I don’t like the way Benton glanced at me as he said over the phone that he wasn’t aware of something, that he hadn’t been informed of whatever it is. As if there’s something happening in the here and now that he should know about, that both of us should. Whatever’s going on isn’t simply a local problem, and as I think this I also know I’m ahead of myself. The two of us getting important if not urgent calls simultaneously doesn’t mean they’re related. It could be a coincidence.
But I can’t shake the ominous signals I’m picking up. I have a feeling I’m going to discover soon enough that Benton and I are about to have the same problem but won’t be able to discuss it much if at all. In our different positions we won’t handle it the same way, and we could even end up at odds with each other. It wouldn’t be the first time and certainly won’t be the last.
“Doc …? Did you get the part about …? Interpol calling …?” Marino says, and I must have misheard him.
“I can hardly understand you,” I reply in a loud whisper. “And I can’t talk. One second please.”
Benton heads into the drawing room, and I wish the drapes had been pulled across the tall expansive windows. It’s completely dark out with only vague smudges of distant lamps pushing back the inkiness, and I’m conscious of the night and what might be in it, possibly close by, possibly watching. Maybe right under our very noses. I detect something sinister has been tampering with us all day and probably for longer than that.
I RETURN TO THE entrance, where I avoid the old corroded mirror on the wall, and I stand with my head bent, facing the front door but not really seeing anything as I listen to Marino over the phone.
It’s difficult to hear everything he’s saying. We have at best a spotty connection, and I’m beginning to get jumpy. I don’t know who’s doing what or spying on whom, and in light of everything else it’s hard not to feel hunted and disoriented.
“Okay, stop. You need to say that again only much more slowly.” I huddle near an ornate cast-iron umbrella stand, and I don’t want to believe this is happening. “What do you mean she’s already stiff?”
“The first guy there checked her vitals said she’s already stiff,” Marino replies, and the connection is almost perfect suddenly.
“And have you seen this yourself or is it what you’ve been told?” I reply because what he’s saying sounds completely wrong.
“I was told.”
“Were there any attempts at resuscitation?”
“She was obviously dead,” Marino says clear as a bell.
“That’s what you were told.”
“Yeah.”
“What was obvious about it?” I ask.
“For one thing she was stiff. The squad didn’t touch her.”
“Then how did they determine she’s stiff?”
“I don’t know but apparently she is.” Marino again reminds me he hasn’t been to the scene.
“As far as we know, the first responding officer is the only one who’s touched her?” I want to know.
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“And what about her temp? Warm? Cool?”
“Warm supposedly. But what do you expect when it’s still ninety degrees out? She could be out there all day and not cool off.”
“I’ll have to see when I get there. But the rigor doesn’t make sense,” I tell Marino. “Unless she’s been out there much longer than one might initially assume. And that wouldn’t make sense either. Even in this weather there are still some people out and about, especially near the water. She would have been found long before now, I would think.”
For rigor mortis to be obvious, the victim would have had to be dead for several hours at least, depending on what muscles are noticeably affected and how advanced the postmortem process has gotten. The high temperatures we’ve been having would escalate decomposition, meaning rigor would set in sooner. But it’s extremely unlikely that what Marino’s been told is correct. That’s also not surprising. Patrol officers are often the first responders, and they can’t always know what they’re looking at.
“… Got him waiting with the twins … uh, who found the body …” Marino is saying, and then I lose the rest.
“Okay. You must be in a bad space again.” I’m getting exasperated, but at least it sounds like he has the scene secured.
But I can’t imagine what he meant when he said that Interpol was trying to call him.
“Looks like someone was hiding in the trees, waiting,” he then says, and the connection is much better again. “That’s what I’m guessing. No eyes or ears.”
“Not if it were the middle of the day,” I point out as I continue glancing around me, making sure no one can hear. “And if she’s been dead for hours as her alleged rigor would suggest? There would have been eyes and ears because it would have been broad daylight, possibly early or midafternoon.”
“I agree with you. That part can’t be right.”
“It doesn’t sound it. But I’ll see when I get there,” I repeat. “What else can you tell me?”
Marino begins to describe what he knows about a violent death that may have happened within the past hour not even a mile from here. The woman’s body is on the fitness path along the river. Some of her clothing has been ripped off, her helmet more than twenty feet away, and there’s visible blood. It appears she died from a blow to the head, or that’s what the first responding officer told Marino.
“He says you can see where she was struggling, moving around as her head was banged against the path,” Marino adds, but what I alert on is his mention of a helmet. “Like someone was waiting until she was passing through a thick clump of trees where nobody could see, then grabbed her and she fought like hell.”
“What helmet?” I ask. “The victim was on a bicycle?”
“It appears she was attacked while she was riding,” Marino answers, and I can hear his excitement in his tense tone while I feel a chill along my spine.
I can’t help but think of my encounter earlier today, first at the repertory theater and then on the sidewalk along Quincy Street. Suddenly the young woman with the British accent is in my mind, and I wish she weren’t.
“She was on the path that cuts through the middle of the park,” Marino is explaining, “and it happened in the spot where there’s a small clearing in a stand of trees. I’m thinking it was planned like that to ambush her.”
“And her helmet was off and some twenty feet from the body?” It’s another detail that like her rigor defies logic, and I wonder what color the helmet is.
I hope it’s not a robin’s-egg blue.
“That’s the story,” Marino says, and I know exactly what he sounds like when something big goes down.
Not just big. But explosively bad. The blitz attack he’s describing will create a public panic if it’s not handled properly. I feel slightly sick inside. I remember the young woman on her bicycle looking at me quizzically as Benton handed her the bottle of water she dropped. She put her helmet back on before she rode off, and she didn’t bother fastening the chin strap. I remember seeing it dangling as she rode off across the street, through the Yard, heading in the direction of the Square and the river.
This would have been close to seven P.M., barely an hour ago as the sun was setting. I tell myself if it turns out the victim is the woman I saw, it would be a bizarre twist of fate, an almost unbelievable one. I almost hope the detail about rigor turns out to be accurate. If it is, the victim couldn’t be the young cyclist in Converse sneakers.
But even as I reassure myself, I also know that what Marino said about the rigor can’t be true. Or the reporting officer is confused. Because I don’t think it’s possible—even in this weather—for a dead body on the fitness path inside John F. Kennedy Park not to be discovered for hours. I suspect the death happened recently, and then I envision the young woman’s flushed face and smile again.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I hear her voice in my head.
“I’ve al
ready talked to your office,” Marino says in my earpiece. “Rusty and Harold are bringing a truck.”
“I need a big one.”
“The MCC,” he says, and the tri-axle thirty-five-foot mobile command center is a fine idea if there’s a place to park it.
“We’re going to need a barricade,” I remind Marino, and I can’t get the woman’s face, her sporty sunglasses and self-assured smile, out of my thoughts.
“That’s what I ordered. Remember who you’re talking to.”
When he headed investigations at the CFC, he was in charge of our fleet. In some ways he knows more about the nuts and bolts of our operations than I do.
“I want a place to duck out of the heat and away from the curious,” I reply. “And we’ll need plenty of water.”
“Yeah, there’s not exactly a 7-Eleven handy, and the park is dark as shit. We’re setting up lights.”
“Please don’t turn them on yet. The scene will blaze like Fenway.”
“Don’t worry. We’re keeping everything dark until we’re ready. Doing what we can to keep the gawkers away, especially any assholes trying to film with their phones. There’s student housing everywhere. Eliot House is right there on the other side of Memorial Drive and it’s as big as the Pentagon, plus you got the Kennedy School, and traffic on Memorial Drive. Not to mention the bridge is right there, and across the water is Boston. So we got no plans of lighting up the scene right this minute.”
“Do we have a name?” I ask.
“An ID was found on the path near her bike. Elisa Vandersteel, twenty-three years old from the UK. Of course that’s if it’s the dead lady’s. I’m guessing it probably is,” Marino says, and my mood sinks lower. “I’m told the picture looks sort of like her, for what it’s worth. And I just pulled up in front of the Faculty Club. You coming out?”
“Where in the UK?” I almost don’t want to ask.
“London, I think.”
“Do you know what kind of shoes she had on?” I envision the cyclist’s off-white Converse sneakers, and I’m pretty sure I caught a peek of bike socks, the kind that are below the ankle.
“Her shoes?” Marino asks as if he didn’t hear me right.
“Yes.”
“Got no idea,” he says. “Why?”
“I’ll see you in a minute,” I reply.
CHAPTER 10
I STEP AWAY FROM THE front door, pausing by the antique entryway table with its big flower arrangement.
Inside the drawing room Benton is discreetly tucked to one side of a window near the baby grand piano. He’s on the phone, his face hard and somber. There’s nobody else inside with him, and I wish I could tell him about the woman on the bicycle. He saw her too, and now the worst may have happened.
But I don’t get any closer. I know when not to disturb him, and I notice that Mrs. P is back at her station, her round old-fashioned glasses staring at me. As I glance at her she quickly looks down and begins to open menus, checking the printed pages inside. I can tell she senses something is wrong.
I can’t hear what Benton is saying to whoever he’s on the phone with, but I get the impression based on his tone that he’s not talking to the same person he was a moment earlier. I catch his eye and indicate I have to go, and he nods. Then he turns away. He doesn’t place his hand over his phone to ask what’s happening or offer what might be going on with him. And that makes me wonder if we really are being contacted about the same case.
But I don’t see how that would be feasible. At this stage there’s no reason I can think of for the FBI to be interested in a local death, possibly of a young woman from London named Elisa Vandersteel. But it’s disturbing that Marino mentioned the International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol. I don’t know why he did or if I might have misheard. But I can’t stop thinking of the cyclist with the blue helmet and Converse sneakers who called me the peanut-butter-pie lady.
I realize the ID found near her body might not be hers, but when I met her she sounded British, possibly from London, and my stomach clenches harder. I feel a sense of urgency that’s personal. As if I knew the woman who’s been killed. As if I might be one of the last people she ever spoke to or saw. And I will myself to control my thoughts.
I can’t say for a fact whose dead body is in the park or how the death occurred or why, I remind myself. I open the door and step out into the dark oven of the patio, where no one is sitting in the stifling night air. I follow the walkway, looking all around me with every step I take. I listen for the quiet nocturnal sounds of insects, of birds lifting off branches in a startled burst, their wings whistling.
I listen for the creaking of old trees, the rustle of leafy canopies or chirp of a katydid. But it’s dead quiet except for traffic that gusts like the wind, rushing, then lagging before it picks up again. I’m aware of the solid roughness of the bricks beneath my softly tapping shoes, mindful of the thick static air and the bright bug eyes of vehicles on Quincy Street.
I pass the same foliage and rockery I did earlier when I was with Benton, but it seems I’m on another planet now, surrounded by unfamiliar voids of lawn, and hulking dark shapes and shadows. Nothing moves except traffic beyond the split-rail paling silhouetted ahead. I can see the libraries sleepily lit up across the street in the Yard, where I was walking not even an hour and a half ago. I reach the sidewalk, and Marino’s SUV is parked at the curb behind Benton’s Audi.
It seems like déjà vu as I climb in and stare at the rear of my husband’s blacked-out Batmobile illuminated in the glare of headlights. Only he’s not in it now, and I feel a pang of loneliness as I see the empty dark space where he was sitting behind the wheel, watching us in the rearview mirror but a very short time ago.
Benton is still inside the Faculty Club, and I continue watching for him to emerge from the red front door, to see him illuminated in the entrance light as he steps outside and follows the walkway. But there’s no sign of him. He must still be on the phone, and it enters my mind that in the midst of all this chaos he has to take care of banal matters such as paying for a dinner we didn’t get to eat. I didn’t think of asking for the check. I simply walked out.
As I pull my door shut and set my briefcase by my feet, I ask Marino what else he instructed my two autopsy technicians Rusty and Harold to bring to the scene.
“And have they already left?” I pull my shoulder harness across me and the steel tongue snaps into the buckle that as usual I had to dig out of the crack in the seat. “Because I need protective clothing and a scene case. I don’t have anything with me, not even a pair of gloves. And there’s no time for me to stop by my office.”
“You need to relax,” Marino says. “I’ve got it covered.”
He looks the way he did when I saw him last, except he’s taken off his tie. I see it on the backseat, sloppily coiled like a polyester snake.
“Please assure me we’re keeping the lights off.” It’s not possible I’m going to relax. “We turn on portable floodlights and we may as well send out invitations and a press release.”
“Remember where I used to work? Remember who used to take care of all that and still knows how?” He checks his mirrors. “I know the drill.” His eyes are darting and he’s sweating. “I guess Benton’s staying?” Marino stares at the Faculty Club, boxy and dignified in the distant dark.
A pale gold light fills the tall twelve-paned windows, and I can see inside the drawing room, the masculine leather furniture, the sparkling chandelier, the gleaming baby grand, and I look for Benton. But there’s no way he’s lingering in front of windows for all the world to see.
“I’m not sure what he’s doing,” I reply. “He was on the phone with Washington when I was leaving.”
“Let me guess,” Marino says, and right off he’s assuming Benton’s call is related to what’s just happened in John F. Kennedy Park.
“I don’t have any idea,” I reply as we pull away from the curb. “I don’t know what’s going on but he did mention earlier that the ter
ror alert is elevated.”
Marino turns on his emergency lights but not his siren. “Something’s going on, Doc. I’m just telling you. And he’s not passing along the info because that’s what the FBI does, doesn’t matter that you’re married to them.”
“I’m not married to the FBI. I’m married to Benton.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
“If the reason he’s on the phone with Washington is the Vandersteel case, there’s no way he’s going to tell you,” Marino says as if he knows my husband better than I do. “He could be talking to Interpol, which might explain the call I got—that’s assuming news of the case here has shot up the chain already, and if so I’d like to know how the hell that’s possible. But Benton won’t tell you shit unless it suits his purposes because right now he’s the Feds. And yeah, you’re married to them. Or maybe worse? He is.”
“This is several times now that you’ve mentioned Interpol.” I’m not interested in hearing his disparagements of Benton, the FBI or anything else at the moment. “Why?” I ask.
“They didn’t call you too, did they?” Marino glances at me, his brown eyes glaring and bloodshot.
“No.” I’m mystified. “Why would they and about what?”
MARINO GUNS A RIGHT on Harvard Street, and the route he takes basically will retrace my steps from my earlier ill-fated walk.
Only now it’s completely dark, and the stars and quarter moon are blotted by a hot haze that for days has been filmy over the horizon, intensifying the colors at twilight from pastel tints to wide brushstrokes of gaudy orange, magenta and deep rose.
“Let me start at the beginning and spell it out,” Marino says. “I was actually on my way to the CFC.”
“What for?” I look at his wide-eyed flushed face as he streaks past apartment buildings, a bookshop, a bank, a café and other businesses that form blurred chains of light on either side of the two-lane road.