“Do we know if her body was clothed when she came in?” I ask.
“I got the inventory here.” Georgia reads her screen and clicks the mouse. “Jeans, a tee, one sneaker.”
“That’s all?” I watch Benton on his phone.
“Nothing else,” Georgia says.
“No problem, thanks, Marty,” Benton says to his SAC, the head of the FBI’s field office in Boston. “Sorry to pull you out of a meeting.”
“Seven thousand square feet, a carriage house garage, a saltwater pool, five acres with a tennis court, listed at six million. Well it was,” Lucy adds. “I guess they’ll be lowering the price or taking it off the market. It’s not good for business if a kid drowns in your pool.”
“I overheard a mention of a lawsuit and a congressman,” I reply. “Do you have any idea what that might be about?”
“It appears the house is owned by Gordian Knot Estates Corporation which is a personal holding company for Bob Rosado’s Massachusetts real estate and who knows what else.”
“The congressman from Florida?” I ask. “He has a home here?”
Rosado is the chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security. He’s in the news often these days because of his controversial push to build a virtual fence on the Arizona-Mexican border. He’s also had his share of scandals.
“His wife is from Massachusetts. They have homes here, New York, Washington, Aspen, and the main residence in West Palm Beach,” Lucy says and I’m getting worried.
My forensic fellow Shina Kato is bright but inexperienced. She’s not board certified yet and would be dismantled as an expert witness in court. Had I been here this morning she wouldn’t have been assigned the Gracie Smithers case or at the very least I would have supervised. Luke should have paid attention but he must have been distracted and busy, and I look at the log again. Harold and Rusty transported the body here and I note their initials and also Jen’s. I need to review the photographs and get myself up to speed as quickly as I can. There’s going to be a stink.
“Gracie Smithers is named in news reports as the victim and it doesn’t appear she was with several friends when she drowned.” Lucy is finding more information on the Internet and Benton is confirming with his office that no agents are to respond to Leo Gantz’s house. “Just one so-called friend,” Lucy says, “a teenaged male who isn’t identified.”
“Probably because he’s a juvenile.”
“They don’t say and that suggests to me he’s not. I find it unusual the police wouldn’t release his name,” Lucy adds while Benton goes on to explain that Marino is on his way to the Gantz house and there can be no interference whatsoever.
“My guess is the male who was with Gracie Smithers isn’t a juvenile and had a reason to pick that particular house for whatever he really had in mind,” Lucy decides. “Sounds like someone powerful keeping things quiet if you ask me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out that the person in question is Bob Rosado’s son, Troy. He’s been in trouble before, cyberbullying a thirteen-year-old girl. She hanged herself in her closet and the Rosados were sued. Apparently they settled. This was Palm Beach County five years ago when Troy was fourteen. Two years later he was stopped for driving erratically. In the backseat was a .416 Rigby with a Swarovski scope, a dangerous thirty-five-thousand-dollar safari game rifle that belonged to his father. When Troy refused to get out of the car the cop tased him.”
“It sounds like he’s a real personality disorder,” I reply.
“It gets worse.” Lucy has found something else.
CHAPTER 25
A DUI LAST AUGUST, NO jail time or fine, his driver’s license was suspended for a year and he was sentenced to an alcohol-drug program for sixteen weeks,” she informs me. “Instead it appears he ended up in boarding school.”
“Was this in Florida?” I inquire.
“The DUI yes. But now he’s here.”
“He’s nineteen or twenty and in boarding school?”
“Just north of here, Needham Academy, which is basically a cushy place for rich people to park their messed-up kids,” Lucy says. “And it doesn’t look like he stays on campus. A month after the DUI and only a week after he started at Needham he was arrested for arson but the charges were dropped.”
I watch Benton walking down the corridor, headed to the elevator. I can tell he’s listening.
“An apartment building that burned after someone shot a flare through a window. It appeared random, no known motive.” Lucy’s data mining search engines find information fast and furiously. “There was one fatality, a man in a wheelchair who couldn’t get out.”
“Smoke inhalation.” I remember the case.
“And right after that the Rosados put their place in Marblehead on the market. A suspended driver’s license? Right. How is Troy getting around?”
“And why wasn’t he charged in the homicide?”
“Apparently they couldn’t find the flare gun or link one to him. And by the way, his father is an avid outdoorsman, a big fisherman and hunter. It’s not unheard of for a hunter to have a flare gun and he probably has one on his yacht.”
“His yacht?”
“An extremely nice one.”
“I’m trying to remember where he got so much money.”
“Real estate, which is why he could afford to go into politics and have a lot of hobbies. Hunting, fishing, whatever he wants including a beautiful wife.”
“He’s certainly been in the news a lot but I don’t recall anything about the son,” I remark.
“They obviously have a crisis management team that knows how to bury things. You have to know how to look if you’re going to find what I just did.”
What she means is you have to know how to hack. I watch Benton push the elevator button and the polished steel doors quietly open. He’s listening to us.
“Here we go.” Lucy leans against the counter, focused on her iPad, and Georgia is focused on her. “Uber,” Lucy says. “Troy uses the on-demand car service and has the app on his phone.”
“And how do we know that?” I ask.
“He may not have been charged in criminal court but there’s litigation. Short-lived but enough to create a record if you can find it.”
Lucy is accessing Bloomberg Law, LexisNexis, maybe PACER. If she’s surfing other sites, ones she shouldn’t, I don’t want to know.
“The owner of the building that burned and the family of the man who died sued but it was immediately settled,” she says. “According to the original complaint, the plaintiffs claim that the night of the fire Troy took Uber to a paintball arena in South Boston. He was dropped off and several hours later was spotted watching the building burn.”
“Spotted by whom?” I ask and Benton is holding open the elevator doors, his eyes on us. “And this never made the news either?” It’s hard to fathom.
“A firefighter questioned him, asked who he was and what he was doing there.” Lucy skims through another file she’s mined. “In the firefighter’s statement to the police he described Troy as excited by the inferno and indifferent to people being injured or killed. When it was brought to his attention that some of the residents had lost their homes and everything they owned he commented that they didn’t have much to begin with anyway.”
“Pure garbage,” Georgia chimes in with disdain. “They should have drowned him as a puppy.”
“You can find the complaint on PACER if you dig through enough subsets of records,” Lucy adds.
The Public Access to Court Electronic Records service is a restricted government website that most nonlawyers find difficult to navigate. Even so that wouldn’t deter a motivated journalist.
“My question is why other people haven’t found the complaint,” I point out. “A high-profile federal official and somehow his son has remained below the radar? How is that poss
ible?”
“Crisis management. He must have someone really good,” she says and I detect a flash of anger again. “You anticipate what might get legs and kneecap them in advance. Constant online monitoring, constant risk assessment and no holds barred in protecting the brand. Whoever manages this for Rosado is extremely savvy and has leverage. I suspect the person spends a lot of time undercover in proprietary databases, does whatever it takes.”
Like you, I think.
“Stealth and manipulation,” I say instead. “All you need is enough influence and money.”
“A politician’s nightmare having a kid like that.” Lucy holds her iPad in front of me so I can see a Facebook page.
TROY ROSADO HAS PRETTY-BOY looks, curly black hair and a bright smile but his eyes are dead. A budding psychopath, and I glance down at my phone as a text from Benton lands.
If the father or someone on his behalf attempts contact avoid.
The FBI must be investigating Congressman Rosado or maybe it’s the son they want.
“That little girl’s a real sad one and it sounds like there will be hell to pay. An empty house, a pool and a really deep pocket?” Georgia says, and she continues staring at Lucy.
Sitting straight up in her chair, proud and serious in her navy blue CFC uniform, Georgia likes my niece a little too much.
“The boy is bad to the bone and evil kids are a whole lot worse than adults.” Georgia is indignant. “It’s some day we got going and I’ve only been here two hours. TV trucks were filming the front of the building and now you can bet the media will start poking around about Gracie Smithers.”
Georgia scans her cockpit of flat-paneled security displays. On them are images of every important perspective including interior scans of the bay, the evidence room and the receiving area where I’m now standing.
“Give me some notice before you head back out,” she says, “so I can make sure there are no camera crews lurking around.”
“Anything else I should know about?” I return the big black case log to the counter.
“Six cases so far as you can see with two more just arrived,” Georgia tells me. “The motor vehicle fatalities. Doctor Zenner says we’ll post them in the morning.”
“That’s fine.”
“They came in right before you got here. DOA at Memorial. Newlyweds. It’s real sad.” She gives in and places a cannoli on a sheet of copying paper. “Also the crane operator from yesterday.” She checks her computer. “He’s pending and Luke didn’t want him released yet.”
“Do we know why?” I ask. “Is there a question about toxicology?”
“I think there’s just questions period. He was operating that big tower crane where they’re building the high-rise apartment building on Somerville Avenue. They don’t know if he slipped on the ladder while he was climbing up to the cab early yesterday morning or if he had a heart attack and fell.” She dabs a finger in creamy ricotta cheese filling and tastes it. “Now I’ve done it. There’s no going back.”
“We’ll be in the autopsy room,” I reply. “In addition to the media there’s an insurance investigator named Rand Bloom who I’d like you to be on the lookout for. He drives a big gray pickup, a Ford, and loves to take photographs and trespass.”
Georgia is writing it down. “I know exactly who that is.” She looks up at me and her eyes are hard and flat. “I’ve seen that truck around here several times. Just the other day, late afternoon . . . I’m trying to think. I believe it was Monday and he was taking pictures of people pulling in and out. When the gate opened he’d photograph whatever was going on in the parking lot. So I confronted him. I gave him a piece of my mind. A sleaze with a big scar and ugly eyes like maybe he got hit in the face.”
“Another thing you can look into for me,” I say to Lucy as we follow the curved corridor away from the receiving area, deeper into my dark Emerald City where guests are taken apart and put back together again.
“You’re interested in what happened to his face?” she says. “Why does it matter?”
“I want to know who and what he really is and what motivates him besides money. Chances are he hasn’t always been an insurance investigator. A lot of people who go into that started out in law enforcement, and he seems to be a common denominator in a number of situations that involve me. Johnny Angiers, for example, the doctor who died in Estabrook Woods. And you heard what we were just saying about Leo Gantz. Bloom has been harassing Joanna Cather and spying on Jamal Nari because of an insurance claim. Then there’s Patty Marsico, murdered last Thanksgiving in Nantucket. He’s the insurance investigator in that case too because her husband sued her real estate company.”
The lights are dimmed inside the evidence room, the door shut and locked, nobody there. Through observation windows I see white paper-covered tables, countertops and drying cabinets with glass doors. A pair of jeans, a T-shirt with some sort of pattern in blue and green, and I see a small sneaker, just one. What happened to her other shoe and her underwear? What about a jacket or socks, and if she had a phone where is it?
“If it turns out this insurance investigator is connected to Gracie Smithers”—Lucy seems to be in my thoughts—“then you’ll know something seriously bad is going on.”
“I already know it’s seriously bad, and you say that as if you’re expecting it is, as if you have a reason to.” I look at her and don’t like what I sense.
A shadow behind her eyes, something dark and impenetrable, and I ask her and she says she’s fine. It’s not important. I reply that everything is.
“What is it that you think isn’t important?” I then ask.
“I don’t like to give energy to things like this.”
“Like what?”
“Okay,” she says. “There are too many weird things going on and people are starting to look at me funny. Not that I haven’t dealt with it before but not here.”
I pause us in the empty corridor. Just ahead is histology with its microtomes, tissue embedding stations and slide warmers. No one is there at this hour. It’s rare for lab workers to stay beyond five. Lucy and I are completely alone.
“What people?”
“When Jen came back from the Nari crime scene she made one of her typical comments to Bryce and of course he couldn’t resist telling me instantly. But he’s starting to act a little flighty as if I make him nervous.”
“Bryce is always flighty.”
“She needs to stop saying things about me. She needs to stop Googling.”
Lucy has never pretended to like Jen Garate and was against my hiring her. Now this, I think.
“How objective can you be about her when you had your mind made up from day one, Lucy.”
“It’s a lot of things, Aunt Kay. Things that aren’t provable and there’s nothing worse.”
“Than what?”
“Than when people start acting unsure. Paranoid. And whatever they’re thinking they won’t say it. They just give you a lot of space.”
“Not you too,” I reply. “What’s wrong with everyone? It’s as if my workplace no longer has gravity and my staff’s chemistry is altered.”
It was better when Marino worked here. Somehow he provided ballast.
“What comments are you talking about? What things are being Googled?” I ask as I think about what Jen said to me earlier today.
Her remark about Lucy flying in prohibited airspace was provocative.
“She wondered where was I this morning when Jamal Nari was shot and mentioned she wouldn’t blame me for offing him after the way he dissed you at the White House. Bryce said she was joking of course.” Lucy acts as if she doesn’t care, and I’m reminded of how foolish people can be.
No one with common sense would engage her in a battle, and the more she acts like it doesn’t matter, the more I’m sure it does. Lucy has patience. She’s stoical. She’ll bide her
time and then one day the Jen Garates of the world won’t have any idea what just happened to them.
“There’s no place for behavior like that,” I reply. “And I don’t understand why she would make a joke about any homicide, much less imply you might have a motive for shooting someone. It certainly isn’t funny.”
“I’ve shot people before. That’s why the FBI and ATF were happy to send me packing. There are other rumors out there from when I had my own security service.”
It’s a euphemism for paramilitary government contracts that we don’t discuss.
“Does Jen know your history?” I ask.
“There’s information on the Internet. More than there used to be. About my past especially.”
“Why?”
“Blogs that paint me as dangerous and crazy.”
“You must have an idea who’s doing it and why,” I reply because it’s so damn rare she can’t find out whatever she wants.
But she says she doesn’t. Not really. Not quite. Nothing she can prove, and there’s that word again. Something she needs to prove, and I’m not convinced she doesn’t have a clue. I worry that she might.
“Let’s be honest. If you went down a list I don’t look so good,” Lucy says and something has tilted her axis.
She seems a strange mixture of energized and slightly spooked. And I also detect excitement.
“If I didn’t work for myself no one would hire me except you,” she says. “And you shouldn’t have and we both know it.”
“No one has justification to go down any list.”
“Behind my back Jen calls me Hack. She says I’m in everybody’s email.”
“You probably are. And it sounds like competitiveness and jealousy to me,” I decide.
We’re walking again. The anthropology lab is just ahead.
CHAPTER 26
THE LIGHTS ARE ON and forensic anthropologist Alex Delgado is bent over an examination table covered with a blue cloth. He’s looking at a femur, stained brown and damaged, the head of it gone, possibly gnawed off by animals.