“You don’t think it’s the same rifle in the three cases?”
“I don’t think the motive is the same,” he says.
“The motive this time is he wanted the bullet recovered,” I suppose. “Because he’s sending us a message.”
“It would seem he’s sending you one,” Benton says.
“Well unless Leo Gantz is sending messages and has access to a high-power rifle and solid copper bullets super and subsonic, his confession isn’t going to hold up.” I point out the absurdity of it. “Especially if he claims he came up behind Nari and shot him at close range. I’m guessing he’s claiming the weapon was a handgun which he then conveniently dropped into the sewer.”
“Unfortunately I’ve heard of far more ridiculous confessions resulting in convictions,” Benton says. “The path of least resistance. Cops love confessions and some of them don’t care if they aren’t true.”
“Marino cares.” I spread the pouch open farther.
Bare feet and legs are pale, and I feel the chill of refrigerated dead flesh through the thin layer of my gloves as I check for broken bones and the slightest blush of contusions that might indicate Nari had an earlier struggle with Leo Gantz or anyone. Rigor mortis is complete, the muscles rigid, and I move up past the tattoos covering old scars caused by needles, up to the knees, the thighs and when I reach his genitals I get a surprise.
THE RING-STYLE CURVED BARBELL enters through the urethra and exits through the top of the glans. I wonder if the piercing gave his wife pleasure or pain, and what the healing time was after Jamal Nari got it.
I check Luke’s report, and there it is under gross anatomy of the genitalia. “I’m glad he didn’t remove it,” I say.
“Why’s that?” Benton looks on, his demeanor typical. Not particularly surprised or curious.
“It’s an awkward item to return with someone’s personal effects. Unless it’s a precious metal or someone makes a specific request I leave it alone.”
“Yet one more example of not being able to judge a book by its cover,” Anne observes. “Drug smuggling and body piercing. You don’t find out who somebody really is until they end up here.”
I move up his torso. I check his arms and his hands, and when I get to his neck I touch my index finger to the wound at the back of it where the bullet entered and separated his brain from the rest of him. A small entrance wound no bigger than a buttonhole was the equivalent of a transformer blowing, and the lights went out instantly. He didn’t know what happened. He had no warning and not a moment of fear or pain.
“At least this killer is merciful,” I say to Benton.
“That’s not why,” he replies. “He’s not trying to be merciful. What he’s doing is practical. It’s tidy and efficient and he’s also showing off his remarkable skill. This person wants our admiration and he wants our fear.”
“Well he’s not getting either, not from me.” I press my fingers into the area of the chest where the intact bullet was removed.
There’s no bogginess, no contusion or tissue response. By the time the bullet penetrated the lung and chest wall, Nari was dead. Picking up a scalpel from a cart I cut through the twine that sutures the Y-incision, opening him up again. The odor is intense and foul and I reach inside with both hands and lift the heavy plastic bag out. It’s transparent, filled with sectioned organs and a bloody fluid, and I set it inside the sink. I reposition myself at the back of his head and work my hands under the shoulders, and Anne helps me turn him on his side.
The fiberglass probe slides easily into the entrance wound at the base of his skull and I thread it along the track, making slight adjustments as I feel resistance from ribs, but not from organs because they’ve been removed. I’m careful not to force, finally stopping. The tip of the probe peeks out of a small incision in the chest that Luke made when he removed the bullet.
I lower the body to the carrier and step away, contemplating the best solution to a significant problem. Rigor is set. Breaking it in muscles of the abdomen, the lower back and pelvis would be like bending iron. It will begin passing in several hours and be mostly gone by morning but I can’t wait.
“I could use your help,” I say to Benton. Then to Anne, “I need a footstool and a camera. But first we need to suture him back up.”
CHAPTER 29
A HALF HOUR LATER I’M in an Audi R8, black with carbon fiber blades on the sides. The V10 engine’s guttural rumble draws stares from people who admire powerful cars and don’t care what they cost or that they guzzle gas like a binge drinker.
Lucy and her supercharged modes of getting around in life seem to be wearing off on Benton. It’s not that he didn’t have an appreciation of the exotic and expensive but he wasn’t conspicuous in his consumption until his FBI boss committed suicide last year. Not sorry or sad, a well-deserved ending to a story rife with the abuse of power and the deliberate destruction of innocents, and that is the truth about how Benton felt. He showed sympathy only to the family Ed Granby left.
In private, my husband didn’t care what drove the head of the Boston Division to lock the doors of his house and hang himself. Benton didn’t care that he didn’t care and then his attitude began penetrating every region of his psyche. He decided he would do what he wants. He would say what he wants, buy what he wants, give away what he wants and be selfish if it was honestly merited. Critical and judgmental people be damned.
A midlife crisis would be another explanation but it wouldn’t be an accurate one. Granby was maniacal in his efforts to end Benton’s career and eradicate his legacy. He tried to marginalize and emasculate and ended up dead. It was the justice most people secretly wish for but will never express and Benton was liberated in a way I didn’t expect. Bad people rarely get what’s coming to them and good guys really don’t win because the damage exceeds the punishment, assuming there’s any punishment at all. Prison and even the death penalty don’t undo a sexual homicide or mass murders or bring back a child abused and killed by a pedophile. I heard the bleak remarks and observations so often I stopped listening. Benton used to be cynical. He’s not anymore.
In East Cambridge now, armed and dangerous in Italian sunglasses, a shoulder holster under his jacket, he has one hand on the wheel. A black leather and titanium bracelet is loose on his wrist, and he turns his growly car left on Bent Street, downshifting. The engine roars like a dragon.
“The damn smell is caught way up inside my nose.” He’s complained about it several times since we drove away from the CFC.
“It goes with the turf,” I repeat.
“I don’t usually get up close and personal with someone who’s been autopsied.”
“That wasn’t typical and you were a good sport.” It seems trivial to say but I’m sincere.
“You don’t seem bothered. Maybe your sense of smell has gotten desensitized.” He’s said that before too. He says it often.
“Quite the opposite thankfully. Odors have their own story to tell and the secret is to block them out after they’re no longer relevant.”
“I can only do that with what I hear and see.” He’s thinking about his cases, which are the same as mine but our experiences are different.
Vastly and darkly different, the monsters he meets are fond of video-recording the pain and terror they inflict so they can replay it later as they fantasize. I’ve seen enough to know I prefer the cold forlornness of bodies that can’t suffer anymore. I’m left with sensations, not much color, shades of red, a little green, a little yellow, mostly odors and the inanimate noises of metal against metal, wheels rolling, water slapping against tables and floors and drumming against steel.
I focus on newly planted trees with bright green leaves, and glass and granite high-rises in a part of Cambridge called Tech Square.
“I confess I’m not as accustomed to nasty smells.” Benton has cracked his window, and the air is rushing in loud and warmly humid. “Phantosmia. I’m not sure it’s real.”
“It is. Molecules of
putrefaction become volatilized like pollution attaching to water molecules in the air and creating smog.”
“So I have the smog of death in my sinuses.”
“More or less.”
“Christ I hope I don’t stink.”
I lean close to him, and diamond-stitched black leather smells new as I nuzzle the curve of his jaw. “A little cedarwood, a little teak and just enough musk and a hint of cardamom. Bulgari.”
He smiles and kisses me, and we’re on Sixth Street now. There’s still plenty of light but piling gray clouds are advancing like armies. The temperature is on its way to hot. Tomorrow promises to be instant summer, volatile with bursts of rain and wind shifts to the south that could push the mercury up more than twenty degrees. There’s too much to do and nature is conspiring against me.
I must get to Marblehead before it storms, and I need to be in New Jersey tomorrow if possible. I intend to see where Gracie Smithers died before rain and wind scrub it away, and a shooting reconstruction is our last hope of understanding the physics of Jamal Nari’s homicide. The girl’s death is simpler and far crueler. What happened to Nari is sterile and enigmatic with its lack of human contact and explanation.
“It’s the equivalent of standing on a tall ladder and shooting straight down at someone who is leaning forward slightly.” I’m thinking about our efforts in the autopsy room, what some would view as unseemly and ghoulish.
“A very tall ladder,” Benton says and the Cambridge Police Department is just ahead, redbrick with green-tinted glass and art deco lamps.
“Not exactly ninety degrees or perpendicular,” I add. “The flight path was closer to seventy-five or eighty.”
“Parabolic drop.” Benton slows down more, the engine louder.
“What goes up must come down.”
“The heavier the round and the lighter the powder charge, the more the bullet’s going to lose velocity and gravity’s going to pull it down. Like these idiots who fire their guns up in the air and the bullets fall and hit people, the trajectory is vertical or almost.”
“That’s the important point. Unless an assailant is standing over his victim and firing straight down you don’t see a trajectory like this. Certainly not in distant shots. The seventy-five- or eighty-degree angle can’t possibly be an accidental phenomenon due to gravity. His spinal cord was severed at the base of his skull exactly as it was in the other cases we know of.”
“I agree,” Benton says. “What kind of elevation are we talking about?”
“That’s what we need to find out. I believe it’s key to who’s doing this. Someone damn good at shooting and damn good at math.”
In first gear now he drives down a concrete ramp that leads into the police department’s underground parking. He’s careful not to scrape the sloping nose of his car, and abruptly we are in shadows and the air through the vents is cooler.
“Right. Because bullet drop wouldn’t explain the flight path unless the shooter did the DOPE and the degree of drop was deliberate.” He refers to the military sniper term Data on Previous Engagement or DOPE, which factors in the type of round, the altitude, temperature, wind and barometric pressure.
“Wherever the shooter was, what he did was precisely calculated.” I’m sure of that.
“I just hope to hell you never have to show those photos in court. They’ll start calling you Doctor Zombie.”
I never intend indignity but death has no modesty and the only way to precisely envision the angle that Jamal Nari was shot was to stand him up. So I decided we would. I covered Benton in waterproof Tyvek, and I then hooked my elbows under the dead man’s arms while Anne secured him by the ankles. We lowered him to the floor, naked and sutured back up with white twine, and Benton helped hold him straight as I grabbed a camera and climbed a stepladder.
The body was so stiff I could have leaned it against a wall but limber would have been worse, a dead weight as unwieldy as a heavy coil of fire hose, 150 pounds minus the organs. Once rigor passed it would have taken more than the three of us to get Jamal Nari back on his feet, and what Benton said is true. I wouldn’t want to show the photos in court, the fiberglass probe protruding from the base of the skull like a black arrow as if he had been shot by Apollo, by a god from above and maybe he was. Only this god is an evil one.
BENTON PARKS IN a reserved spot several spaces away from the police commissioner’s unmarked dark blue Ford. Gerry Everman is still here at this hour. Maybe he’s observing Leo Gantz through one-way glass. Then I think of Machado and hope we don’t run into him.
“I’m trying to figure out the best way to handle this.” By this Benton means Marino. “Leo Gantz’s confession is an interference and a nuisance at best and Marino’s going to want to cut him loose, to get whatever information he might have and then get him out of his hair.”
“It sounds like you don’t feel the same way.” I climb out of the car.
“I don’t,” he says as we walk past a row of white BMW motorcycles tricked out with emblems, lights and sirens.
“Why?”
He pushes open a door that leads inside the first floor of a modern building originally designed by a biotech company that sold out to the city. “The safest thing would be to keep him locked up for a while.”
“The safest thing for who?”
“The safest thing for Leo and that might be exactly what he wants.” Near the polished granite wall of elevators Benton nods at four uniformed police officers, young and bulky with muscle and ballistic gear, familiar-looking but I don’t know them.
They seem strangely congregated by the door and don’t nod back at him, riveting their attention on me and I already sense what’s coming. I feel uneasiness in my stomach and a cool wariness creeps up my neck. It occurs to me they were expecting us.
“How you doing, Doc?”
“What are you gentlemen up to tonight? It looks like you’re keeping the streets more than safe.”
“You know who’s in town.”
“I certainly do,” I reply while Benton is ignored.
“Mind if I ask you something?”
“Help yourself.”
“I got over a cold last month and am still congested.”
“Same thing and I can’t shake the cough,” another one says.
“Me too,” says yet another.
The four of them are talking at once, their attention on me as if Benton isn’t here. He’s calm and unflappable. He doesn’t register surprise at the ruse of a welcome or questions about medical advice from men who sound perfectly healthy. Tension and resentment toward the FBI have been palpable since the marathon bombings and the murder of MIT Officer Collier, a close colleague of Cambridge police, his department within the Cambridge city limits. The FBI is accused of not sharing intelligence and that’s nothing new but this time it’s as personal as it gets.
They continue bantering with me so they can stick it to my husband. This is for his benefit, passive-aggressive behavior on the way to bullying, and I’m convinced they saw us coming. Benton’s car draws attention. All it took was one cop spotting us and tipping off the others so they could lash out, and I can’t say that I blame them. Benton presses the elevator button again and I know he’s bothered even if he doesn’t show it. The doors slide open and we step inside.
“Good to see you, Doc.”
“Be safe out there,” I reply, and just as I’m certain we’ve escaped the worst I find out I’m wrong.
“Hey! We’re being rude leaving out the FBI.” A uniformed arm suddenly juts out and the shutting elevator doors bounce back into their frame.
“Excuse me?” The officer confronts Benton. “Maybe you got something to say?”
“About what?” But he knows.
“Why the FBI thinks it’s okay not to share information that might prevent cops from getting shot while they’re sitting in their cars.”
Benton leans against the open door, his hands in his pockets, his eyes steady on the four of them. And the officer
removes his arm.
The officer steps back and says, “Wait until we know something you should be told. And we don’t pass it on. See how you feel if something happens to one of your damn agents.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” Benton says.
“Really? Why not?”
“Because you’re better than that.”
“The FBI should apologize.”
“About a lot of things.” Fear and intimidation aren’t colors on Benton’s palette, and the doors slide shut and he meets my eyes. “The Bureau won’t. It never does.”
“Their hostility might be related to Machado. There’s no telling what he’s spreading around.”
“It’s not about him. They said what it’s about. They couldn’t have been clearer.”
“They shouldn’t take it out on you.”
“They should. I’m safe because I won’t go over their heads and complain,” he says. “The commissioner is here right now and they know I could head straight to his office. They also know I would never do it.”
CHAPTER 30
WE RIDE THE ELEVATOR up and the confrontation downstairs reverberates. I try to quiet my inner voice but I can’t. I’m not a pessimist but I’m not a Pollyanna either.
Resentment of the Feds is at an endless boil, rattling nonstop like scalding water in a pot. It doesn’t come and go anymore like it did when I was getting started. Now it’s chronic. Absolute power has corrupted and the absence of checks and balances seems complete. There’s no place to go but the media, and cops like the ones we just encountered can’t do that without permission from the brass, which they’ll never get.
“Terrorists score points when they inspire people to act indecently, to misuse what they are sworn to protect.” I watch the floors slowly go by. “It started with 9/11 and is building momentum. Our government spies and lies. Those trusted to uphold and enforce the law use it to their advantage instead.”