Marino won’t like what I just said but that’s too bad. It’s not my job to terrorize.
“Well it’s kind of throbbing.” Leo likes the idea of being detained in a safe place for a while, and I remember how close he was to Rand Bloom’s pickup truck.
“It’s very important this stays clean so you don’t get an infection,” I explain. “It probably would be a good idea to get you on an antibiotic. Are you allergic to any medications?”
“Like what?”
“Penicillin or one of its derivatives. Amoxicillin, ampicillin for example.”
“You can prescribe anything you want. Maybe Oxys while you’re at it?”
“I’m afraid it won’t be me doing the prescribing. But I’ll have a word with someone before I leave.”
“I’m just kidding about the Oxys. Shit, you’re serious. Do you ever lighten up?”
“You know what they say about scientists. We’re boring.”
“I’m good in science.” His stare is intense.
He’s excited and I feel the transference as it happens. Leo Gantz is bonding with me and my internal conflicts begin to agitate. Do I cross boundaries or not? For the sake of truth and to save him from himself do I let things happen or make them stop?
“Let’s talk about how you came to hit your head on the frame of the shower door,” I say to him as if it’s a given.
“I didn’t.” He’s visibly startled.
“Did you forget it was there and hit your head when you were reaching inside the shower stall to turn on the water?”
“What?” He looks at me with a mixture of amazement and shock.
“I’m trying to reconstruct it based on the pattern of your wounds.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ve seen it happen.” I position the ruler near the lacerations and with my free hand take a photograph. “A hidden hazard, a design defect. The aluminum doorframe has edges, two parallel ones where the glass door slides in snugly so water doesn’t leak out onto the floor.”
“He hit me in the head when I wasn’t looking. That’s how I got hurt.”
“You certainly were hit in the head, Leo, but not with the tennis trophy I examined. Last year’s state championship. That’s impressive.”
“I was bleeding in the bathroom,” he says. “Because I went in there to clean up after I got home. After he attacked me. And then I went back and shot him.”
“You’d been doing yard work. Maybe you wanted to clean up after doing yard work. By this afternoon it was getting quite warm and humid.”
“So what!” His demeanor has radically changed from stoical and excited to scared and defensive. “So what if I did clean up after work?”
If his lie is uncovered he might be sent home, and the idea of that overwhelms him with panic.
“Except that based on the amount of dried blood on your scalp and in your hair I don’t think you got around to showering.” I indicate clumps of his long red hair. “At least not after you were injured. You may not have gotten around to it at all today.”
“Y-You’re trying to trick me,” he stammers.
I use another round of Betadine and gauze, taking my time. “There are no tricks here, Leo. Only the evidence. And what’s apparent is that you were in the bathroom, possibly to clean up after doing yard work. You started this morning …”
“How would you know what I was doing?”
“I saw you.”
“Where?”
“At close to noon you were near my house.” There’s no point in being coy. He knows where I live. “You were using a gas-powered leaf blower, cleaning dirt and cut grass off a sidewalk next to a gray pickup truck that was parked on the side of the street.”
Rand Bloom.
“Shit. You were with that dumbass detective, the one who yelled at me and showed up at my house. It’s not even my truck.”
I know whose it is.
“I noticed it,” I reply. “The driver wasn’t in it which is why Detective Marino assumed it was yours. That and it was parked right where you were using the leaf blower.”
“I don’t have to answer your questions.”
“I didn’t ask one.” I tuck the gauze into a biohazard bag and my used gloves follow.
I roll out a chair in the position I want and sit down close to him, face-to-face.
“I’M WONDERING WHO WAS barefoot.” I slide my aluminum medical case off the table and set it upright on the floor next to my chair.
Leo is silent and I detect he’s getting more upset. He doesn’t want me to leave, and I quickly calculate. How far do I go, and I decide it will be as far as it takes. Marino or Benton can always walk in and stop me. But they won’t. Not yet.
“Someone was barefoot in the bathroom where you were bleeding,” I say next. “Maybe Detective Marino will show you photographs if you ask. A partial bloody footprint between the shower door and sink, and there are bloody handprints on the wall.” I give him information.
Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t.
“It appears everything was cleaned up, but with certain chemicals we can still see blood,” I continue, hammering a point that usually isn’t mine to make. “It’s very difficult to get rid of. The police have compelling photographs. Maybe you should see them.”
“I don’t give a shit about any damn photographs,” he says angrily, but he’s unnerved.
“At around five-thirty P.M., about three hours ago, you tweeted that you killed Mister Nari.” I step over the railing of my boundaries onto the ledge of what I must have. “You tweeted this from your home.”
“How do you know where I was?”
“You probably know about IP addresses. You’re a very smart young man. You’re good in science. Is five-thirty around the time you were injured in the bathroom?”
“I don’t remember,” he says.
“Your wounds look several hours old. But they might be older. Possibly four or five hours old but definitely not twelve. The question people will ask is which came first. The tweets and your calls to the police or your being hurt. People will ask if you hit your head on the shower doorframe or if someone shoved you or banged your head against it. Perhaps you were caught off guard as you stood there in a white tank top and shorts, perhaps turning on the water with your back to the door. One is bound to wonder if someone got upset when you confessed to a crime as serious as murder.”
His abusive father couldn’t have been happy with what Leo did. Maybe it would be fine to frame a high school psychologist for a possible payoff. But it couldn’t be fine to admit to murder. That’s the flip side of encouraging deceit when it suits. You don’t get to pick someone’s lies, and I can well imagine Leo’s father going into a rage when he heard the news. The question is when. I don’t know and the wounds aren’t going to tell me.
“You’re a damn undercover cop pretending to be a doctor.” Leo’s eyes are angry and suddenly swimming with tears.
“I’m not a cop or undercover but I am a doctor. My specialty is dealing with violence, with injuries and deaths associated with it.” I remain seated. I don’t dare move. “Let’s get back to the gray pickup truck. I saw it again after I noticed you near it this morning. An insurance investigator drives it. Maybe you’ve met him. He bothers a lot of people.”
“What does he look like?” Leo oddly asks and I describe Rand Bloom.
I don’t say the name, and Leo stares. I catch the doubt in his eyes. Then fear. Then nothing.
“I got no idea.” It’s an obvious lie, and I get up from my chair because I know the effect it will have.
“He follows people. He parks in front of their homes,” I reply. “That can be very intimidating.”
“I killed Mister Nari after he attacked me!” Leo blurts.
“You weren’t beaten with the tennis trophy but you or someone smeared it with blood, flicked drops of blood on it to make it look that way.” I pick up my medical kit because it’s time to leave. “Which wa
s pretty clever and fairly convincing. A lot of people would have been fooled.”
“You can’t prove it!”
I notice my phone on the table. An alert indicates a secure file has been sent.
Lucy, I think.
“You can’t prove it was me!” Leo raises his voice accusingly.
He starts to say something but catches himself. He starts rocking in his chair. I’m about to go and he shows he’s scared.
“They’ll get me.” His eyes are huge and he’s begging. “If I walk out of here they’ll get me!”
The door opens and Marino is there.
“Nobody’s going to get you,” he says to Leo. “But I need to know who you’re talking about.”
Leo shakes his head. He refuses.
“I can’t protect you if you don’t tell me.”
They. It blazes in my thoughts.
“If you don’t tell me there’s nothing I can do,” Marino says.
They. It doesn’t sound as if he means his father.
“Okay fine. Have it your way,” Marino bluffs. “I’m cutting you loose. You can go home and think about it. When you want to tell the truth for once give me a call.”
“You said I’m going to the hospital.” Leo stares at me as if I’m the biggest traitor on earth.
I walk out of the small room.
“You said it! You said you wanted to help me!”
When I’m inside the open area with all of its cubicles he screams obscenities, and then I look back at another sound. He’s jumped up from the table and he violently kicks his chair. It rolls across the room and slams into the wall at the same instant Marino is on top of him.
“Get off me! Get off me!” Leo is shrieking and struggling, his cap knocked off.
Marino clamps his arms around him from behind and lifts him off the floor as if he weighs nothing.
CHAPTER 34
BIRCH TREES FLASH BRIGHT white in the Audi’s headlights. Tall slender trunks with papery bark lean toward the highway from rock piles that dissolve into dark hilly woods. It’s almost nine-thirty and traffic moves steadily as we head north to Marblehead Neck, the sky impenetrable with ominous clouds, the wind gusting hard. Distant thunder cracks.
Leo Gantz’s story about the attack with a tennis trophy was an afterthought that occurred to him once he had the convenience of a genuine injury. He went so far as to smear blood on the trophy and assume the edges of the square base would account for the pattern of the wounds to the side of his head. He’s quick thinking, extremely bright, and I’ve come up with a theory that I believe is right.
He wasn’t shoved into a doorframe because he falsely confessed to murder. It was the other way around. He fabricated a public spectacle after he was assaulted while preparing to take a shower. Leo’s tweeting, his calling the police and the FBI was his way of punishing the devil he’d made a deal with and thought he knew.
His father.
“Years of pent-up hurt and anger,” I say. “His father probably hurt him earlier today and not for the first time, far from it. Leo’s not going to admit it. But he found a way to get him back and at the same time keep himself safe.”
“Caught in a cycle he can’t break, hating who he loves and loving who he hates.” Benton typically weaves in and out of traffic like a slalom skier but for some reason he’s holding steady in the far right lane. “Then he’s overwhelmed by remorse and the need to punish at the same time he desperately seeks attention.”
“And fear,” I reply.
“At least he’s out of harm’s way for now. What happens to him later isn’t promising. He’s a bigger danger to himself than anyone else might be.”
Leo is in the Cambridge Police Department lockup under the watchful eye of an on-call matron, one of their female crime scene techs. In the morning he’ll be transferred to McLean.
“It’s been going on for a while and escalating, building to combustion,” Benton adds. “The murder of Joanna’s husband and whatever happened in Leo’s house this afternoon lit the match. The fire was set. That’s the way it works. One last thing and all hell breaks loose.”
Added to this fuel load were severe money pressures with no escape in sight until Bloom entered the scene, we believe. All he had to do was his usual spying to see that Joanna Cather was spending time with Leo and cared about him.
“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 o
ne-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.”