Marino gulps down the last of the fizzy water and quietly belches.
“It’s the oldest trick in the book to wait until someone disarms the alarm and goes out with the dog.” I feed Sock with my gloved hand, meatballs of grain-free whitefish and herring, making sure he doesn’t eat too fast and aspirate food.
My rescued companion is prone to pneumonia. Eating too fast is left over from early years at the racetrack when he wasn’t always fed.
“You really don’t think I’d do that unarmed,” I say reasonably as I return to the entryway.
Marino places his glass in the sink and follows me, our coats dripping slowly on the floor.
“How many cases have we seen where the stalker knows his intended victim has a dog and starts watching for patterns?” I remind him, and maybe I want to make him feel bad.
He walked off the job. He didn’t bother to share his news. Since I’ve been sick he’s not called once to check on me. I set the alarm and hurry us out of the house while Sock is preoccupied with a sweet-potato treat. A second one is in my pocket and Quincy knows it, he always does. He tugs after me down the steps and along the walkway.
The rain is letting up, and it’s unseasonably warm, in the low fifties, and it wouldn’t seem possible that we’re less than a week away from Christmas, were it not for the tasteful wreaths on doors, the red ribbons and bows on lampposts. We’ve not had a hard freeze yet, the weather temperate for December and overcast, but it won’t last. This weekend it’s supposed to snow.
“At least I don’t have to worry about you handling a gun safely.” Marino helps Quincy into his crate and latches the door. “Since I’m the one who taught you how to shoot.”
Quincy sits on his fleece pad and stares intently at me with bright brown eyes.
“I don’t want to mess up his training,” I say wryly as I produce the sweet-potato treat.
“It’s a little late now,” Marino says as if his dog’s complete lack of discipline must be my fault like everything else.
Quincy pokes his nose through the wire siding. I can hear him chewing as I settle into the front seat.
Marino starts the engine and reaches for his portable radio. He contacts the dispatcher and requests that any units in the area be on the lookout for a young white male who might be casing properties on the northern edge of Harvard, last seen running toward the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Car 13 immediately answers that he’s a few blocks south, near the Divinity School.
“Any further description?” car 13 asks.
“Bareheaded, possibly rather slight, possibly a juvenile,” I quietly remind Marino. “Possibly on foot.”
“No hat,” he says over the air. “Last seen running toward the woods in the direction of Beacon.”
7
Marino’s unmarked SUV is fully loaded with a scanner, radio, siren, and grille lights. Storage boxes and drawers keep equipment organized and out of sight, the dark fabric upholstery and carpet spotlessly clean. I feel his pride in his “ride,” as he used to refer to his Crown Vic during his Richmond days.
“It looks quite new and in very good shape. And a hybrid. You’ve gone green. I’m impressed.” I run my finger over the Armor All–shellacked dash. “Slick as glass. One could ice-skate on it.”
“V-four, two-liter EcoBoost, can you believe it?” he grumbles. “The department just got brand-new twin turbo V-sixes but those are going to the brass. What happens when I’m in a pursuit?”
“You win the prize for a small carbon footprint.” I look out my window for the prowler who was on the other side of the wall behind my house.
“May as well go giddy-up to a turtle. It’s like giving us water pistols so we save on ammo.”
“That’s not exactly analogous.” I can’t help but smile at his silliness, vintage Marino grousing.
“My last car before I left Richmond was a V-eight Interceptor. I could go a hundred and fifty friggin’ miles an hour in that baby.”
“Fortunately I can’t imagine ever needing to go that fast in Cambridge unless you’re an aircraft.” I don’t see anybody out at all.
For several minutes we don’t pass a single car as I wonder why someone might be spying on me, possibly since I got home from Connecticut. I don’t believe this is about a smash-and-grab. Who is it? What does he want?
“Benton should have come home.” Marino drives the speed limit through the Harvard campus, thirty-five miles an hour, about as fast as anyone needs to go around here. “Sick as hell and all by yourself? Not to mention what you just went through.” He has to bring that up again, and he’ll continue bringing it up.
“Benton couldn’t have helped anything by coming home,” I reply, but it isn’t true.
If someone is casing our house or stalking me it would have been very helpful having him around and I don’t like it when he’s gone. Recent weeks have been long and hard and maybe I shouldn’t have told him I was fine and didn’t need him because it wasn’t true at all. Maybe I should have been selfish.
“You shouldn’t have been left alone. I wish I’d known what was going on with you.”
Marino would have known had he bothered to ask, and I look out my window at Harvard’s brick-and-glass art museum flowing past. The Harvard Faculty Club is dressed for the holidays, and the Houghton and Lamont Libraries are formidable brick shapes behind old trees inside the Harvard Yard. Tires sizzle over wet pavement. Quincy quietly snores in back, asleep in his crate, and Marino’s police radio is busy.
A 911 hang-up. A domestic call. Suspicious subjects in a red SUV with reflective bumpers fleeing the parking lot of a subsidized housing development on Windsor Street. He listens intently as he drives. He’s content and energized, back where he belongs, and I’ve not had a chance to confront him about what he’s done and now really isn’t the best time.
“Maybe when you feel so inclined you can explain what’s going on with you.” I bring it up anyway.
He doesn’t answer and a few minutes later we turn onto Memorial Drive. The Charles River glints darkly on our right, gracefully curving toward Boston, the downtown skyline opaquely illuminated through clouds. The antenna on top of the Prudential Building throbs bloodred.
“We talked about it in an earlier life,” I finally say. “I predicted it that day in Richmond right before I moved. Ten years later, here we are. I would have appreciated it if you’d talked to me about your career change.”
He cocks his head toward his radio, listening to a call about possible car break-ins at the housing development on Windsor Street referenced a few minutes earlier.
“Simply as a courtesy, if nothing else,” I add.
“Control to car thirteen,” the dispatcher repeats.
Car 13 doesn’t answer.
“Shit.” Marino grabs the portable radio out of its charger and turns up the volume.
To drown me out about a subject he doesn’t want to discuss, I decide, but at the same time I’m puzzled. Not even fifteen minutes ago car 13 radioed that he was near my neighborhood checking for the prowler. Maybe he abandoned that call for this other one.
“Control to car thirteen. Do you copy?” the dispatcher repeats.
“Car thirteen, copy,” the officer finally comes back, his signal weak.
“Are you clear of that stop?”
“Negative. On foot approaching building three, where it appears several vehicles have been broken into. A red SUV with reflective bumpers seen driving away at a high rate of speed with several subjects inside.” He’s breathing hard. “Description fits a vehicle that’s caused trouble here before. Possibly gang-related car breaks and vandalism. Request backup.”
“Dangerous as hell no matter how much they’ve cleaned it up.” Marino is enthralled. “A lot of bad shit goes on there, drug dealers dropping by to visit their mothers and do a little business while they’re at it. Crystal meth, heroin, bath salts. Plus car breaks, vandalism, a drive-by shooting a couple weeks back. They do shit and run like hell and then sometimes c
ome back as soon as the police clear the scene. Like a big fucking game to them.”
I’ve not seen him this way in a very long time.
“That’s the crazy thing around here,” he says excitedly. “You got housing projects right next to million-dollar homes or in the middle of Tech Square with its billion-dollar business. So we’re getting a lot of heat to clean things up.”
“Answering thirteen. Copy at Main,” another unit responds that he’s in the area. “Going now.”
“Copy that,” the dispatcher answers.
“Do you remember the day in Richmond I’m talking about?” I bring him back to that.
“What prediction?” He places his radio in his lap.
I describe the rainy afternoon in my dream, remembering the Marino from then as I look at the Marino next to me, this one older, with a deeply lined face, his balding head shaved smooth.
He’s still strong and formidable, in jeans and a black Harley-Davidson slicker, and I can tell by his reaction to what I’m saying that he’s feigning a bad memory. I sense it in the way he’s staring straight ahead, then turning around to make sure Quincy is okay before shifting his position behind the wheel, gripping it with both of his huge hands. What he won’t do is look at me. He can’t because of how close we came to what neither of us will acknowledge.
Before he left my Richmond house that day he stepped inside to use the bathroom. When he emerged I was waiting for him in the kitchen. I said he needed to eat, and what he didn’t need to do was drive. He’d had too much to drink and so had I.
“What is it you’re offering?” He wasn’t referring to food. “We could make it together, you know.” He didn’t mean a meal. “I’m one piece and you’re the other the way we fit together and it’s perfect.” He wasn’t thinking about cooking and he wasn’t talking about work.
Marino has always believed we would be the ideal couple. Sex would be the alchemy that transforms us into what he wants, and on that rainy occasion in Richmond we almost tried. I’ve never loved him that way. I’ve never wanted him that way. I was afraid of what he’d do if I didn’t give in, and then I feared what would happen if I did. Marino would have been more damaged than I would have been, and I didn’t want him following me anywhere, if that’s what he thought was being offered.
That was what stopped me. It wasn’t just about sex anymore. He was in love with me, and he told me so. He said it more than once while we ate dinner. Then he never said it again.
“I warned you. I predicted you’d want to do exactly what you’ve done.” I’m intentionally vague. “I just don’t know why you couldn’t discuss your career plans with me instead of my suddenly getting cold calls for references and letters. The way you handled it wasn’t right.”
“Maybe the way you handled things that day in Richmond wasn’t right.” He knows. He remembers.
“I don’t disagree.”
“I didn’t want you to talk me out of it this time, okay?” he says.
“I would have tried.” I unlock my iPhone to access the Internet. “For sure I would have tried to talk you out of quitting the CFC. You’re absolutely right.”
“At least you admit it for once.” He seems pleased.
“Yes I admit it, and to talk you out of a life’s decision like that would have been unfair.” I type Gail Shipton’s name in a search screen. “It was unfair the other times I did it and I’m sorry. I sincerely am. But I selfishly wouldn’t have wanted to lose you, and hopefully I haven’t.”
I can tell by his face in the near dark that he is moved by what I just said, and I wonder why it’s so hard for me to say what I feel. But it is. It always has been.
“Now we’ve got a case to work,” he says. “The way we used to.”
“Better than we used to. We have to be better. In the past ten years the world hasn’t exactly become a nicer place.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m doing this,” he says. “Law enforcement needs people with perspective who can see the way things were and where they’re headed. When you and me were getting started it was all about serial killers. Then Nine-Eleven happened and we had to start worrying about terrorists, not to imply we don’t have to worry about serial killers too because there’s more of them than ever.”
I find a Fox streaming news feed from thirty-five minutes ago describing MIT graduate student Gail Shipton as missing, last seen late yesterday afternoon in Cambridge at the Psi Bar.
It’s speculated she might be the dead woman just discovered at MIT’s Briggs Field, and the accompanying video shows Cambridge and MIT police setting up auxiliary lighting in a red dirt infield near a parking lot. That scene cuts to Sil Machado giving a statement. The rain is loud in the microphone and drips off his baseball cap.
“At this time we have no formal comment about the situation.” Machado’s nickname is the Portuguese Man of War but he doesn’t look fierce as he stares into the camera.
A twitch of nervousness runs beneath his somber demeanor, his shoulders hunched tensely against the rain and wind. He has the stiff expression of someone who is uncomfortable and trying not to show it.
“We do have a deceased individual,” he says, “but no confirmation of what happened or if it might be the woman reported missing.”
“I don’t believe it.” Marino glances over at my phone as he listens. “Machado and his fifteen minutes of fame.”
“Has Dr. Scarpetta been contacted?” the correspondent asks.
“As soon as we’ve cleared the scene the body will be transported to the medical examiner’s office,” Machado states.
“Is Dr. Scarpetta on her way here?”
I scan to see what else might be on the Internet as wipers loudly drag the glass, and then Marino’s cell phone rings. It sounds like a revving Harley-Davidson with Screamin’ Eagle pipes. He touches a button on his earpiece and Sil Machado’s voice is on speakerphone.
“Talk about the devil and look who calls,” Marino says.
“Channel Five’s been showing a picture of her,” Machado starts in. “At least we’re getting a lot of tips from people who think they saw her at the Psi Bar. But nothing helpful so far.”
“How did Channel Five get her picture?” Marino’s earpiece blinks bright blue.
“Turns out the girl who reported her missing posted it on their website around midnight,” Machado says. “Haley Swanson.”
“That’s kind of weird.”
“Not necessarily. Everybody’s a journalist these days. She called nine-one-one and then posted the photo and that Gail was missing. Guess she was trying to help us do our job, right? The person in the photo looks like the dead lady. Exactly like her.”
“Gail Shipton,” Marino confirms as I find a story on the Internet that grabs my attention.
“Unless she’s got an identical twin.”
Gail Shipton is involved in high-stakes litigation that is about to go to trial, and I remember Carin Hegel and what she told me in the federal courthouse several weeks ago. She referenced a gang of thugs and living away from home. I scroll through the story about a lawsuit Gail filed, the details surprisingly scant for a case this big. I search some more.
“Has Haley Swanson come to the station to do a report yet?” Marino asks.
“Not that I know of.”
“That bothers me.”
“Maybe she figures there’s no point, that Gail’s not missing anymore, that it’s a lot worse than that. How far out are you?” Machado’s voice fills the car.
“ETA about five.”
“The Doc with you?”
“Ten-four.” Marino ends the call.
“Gail Shipton was in the middle of a legal battle with her former financial manager, Dominic Lombardi.” I skip through the story displayed on my phone. “His international company, Double S, is locally based, just west of here in Concord.”
“Never heard of it.” Marino irritably flicks his lights at an oncoming car that has its high beams on. “Not that I give a shit about
financial companies since I’ve never exactly needed one and think most Wall Street types are crooks.”
I search for “Double S,” and there are plenty of stories about it, most of them puff pieces probably placed by their PR machine.
“It appears to specialize in extremely high-net-worth clients.” I dig down several pages and click on another news story, this one indicating not all has been rosy for Double S. “They’ve had problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, investments that allegedly violated the Know your client rule. Plus some problems with the IRS. And this is rather interesting. They’ve been sued at least six different times over the past eight years. For some reason no case has ever made it to court.”
“Probably settled. Everybody settles. Litigation is the new national industry. The only thing made in America anymore,” Marino says acidly. “Legalized extortion. I falsely accuse you of something and you give me money to shut up. And if you can’t afford a hotshot lawyer you’re screwed. Like what just happened to me, a class-action suit handled by a shitty little law firm and I’m out two thousand bucks in truck repairs because the dealership had the biggest law firm in Boston and a PR firm and everything. A damn design problem with the bed being out of alignment and they said it was the little guy’s fault for driving it too hard over ruts.”
Marino, who is anything but little, rants on about a truck he bought in the fall, his angry story one I’ve heard so often I practically have it memorized. After he’d driven the brand-new pickup for less than a week he noticed the rear was squatting, as he put it. When he gets to the part about the bump stop being impacted by the rear axle and the frame being too weak, I cut him off.
“I can’t tell if the cases were settled.” I return his attention to Gail Shipton’s lawsuit against Double S and the suspicious fact that it appears she’s conveniently dead less than two weeks before the trial is to start. “But so far I don’t see any mention of settlements, just that the cases were dropped. That’s the word used in a story that ran in the Financial Times several years ago. ‘Double S is a big international business run by a small company in the horse country of Massachusetts.’”