“And their relationship intensified when he started getting in trouble.”
“Adjustment disorders, breakdowns aren’t uncommon when kids change schools.” His eyes move from mirror to mirror. “Leo began high school last fall. He went from a public school to having a full scholarship at a prestigious private academy and quickly began undergoing behavioral changes.”
Beyond silvery guardrails houses are tucked back, some of them big and from an era when land wasn’t subdivided and highways were cow paths. Benton continues checking his mirrors without turning his head, and it’s not traffic he’s monitoring.
“Compounded by his dysfunctional home,” he says. “A submissive unsupportive mother, a father whose alcohol abuse has reached the point where he’s out of work and in serious debt.”
Headlights in the lanes opposite and behind us are blindingly bright. I watch Benton watching his mirrors as I look at what Lucy has sent. I continue to ponder it. I continue to think how things get broken with no hope of being fixed. Law enforcement can be one of them, and corruption in the Department of Justice isn’t new to us. Rand Bloom used to work for DOJ. That’s what he did before he went to work for TBP Insurers.
“Are you worried we’re being followed?” I ask as Benton checks his side mirror now, both hands on the wheel, his index fingers on the paddle shifters.
“A pickup truck has been behind us on and off for the past ten miles.”
“Don’t tell me it’s a gray Ford.” All I can see in my side mirror is the glare of headlights and I resist turning around and looking.
Benton recites the plate number and it really is outrageous. Bloom is doing it again. But it can’t be him.
“White, clean-shaven, a thin face, short light-colored hair peeking out of a cap.” Benton is describing someone else, and he’s disappointed. “Glasses. Not dark glasses. Regular glasses. Tailgating. I could call him in for reckless driving but that’s about it. If it was Bloom we could trump up something to have him pulled over. But I don’t know who this is.”
“But it’s Bloom’s truck.”
“It doesn’t matter. I wish it did.”
“We have to do something, Benton.”
“I don’t make traffic stops. Even if I did I’m driving my personal car.”
“But we’re being harassed.”
“That’s not provable,” Benton replies and then I think of what Leo said.
They.
“Get hold of Marino and let him know. If he wants to get the state police involved it’s up to him but I seriously doubt he will,” Benton says. “There’s no probable cause to pull over the truck unless it’s been reported stolen. And then it won’t be us doing it. Whoever it is knows we’ve got nothing. He’s being a jerk and that’s not against the law.”
I call Marino’s cell phone and when he answers I can tell he’s driving. I explain what’s going on. He says he just left Bloom’s apartment complex and he wasn’t there and neither is the truck.
“I’ll check with dispatch and get right back to you,” Marino adds.
He does in minutes, and the truck is still close behind us.
“I got no idea,” Marino announces and I have him on speakerphone, the volume up as high as it will go. “The truck hasn’t been reported stolen and Bloom’s not answering his phone. Supposedly people he works with haven’t heard from him since midafternoon and sometimes he lets people borrow his truck. Maybe he did that to throw us off because I’m sure he figured we’d be bringing him in for questioning. So he’s flown the coop and is giving you the absentee finger.”
“Does he live with anyone?” I ask.
“By himself in a one-bedroom apartment in Charlestown, which is where I just was. He didn’t answer his door.”
“What about a warrant for his arrest? Do you have that?” I hope.
“Refresh my memory, Doc. What did he do?” Marino sounds angry and defeated. When he feels that way he’s sarcastic. “And you said it’s not him in the truck anyway. We got no probable cause at this point. All I can do is question him when he turns up.”
“Can the state police check to see who’s driving his truck?”
“There’s no probable cause,” he repeats. “It’s not against the law to drive another person’s truck unless it’s stolen. And his registration is current. He’s got no outstanding warrants or violations. Believe me I’ve checked.”
“So someone can have a good time tailing us to a crime scene and there’s nothing anyone can do.” Now I’m frustrated beyond belief.
“Welcome to my world,” Marino says. “You damn sure it’s the same truck?”
“Absolutely. It’s been following us for the past fifteen minutes or so but we don’t recognize the person in it.”
“It’s probably some dirtbag Bloom works with,” Marino decides. “It seems to be TBP’s policy to follow people, to do whatever they can to frighten and distract the shit out of them. Unfortunately he’s not their only investigator.”
I end the call and say to Benton, “I feel as if we’re in the middle of some nightmarish nexus.”
“Then let’s separate what’s connected.” He’s flatline calm, the way he gets when he’s on high alert and not to be trifled with. “Let’s reduce it to discrete parts. Starting with Leo’s relationship with Joanna, who certainly has been in Bloom’s sights ever since her husband sued Emerson Academy for twenty million dollars.”
“Let’s be honest. That’s a crazy amount.”
“Aim high and get what you get. You know how it goes.”
“I certainly do.”
“But with Bloom there’s no room for negotiation.” Benton slows down and the truck is close behind us, relentless now and not subtle about it, as if the driver knows he’s gotten a rise out of us. “His M.O. is to further injure and neutralize.”
The suit was filed last September and the insurance company offered to settle for ten thousand dollars, an insulting amount that wouldn’t have covered Nari’s legal fees up to that point. The litigation took the usual course with him opting to take the school to court and to go after TBP for unfair practices, Lucy has let us know that and much more.
“Joanna’s friendship with Leo presented Bloom with a perfect opportunity for extortion,” Benton adds, and the high cab of the truck on the rear of his low-slung car makes me feel we are about to get run over.
“Imagine what she was going to get thrown at her during the trial,” I reply. “She and her husband probably didn’t have a clue who they were dealing with.” A corrupt former government enforcement official, and the irony is that Rand Bloom’s associations and machinations had nothing to do with the assault that disfigured his face.
By all accounts it was random when a homeless person approached his car at a traffic light and beat Bloom with a steel tactical baton, shattering an orbit and cheek and knocking out his front teeth. The incident occurred in Washington, D.C., two years ago, assailant unknown, and I don’t believe that part at all. Bloom was uncharacteristically sketchy and passive when questioned about it, Lucy let us know, and I have a feeling that in someone’s mind a message was sent and Bloom wasn’t going to argue with it.
At the time, he was a lawyer for the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section and embroiled in a contentious investigation that has me reeling. TBP had been reported for alleged campaign violations in Congressman Bob Rosado’s 2008 reelection and a grand jury had been convened. There was no indictment, not even a fine with the Federal Election Commission even though it wasn’t the first time TBP had been accused of illegal campaign contributions and bribery. Last summer, Bloom left DOJ and TBP hired him.
Benton watches his mirrors, slowing down more, well below the speed limit now.
“The underside of the rotten log that no one wants to talk about,” he says in the same flat tone that belies what he really feels. “Public I
ntegrity, white-collar crime, what we’re trained to investigate and prosecute offers the opportunity to abuse power and cozy up to bad guys. Criminal Intelligence analysts become hired guns for murderers, and sleazes like Bloom manipulate the system and make a hell of a lot more money in the private sector. I have no doubt he ensured the outcomes of investigations through promises and backroom deals with influential special interest groups.”
“Which I suspect is the insurance company’s SOP,” I reply. “And maybe Congressman Rosado’s too, and here we are on the way to his house and Bloom’s damn truck is tailing us.”
“And I’ve had enough,” Benton says.
“Just ignore it.”
“I’ll show you how I ignore things.”
He suddenly cuts into the left lane, downshifts, and the speed drops with whiplash abruptness before he swoops in behind the gray Ford’s shiny chrome rear bumper, menacingly close, in a low gear, the RPMs high, the engine roaring. Then he floors it, back into the left lane, staying parallel with the truck’s driver’s door for a second, maybe two.
“Fuck you,” Benton says, and we scream ahead.
At 110 the highway opens up as if we are the only ones on it, and he downshifts, suddenly slowing, the engine rumbling and spitting. The truck doesn’t try to catch up, and it couldn’t possibly. We can’t see it anymore and I barely got a glimpse of the driver. Someone small and fair with oversized square-rimmed glasses; the person seemed to be smiling, and an unsettled feeling stirs. I’m not sure of gender. The driver might not be a man.
“I made my point,” Benton says.
“But who? We should know who the hell that is.” I’m startled by what Benton just did and also by what Joanna Cather said to Marino and me.
Months leading up to his murder, her husband claimed a pickup truck had begun following him after dark, the driver wearing glasses and a cap. Someone had appeared at the bathroom window in their apartment and they began keeping the shades down. Jamal Nari wasn’t being paranoid and I no longer believe the person spying was Rand Bloom or at least he wasn’t the only one.
They.
“More harassment, giving us the finger, I think Marino’s right.” Benton is explaining what isn’t logical because if that’s how he really felt he wouldn’t be acting this way.
His sudden flare of threatening behavior on the highway isn’t typical of his discipline, which borders on stony, and I look at his sharp profile illuminated by headlights of oncoming traffic, at the hard set of his mouth. I feel his coiled aggression. For a flicker I detect his fury.
WE DRIVE DEEPER INTO the rugged North Shore, winding east to Revere Beach and its former amusement park called Wonderland, now a rapid transit station for the Blue Line.
I think out loud about individual cases, about discrete parts we need to isolate. Patty Marsico, Johnny Angiers, Jamal Nari, Leo Gantz, I spell it out, and now fourteen-year-old Gracie Smithers murdered at Bob Rosado’s house. I try to fit the pieces together, looking at every angle, revisiting every detail, and next I think of the two homicides in New Jersey and the tweets we can’t trace.
Everything that’s happening can’t simply be about money. There’s got to be more to it than insurance claims, extortion or a wealthy congressman protecting his power and position, and I unlock my phone and log on to the CFC database. I find Patty Marsico’s case. I skim through the police report, the scene photographs, refreshing my memory as I think back to her autopsy and what I was deposed about.
Sixty-one years old, a cancer survivor in the midst of a divorce, she was checking on an unfurnished oceanfront home after a nor’easter, and TBP’s attorneys argued that the brutal homicide was the work of someone she knew. It was personal and the implication was her estranged husband let himself into the house and beat and drowned her, then took his time drinking beer and cleaning up with bleach. I enlarge a photograph of the nude body suspended by electrical cords tied around the wrists and looped over a ceiling pipe in the flooded basement. I remember standing in the water, feeling its coldness through my rubber boots. I remember sensing evil.
I felt it inside the house and later when I was walking the grounds and the beach with Benton and Lucy. I felt it when we headed back to the airport where Lucy’s helicopter waited. Nothing more than intuition, and while I don’t rely on gut feelings I also don’t ignore them. We have them for a reason, to survive, and a part of my brain was aware of someone being aware of us.
“Patty Marsico had injuries from her head being slammed against a flat surface,” I remind Benton. “Fingertip bruises on her upper arms and shoulders from being grabbed and held down as the person drowned her in three inches of water. Her clothing was bloodstained and soaking wet indicating it was removed after she was dead.”
“And the killer folded it and placed it inside a kayak that was floating aimlessly when we got there,” Benton says. “A gesture that was mocking.”
CHAPTER 35
I CAN SEE IT VIVIDLY. Water had poured in from flood-level tides, and when I waded closer to the colorful sea kayak it rocked and drifted away from me like a riderless horse, like a ghost ship.
The killer had placed Patty Marsico’s coat, linen pants, blouse and undergarments on top of the cushioned seat, and I remember her pocketbook and keys were upstairs on a table in the foyer, her loafers scattered nearby. She had just entered the house when someone terrified her right out of her shoes.
“Mockery and a total indifference to life,” Benton says. “Sexual pleasure from terrorizing and imagining how people will react.”
“There was no sign of sexual assault,” I remind him.
“The sexual gratification came from the violence.” He studied the scene when he was there, taking in every detail silently, oddly, like a peculiar savant. “But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a motive,” he says. “I’ve always felt there was, that Patty Marsico was a problem for someone.”
“Her husband? He wanted to collect insurance money that he wouldn’t be entitled to after the divorce? And he staged her death to look like a sexual homicide? That’s what TBP wants everyone to think.”
“It’s not what happened and there’s no evidence her husband was ever inside the house, which is one of many reasons why he’s never been arrested,” Benton says. “He also has an alibi. He was at work. It was witnessed by at least half a dozen people.”
On North Shore Road now we cross Pines River, and the water is dark and empty on both sides of the bridge. To our right, the Broad Sound is as black as outer space. The GPS says we have ten miles to go. At the speed limit it will take us almost twenty minutes.
“Gracie Smithers.” I get to what is bothering me most.
“I’m considering the same thing.” Relaxed and driving smoothly, he has his left hand on the wheel and I reach for his right one.
I lace my fingers in his and feel his warm smooth skin, the tension in the fine muscles, the tapered hardness of his bones. He glances over at me as we talk.
“She was incapacitated by having her head slammed against a flat surface, then held down in water, her cause of death drowning,” I point out. “A murder that was staged and it feels like an ambush unless she was abducted which I seriously doubt.”
Gracie’s parents didn’t know she was gone until they got up early this morning in their Salem home, Investigator Henderson told me some three hours ago after he was assigned to the case. The Smitherses called the police and almost simultaneously their daughter’s body was discovered some five miles southeast in Marblehead Neck. A Realtor checking on the Rosado house noticed a vodka bottle near the pool, the cover partially pulled back.
Henderson went on to tell me that at some point late last night when Gracie’s parents thought she was asleep she snuck out her bedroom window. He believes she was meeting someone and that this person was Troy Rosado. He’s known to party at Salem State College where Gracie’s father teaches eco
nomics, and several days ago he spotted Troy and Gracie at the college ATM. She was forbidden to see the troubled nineteen-year-old again.
Conveniently the congressman’s son is now nowhere to be found, it seems. Henderson contacted Troy’s mother who claimed he’s supposed to fly to Florida early tomorrow morning for a weekend of scuba diving with the family. She’s certain that if the investigator checked he’d find Troy packing up his room on the boy’s residential campus of Needham Academy, getting ready to come home for the summer. For privacy and security reasons she refused to release information about the private jet he’s scheduled to be on.
“The important question is whether Gracie Smithers’s murder was premeditated or did something get out of hand?” Benton says as we pass through Swampscott on 129 and the darkness around us is almost complete. “Was there expediency in her being killed and I continue to ask the same thing about Patty Marsico.”
I envision the murders as if they’re happening before my eyes, and what doesn’t fit is that Gracie was killed by an impulse-driven teenaged boy.
“He might have gotten sexually aggressive with her,” I explain. “Things might have gotten out of hand. But I find it improbable that he murdered her and then had the organization and cool to pull the cover back from the pool and stage an accidental drowning.”
“I tend to agree.” Benton slowly strokes my hand with his thumb. “And if someone else in fact killed her then this person must have been on the property with them.”
“If this isn’t about money then what?”
“Whatever is of value. Money is obvious. But equally worth killing for is information.”
“Such as being an unwitting observer, being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I suggest.
“Exactly,” Benton says. “Patty Marsico and Gracie Smithers might have known something even if they had no idea they did.”
In the distance are the scattered lights of Marblehead Neck and beyond are the harbor and the sea. I’m worried about how dark it is, the moon and stars obliterated by building clouds but waiting until morning isn’t an option. If word gets out that I believe Gracie Smithers is a homicide then the actual scene of her death may be tampered with. I worry it already has been. I need to see the saltwater pool and I need a sample of the sediment at the bottom of it, and I need to be ahead of heavy rain and winds that are closing in. Moments ago big drops spattered the windshield and then we drove out of it. But advancing thunderstorms will catch up with us soon.