“What became an unfixable failure,” I add.
THE CRIMINAL ARTIFICIAL Intelligence Network known as CAIN morphed into the Trilogy program, a massive effort on the part of the FBI to modernize its outdated information technology.
The project was finally abandoned about a decade ago after wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, and I can’t help but wonder how much of this was Carrie’s fault.
“More precisely,” I’m saying to Marino, “I wonder how much was of her divining because nothing would suit her better than to be pitted against inadequate software and data management that she in fact may have manipulated and sabotaged during its inception.”
“You got that right and exactly my point. A genius mad scientist like her?” Marino says. “You really think she couldn’t wreak havoc on anything she wants? Especially if it’s got to do with communication technology or computers?”
“So could Lucy,” I remind him. “And I’ll just keep emphasizing that unfortunate truth. She created CAIN, and virtually anything Carrie can do? So can Lucy. That’s the way the FBI would think about it. That would be their justification for going after Lucy. They can blame her and assign means and motives to anything they want because she’s capable. It’s believable. And it suits them, let’s be honest.”
“Then maybe Carrie turned on the music to piss them off and get Lucy into trouble. Double the pleasure, double the fun,” Marino says. “Screwing with the sound system is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. It’s not against the law but it’s stupid. We don’t know that Carrie didn’t do it to entertain herself.”
“I’m not saying she isn’t capable,” I reply. “But I’m betting it was Janet and Lucy deciding to treat Erin Loria and her compatriots to a concert.”
“They shouldn’t be doing shit like that. They’re playing right into Carrie’s hands.”
“We can’t let anyone determine how we act. That’s true. Specifically it’s true that Carrie wants to control and change us. That’s always been what she wants.”
“And here I thought what she wanted was all of us dead.”
“One way or another and eventually that’s the plan I’m sure,” I reply.
“Lucy needs to be careful about getting in people’s faces right now. Maybe you can talk to her when things calm down. She doesn’t need to be making things worse than they already are.”
“How could they be worse, Marino? The FBI showed up with a warrant. Agents have been walking out the door with her belongings, violating her entire existence.” I turn up the wipers as high as they’ll go and they sound like an angry metronome throwing a tantrum.
“What could be worse is they arrest her and lock her up without bail.” Marino smokes the cigarette down to the filter. “And don’t think they can’t do it. She owns a helicopter and a jet. She’s a pilot. She has a ton of money. They’ll argue she’s a flight risk and the judge will rule in the FBI’s favor. Especially if there’s a judge behind the scenes who has an agenda—a federal judge like Erin Loria’s husband. The first thing we should be asking is the timing for the sting operation. Why strike now?”
Today’s date enters my mind again. August 15. The two-month anniversary of when Carrie shot me.
What I say is “You’re right. Why today? Or is the timing random?”
“I don’t know about random but I also can’t think of anything important.”
“Exactly two months ago Carrie attacked me.” I shouldn’t have to remind him.
“But how would that be important to the FBI? Why would that date motivate them? I don’t see how it would matter.”
“It’s more likely to matter to Carrie.”
“Well we can be sure they’re looking for probable cause to get Lucy indicted for something. I don’t know what but I think we can make an educated guess about who it relates to,” Marino says. “Prison would be the end of Lucy. She wouldn’t survive, and Carrie would love that …”
“Let’s stay out of such a fatalistic airspace.” I don’t want to hear his Doomsday predictions, and I can barely restrain myself from admitting the truth to him.
I want to tell him about the videos even as I continue to entertain the same troubling questions. What if the FBI has seen them? What if the FBI texted them to entrap me and anybody else I might involve? I don’t know who to trust, not even my own attorney Jill Donoghue the more I think about it, and when I’m this unsure of anything I’m careful. I’m deliberate and calculating.
“The problem is once an investigation gets in gear good luck stopping it.” Marino is painting more fear-inducing scenarios. “The Feds don’t let something go unless they got no choice, unless the grand jury comes back with a no bill and that almost never happens. Lucy’s goose would be cooked. No grand jury is going to have any sympathy for a fired federal agent who’s filthy rich and comes across the way she does …”
“I suggest we keep our attention on what we’re doing.” I absolutely can’t stand to hear his dire projections about her, and I don’t need him to tell me that she doesn’t inspire empathy or even the benefit of the doubt.
“I’m just telling you the facts, Doc.” He pinches out the cigarette, drops it in an empty water bottle and lights up another one, offering it to me. “Here. You need it.”
I think what the hell. I take the Marlboro from him, and there are some things I’ve never stopped being good at. Smoking is one of them. I inhale slowly, deeply and my emotional elevator goes up to a floor I forgot I had. It’s nice, a lot of light and a view, and for an instant I let go of gravity and it lets go of me.
I hold the cigarette in Marino’s direction, giving it back and our fingers brush. I’m always surprised that his sun-weathered skin with its thick coppery hair is soft and silky. I detect his aftershave, spicy and overlaid with a patina of sweat and tobacco smoke. I smell the wet cotton fabric of his cargo shorts and polo shirt.
“You ever try weed when you were young?” He takes another drag, holding the cigarette as if it’s a joint.
“You mean when I was younger?”
“Seriously? I’m betting when you were in law school, tell the truth? All you Ivy Leaguers hanging out smoking weed, arguing about interpretations and precedents and who’s gonna make law review.”
“That wasn’t my experience at Georgetown. But maybe it should have been.” My tone sounds somber and distracted as I continue checking my mirrors.
I stare through thudding wipers at misty lanes of traffic, water spewing from tires ahead and to the left of us. I don’t go above the speed limit. I’m tense, my eyes constantly in my mirrors looking for Carrie. We sweep around the Fresh Pond reservoir and the pockmarked surging water is the color of lead. The noise of something metal rolling in back starts again and stops, and I can’t get Carrie out of my thoughts.
CLANK CLANK CLANK.
“What the hell?” Marino says in a cloud of smoke. “That’s just freakin’ strange.”
“Everything is inside storage lockers and containers.” I go through every possibility I can think of that might account for the noise. “The folded-up stretchers are strapped in. There shouldn’t be anything loose.”
“Maybe one of your scene cases came open. Maybe it’s an evidence bottle, a flashlight, something like that rolling around.”
“I seriously doubt it.” Carrie appears in my mind.
I see her face. I see her wide crazed eyes and the lust smoldering in them as she cut Lucy with the Swiss Army knife. It was the same way Carrie looked at me when she fired the spear gun, and the clattering and clanging in the back of the truck continues. Marino is making the point that the noise wasn’t there earlier.
“And no one has been inside,” he’s saying. “I mean there’s no way anyone went inside it while we were at Lucy’s? You sure? You positive the truck was locked while you were blocking that FBI asshole’s car? Did one of them go inside the truck? Maybe looking for an extra key so they could move it? Did someone try to force open a door and broke somethi
ng and that’s what we hear rolling around?”
“I’m sure it was locked.” I think I am but now that he’s mentioned it I can’t swear to it.
Uncertainty begins to pick at me. When I packed up my equipment midmorning it was right after I got the first Depraved Heart video clip. Maybe I was distracted as I arranged the large plastic cases in the back of the truck. Maybe I forgot to lock the tailgate doors. It’s something I do automatically with a key that also sets and unsets the alarm.
I never leave the back, the cab or any of the access panels unlocked for a number of reasons. Defense attorneys, for example. They’d harangue me about it on the witness stand. They’d have jurors doubting the integrity of any evidence I collected including the dead body itself.
“Jesus,” Marino mutters as whatever is loose in back rolls again and stops with a clank.
“We’re almost there,” I reply. “I’m going to look.”
CHAPTER 29
CARS IN CAMBRIDGE ARE FEW. THEY MOVE SLOWLY with their lights on as we drive near the Harvard campus, headed back to Brattle Street, one of the most prestigious addresses in the United States.
Former residents include George Washington and Longfellow, and the handsome timber-frame two-story house where Chanel Gilbert died was built in the late 1600s. Painted a dusky blue, it’s symmetrical with black shutters, a gray slate roof and a central chimney. Over the centuries most of the original estate was subdivided and sold off, and the only way to reach it is a shared driveway of old interlocking brick pavers in a herringbone pattern.
I carefully bump along in my big truck and park in front, listening to rain pummel and splatter. As I look around I get an uneasy feeling. I get more than one of them. They’re coming in waves as trees rock and thrash in the wind and rain, and I turn off the wipers and the headlights, and the glass is flooded. Ours is the only vehicle in the driveway and that’s not right.
“Where is everyone?” I ask and it sounds like we’re inside a car wash. “Where’s your backup?”
“Damn good question.” Marino is on high alert as he scans the long narrow driveway, the front of the house, the dense old trees shaking and losing leaves in a battering wind.
“I thought you instructed that the property was to be secured.”
“I did.”
“There’s not a police car in sight and where’s the red Range Rover?”
“No kidding. This is fucked up.” Marino releases the thumb snap of the black leather holster on his hip, and thunder rumbles and cracks.
“Did you instruct Vogel, Lapin, maybe Hyde to have it towed to the labs?”
“There was no reason to do that. We weren’t really thinking foul play until now. Maybe Bryce took it upon himself to get it towed after you talked to Anne and Luke and decided this is a homicide.” Marino is scrolling through the contact list on his phone, glancing up every other second, his eyes moving constantly.
“I talked to them not even half an hour ago,” I remind him. “There’s not been time for the Range Rover to have been towed, and certainly I didn’t request it and there’s no way Bryce would have.”
“I sure as hell didn’t tell anybody to tow it.” He wipes condensation off the side window as he stares out, checking the big mirror for the empty stretch of rain-swept driveway behind us. “The Range Rover key was on the kitchen counter and Hyde took a quick look inside it. He said he didn’t see anything interesting. In fact there wasn’t much in it at all and it was his impression maybe it hadn’t been driven in a while. That was what he said, and we didn’t do anything else because we were operating under the assumption there was no crime involved, just an accident. At that time there was no point in thinking about processing her car.”
“What happened to the key after that?”
“I have it and the house key.”
“Obviously there’s a spare unless the Range Rover was hotwired or gotten out of here some other way.” I look around to see if anything else might be missing or altered since we were here midmorning.
The centuries-old house is shrouded in a gray mist that rises up from the rain-splashed earth, and my attention fixes on the solitary strip of crime scene tape barricading the brick front steps. The flimsy yellow plastic tape shivers in the wind and rain, and it wasn’t there earlier. More importantly I notice the absence of scene tape anywhere else. It’s not barricading the kitchen door we used this morning. It’s not wrapped around trees or across the driveway.
Then I spot a fat roll of bright yellow tape abandoned in a flower bed next to wooden bulkhead doors that I assume lead down into the cellar. Apparently someone began securing the perimeter and stopped, leaving the roll where I see it now in a flower bed of purple asters and brown-eyed Susans that are rain-beaten and trampled. I think back to when I was alone in the entranceway and everyone was supposed to be gone except Marino and me.
I inexplicably heard what sounded like a heavy door thudding shut. The one in the basement that led out to the backyard was mysteriously unlocked even though Trooper Vogel claimed to have dead bolted it. Next the kitchen trash was missing and the table was oddly set with a decorative plate taken off the wall. Now the Range Rover is gone. I stare at the old house with its dark windows of wavy glass. Maybe it’s haunted but not by a ghost. Someone has been on the property since we were here last.
“Didn’t I hear you tell your guys to wrap this place in a big yellow bow?” I say to Marino. “Because the only tape I’m seeing is there.” I point at the front of the house. “One strip tied to the railings doesn’t exactly serve the purpose of keeping people out of the house or off the property. Do you know who did it and why the tape roll is over there? It’s as if the person was interrupted and decided to walk around to the side of the house and left the roll in the flower bed before driving off. I can see from here that a lot of the plants near the bulkhead doors have been stepped on or crushed.”
“Hyde or Lapin must have come back after you and me left for Lucy’s place.”
“And then what?”
“Damned if I know.” Marino is looking at his phone. “I texted Hyde when we headed here and he’s not answered. Nothing from Lapin either.”
“When was the last time you heard from either one of them?”
“I talked to Hyde when I called him about the kitchen trash maybe three hours ago. I’m trying him again.” He blows out a breath in loud frustration when the call goes straight to voice mail. “Dammit!”
“They haven’t shown up and you’ve not heard from them. Are we worried?”
“I’m not ready to go there yet. If I instigate a search for either one of them there could be hell to pay. You want to get people into trouble and have them hate you then that’s the way to do it.”
“What about the state police?” I think of Trooper Vogel again. “Is it possible they’ve been here? Could they have towed her Range Rover?”
“Hell no.”
“And the FBI?”
“They better not have been here without telling me. They better not have touched or towed anything.”
“But is that possible? Could the Feds have taken over the investigation and we don’t know? It certainly seems they’re interested.”
“If this was their investigation? By now they’d be crawling all over the place the same way they are Lucy’s property. We wouldn’t be sitting here by our lonesome. We probably couldn’t get back on the driveway much less inside the house.”
“They were in this area earlier up in the helicopter …”
“With Benton.” Marino can’t resist reminding me uncharitably. “He was flying right over us when we were here and then more or less followed us to Lucy’s. So who are they really watching? Who’s he really watching?”
“It’s probably a good idea to assume the FBI is watching all of us.” I kill the engine, and nor’easter-force winds shake the truck as rain floods the front windshield. “Let’s just assume the Feds believe Lucy may be implicated in what’s been happening and that I’m in
collusion with her. Maybe you are too. Maybe they have all of us on their radar.”
“In other words Lucy’s a serial killer? Or she and Carrie both are, and we know it but are protecting them? And Lucy shot you in the leg and swam off with your dive mask? Or maybe you shot yourself? Or maybe Benton did? Or maybe Moby Dick or a fish called Wanda are to blame? What a crock of crap and how the hell can you be married to someone who’s spying on you, treating you like a fugitive?”
“Benton doesn’t spy on me any more than I spy on him. Both of us have our jobs to do.” That’s as much as I’m going to explain, and I stare out at the centuries-old property in the pounding rain.
THE HOUSE looks dead and lonely, and I’m feeling the same thing I did when we were here earlier. It’s hard to describe. Like a coldness in my diaphragm that causes me to breathe shallowly, very quietly. My stomach is clenched like a fist. My mouth is dry. My pulse is rapid.
I’m questioning myself, and it’s not that I never did before but I seem to do it constantly of late. Am I picking up on real danger? Is it my imagination because I’ve been traumatized? But no matter what I silently analyze or debate as I sit inside the truck I can’t dispel my unsettledness. It’s getting stronger with every moment that passes. I sense a malignant presence. I feel we’re being watched. I think of the pistol in my shoulder bag as I keep up my scan and Marino scrolls through his recent calls.
He presses SEND and says, “Lapin’s phone is going straight to voice mail too.” He leaves a message for him to call right away, and then he says to me, “What the hell? They get beamed up by aliens?”
“If they’re out in the middle of this weather they may have their phones tucked away so they don’t get soaked. Or maybe they can’t hear them ring. Sometimes the cell phone service is disrupted when we have storms like this.” I watch large maple trees whipped and raked by the wind, the underside of their leaves flashing pale green. “But should we be worried, Marino? I don’t want to get them into trouble but I’d like it a whole lot less if they’re not all right.”