Chaos

  I check my e-mail. My office is working overtime, and another note from Ernie confirms what we suspected, that the same panguite fingerprint we found in the Molly Hinders case was also present in the whitish linear burns on Elisa Vandersteel’s body. Both women were electrocuted by carbon nanotube conductors that were retracted by spools into a monster drone powered by capacitors and coated in a thermal protective paint that includes panguite. The weights at the ends of the conductors, what resemble sinkers, also contain panguite.

  Benton says making a weapon out of something stolen from his powerful brother was Theo’s way of appropriating what he perceives as rightfully his. “Sort of like Jacob stealing Esau’s birthright,” my husband said, and he also believes that the murders in Cambridge were target practice, in a sense, except the selection of the women was emotionally driven by Theo’s tendency toward erotomania and sexual violence.

  Based on further information Benton has gotten from the brother William, it would seem that Elisa was friendly with Theo and likely had no idea that he was obsessed with her. Apparently after he returned to Cambridge a year ago he suggested that she should come here and try to get her foot in the door as an actress. She could stay with him while she interned, and she did for several weeks, living in a back room and helping with cooking and other chores.

  Then she met Chris Peabody and soon after moved in with him, in part to get away from Theo, who by all accounts she was fond of but found increasingly annoying and overbearing. She thought him peculiar but likely never imagined that he was spying on her, stalking her, becoming increasingly enraged when he saw her with the young man she’d met and was falling for.

  It’s occurred to me that Theo may have been watching when Elisa rode her bicycle to the Faculty Club. I remember her kissing Chris Peabody on the sidewalk while Benton and I were there. It may very well be that Theo had been engaging in dry runs, practicing his drone maneuvers with her being none the wiser, and as she was riding through the park he may have decided to scare her. Maybe he didn’t mean to kill her. But he did.

  He wouldn’t have shown up at the scene and taken the neckerchief or anything else from her body if he hadn’t intended to kill her. The blue paisley-printed bit of cloth was a souvenir. Maybe Theo would have taken other items had Anya and Enya not appeared, and I wonder how long he might have hidden in the bushes watching them. It wasn’t a deer that startled the twins. That’s not what they heard running away in the dark.

  There’s much we’ll never know unless Theo tells all. Or maybe his many recordings will offer an explanation. Benton believes the former MIT professor had been following Elisa and Molly remotely with his airborne camera. If so, there should be graphic proof of his voyeurism, dry runs, his kills. We’ll get a peephole view into his violent sexual fantasies.

  Benton and his colleagues will spend a lot of time going through boxes of carefully labeled audio-video storage devices. Apparently there are years and years of them inside Theo’s landfill of a house, and it’s a good thing he can’t resist his compulsions. That may seem strange to say since people are dead, but many more would be had he been more disciplined.

  The plan very well may have been to have these airborne directed-energy weapons stationed all over the place, and eventually Carrie would have an army of her own human drones operating mechanical ones. We may not know what she had in mind, and I suspect Benton won’t find out no matter how much time he spends questioning her eventually.

  Carrie isn’t going to talk. If she does, nothing will be truthful. Or even if it is, it won’t be helpful. Not to us.

  I’M STARTLED AWAKE WHEN Tesla suddenly sits up and barks, and I realize I must have drifted back to sleep. I fluff pillows behind me to prop myself up, and I pet her head as she barks again and Sock barely stirs.

  “Yes, I know you’ve learned a big dog trick but please be quiet.” I pet the small white bulldog with her brown-masked eyes as she barks and barks, her sides heaving in and out like bellows.

  Woof—woof—woof—woof …!

  “Okay, that’s enough. What is it you think you hear?” I throw back the covers, and she won’t stop.

  I get up and pad barefoot to the curtained window across from the bed, and peeking out, I don’t see anything except the rain lashing and flooding the driveway two stories down. The wind howls again, and Tesla barks more frantically as our brindle greyhound Sock continues to snooze.

  “All right. Shhhh.” I stroke Tesla gently, talking very soothingly, and it makes me feel better too. “It’s just a storm.” I rub her speckled ears, and the door to the bedroom opens.

  “Rise and shine,” Dorothy sings out as she enters, and now I know why Tesla was barking.

  It was my sister she was hearing, and Dorothy is wearing a large T-shirt and nothing else as she carries two coffees.

  “Mind if I come in?” as she hands me a steaming mug and sits on the bed. “Hush Tesla. I can’t stand a yippy dog.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call her yippy. She sounds rather fierce.”

  “Well it’s an irony, right? She’s named for a car that’s supposed to be quiet.”

  “Actually it’s Lucy’s joke. For someone with the biggest carbon footprint on the planet? Now she can tell people she has a Tesla.”

  “How do you feel? I’ve heard stories about people who get shocked almost to death or struck by lightning and suddenly they can play the piano or their IQ goes up ten points.”

  “I’ll let you know. I’ve always wanted to play the piano.”

  “Did you have unusual dreams?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Listen, Kay. I need to explain better what happened,” my sister starts to say, and I stop her.

  “How is Desi doing?” I ask because all of us should worry about how traumatized he might be.

  “I’m telling you!” Dorothy brags as if she had something to do with it. “What a trouper that boy is! He seems fine.”

  “He’s had plenty of practice putting on the brave front, Dorothy. That doesn’t mean he’s fine.”

  “You know? One of the things I’ve learned after writing how many children’s books?” She smiles at her rhetorical question. “Plenty, right? The point is, I know kids. And I’m always amazed at how we’re bothered by a lot of things that don’t bother them in the least.”

  “Just because he’s not showing something doesn’t mean he’s not bothered. It will be good for Benton to talk to him when he and Lucy get home.”

  “Look.” Dorothy sips her coffee. “That evil woman came up to me, and of course I did a double take because at first I thought she was Lucy.”

  “Stop.”

  “I was waiting at the gate, and she started talking to me, and what a coincidence our seats were next to each other—”

  “Stop right there.” I hold up a hand, and shake my head.

  “But I need to explain what happened. You need to let me—”

  “So far you’ve not explained it at all,” I interrupt, “and we need to leave it that way, Dorothy.”

  “But I just said—”

  “You’ve explained nothing. Period. We can’t discuss what went on with you and Carrie at the airport, on the plane, or when she showed up here at the house after you invited her here and then let her in. Okay?”

  “But I—”

  “No.”

  “It’s just that you must think I’m really stupid but it’s not like anyone ever told me about her—”

  “I’m a witness in the case the same way you are. Now not another word. Thanks for the coffee. It tastes sweet. Did you put sugar in it?”

  “Agave nectar, just the way you like it.”

  “I don’t take sweetener.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since ever, Dorothy.” And I have to laugh because the more things supposedly change the more they don’t. “You were always the caretaker,” I tease.

  “I’ve never been one of those,” she says sullenly, and she doesn’t seem to be such a good one for
herself either.

  My sister’s hair is too long and too blond, and whoever she’s paying a fortune to for aesthetic work ought to be locked up. Her unnaturally round cheeks crowd her eyes when she smiles, her lower jaw is too heavy, and she couldn’t frown if she tried, making it slightly more challenging to read her discontent and underlying chronic boredom.

  “You have to understand this is the biggest thing I’ve ever done.” Dorothy’s over-enhanced breasts are on high alert, and it would suit me if her T-shirt were about ten inches longer.

  “What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever done?” I inquire. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

  “I helped catch someone. You’ve always been the crime buster, Kay. And I’m just this overblown pretty woman who’s doing the best she can to keep her shit together while I just get damn older all the time. I mean look at me. No matter what I do.”

  I start to tell her to cut out the tanning booths. Her skin looks spray-painted tan, but I don’t go there. She doesn’t need my criticism, and maybe I’m not the only one who’s pathologically insecure but doesn’t show it most of the time.

  “I’ll tell you what’s missing.” I set down my coffee on the bedside table. “If you go into the closet and open the first cabinet on the left, you’ll find something special I keep down here for rainy mornings just like this one.”

  “A joint would be nice,” she says.

  “A very nice Irish whiskey,” I reply. “Go on in there and pour us two shots. Then we’ll talk as long as you don’t ask me anything you shouldn’t.”

  I watch my sister walk into the big cedar-lined closet, and I hear her going into the cabinet and pulling the cork out of the bottle.

  “We should get Mom on the phone this morning. Both of us,” I say as Dorothy returns.

  “Not unless she puts her hearing aids in. I’m tired of yelling.” She sets the shot of whiskey by my coffee. “You’re never around. In fact you never have been ever since you left for college. So I’ve been on my own with her. And now I’m the one she picks on.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  “The book business not being what it was? Kids don’t want to read what I write, not this day and age.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I mean let’s face it. I’m not going to be invited to Comic Con.” My sister looks rather crushed.

  “Never say never.” I taste the whiskey and it’s warm going down, warmer than the hot coffee but in a different way. “We spend our lives reinventing ourselves, Dorothy. I never knew that until I got a little older and wiser.”

  “Well our mother’s decided I’m the failed one. It used to be you because of your divorce and no kids, and then you decided to be a doctor to dead people so you don’t have to worry about losing patients, about them dying on you.”

  “I’m sure that’s what mother says.” I reach for my coffee.

  “That and getting involved with a married man.”

  “Mom has to say we’ve failed because she feels she has,” I reply. “She never had a chance to do any of the things we can, and maybe she questions what her purpose on this earth has been. If so, that’s not a good way to feel when you’re almost eighty years old.”

  “Well look.” Dorothy throws back the whiskey as if she needs courage, which she doesn’t. “We’re the only sisters we’ve got, right? So we’re in this together, and mainly I wanted to make sure you’re okay with Pete and me.”

  “I don’t really know much about Pete and you,” I reply as I feel indignant inside when I have no right to feel that.

  “It’s the real thing, and one favor you could do me is make it sound like I did something helpful at least in catching that monster. What’s her name? Carrie Gretchen.”

  “Grethen. And you were helpful,” I reply, and it’s true but not the way my sister would have intended.

  She was helpful because she single-handedly brought Carrie to my door. It was Dorothy who began answering Facebook postings from someone who claimed to be a childhood friend from our early days in Miami. My sister bought into Carrie’s traps hook, line and sinker, and began a correspondence that supplied more information to Carrie than she already had.

  Dorothy happily volunteered nasty nicknames, and that my father had recorded a radio commercial for his small grocery store. Carrie must have gotten her hands on it or maybe Theo Portison did. There’s nothing good to come of my rubbing it in that Dorothy engaged in a long conversation with a perfect stranger on a flight, and then invited this person to my house and almost got all of us killed and Desi abducted. Dorothy is no match for Carrie’s machinations.

  But then none of us really are or it wouldn’t have taken this many years and destroyed lives to catch her.

  CHAPTER 47

  A MINUTE PLEASE TO WASH my face and grab my robe.” I walk away from the bed, heading to the bathroom. “Then we’ll get Tesla and Sock downstairs and you can help me in the kitchen. What’s Desi doing? Is he up yet?” I call out to Dorothy.

  “He slept with Janet,” I hear her say. “I think they’re getting started on brunch. They wanted to surprise you by helping.”

  I smell sausage cooking. And Desi’s quite the meat-eater in our midst, he and Marino.

  “Why did she want him, Kay? Why would anyone go to such lengths to kidnap a nine-year-old child?”

  I stop outside the bathroom door and look at her, wondering if she’s serious, and sadly she is. “People have gone to much more extreme lengths than Carrie did,” I reply, and my sister doesn’t want to know some of the horrors I’ve seen.

  “Well I honestly don’t get it.” Dorothy wouldn’t get it because she couldn’t be bothered with Lucy, and that’s another thing I need to let go of.

  We head downstairs, a rambunctious puppy bulldog and slow old greyhound at our heels, and in the kitchen Janet has the window open over the sink. The sound and smell of the rain is carried in on warm steamy air, and my thoughts are pulled away, outside into the storm. Desi is setting the table in the dining room while Dorothy makes more coffee but I’m not in here in my head.

  I’m back in my Miami neighborhood, and I see the child I once was, small and slight with white-blond hair, light blue eyes and cheap clothes. I see my yellow shoe box of a house and the scraps of overgrown yard with sagging chain-link fencing on three sides that kept nothing out including local cats and dogs and an occasional escaped parrot. I see all of it as if I’m watching a movie or back in time, and then thunder splits the air and lightning illuminates the windows.

  “Uh-oh,” Desi says as he walks back into the kitchen, and the power has gone out. “The lights in the dining room don’t work all of a sudden.”

  The backup generator has kicked in. But only certain areas of the house will have power. Fortunately the kitchen does, and then someone is pounding on the back door.

  “It’s Marino,” Janet is looking at her phone. “I’m just seeing his text. He was at the front door, now he’s in back and needs to see you, Kay.”

  “I didn’t hear him pull up.”

  “The rain’s too loud to hear much of anything,” Janet says as I follow the hallway past the pantry, to the back of the house.

  When I open the door Marino is standing hunched over in a yellow slicker with the hood up, and he says, “We need someplace private to talk. The doorbell in front is broke. I rang it trying to be polite for once.”

  “The doorbell you pressed is original to the house and not connected to anything. Didn’t you see the modern little box with the lighted button that’s been there as long as we’ve lived here?”

  “It’s dark as shit. What about you grab an umbrella or something and we’ll talk out here.”

  “In the pouring rain with thunder and lightning? How about you come inside and I’ll pour you a coffee?”

  “Nope. Right here.” He points next to him. “Really, Doc? I’m not kidding,” and I can tell he’s not as I grab a waterproof jacket off the coatrack
.

  I put it on, pulling up the hood, tightening the drawstring. Stepping outside, I close the door and face him in the splashing downpour.

  “What is it, Marino? Are you afraid there might be surveillance devices in the house? Is that what the problem is?” I ask because there could be for all I know. “I’m going to have to talk to Page and make sure she’s not let someone in, perhaps someone masquerading as a service person.”

  It’s the sort of thing Carrie would do, I explain as the rain coolly taps the top of my covered head. But Marino’s hardly listening, and I’m beginning to sense bigger trouble.

  “I’m not taking any damn chances, Doc.”

  “Why are you here? What is it?”

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he says, and I feel instantly sick.

  “Are Benton and Lucy all right?” I can barely speak as I think of them flying and driving in this weather.

  “Huh? I don’t know. I guess.” Marino’s eyes are wild, and he couldn’t be more distracted.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I raise my voice above water spattering pavers and the sound of the wind-rocked canopies of old trees.

  Beaten-down flower petals litter the back lawn like tatters of pastel tissue paper, and puddles sizzle as rain splashes the grass and mulch.

  “That blue paisley bandanna Desi had on?” Marino says loudly, water streaming down from the peak of his hood. “The DNA’s a problem. It’s worse than a problem.”

  Carrie came to my door like anybody else would, standing there smiling, I can only imagine, and Dorothy led her through the house. Then Carrie and the drone appeared in the backyard at precisely the same time, robbing Janet of any opportunity to defend herself or anyone. I realize this probably is why Marino is insisting we talk outside in the middle of a rainstorm.