“He cheated the DNA. He solved a case that isn’t solved and now what’s he going to do about it?” We walk through bunchgrass that would be bright with wildflowers in warmer months. “He’ll clear the D.C. cases, blame the murders on Martin Lagos, and make what’s happened here a separate investigation into organized crime and professional hits,” I suppose.
“Which is totally illogical and someone will point that out eventually. Not everybody in the FBI is incompetent and corrupt,” Benton says. But what he’s really saying is he doesn’t want to believe anybody is.
“We don’t have the luxury for what will happen eventually.”
“A contract killer brings his own weapon to a job,” Benton says. “He doesn’t leave clothing at the scene, take a blood-soaked hooded sweatshirt from one of his victims so he can disguise himself as he runs like hell through a crowd of schoolchildren on his way back to wherever he left his car. He doesn’t grab an envelope full of cash and then accidentally drop it in a public park, an envelope with blood and a return address on it.”
Benton watches where he steps, his borrowed sneakers drenched. The wind is more frigid than I thought and everything we brush against is waterlogged.
“This is someone out of control who didn’t kill the people of Double S for money,” he says. “Maybe he wanted a reward and the ego gratification of being thanked for getting rid of Gail Shipton but the others were personal. They had it coming. Maybe not in Swanson’s case. He may have been in the way and that’s it.”
“The killer is someone they knew and underestimated or ignored.” The legs of my pants are soaked and my hands are cold. “People like this don’t unlock a door or turn their back on someone they have even the slightest hesitation about.”
“Rage,” Benton says. “Lombardi hit this person where it hurts. He insulted and humiliated him and I have a feeling Lombardi had done it before. We’re going to find there’s a history. He knew him and I maintain no one at Double S asked him to murder Gail and wouldn’t have because of the scam she was involved in, and that’s not why he killed her anyway.”
“He may believe that’s why. He may believe that’s why he’s killed all of them.”
“He believes what drives him is rational but it’s all about what arouses him,” Benton says. “And maybe he’s gotten crazy because what he just did was dangerously foolish and it surprises me that someone as ruthless as Lombardi missed every cue until his blood was gushing all over his desk.”
“Arrogance. A bully above the law who thought he was untouchable. Or maybe there’s another reason he took this person for granted.”
“Granby’s looking for a Russian gangster to arrest and I’m sure he’ll find one somewhere,” Benton says bleakly.
I envision Ed Granby trim and dapper, with glittery small eyes and a long nose as pointed as a pencil, his hair combed straight back and gray only at the temples. His hair is so perfect I’m sure he dyes it like that and I feel my indignation swell and rise and I walk close to Benton, feeling him against me, and I feel calmer as the house looms nearer but still about a quarter of a mile off, a light on at ground level, the rest of it dark.
I check messages, my phone display glaringly bright in a darkness moiling with fog. Lamps in the distance illuminate little as they barely push through as if we’re out on a ship approaching a socked-in shore. I have another reminder from Ernie Koppel that he’s home if I want to talk and I try his number as we walk.
“I’m outside and it’s windy,” I apologize when he answers.
“I imagine you’re still in Concord and we’re eating dinner glued to the TV. It’s on every news channel.”
“What have you got for me?”
“An early Christmas present, a lot of things.”
“That makes me happy.”
“A tool-mark match, yes, and you’re not surprised because you suspected it. And you’re right about the Maryland case,” he says. “The same mineral fingerprint as this one here at MIT and also from the residue you just collected at the Concord scene.”
“From the stubs Lucy dropped off.”
“Yes,” he says. “The same mineral fingerprint on the dead person’s fleece. Halite is basically rock salt and under SEM it’s obvious it was artificially grown by saturating salt water and allowing it to evaporate, which makes me suspect the residue that’s turning up is from something manufactured for a specific commercial use.”
“Do you have any idea what?”
“Calcite and aragonite are common in construction, found in cement and sand, for example. And I know that halite’s used in glassmaking and ceramics and also to melt ice on the roads. But the three of these minerals together with the same elemental fingerprint as in the Maryland case and now this one and basically every sample I tested? It could be some sort of art supply for pottery or sculpture, maybe some type of mineral pigments in tempera paint or special effects. Under black light it sure as hell would be iridescent.”
“Anything about the fibers?”
“From Gail Shipton, Lycra from the blue fibers you collected and also what she was wrapped in. The white cloth is also Lycra. And that’s also consistent with the fibers found in the Washington, D.C., cases, maybe the same fabrics in all of the cases but different runs of it. One thing that surprised me is the vapor rub. I can’t pinpoint the brand but the spectral fragmentation pattern made for a relatively easy identification that’s the surprise in the Cracker Jacks. Apparently someone was looking to do more than clear his sinuses. MDPV,” he says.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m definitely not kidding. DNA handed off a sample to me late afternoon and I gave it a whirl with FTIR and that’s what I got but I’m not a toxicologist. If you’re not opposed to using up some of the sample, I suggest liquid chromatography–tandem mass spec just to confirm. And by the way the tox lab tells me it’s the same methcathinone analog as that suicide from last week, the lady who jumped off her building. A really dangerous designer drug someone’s selling on our streets, the same one that’s been wreaking havoc this past year I’m afraid.”
“Thank you, Ernie.”
“I know it’s not for me to offer but I’m going to anyway. I think it’s the same guy. He’s doing something weird to them, maybe wrapping them in stretchy fabric and then using some sort of artistic medium, maybe painting portraits of them after they’re dead, who the hell knows. You be careful, Kay.”
“Racehorses and bath salts,” I say to Benton when I get off the phone. “I guess if you want to focus keenly and experience superhuman energy and euphoria and wreak havoc on your neurotransmitters, mix a little monkey dust in your vapor rub and keep swiping it up your nose.”
“That helps explain what he just did. It might explain a lot of things. Increasing paranoia, agitation, aggression, and violence.”
“His system’s going to be roaring, hot and sweating, his blood pressure through the roof.” I think of the bareheaded young man with no coat on in the rainy cold. “He may be getting psychotic.”
I imagine him watching me in the dark behind my house and I wonder who and what he thought I was, and who is Benton? Who are any of us or his victims to him?
“The horror of this drug is that you can’t escape from it and you never know what dose you’re getting in a package,” I explain. “So the reaction can go from mild to insanity and brain damage. Eventually it will kill him.”
“Not soon enough,” Benton says.
Through fragrant evergreens that smell like cedar we near the lighted windows on the first floor, careful about cameras, making sure no one is around as I continue looking back like a fugitive.
I see no headlights or flashlights, just the darkness of the wet foggy night and our foggy breath, and I hear the wet sounds of Benton’s borrowed shoes. I estimate that from the entrance of the property to where the driveway curves past the outbuildings and the office and around to Lombardi’s house the distance is almost two miles. We trudge through a vegetable garden tha
t’s dormant and dead and then spreading out before us are a tennis court with no net, a barbecue pit, and a lap pool that’s covered for the winter.
There’s another tarmac, this one round and made of pavers that I suspect are heated, and beyond it are four bay doors that are heavy metal like hurricane shutters. Inside are cars, Benton says, rare Ferraris, Maseratis, Lamborghinis, McLarens, a Bugatti, all with Miami plates, the baubles of the super-rich and super-thieves, and like yachts, business jets, and penthouses, they’re a way to launder illegal money. The cars probably were destined for the Port of Boston and headed to places like Southeast Asia and the Middle East, Benton suspects.
A solid-wood door opens onto the long, glass-enclosed stone walkway that up close I can see has a golf cart inside and is stacked with split firewood. This leads from the outbuilding that’s a spa to the house that includes the private kitchen and living area, the master suite on the top floor and the garage on the lower level. Benton opens another door that he left unlocked when he was here earlier with Marino and we enter Lombardi’s private kitchen, an open space with a deep fireplace near a breakfast table and zinc counters and big windows overlooking the grounds.
A wine cellar is visible beneath plate glass in the hardwood floor and when I walk across it I have the fleeting sensation of vertigo, a fear of falling, that flutters in my stomach. I step to one side of it and don’t look down at the hundreds of bottles in circular wooden racks and decorative wooden casks and a table for tasting.
Copper cookware as bright as rose gold hangs from a wrought-iron rack above a butcher block with a maple top where plastic bags of groceries are spilled open, hastily set down by the chef when he returned from shopping late today. Milk and fine cheeses and cuts of meat have been left out and I can see evidence of his panic after he discovered police cars in the driveway.
He would have driven right past my big white truck with MA Office of Chief Medical Examiner and our crest painted in blue on the sides and there are few sights less welcome than my staff and machinery showing up. It’s heart-stopping. It causes instant visceral terror and I tend to forget the god-awful effect I have especially when I’m unexpected, which is almost always. I resist the impulse to tuck perishables into the refrigerator. It seems such a waste. I photograph them instead.
I pause by the commercial French cooktop to look at fine carving sets with green beechwood handles. Paring, boning, tomato, bread, and chef’s knives, wide and narrow and up to twelve inches long, and also sharpening steels, are all in the proper slots of two cutlery blocks. I take more pictures, documenting every place I look and whatever I touch, as Benton continues to check messages landing from Lucy in a rapid succession of alert tones that he’s set to sound like an irritating bicycle bell so he doesn’t miss a single one.
39
“All the phones here are on software like a PBX.” Benton talks more freely now, showing me what Lucy just sent.
“A good way for Lombardi to keep tabs on what everyone was doing,” he elaborates but not happily or with the gratification that I feel as the facts are made plain, “and apparently he got a call at four fifty-seven this morning from a number that has blocked caller ID. None of Double S’s sixteen phone lines including the ones here in the house accept blocked calls.”
Inside drawers I find wooden boxes of steak knives and a variety of cooking tools, potholders, and dishcloths. There are takeout menus for local pizza and Chinese but I doubt anybody delivered up here.
“So this particular caller had to enter star eighty-two like every other poor schmuck on the planet or his call wouldn’t have gone through,” Benton says. “Lucy’s asking if I recognize the number and I do. It’s Granby’s mobile and it’s not the only time he’s called here. She says this same number has shown up a lot. The question is when.”
He types his answer to her, and he’s no longer careful about what he tells me out loud. We have evidence of Granby’s criminal involvement. Double S’s computer is proving to be a treasure trove and it’s no longer our word against anybody else’s. It’s not a suspicion or circumstantial evidence, and it’s impossible we can be accused of misrepresenting the ugly truth. The data are irrefutable and safely backed up at my office. And Benton’s boss has no idea what’s about to happen to him.
“Marino arrived at my house around five this morning,” I point out. “By then news of the body at MIT and who it might be was already on the Internet. So it appears Granby’s call to Lombardi was probably about that.”
Another irritating bicycle ring and Benton reads, and then he says, “A lot of calls back and forth between the two of them, clusters of calls back in March, April, during the time when Granby was relocating here, and dozens of them last month, some on the very days that Sally Carson’s and Julianne Goulet’s bodies were found. Christ.” Benton leans the small of his back against a counter. “This is fucking awful.”
“We knew it would be.”
“What else would Granby have been calling about if it wasn’t Gail Shipton?”
“I think you know the answer.”
“A simple one,” Benton verifies what he already believed. “She wasn’t supposed to be murdered. Nobody asked this psycho to do it and Lombardi was ballistic and he’d been there before with whoever this person is only now there’s even worse trouble because Gail is directly connected to Double S. It’s like asking a drunk to run your bar.”
“You don’t ask a drunk to run your bar unless you don’t know he’s a drunk or have something personal with him.” I slide out a knife with a nine-inch carbon-steel blade that’s curved to carve around bone.
“Get your rogue killer here, get your PR person here, serve cupcakes and straighten it out,” Benton says.
“Good luck when the rogue killer is on stimulants and craving sugar, swinging out of balance and about to explode.” I hold the knife in my gloved hand, feeling its balance and the smooth, hard shape of its elegant wooden handle.
It wouldn’t be good for killing someone. I return it to its cutlery block and it makes a quiet steely hiss as it slides into its slot.
“Of course the chef would have to confirm if something’s missing.” I don’t need to look at any other knives in Dominic Lombardi’s kitchen. “Any one of these could inflict lethal damage.”
“But it’s not what was used,” Benton says and I shake my head.
The weapon is nothing like any of these. It’s an oddity, whatever it is, and as I continue taking photographs I explain that the blade we’re looking for is short and narrow, single-edged, with a beveled angle, and possibly the tip is rounded and badly bent.
“I’m basing this on the shallow incisions with peeled skin and abraded edges that parallel the deeper ones,” I add. “And the pattern on a towel he used to wipe off the knife also gives us a clue about its shape and that it might have burrs that snagged threads when he wiped it off. Knives generally don’t get burrs unless you sharpen them.”
Another bicycle bell, a long text from Lucy, and she informs Benton that Lombardi’s second wife spends much of her time in the Virgin Islands where he has a number of companies registered. Shell companies, Lucy suspects, including art galleries, high-end spas, stores, hotels, construction, real estate development.
“Businesses convenient for money laundering and probably drugs,” Benton suggests. “Maybe labs where the designer drugs are coming from, here or abroad.”
He opens a door near a half bath, with a toilet and sink, and a windowsill overflowing with gourmet magazines. Bon Appétit, Gourmande!, Yam. The leisurely reading of a French chef who suddenly has no job anymore. And people like him would be a dime a dozen if he went back to Paris, where his wife is with someone else and his children have no use for him. Tout est perdu. Je suis foutu, he said to Benton when he and Marino were making their clandestine tour.
We climb carpeted steps, four of them, and then a landing with prism crystal sconces spilling from faux-stucco walls. I imagine Lombardi climbing and pausing to rest or cat
ch his breath with thick, stubby-fingered hands on the polished brass railings, the diamond ring on his right pinky and the bracelet of his solid gold watch clicking against metal as he moved his heavy body along. Getting around his compound and up to the master floor couldn’t have been easy, as big as he was.
Benton opens another door that isn’t locked because he left it that way and on the other side is a vast space overwhelmed by antique Italian furniture in rare woods, and the elaborate crown molding and decorative relief on the walls and ceiling are gold. A multicolored, two-tiered Murano fruit chandelier hangs from a faux Michelangelo mural of God creating Adam, and there’s a circular conversation settee upholstered in gold satin near the foot of a bed fit for a king. The headboard is more than five feet high and a brilliant red with gilt acanthus.
A Renaissance desk with a Florentine throne chair would never have handled Lombardi’s considerable girth, and the Venetian mirrored chests of drawers would have reflected his discontent and glutted boredom every time he opened a drawer. Drapes across the floor-to-ceiling windows are crimson velvet with intricate gold and silver embroidery, and when I push a panel to one side the lining is gold silk, heavy and lush against my hand. I look out at the view of his bloated world where everything had a price and probably meant nothing, paid for with the blood and suffering of whoever he could squeeze the smallest commodity from, whether it was sex, murder, or money for designer drugs that will make you insane and dead.
The unlit connected walkways are barely etched in the foggy dark early night and there are no lights on in the spa building, and I notice for the first time that the back of the office building has no windows. Lamps along the winding drive are smudges of yellow light and beyond are the voids of the paddock and the pond, and then the gambrel barn. It hulks against a black horizon, a hint of light seeping through spaces in the wide sliding door and shuttered windows that are barred, and I wonder who’s in there besides the horses. The staff who heard and saw nothing have made their exodus, and Marino would be waiting for us but I doubt he can. He’s NEMLEC, he’s nothing, and Granby’s henchmen will have told him he’s nonessential and to leave. I continue to glance at windows and doors and to look for lights and listen for sounds, wondering when the same thing will happen to us.