“He could have knocked her unconscious and dragged her down to the water to drown her.” Freedman explores the sand and the cinders, his flashlight probing. He’s sweating profusely, and I’m aware of Benton.
His attention is on the dark horizon, on blooming black clouds volatile with electricity. He keeps looking up and out to sea.
“There’s no evidence she was dragged, no abrasions consistent with that for example.” I collect a sample of sand by the fire pit, a coarse granular granite that’s a tannish gray.
It will contain microscopic traces of charred wood that I don’t expect to be present on the beach, and it’s a reflex for me to anticipate the worst. I’m hardly conscious of it. Whatever might diffuse a jury’s logical conclusions is certain to be asked, and I already expect the question. How can I state for a fact that the sand Gracie aspirated came from the beach? I’ll make sure there can be no confusion, and I envision the delicate fourteen-year-old, a child, and my indignation builds like the thunder cells overhead.
“There’s substantial evidence she drowned, inhaling water and what may be beach sand. I suggest we get this tested for DNA immediately.” I hand the envelope to Freedman but he’s hardly listening to me. “I wouldn’t wait. Get it to CFC first thing in the morning if you can.”
Benton has stepped closer to the shore, his light moving along the water’s edge, waves swelling, heaving onto the brownish rock-strewn sand, fanning out in lacy white foam. The sound of it is loud and pervasive as I creep my light over the beach, illuminating gravel, painting over small rocks that become bigger and then boulders and solid outcrops. Up to a small dry tidal pool where only a storm surge could reach, and what shines this time is tinted glass.
Beer bottles perfectly upright in a shallow crevice, the labels facing exactly the same way, and I’m grateful for my nylon boots with their thick tread as I climb massive granite worn smooth. There are four green St. Pauli Girl bottles, the same beer that was in the bar refrigerator, and a spread-out towel and a faux leather jacket with inlays shaped like flowers. It’s zipped up and precisely folded as if it’s on display in a shop. I look at the label inside the collar without disturbing the jacket, a size extra small, and I take photographs.
“I can take care of this unless you want to?” I call out to Freedman, who’s getting more distracted.
“Go ahead.” He hardly looks in my direction.
The wind is gusting, shaking trees and smelling of rain. I pick up the jacket and check the pockets.
“Possibly a house key, a cell phone,” I tell him but he’s hardly listening anymore, and Benton has moved closer to me. “A lip gloss, breath mints, a five-dollar bill, a quarter, a dime, a nickel.” I bag them too. “And four bottle caps.” The beer bottle caps are bent on one side from being pried off the bottles, and that’s deliberate too.
I doubt Gracie Smithers opened the beers and saved the bottle caps, and there’s no bottle opener. It’s not here. I refold the jacket and place it inside a bag. Her blood alcohol was negative. She wasn’t drinking but someone was, and I suspect this person neatly, obsessively arranged the empty bottles, the towel, the jacket, and I think about the guitars on their stands in the apartment on Farrar Street. I think about the boxes of condoms and Imodium in the cabinet, how perfectly they were arranged. Then my thoughts return to the possibility of a caretaker whose job is to do far more than ensure the safety of Rosado’s properties. Troy needs constant monitoring I have no doubt. Someone needs to keep him out of trouble.
“Do you want to get a look?” I raise my voice to Freedman over the heaving surf and wind that’s beginning to howl.
“It’s about to get bad.” He stares in my direction as lightning illuminates dark mountains of clouds and thunder rumbles. “We need to move fast! We don’t want to get caught in this!”
I take more photographs and then I pick up a corner of the towel, blue and white with an anchor design. I wonder where it came from. There were no towels inside the house, and I see what’s under it and the feeling hollows me out, what I felt when I saw the kayak floating in the flooded basement, what I felt when I found seven pennies on my wall, the same date, heads up, each oriented exactly the same way and as bright as brand-new.
The smear of blood is the size of my hand, dark brown with several long light hairs adhering to it. I take more photographs as Benton climbs up to me. I show him what I’ve found and he doesn’t need to tell me that it’s staged. It’s not that the blood and hair aren’t real. It’s not that this isn’t the scene where someone slammed Gracie Smithers’s head against a hard flat surface, a rounded slab of granite rock. But the rest of it is for the benefit of whoever discovered it, and the message gets only worse.
“Like smoking a cigarette after sex.” Benton continues staring off at the sea. “Spreading out a towel over the victim’s blood, sitting on it next to her neatly folded jacket, drinking beer, enjoying the afterglow.”
“It doesn’t sound like something an impulsive nineteen-year-old boy would do.”
“No way,” he says. “Whatever happened between them likely occurred at the fire pit where her necklace was ripped off. I suspect Troy got sexually aggressive with Gracie, a minor, and it was going to cause a real problem this time.”
“Two people are involved in her death?”
“Troy started it and someone far more dangerous, someone in control had to clean up his mess, someone who possibly is paid to clean up Rosado messes and takes pleasure in it. Sexual pleasure,” Benton says.
“Are you thinking about Rand Bloom?”
“I’m not. I’m thinking that Congressman Rosado may have his own personal fixer, his own hired psychopath,” Benton says as Freedman paces the beach, turning up the volume on his radio.
I get swabs and a small bottle of sterile water out of my case.
“Twenty-seven,” Freedman transmits.
“Go to nine,” a female voice sounds over the air, and Freedman moves closer to the rock stairs that lead back up to the tiered acres of the property.
I swab blood. I collect the hairs with plastic tweezers.
“Switching now.” Freedman sounds very tense. “Twenty-seven with you.”
I begin bagging the towel, the beer bottles.
“Affirmative,” Freedman says loudly into his radio, and Benton stands up, his attention fixed on the black horizon.
The thunder is louder and closer, shaking the night, and lightning illuminates thunderheads like a face-off between angry gods. We climb down the rocks to the beach and I collect a handful of sand as the rain begins. It is sudden and cold, falling hard with no warning, and Freedman is busy on his radio as he heads back up the mossy leaf-covered steps, which instantly are wet and as slick as glass.
“We need to find out who that belongs to,” Benton says as he stares out to sea.
The sailboat is moored maybe half a mile offshore, its sails furled, a large vessel, at least sixty feet. In the blinking light of a navigation buoy I can barely make out the crane-like davit, the block and tackle, the loops of rope hanging down from the stern dipping up and down in the heavy surf.
“That’s a strange place to be moored, the ocean not the harbor.” Benton shoves his wet hair off his face, rain drenching us fast. “It looks like it hauls a dinghy but where is it?”
Freedman is halfway up the steps as rain billows in sheets. “The pool!” he yells and he almost falls as he starts to run.
CHAPTER 37
IT WAS THE LAST place the police thought to look, and why would it be foremost on their minds? Benton and I didn’t imagine it either, that the scene where Gracie Smithers’s body was discovered this morning would be a crime scene a second time.
When we reach the saltwater pool the police have pulled the dark green cover and it’s piled on the deck. They stand around the deep end, four uniformed officers and two plainclothes, staring at the body suspended facedown in murky water inches above the sediment-covered bottom. Their collective mood is electrically charge
d, glimmers of upset flashing, and their aggression rumbles from a deep place, threatening to explode like a bomb going off.
“The cover was all the way on,” an officer explains to us above the din of the heavy rain, his voice as tense as a violin string about to snap. “I figured the Realtor did it after the girl was found but I thought we should check.”
Freedman is struggling out of his jacket, his shoulder holster, and I grip his arm to stop him from jumping in. I shine my light down in the water and the hands floating up are profoundly wrinkled and chalky white, a phenomenon known as washerwoman’s skin, the advanced stages of it. The body has been submerged for a while.
I bend down and dip my fingers in, and the salt water is unheated and chilled, the cover keeping the pool well below the ambient temperature. Hours, I think. Possibly as many as three or four, the dead man clothed in jeans and running shoes, a flash of pale flesh at his ankles, no socks. A loose denim shirt billows up, and I squat at the edge and move my light closer to the surface, and the beam catches an earring, a multifaceted small clear stone in the lobe of the left ear. On the left wrist is a rugged black watch on a black band. His hair is short, dark and curly.
I get up and ask, “Does anybody see a pool skimmer? Anything with a long handle?”
Everyone begins searching at once while Benton stays by my side, and I meet his eyes and don’t say a word. I don’t have to because he knows me. He knows when something isn’t what it seems. I call my investigative unit and Jen Garate answers. I tell her we have another body from the same location in Marblehead Neck. I inform her tentatively who it might be, and Benton is listening. He steps away to use his phone.
“We need Rusty, Harold, a removal service here right away,” I talk over Jen’s excitement.
“Oh my God. How weird is that? What was he doing there? An insurance person? Oh. I know. The homeowners are afraid of being sued.” Her words tumble out. “But who would kill an insurance person? This is creepy. I’m on my way.”
“I thought you were off.” I remember her leaving for the day.
“Becca had something come up.” Jen explains that she took a colleague’s midnight shift, and then I inform her I don’t need her to come, just a truck to transport the body back to my office.
“You don’t need the scene worked?” Her disappointment is shamelessly obvious over the phone.
“I’m working it,” I reply as I watch Benton walk off the deck into the sopping wet grass, on his phone, splashing rain drowning him out as he talks to someone.
Next I let Bryce know what’s happened. I tell him that whoever does the transport can’t be alone at any time, not even for two minutes. There must be a police presence while the body is being removed and he’s to see to it because the officers at the scene right now are upset and distracted.
“Call dispatch, a lieutenant if you can find one, to make sure that Rusty or Harold or whoever we get is accompanied by armed officers. It’s not negotiable in light of the circumstances,” I say and I end the call.
I tuck my phone back in a pocket and Freedman hands me a leaf rake with a blue net and a long aluminum handle.
“What are you doing?” he asks, and he really has no idea, none of them do, but I won’t explain until I’m sure.
“I’m going to guide him to the shallow end and pull him out,” I reply. “Does anybody have anything we can put him on? I don’t have sheets. I’m afraid I didn’t come quite prepared for this.”
“I’ve got a weather tarp,” an officer volunteers.
“Would you mind? That, towels, anything. And if you could direct your lights in the water for me so I can see what I’m doing?”
I drop in the rake and the silver handle seems to bend in the refracted light, and I touch the body with the frame of the net. I maneuver it flatly against the waist and nudge gently, and the body moves easily. Inching my way along the ledge, I guide the body toward the shallow end and it stops at the steps, the left shoulder barely brushing the rough concrete. From there Rand Bloom is within reach, and I refrain from saying who he is until we are turning him over and pulling him out.
“What?” someone says.
“Who the hell?” says another.
“It’s not Joe?”
“Then where is he? That’s his car. I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know what Joe Henderson looks like or why his car is here,” I answer. “I just know this isn’t him.”
Benton returns to the pool deck, the rain pounding all around us, the wind tearing at our soaking wet hair and clothing, and I catch the lights peripherally before I turn to look. An orange rigid-hulled Coast Guard boat races through the darkness, blue lights strobing, charging toward the dark sailboat heaving on the angry sea.
WATER POURS FROM UNDER the body as we ease it onto the spread-out orange weather tarp.
Freedman hands me cloths he got from somewhere, microfiber, probably car shammies that are useless. I let the rain rinse the salt water off my hands and clothes. There are no lights in the pool or on the deck, only our flashlights, and in the glare of them Rand Bloom’s dead face looks more deformed, more grotesque.
The small vertical slit in the front of the denim shirt lines up with the stab wound I find midchest after undoing several buttons, a single-edged blade that was twisted. His assailant was facing him, and I envision a tactical kill, the knife thrust under the breastplate into soft tissue, angled up into the heart, and I open my medical case. I get out thermometers, a ruler for scale, and the temperature of the body is barely ten degrees warmer than the water.
I take photographs, aware that the Coast Guard boat is alongside the sailboat, blue lights sparking. Then I get Luke Zenner on the phone. I hear music in the background over the splashing rain.
“I realize you’re not on call,” I say right off, and I can see flashlights in the distance as Guardsmen board the sailboat.
“Not a problem.” What Luke means is he’s not been drinking and is fit for service, and I explain where I am and why.
“I need you to come in for this, Luke.”
“I hope you’re headed to the airport and down to Florida …”
“We’re not.”
“But you want me to do the case tonight?”
“Yes and I’m recusing myself.”
“Of course. Whatever you need.”
“It’s best I’m not there at all, not even as a witness,” I say and Benton is on his phone again, his back to everyone.
I can see him staring out to sea as he talks.
“That’s fine.” Luke is moving away from the music. “Do you mind if I ask why?”
“I met Rand Bloom earlier today.”
“And you’re certain that’s who it is?”
“We’ll verify his ID but yes. I’ve had brushes with him in the past, adversarial ones,” I reply. “I can’t be objective …”
“Can you hold, Kay? It’s Marino. Probably about this.”
I hold as I watch Benton in the dark yard, in the pouring rain, both of us drenched to the skin, and I can’t help but think about how this day began and how it’s about to end, from bad to worse and what will be next? It’s almost midnight and something else occurs to me as I look around at the thick darkness, the rain splashing on the pool and the pulled-back cover and the granite deck. We were inside the house earlier, and I ask Freedman why no one turned on the outside lights.
“We tried.” He hugs himself against the billowing rain. “It appears all of the exterior bulbs have been removed.”
“Removed?”
“I assumed because no one’s living here and the grounds probably aren’t shown after dark. Well I’m sure as hell not assuming anything now,” he says, and then Luke is back in my earpiece.
“I guess Benton got hold of him,” he says of Marino. “You definitely want this done now.”
“Since it’s the third death today that seems to be connected somehow,” I reply. “Yes.”
“I ask because Marino wants to co
me in after he goes through Rand Bloom’s apartment. He wants me to give him a couple hours.”
“He needs to look for sources of DNA. A toothbrush, for example, and he shouldn’t witness the autopsy either,” I reply. “He can’t be objective. Neither of us can. He almost got into a fight with Bloom this afternoon. I don’t want you to wait for him and I don’t want him present,” I emphasize.
“Is there something personal I should know about? I don’t mean to be presumptuous but if there is it will come up, and it’s better that I prepare.”
“I didn’t know Rand Bloom personally.” I’m not going to admit that I didn’t like him.
In fact I might have hated him, and I watch Benton end his call and look directly at me.
“I have a feeling this is fairly straightforward,” I say to Luke. “A stab wound midline to the center chest, posterior to the sternum. The water temp is fifty-one degrees, ambient air seventy-eight now because it’s a lot warmer than it was this afternoon. The body temp is seventy-six. He would have cooled quickly in cold covered water and I estimate he’s been submerged four or five hours at least. Witnesses will help with when he was last seen alive. Marino and I saw him drive off this afternoon about four. I’m wondering if he left us and came straight here.”
“Rigor?” he asks.
“Delayed by the cold water and just beginning to form.”
“A wound like that and I suspect he bled out internally,” Luke says. “I’ll measure how much blood is in his chest cavity and check carefully for any signs of drowning.”
“If the blade penetrated his heart or a major vessel, his survival time would have been minutes. If there’s any sign of drowning then that likely means he was stabbed very near the pool, possibly on the deck. He would have taken some agonal breaths and that’s about it.”
“What about blood around the pool?”
“If there was it’s gone now,” I reply as the rain boils on the deck, and Benton is by my side, the blue lights flashing by the sailboat. “It’s a monsoon here.” I end the call and meet Benton’s eyes. “Please don’t tell me there’s another one.”