“No drugs in the apartment?” Win frowns. It makes no sense. “What about alcohol in the apartment?”
“Looking,” she says.
“Anything on her autopsy report that might indicate she had a history of alcohol abuse, drug abuse?”
“No mention that I can find.”
“Then why would someone suggest she might have a history of drug use? What about her trash? Anything found in her trash? What about her medicine cabinet? What was removed from the scene?”
“Here we go,” Stump says. “A used syringe with a bent needle in a wastepaper basket. In the bathroom. And in the medicine cabinet, a vial of an unknown substance.”
“Certainly the vial must have gone to the lab. The syringe, as well. No report on those?”
“Evidence, evidence . . .” Talking to herself, looking through the files. “Yes, the syringe and vial were submitted. Negative for drugs. Says the vial had, and I quote, ‘an oily solution in it with unknown particulate.’ ”
“Keep going,” Win says, writing as fast as he can. “What else was recovered from the scene?”
“Her clothes,” Stump reads. “Skirt, blouse, stockings, shoes . . . You can see them in the photos. Her purse, wallet. A keychain with a Saint Christopher’s medal—glad he protected her—and two keys. One an apartment key, the other a key to her office at Perkins, it says here. Those things were by the door, on the floor. Dumped out of her purse.”
“Let me look again.” Win takes all of the photographs from her, spends some time studying each one.
The scene, the morgue. Nothing he didn’t notice earlier, except the scenario is making less sense to him. Her bed was made, and it appears she was dressed for work when she was attacked. A vial found, a used syringe, an unknown substance. Negative drug and alcohol screen.
“Dermatitis on her torso. A rash,” Stump reads. “Maybe some sexually transmitted disease? Examination conducted by a Dr. William Hunter, Harvard’s Department of Legal Medicine.”
“Used to do the medico-legal investigations for the state police,” Win says. “Back in the late thirties, the forties. Started by Frances Glessner Lee, this amazing woman into forensics way before her time. Unfortunately, the department she funded doesn’t exist anymore.”
“You think any of the evidence would still be left?” Stump asks. “Maybe at the Boston ME’s office?”
“Wasn’t around back then,” Win says. “Not until the early eighties. Pathologists at Harvard worked cases as a public service. Any existing records would be at Countway Medical Library at Harvard. But they don’t warehouse evidence. And digging around in there could take years.”
He looks at photographs taken in Janie Brolin’s bedroom. Ransacked drawers, clothing scattered on the floor. Perfume bottles, a hairbrush on top of a dresser, and something else. A pair of dark glasses.
Puzzled, he says, “Why do people who are blind or visually impaired wear dark glasses?”
Stump replies, “I guess to alert others that they’re blind. And for self-conscious reasons—to cover their eyes.”
“Right. It’s not about the weather. About it being sunny,” Win says. “I’m not saying that blind eyes aren’t sensitive to light, but that’s not why blind people wear dark glasses, including indoors. Here.” He shows Stump the photograph. “If she were dressed for work, waiting to be picked up, and was ready to go, then why were her dark glasses in her bedroom? Why wasn’t she wearing them? Why didn’t she have them with her?”
“It was raining, a dark, gloomy day . . .”
“But blind people don’t wear dark glasses because of the weather. You just said it yourself,” he says.
“Maybe she forgot them for some reason. Maybe she was in the bedroom when someone showed up, interrupted her. Could be a number of reasons.”
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we should go get something to eat,” Win says.
EIGHT
Nine p.m. The FBI’s field office in Boston. Special Agent McClure uses the Cyber Task Force’s network sniffer to capture Internet traffic of interest.
Specifically, data that fit the profile of e-mail sent from Monique Lamont’s IP address and received from another address, also in Cambridge. She’s been busy of late, and McClure has to surf through all of her communications, even if they couldn’t possibly have anything to do with terrorism and the suspicion she’s funding it through a Romanian children’s-relief fund that may very well be connected to a nonprofit organization called FOIL. The FBI is becoming increasingly convinced there’s a growing terrorist cell in Cambridge, and Lamont is financially supporting it.
Wouldn’t surprise McClure in the least. All those radical students—Harvard, Tufts, MIT—who believe the Constitution ensures that they can do and say pretty much anything they want, even if it’s anti-American. For example, holding demonstrations to oppose the war in Iraq, rallying for separation of church and state, disrespecting the flag, and, most personally offensive to the Bureau, vehement attacks on the Patriot Act, which rightly allows the very thing McClure is this moment doing: spying on a private citizen without a court order so other private citizens can be protected from other terrorist attacks or the fear of them. Understandably, there are misfires. Bank accounts, medical records, e-mails, telephone conversations that turn out to be unfortunate violations of people who turn out to have no terrorist involvement whatsoever.
The way McClure views it, however, is that almost everyone who is spied on is guilty of something. Like that John Deere salesman in Iowa a few months back who suddenly came up with enough cash to pay off the fifty thousand dollars he owed various credit-card companies. When his account was automatically flagged, further investigation revealed he had a second cousin whose college roommate’s nephew married a woman whose sister’s stepdaughter was, for a while, the lesbian lover of a woman whose best friend was a secretary at the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Ottawa. Maybe the John Deere salesman wasn’t involved in terrorism, but as it turned out, he was buying marijuana allegedly for medical purposes because of alleged nausea due to chemotherapy treatments.
McClure reads an e-mail sent to Lamont in real time.
I won’t withdraw this easily. How can you, after all you’ve invested in the only true and pure passion you’ve ever had in your life? Problem is, you want it until it no longer suits, as if it’s yours alone to walk away from, and guess what? This time you’re into something you can’t control. I’m capable of causing destruction that will exceed anything you could possibly imagine. It’s time I show you exactly what I mean. The usual place, tomorrow night at ten.—Me.
Lamont replies.
Okay.
Special Agent McClure forwards the e-mail to Jeremy Killien at Scotland Yard, and writes:
Project FOIL reaching critical mass.
The hell with it, McClure thinks twice. Who cares what time it is over there? Scotland Yard guys can be yanked out of bed the same way FBI agents can. Why should Killien get special consideration? In fact, it would be a pleasure to annoy Detective Superintendent Sherlock. The damn Brits. What have they done except focus on Lamont because of her latest publicity stunt, which caused them to find out she’s under investigation, which in turn forced the Bureau to step things up so the Yard doesn’t take the credit. It wasn’t the Brits who first flagged her as a potential terrorist threat, after all, and now they think they can storm in and steal the Bureau’s thunder.
McClure makes the call.
A couple of British-sounding rings, and Killien’s sleepy British voice.
“Read your e-mail,” McClure says to him.
“Hold on.” Not exactly gracious about it.
McClure can hear Killien carrying the portable phone into another room. Hears keys clicking, muttering “damn bloody slow” and “almost got it up. Well, that didn’t come out right, did it. There we are. Good God. Don’t like the sound of that.”
&nbs
p; “I think we need to move on it,” McClure advises. “Don’t see how it can wait. Question’s whether you want to be here. On such short notice. I understand it’s not . . .”
“No option there,” Killien interrupts. “I’ll make my arrangements straightaway.”
Win apologizes for serving tomatoes that aren’t homegrown.
“As if I don’t know. I happen to be an expert in produce,” Stump says, sitting some distance from him in his living room. “In fact, you’ll probably think this is an awful confession for me to make, but my real job is my market. My father started it from nothing, and it would break his heart if I let him down. But about tomatoes. An insider’s tip. Best ones are from Ver rill Farm, but we’ve got a couple months to go, depending on how much rain we get. I love being a cop, but the market loves me back.”
The lights are low, his apartment filled with the tantalizing aroma of hickory-smoked bacon. Fresh tomatoes or not, the BLT Win fixed tastes about as good as anything she’s ever eaten, and the French Chablis he opened is crisp and clean and perfect. Stump looks out at a typical Cambridge view. Old brick buildings, slate roofs, and lighted windows. When he suggested getting something to eat, she assumed he meant a late-night dinner, was excited and unnerved when he suggested his place. She should have said no. She watches him eating his sandwich and sipping his wine, and feels even more certain that she should have said no. When he lit a candle on the coffee table and turned out the lights, she knew for a fact she’d just made a tactical error.
She sets down her place, says, “I really should be going.”
“Not polite to eat and run.”
“You can call me tomorrow if you need more help. But . . .” She starts to get up but seems to be made of stone.
“You’re scared of me, aren’t you?” he says in the soft, moving light. “Were scared of me long before I got thrown into this case and then pulled you down with me.”
“I don’t know you. And I tend to be wary of the unfamiliar. Especially if I try to put together pieces and they don’t fit.”
“What pieces?”
“Where do I start?”
“Wherever you want. Then I’ll get to all your pieces that don’t fit.” His eyes pick up the candlelight.
“I think I need another glass of wine,” she says.
“Was just about to do that.” He refills their glasses, the leather couch creaking as he moves close.
She smells him, feels his arm barely brushing her sleeve, feels his presence like gravity. Pulling her in.
“Um. Well.” Sips her wine. “Start with this. Why do they call you Geronimo?”
“Not sure who they are. But why don’t you venture a guess. This should be good.”
“A mighty warrior. Always on the warpath. Maybe someone who makes potentially fatal leaps. Remember when we were kids? You jump off the high dive and yell ‘Geronimo’ ?”
“Didn’t have access to a pool when I was a kid.”
“Oh, no. You’re not going to give me some discrimination sob story, are you? I happen to know that when you were a kid, people of color were allowed in public schools.”
“Didn’t say it was about discrimination. I just didn’t have access to a pool. The they you’re talking about is my grandmother. She’s the one who nicknamed me Geronimo. Not because of his warrior status or fatal leaps or whatever but because of his eloquence. He said, ‘I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us. And the sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say.’ ”
Something catches in her chest. “I don’t see the connection,” she says.
“Between those words and the person sitting next to you? Maybe I’ll tell you, but it’s your turn. Why Stump? Honestly speaking? I can’t think of any good reason for anybody to call you Stump.”
“The World War Two Navy destroyer, USS Stump,” she says.
“I thought that might be it.”
“Seriously. My father came here to escape Mussolini, every horror you can think of when you conjure up that monstrous period of history. One that I hope to hell is never repeated, or I’ll believe our entire civilization is damned.”
“I worry we’re already damned. Worry about it more every day. I’d probably move if there was a good place to run.”
“Imagine how the old-timers feel. My dad watches the news three, four hours a day, says he keeps hoping if he watches long enough, things will get better. He’s depressed. Sees a psychiatrist. I pay out of pocket because . . . Well, don’t get me started on health coverage and all the rest of it. When I was a kid, he started calling me Stump because of the war hero the ship was named after. Admiral Felix Stump, known for his gallantry, his fearlessness. The ship named after him had the motto: ‘Tenacity: Foundation of Victory.’ My father always said the secret to success is simply not giving up. Kind of a cool thing to tell a little girl.”
“When you had your motorcycle accident, didn’t it ever occur to you to change your nickname?”
“And how do you do that?” She looks at him, and for reasons she can’t fathom, what he just said hurts. “People have called you Stump most of your life and suddenly you tell them, ‘Hey, now that half my leg’s been amputated, don’t call me Stump anymore.’ It would be like not calling you Geronimo anymore because you got whacked out and leapt off your balcony or something, paralyzed yourself.”
“I’m not reading into this that you might have had suicidal thoughts when you crashed your motorcycle into a guardrail, am I?”
Reaching for her wine, she says, “I don’t guess Lamont’s ever mentioned my accident. Since she never’s really mentioned me, according to you.”
“She’s never mentioned you, according to her. Never once except the other morning when she said I’d be working with you. Which, by the way, wasn’t true at that time, because you had no intention of helping.”
“There’s good reason why she doesn’t talk about me,” Stump says. “And there’s good reason why she’ll probably always regret I didn’t die in that accident.”
Win is quiet for a moment, looking out the window, drinking his wine. She feels his distance, as if the air between them just got cooler, and anxiety and guilt rush back at her with force. What she’s doing is wrong. What she’s done is wrong. She gets up from the couch.
“Thanks,” she says. “I’d best head out.”
He doesn’t move. Just stares out the window. The candlelight moving on his profile makes her ache.
“If you need any further help with reports, other paperwork, well, I’m happy to. Anytime,” she says.
He turns his head, looks up at her. “What?”
“I’m saying it’s not a problem. No big deal.” Her feet don’t want to move. “You forget who you’re talking to.” Why doesn’t she shut up. “I know when someone has a hard time reading. Another one of those pieces that doesn’t fit. Yet one more way you fool people.” She’s suddenly on the verge of tears. “I don’t know why you feel you have to lie about it. To me. I’ve known it for about as long as I’ve known you. All those times you come in my shop, ask clever questions to disguise the fact that you can’t read the ingredients on a damn jar of marinara sauce. . . .”
He stands up, moves close to her, almost menacingly.
“ You’ve got to get past it, that’s all,” she says, and it crosses her mind that he might hurt her.
Maybe she’s goading him into it. Because she deserves it, after what she’s done.
“Then both of us are lame,” he says.
“That’s a terrible word. Don’t ever use it around me. Don’t ever use it around yourself,” she says.
He grips her shoulders, is inches from her face, as if he’s about to kiss her, and her heart pounds so hard it throbs in her neck.
“What happened between you and Lamont?” he says. “You asked me the same question. Now I’m asking you.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“How the hell do you know what I think?”
“I know exactly what you think. Exactly what somebody like you would think. All guys like you think about is sex. So if something happens that someone can’t talk about, it has to be about sex. Well, what she did to me is about sex, all right.”
She pulls him down to the couch, forces his hand on her lower leg, knocks it against her prosthesis, and it makes a hollow sound.
“Don’t,” he says, almost on top of her, the light of the candle gently shaking the darkness. “Don’t do this,” he says, sitting up.
“The night we were at Sacco’s. She drank at least a bottle of wine by herself, went on about her father, this aristocrat, rich, some internationally prominent lawyer, and how she never meant anything to him and how much she feared it had messed her up, made her act out in ways she didn’t really understand and was sorry about later. Well, there’s this guy, and he’s been staring at her, flirting with her all night. She ends up bringing him back to my house, and they go at it in my bedroom. I’m the one who slept on the couch.”
Silence. Win starts rubbing the back of her neck.
“He was this loser, this stupid, crude, ignorant loser, and as luck would have it, a convicted felon she’d sent to prison a few years earlier. Of course, she didn’t remember. All the people who go through her court, so many damn cases you can’t remember faces, names. But he remembered her. Which is why he hit on her in the bar to begin with.”
“She did something stupid,” Win says quietly. “And you were there to see it. Is it really such a big deal?”
“It was to pay her back. To screw her good, as he put it. To screw her worse than she screwed him, he was yelling that morning on his way out my door. Then what does she do? She pulls his case, does a little digging, finds out he’s in violation of his parole. Goes back to jail for six months, a year, I don’t remember. One day, he and a couple of his redneck buddies see me filling my Harley at a Mobil station on Route Two, follow me, and he starts whooping at me out his window, yelling, making sure I saw his face right before he ran me into the guardrail.”