for disaster, and I look here. I look there. Up and down. Moving around. I don’t allow anything to hold my attention for more than a second or two, barely stopping my eyes from moving. Don’t fixate because that’s when it will happen.
That’s when you lose it, and I can’t count the people I’ve collected off the epoxy paint–sealed floor or presented with the ubiquitous plastic bucket. Mostly cops who gather around the stainless-steel autopsy table as if it’s no big deal, and I always see it coming.
That fifty-yard stare as my scalpel slices through the chest, making the Y incision, running down the torso, detouring around the navel, reflecting back tissue with quick deft flicks of the blade.
Exposing gastric contents, the intestines, and it’s not aromatherapy, to quote Marino. Only he pronounces, even writes it Romatheraphy with a capital R. As in the Eternal City. As in Romulus and Remus.
Two
Four
Six
Eight
Remember
Not
To
Fix-ate!
My little morgue ditty. Rhymes are an easy way to remember. Keep moving. Look here. Look there. Don’t stare. I recite my little ditty in my mind because I’m the one who needs it this time. And I keep my eyes moving. And my attention wanders …
Over the grass.
Across the tawny dirt path.
Back to the dead woman forlorn on her back.
In her white sports bra.
Her blue shorts.
And gray-striped socks.
Her head, each hand, each foot wrapped in brown paper like an uprooted tree in a burlap diaper.
Dead.
Packaged as evidence, disgraced and depersonalized, and that can’t be the bold, proud, spirited woman I met earlier today. Not once. But twice. Attractive, quick-witted, fit, overflowing with confidence and life. Reminding me of Lucy. How could she be reduced to this? To detritus hauled away and carved up?
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
But it did kill her, and what a strange thing to say, as if a part of her knew and was trying to laugh it off. I should have stopped it somehow. She was in my presence twice and I didn’t stop anything.
I look around the black cubical tent with its exposed gray aluminum frame. Then back at the body, and I remember her strong tan shoulders and bright smile as she taped recipes to the walls inside the Loeb Center. I remember her dropping her water bottle on the sidewalk in front of the Faculty Club.
You’re the peanut-butter-pie lady.
She was hot, her tan skin covered in a sheen of sweat. The sun was going down. There were smudges of peach and pink along the horizon, and I watched her ride across Quincy Street.
Dead.
I look up at the trees. Their heavy green branches are motionless in stifling air that would be a clamorous symphony if odors were musical instruments in an orchestra of stench. I’d be hearing minor keys, sharps and flats, a crescendoing chaos swelling with percussion. Heavy with bass strings. Building to a suffocating coda.
Then the house would go dark after the encore of death, and the bloated teeming crowd would be too turgid and foul for me to force my way through anymore. Looking for an exit. Not finding one. There isn’t one. Briggs would be the first to say it. I can’t show up at the morgue in Baltimore for him.
It would only give the bad guys something to dig up that doesn’t need to see the light of day, Kay.
I can hear him as if he’s standing in front of me with his deep dimples and big smile. There’s really only one rule in life, he preached. To do what’s right. But he didn’t always, and I wipe my eyes on the backs of my hands.
CHAPTER 33
I REST QUIETLY ON TOP of my hard black boxy perch. I keep my back straight, breathing slowly, deeply, trying not to slouch.
I bought the heavy-duty plastic scene case on sale at Home Depot years ago, and it’s an appropriate throne for the Queen of Crime, for Her Travesty and Royal Hardship. Bryce is quite the pun meister. He calls me a lot of things when he thinks I can’t hear him.
I wait for my molecules to gather, for the dizziness to pass. My brain seems to slide around heavily, slowly, inside my skull like an egg yolk as I turn my throbbing head this way and that. I listen to Marino and Benton. Sipping water, I look closely at who’s talking. Back and forth like a Ping-Pong match. Point and counterpoint like a Gregorian chant. The Pugilistic Crank versus the Unflappable Stoic.
I have a ringside seat as Marino questions, and Benton deflects and evades, not answering anything important about what’s happened to our mutual friend John Briggs. But it’s not lost on me that my husband doesn’t hesitate to probe about the dead woman in our midst, a twenty-three-year-old Canadian who shouldn’t be on the FBI’s radar, certainly not yet.
I also don’t trust Benton’s imperviousness to the helicopter that’s begun flying up and down the river. Or maybe it’s more than one. But he acts as if he doesn’t notice what at this hour isn’t a sightseeing tour, and it sounds too big to be a local TV news crew. I have a feeling the Feds have started showing up or are about to, and I don’t think Marino suspects what’s going on. Probably because oblivion is better, and as I rest and hydrate I give him another second or two before he faces reality in a most unhappy way. I know a not-so-friendly takeover when I see one.
“… The question’s also going to be why she really left their employment,” Benton is talking to Marino about the Portisons in London and their former au pair Elisa Vandersteel. “Because if the family was happy with her they would move heaven and earth to hang on to her. Why did she leave?”
“Maybe her visa.”
“There are ways around that if the family wanted to keep her and she wanted to stay. The two boys are older though. Thirteen and fourteen, and it may be as simple as they don’t need someone looking after them anymore.”
“What two boys? How the hell do
you know that? Did Lucy tell you?”
But Benton doesn’t feel obligated to answer questions unless it suits him. He’s asking and commenting about the case as if he’s in charge, and Marino is beginning to fidget and get flustered. After carefully packing his Pelican case, he’s suddenly kneeling back on the grass to reopen it as if he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
“Yeah, I know what the questions are,” he retorts, unsnapping clasps, and he’s getting defensive and louder. “You must have talked to Lucy and I don’t know why because last I checked this wasn’t your damn case.”
“Maybe she found out something from the people at the theater?” Benton doesn’t answer that question either as he looks toward the body some fifty feet away. “For example, what or who brought her to Cambridge?”
Marino opens the big lid on his scene case.
“The question is whether Elisa Vandersteel was an intended target or simply random—in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Whose question?” Marino begins rechecking the evidence he packaged, and I see his paranoia and anger grow by leaps and bounds. “I thought you were here to talk about Briggs.” His hot flushed face stares warily at Benton as the truth sinks in.
Something has happened to the jurisdiction in the Vandersteel case. That would explain why Benton is here. If the FBI has taken over the investigation it would make sense that he’s been prowling around the scene inside the tent, watching where he steps, scanning trees, the grass, the path, and the damaged lamp and exploded glass. When he’s not looking at me, he’s looking at everything else, and it’s beyond his usual curiosity.
I can tell when he’s making assessments. I know when he’s in his profiler mode. I also know that the FBI shouldn’t have been invited to assist in the Vandersteel case—not at this early stage. But Benton’s demeanor, his heavy energy and quiet gravitas, are telling me he doesn’t need an invitation.
What that suggests is a fait accompli, and it’s a thought I find disturbing and unsettling. We don’t know if she’s a homicide, and since when is the FBI interested in electrocutions or lightning strikes?
I have no doubt Barclay divulged all sorts of things as he escorted Benton through the park. But by that point most of the damage had been done. A decision had been made or my husband wouldn’t have shown up here to begin with, and Benton can’t just walk in uninvited and help himself to a case. There’s a process, and I wonder when Marino’s going to catch on that Benton isn’t treating him like an investigative colleague anymore.
I watch him pack up his coffin-size scene case, obsessively fussing with it the way he does with one of his monster tackle boxes or tool chests.
“… A heart attack is my vote.” He’s like a moth batting against a window screen, determined he’s going to extract more from Benton about Briggs, about anything.
But what I’m really witnessing is the agonal stages of Marino’s lead role—or any role—in the Vandersteel investigation. He won’t be involved with what’s happening in Maryland either. But then, technically he never was.
“… That’s why I’m wondering if Ruthie said anything about him not feeling good,” Marino says as Benton ignores him.
Marino hasn’t been informed outright that his case has been co-opted by the Feds, and since they aren’t collaborative that’s the same as being fired. Something like that wouldn’t come from Benton. That’s not how it’s done when a local investigator is removed from a case—or more accurately stated, when a case is removed from a local investigator. Benton won’t be the one to say it and he doesn’t have to for the ugly truth to be all around us like the stench and the heat.
“Like maybe he hadn’t been feeling right, was having chest pains. Or maybe it had to do with the pacemaker he got eight or nine months ago?” Marino has begun to bluster, and Benton isn’t answering. “But I can see you aren’t going to tell me shit. In other words you’re being a typical FBI dickwad.”
Benton isn’t really, and were Marino not so distracted by his discomfort and fatigue, by his usual power struggles and insecurities, he might realize what’s glaring. Briggs had a top-level security clearance and regularly advised military leaders, the secretary of state and various directorates including the Departments of Defense and Justice.
He attended social events at the White House and was accustomed to briefing the president. For obvious reasons he’s of keen interest to the U.S. intelligence community, which isn’t going to insert itself directly into the domestic investigation of his death. The CIA is sneakier than that.
Typically it uses the FBI as a liaison or a front because global spymasters aren’t supposed to deal directly with domestic medical examiners, cops and the likes. That’s a sanitized way of saying that in the real world the CIA is the invisible witch rubbing the FBI’s crystal ball, diverting and deploying its agents and experts like a squadron of flying monkeys.
What happens next suddenly and without warning is they descend upon your scenes, your witnesses, your offices, paper records, database, labs, morgues, your very homes and families. There’s no regard for what damage might be done, and cops like Marino may never know what hit them or the reason. Having a major case overtaken by the Feds is every investigator’s nightmare—especially if the agents involved are secretly doing the bidding of some cloak-and-dagger organization like the CIA.
I watch Marino watching Benton look around, assessing, contemplating, carrying himself as if he has the right to be here while I scarcely know the smallest thing about my mentor, my friend found dead in a pool. What pool? Was this at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware? I know he swam there religiously when he was overseeing the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs.
Or was Briggs traveling? He would use the hotel pool if there were one. But I have a feeling I know, and it would be tragically ironic. It would seem like an Old Testament judgment as I envision the quaint stone house in its charming Bethesda neighborhood off Old Georgetown Road. Briggs bought the property decades ago. One of the draws for him was its close proximity to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where we once worked together.
“Here.” Marino looms over me, and I realize he and Benton have stopped talking.
Marino has dug up a sports drink that’s as hot as the humid foul air. The bottle was hiding inside a rucksack for God knows how long but I don’t care. I wipe lint and grime off it, twist the cap, releasing the seal with a pop. The fruity flavor is salty and cloying, and I feel it instantly like the hit of a cigarette or a shot of Scotch.
“I don’t know if something like that can go bad after a while,” Marino watches me sip, and his clothing is several shades darker from sweat. “Sorry it’s not cold.”
ON THE DECK BEHIND the house is the Endless Pool Briggs was constantly repairing.
I can see it in my mind as vividly as a photograph, and it pains me unbearably. Too frugal and stubborn to replace it, he held it together with spit and rubber bands, he liked to quip. To him it was a functional exercise machine no different from a treadmill or a stationary bike, and swimming in place was part of his daily routine when he was at his and Ruthie’s Maryland home.
I was witness to it when I would stay with them, and the appointed time was six P.M., the witching hour between work and Johnnie Walker, as he liked to say. He’d step down into water heated to eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and turn on the current, selecting whatever resistance suited his mood and conditioning. Then he’d swim in place for thirty minutes. No more or less, and after all we’ve been through? After all my complaints about his jerry-rigged engineering? This is how it ends?
I ask Benton that. I need to know it for a fact. Where was Briggs? Was he at the house in Maryland? I want to know for sure and don’t care if Benton doesn’t want to talk in front of Marino or perhaps at all. I don’t care whose case it is. I need to know a few things. I need to know them now.
“Yes, in Bethesda,” Benton answers me while communicating with a look not to push him too far, that we c
an’t be talking about this here.
“Where was Ruthie?” I push a little more. “Was she home?” He can tell me that much.
“She was making dinner.”
The kitchen sink overlooks the redwood deck and fenced-in yard in back. But one can’t see the pool because it’s off to one side near the bird feeder and the toolshed. I told Briggs more than once it wasn’t safe. If he had a heart attack, if something happened, very likely no one would see him in time.
I badgered him about getting a defibrillator, about installing security cameras. When he got the pacemaker, I gave him a CCTV starter kit so Ruthie could monitor his exercise from different areas of the house.
Thanks but no thanks, he let me know. I don’t need to be spied on more than I already am.
Approximately six hours ago, I’m told, he headed out the back door with his towel, his goggles, barefoot, and in swim trunks. I’ve been to the residence countless times. I can see the Endless Pool about the size of a home spa. I recall Briggs installing it on the deck maybe fifteen years ago when old football injuries started acting up and he began referring to himself as the joints chief of staff.
He gave up running for swimming, and at their Maryland home he’d wage war against the Endless Pool’s artificial current. If he wanted to build endurance he didn’t go longer but harder. He’d wear water mitts or scuba fins to increase resistance, and I ask if he had on either. Benton doesn’t seem to know, and I watch Marino pick up a handle of his big Pelican case, rolling it closer to the tent entrance as I hear voices and the clatter of a stretcher.
Then Marino’s cell phone startles the stifling quiet, the ring tone a World War II air-raid siren, an urgent alert I’ve heard before but not often. He steps away from his scene case and us as he answers someone high up in the Cambridge Police Department food chain.
“Yeah, I’m still here and about to wrap it up. What? You’re kidding.” His voice is exasperated but restrained. “Yeah, I’m hearing you. Not that I’m surprised.” He glares at Benton. “When the hell was this?”