Flesh and Blood

  “It’s hard to know exactly what he hit on his way down. That’s one of the reasons I pended his case,” he says to me when I ask him about the marks on the crane operator’s face. “As you can see he has a lot of nonlethal injuries from hitting the rungs of the steel ladder and its caging as he fell, and he also has narrowing of his vessels, apparently asymptomatic cardiovascular disease. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t get dizzy or faint. Climbing up two-hundred-something feet of ladder would be strenuous.”

  “He also could have been kicked.” I open another map on my computer, this one of Edgewater, New Jersey. “If someone were already inside the cab, all this person had to do was open the door when Ruiz reached the top. Swift hard kicks to the head and he slams back against metalwork and loses his grip, which might explain his dislocated shoulders. His backpack got snagged possibly repeatedly, and the injuries to his hands indicate he may have attempted to grab hold of rungs and the caging as he fell. What does Machado think?”

  “I guess you haven’t heard. As of late this afternoon he’s no longer with Cambridge. I understand he’s taken a job with the state police.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” But Marino’s better off and that means all of us are.

  Another high-rise under construction, another tower crane just blocks from where Julie Eastman was murdered, and I search for government reports, for anything that might have been made public. I ask Luke if there’s been any discussion about Ruiz being a homicide.

  “Not yet,” he says.

  “And the construction site? I’m assuming it was immediately shut down.”

  “Yes. You know what happens when OSHA gets involved.”

  “Well there was something similar in a New Jersey shooting that’s connected to the Nari shooting …”

  “Hold on. And these shootings are related to the construction death?”

  “I’m thinking that,” I reply. “A construction site close to the Edgewater Ferry Landing was shut down two days before Julie Eastman was murdered. Apparently there were complaints to OSHA about safety violations and the job was temporarily halted pending an investigation. And six months ago, the shooting homicide in Morristown? Jack Segal was murdered as he was getting out of his car behind his restaurant, which is a third of a mile from another major construction site with a tower crane.”

  “Was that site also shut down?”

  “It would have been,” I reply. “Segal was murdered December twenty-ninth and I don’t know of any construction site that is active during the holidays. They obviously don’t disassemble tower cranes when work is halted and there’s nothing to stop someone from climbing up and breaking into the cab.”

  “To shoot people.”

  “The ultimate deer stand, hundreds of feet in the air,” I reply.

  “The question is who the hell would think of something like that?”

  “Someone who’s been doing very bad things for a while and has no fear,” I reply. “A trained killer in other words, the worst rogue imaginable.”

  AN HOUR LATER IN the bar downstairs, I squeeze lime into a gin and tonic while Lucy drinks beer.

  “Are you still convinced Copperhead …?” I start to ask.

  “It’s a stupid name,” she interrupts. “A stunt for attention.”

  “The killer is the one who chose it, not the media.”

  “Right. Hijacked the Twitter account of a dead plumber, picking a name that would fuck with us.”

  “How did this person do it?” I follow Lucy’s lead. I avoid using pronouns or any reference to gender.

  “Easy if you know how to data mine, how to access death records. And we’re supposed to start thinking that too. It’s all planned and deliberate.”

  “We are? Us specifically?” I ask and she says nothing. “Why would it enter your mind that this person wanted to ensure we’d find an intact bullet?” I get back to my question as I continue to think about what else Jack Kuster said.

  Lucy is subjective. She’s wound so tight she’s about to pop. She’s that way for a reason. Lucy always has one and I’m going to find out what it is.

  “An engraved three on a bullet and we’re supposed to think about how many other people are going to die and if the next victims are us,” she says.

  I think four to go as I sip my drink and listen to the clatter of the Midtown Express Train. The grand white brick Madison Hotel is close to railroad tracks in a historic area of Morristown that’s only a thirty- or forty-minute drive from where Julie Eastman was murdered. The restaurant where Jack Segal was shot is even closer, and a month ago the killer was inside this hotel’s business center sending me a tweet.

  A poem from Copperhead that referenced a silent hangman and gold-like fragments. A poem that said tick tock. A disturbed unsettled flutter starts in my gut as if I’m about to be sick.

  “An elevation of several hundred feet.” I bring that up to see what Lucy will say. “How is that possible in the area of Cambridge where Nari was shot?”

  “You say that as if you already know the answer.” She looks at me.

  “I might. Maybe I got the idea from you.”

  “Not from me.”

  “From my wanting an explanation other than a helicopter, specifically your helicopter,” I reply.

  “The tallest building anywhere near the house on Farrar Street is maybe four or five stories,” she says and then she brings up construction, the high-rise being built on Somerville Avenue where the tower crane operator died.

  “So you thought of it too,” I reply and I tell her he might have been murdered.

  “That would make sense,” she says.

  “Why would it?” I ask.

  “It was smart of you to figure it out and I agree. It makes sense,” she repeats.

  The bar is pleasantly dark with wainscoted walls and bare wooden floors, and there’s a piano at the far end, nobody playing right now. It’s almost eleven and we’ve showered and changed, both of us in jeans and polo shirts, finishing salads, going easy with our drinks after hours in the heat. I feel the unpleasant flutter again as I confront her about helicopters because someone else will and may have already.

  “You were flying Thursday morning around the time Nari was murdered.” I sip my drink and focus on my stomach to see if the tonic water might settle it.

  “After he was murdered,” she corrects me. “I took off from Norwood at eleven-oh-eight and that’s on an ATC recording. It’s an indisputable fact.”

  “I’m not interrogating you, Lucy. But it has to be cleared up. I think the shootings are being done from tower cranes but we have to talk about helicopters.”

  “Go right ahead, interrogate. You won’t be the only one. In fact you aren’t.”

  “What time did you begin monitoring the Boston-area frequencies Thursday morning?” The tonic water isn’t helping and I don’t know what’s wrong. “You routinely do that prior to a flight. You check weather. You check area traffic and notices.” The waitress is heading our way, a young woman with short spikey hair, in tight black pants and a white cotton dress shirt. “Could there have been another helicopter up that might have …”

  “Might have what?” Lucy interrupts. “The killer put it on autopilot and fired a heavy weapon system out the window? Or maybe had an accomplice who was doing the flying with a door off? No way. You were smart to think of the cranes. I guarantee you’re right. It makes sense.”

  “Need another?” The waitress smiles at me and glances warily at Lucy as my feeling gets worse.

  “A shot of gin on the side and extra tonic water please.” It’s a bad idea and I probably should go upstairs to bed but I can’t possibly.

  “Do you have Saint Pauli Girl?” Lucy asks boldly and I’m stunned.

  “Yes.” The waitress sounds nervous.

  “Now we’re talking.” Lucy is intimidating her and she hurries off.

  “What just happened?” I take a deep slow breath, waiting for the nausea to pass. “How did you know about the
beer?”

  “You mean the empty bottles lined up on the rocks where Gracie Smithers had her head smashed? You took photographs at the scene and uploaded them into the database. You also took plenty of photographs at the Patty Marsico scene in Nantucket. Do you remember what was on the windowsill inside the flooded basement? Four empty Saint Pauli girl bottles, wiped clean of prints, the DNA destroyed by bleach, the labels facing out. You know who owns the real estate company, the one that Patty Marsico’s estranged husband tried to sue? Gordian Knot Estates, the corporation formed three years ago by Bob Rosado.”

  “You just scared the hell out of our server.” I finish my drink and don’t feel any worse or better.

  “I don’t want her hanging around.”

  “I don’t think she has any interest in hanging around. Are you ready to start telling me the truth? Do you think I don’t know when you’re not?” I touch my forehead and it’s hot.

  “You know everything,” she says.

  “We’ll sit here until I do.”

  “Why’s your face so flushed?”

  “No more lies,” I reply.

  “It’s not lying. It’s about timing, about my feeling it’s safe to share information. So far it hasn’t been safe and I wasn’t sure of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe you won’t approve. Maybe you won’t believe me the same way certain other people don’t.”

  “What other people?”

  “Marino. I know what he thinks.”

  “What did you tell him that you haven’t told me?”

  I hold her stare, trying to read what’s going through her mind, secrets she doesn’t want to trust me with, and she’s not afraid. She’s not angry. She’s something else I can’t quite define and then I catch the scent of it. I feel its motionless presence, its stare like a majestic animal perfectly camouflaged. And I know what it is.

  Lust.

  “The signet ring that’s been in Janet’s family.” Sexual lust, bloodlust, I sense both raging inside her. “You stopped wearing it and then Janet’s father got it back. Not the other way around.”

  “She shouldn’t be talking to you.” A glint of hurt darkens Lucy’s eyes to the color of moss.

  “Some months ago you suddenly got a different helicopter …”

  “I like the Agusta better. It’s twenty knots faster.”

  “And recently you bought a new Ferrari.”

  “We need a backseat and I’ll bet Janet didn’t bother telling you why.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “She should tell you. Well it’s not important anymore. At least a backseat is helpful when I pick up Sock.”

  “What isn’t important anymore?”

  “You need to ask Janet.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Her sister has stage-four pancreatic cancer.”

  “I’m so sorry. Christ. I’m so sorry. What can I do to help?” I’ve met Natalie and what races through my mind is the rest of the story.

  She’s a single mother with a seven-year-old son.

  “Janet promised to take Desi,” Lucy says and I’m not surprised.

  Of course Janet would and even if it weren’t the right thing to do I also know she wants children. She’s not coy about it. Former FBI, an environmental lawyer now, she’s gentle, settled down and would be an excellent mother. Lucy worries she’d be a bad one. She’s always said she couldn’t deal with kids.

  “Of course I’ll help. I’ll do anything you need,” I repeat.

  “I can’t do it,” she says.

  “Desi adores you.”

  “He’s great but no.”

  “You would let him end up in social services?” I can’t believe she would be so selfish and cold. “Well that’s never going to happen. I’ll take him before that happens, and you of all people know …”

  I don’t finish. I’m not going to say that if it hadn’t been for me stepping in and being a surrogate mother to her there’s no telling what would have happened.

  “Natalie was diagnosed a few months ago,” Lucy says, her eyes bright with tears for an instant.

  At least she feels bad about it. At least she feels something.

  “It had already spread to the lymph nodes, her liver.” She looks around the bar and she doesn’t look at me. “It’s stage four and all of us have prepared for the worst. I got the car. I’ve done everything I can and it was fine until last month when I decided no. I told Janet no I can’t. She should do what she needs to do but I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “No. It’s not possible.”

  “Last month.” It occurs to me. “Why did you decide this last month?”

  Lucy takes the last swallow of her beer. “I’ve told her she shouldn’t be with me. Especially if there’s a kid, neither of them should be with me. But she won’t listen and I can’t tell her the reason.”

  “That’s why you stopped wearing her ring. You want to break up. Are you seeing someone?”

  “Yes I want to break up.”

  “Yet you and Janet were flying Thursday morning and buzzed my house. You’re clearly very hurt. I know you love her. You never stopped loving her all the years you were apart. You found each other again and now you do this?”

  “The past is the problem. It’s anything but past and that’s a problem as big as one could ever get,” she says and I feel it again, the huge beast I can’t see and then the sensation, the flutter in my gut.

  “It doesn’t sound to me that you really want to break up.” I hear my own voice and it isn’t convincing or strong as I try to push down nausea.

  “She needs to move out. She should have already. I told her I’ll give her whatever she wants but she needs to get as far away from all of us as she possibly can.” Lucy’s face is stony and beneath her hard cool surface is a desire too hot to touch, molten and flowing like the core of the earth.

  “You just said all of us.”

  “I was with Janet when it began. First Quantico and then we were living together in D.C.” Lucy says what seems to be a non sequitur. “But Janet wasn’t on the radar and now she is.”

  “On whose radar?”

  “Janet would be on it now and it’s incredibly dangerous, it couldn’t be more dangerous with only one way it can end. Anything I care about she wants me to lose.”

  “Janet doesn’t want to take anything from you.”

  “I’m not talking about her.”

  “Then who?” I’m suddenly chilled and sick.

  I put my jacket on. I press my hands against my face and they’re so cold my fingernails are blue. I think about rushing to the ladies’ room. I sit still and breathe slowly. I wait without speaking until the attack passes, and I see it again. I see it move.

  CHAPTER 43

  THE BEER. THE SAINT Pauli Girl,” Lucy says and the great beast is as big as the Rockies.

  I feel its unblinking stare and its smell is strongly sour.

  “You don’t find it everywhere and this bar doesn’t have many people who ask for it.”

  “You know someone who drinks it,” I reply, and she nods, and the air shifts and the smell changes.

  A gamey wet odor that I know is an olfactory hallucination as a primitive part of my brain somehow knows what’s coming. It’s threatening enough that I can’t give it form. I can’t capture it as a conscious thought.

  “On the night of May eleventh, Sunday, Mother’s Day, at eleven-thirty-nine P.M. to be exact, this particular server”—Lucy looks across the room at her—“waited on a woman who sat at that table over there near the bar.” She indicates a corner table that is occupied by a heavyset man in a suit, drinking whiskey. “This woman ordered Saint Pauli Girl, four of them over a period of two hours, and when she ordered the third one at exactly eleven-twenty-two P.M. she got up to use the ladies’ room. But that’s not the only place she went.”

  “She stopped by the business center.” I can see where this is headed and I feel myself resisting as
the flutter comes back powerfully and moves up my throat.

  “Yes,” Lucy says and our waitress returns with a St. Pauli Girl, my extra shot and a large carafe of tonic water, cold with tiny gas bubbles suspended in it.

  She sets them down and doesn’t linger.

  “She thinks I’m going to cause her trouble, but I’m not.” Lucy picks up her beer.

  “Why would she be in trouble?” I pour the gin into my melted ice and fill the glass from the carafe.

  “Because the beers were comped. Maybe one would have been okay but not all four of them. She says she did it because the woman scared her. She was quote weird with creepy eyes, and after she was finished drinking each beer she placed the empty bottle in her tote bag. She didn’t use a glass and she wiped off the table and her chair.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “She didn’t want anyone to have access to her DNA or fingerprints. Did the waitress tell you this?” The gin and tonic helps wash down the bile sneaking up. “And when did you have this conversation?”

  After we checked into the hotel I was busy on my computer. I made phone calls to Luke and then to Benton, who’s not answering, and I showered and changed, meeting Lucy here at ten-fifteen. She got to the bar before I did and gathered the information she needed, and it’s no wonder the waitress is avoiding her.

  “She’s seen what’s all over the news about the shootings here and in Cambridge,” Lucy says. “I made it clear she would be wise not to hold anything back from me and if she keeps her mouth shut so will I. Four free beers and Carrie, who came on to her, gave her a hundred-dollar bill for a tip, tucked it in the front of her pants.”

  “Carrie?” The beast steps out of the brush and it’s unbelievably noisy and I smell how old it is. “Carrie?” I repeat, and Lucy smiles thinly, coldly.