The Front

  Win pulls her against him, rests his chin on top of her head. “She know?” he asks.

  “Oh, sure. Couldn’t do anything about it, though, now could we? Or it would come out in court how I first met the guy. How my thinking it was safer to let the two of them have sex in my bedroom instead of her disappearing with some jerk she’d just met in a bar. How my treating her like a friend, in other words, ultimately lost me a leg.”

  He touches it, traces it with his finger, over her knee, rests his hand on her thigh, says, “It’s not about sex. Not the way you mean it. She couldn’t ruin that part of you if she tried.”

  The pathologist who performed the autopsy on Janie Brolin lives on a narrow inlet of the Sudbury River, in an odd little house on an odd property as overgrown as Nana’s.

  The patio in back is missing bricks and almost completely covered with ivy. An old wooden canoe is stranded in a yard scattered with bright yellow daffodils, violets, and pansies. Win rings the bell, showing up unannounced, and already his day is starting out badly because of good news from the labs. Tracy found prints.

  His idea of trying luminol paid off in one respect—a latent print fluoresced on the disposable camera package he found in the Victorian mansion, meaning whoever touched the cardboard had a copper residue on at least one of his fingers. Copper and blood both fluoresce when sprayed with luminol, a common crime scene problem that in this instance worked to Win’s advantage. Unfortunately, the copper-residue print doesn’t match anyone in the AFIS database. As for other prints? The ones on the wine bottle came back to Stump and Win, and as for Farouk, he left several partials on the envelope he touched. The Fresca can and note from Raggedy Ann both have prints that match one another but don’t match anybody in AFIS, either.

  Stump lied.

  Now’s not the time to think about it, he tells himself as he rings Dr. Hunter’s doorbell again.

  How could she? In his arms, in his bed, staying with him until four a.m. He just made love to a lie.

  “Who is it?”

  Win identifies himself as state police.

  “Come around to the window and give me proof,” a strong voice says through the door.

  Win moves to one side of the porch, holds his credentials up to the glass. An old man in a three-wheel mini-scooter peers at the creds, then at Win, seems satisfied, drives back to the door, and lets him in.

  “Safe as it is around here, I’ve seen too much. Wouldn’t trust a girl scout,” Dr. Hunter says, driving into a wormy chestnut living room that overlooks the water. On a desk is a computer and a router, piles of books and papers.

  He parks across from the fireplace, and Win sits on the hearth, looking around at photographs, many of them younger versions of Dr. Hunter with a pretty woman who Win supposes was his wife. A lot of happy moments with family, friends, a framed newspaper story with a black-and-white picture of Dr. Hunter at a crime scene, police everywhere.

  “I have a feeling I know why you’re here,” Dr. Hunter says. “That old murder case suddenly in the news. Janie Brolin. Must say, I couldn’t believe it when I first heard. Why now? Then, of course, our friendly local DA is known for, shall we say, her surprises.”

  “Ever enter your mind way back then that the Boston Strangler did it?”

  “Utter nonsense. Women raped and strangled with their own clothing, their bodies displayed, and all the rest? It’s one thing to use a scarf or stockings and tie them in a bow, quite another to use the victim’s bra, which in my experience usually happens when the killer was sexually assaulting her, shoving and tearing at her clothing, and the bra is the most obvious and convenient ligature because of its general vicinity to the neck. I should add that Janie wasn’t the sort to let anybody in her house for any reason whatsoever unless she was absolutely certain who it was.”

  “Because she was blind,” Win supposes.

  “I’m not far from it myself. Macular degeneration,” he says. “But I can tell a lot by a person’s voice. More than I used to. When one of your senses gets worse, the others pitch in and try to help it out. Journalists were more circumspect in 1962, or maybe her family just wouldn’t talk or the press wasn’t interested. I don’t know, but what was left out of the papers, as best I recall, was Janie Brolin’s father was a doctor in London’s East End and no stranger to crime, patched up victims of it on a regular basis. Her mother worked in a pharmacy that had been robbed a couple of times.”

  “So Janie wasn’t naïve,” Win says.

  “Feisty, street-smart, which is one of the reasons she had the pluck to take a year abroad, all by herself, and come to Watertown.”

  “Because of Perkins. She was blind and wanted to work with the blind.”

  “That’s the speculation.”

  “You ever talk with her family?”

  “Her father, just once and very briefly. As you well know, not everybody wants to talk to the pathologist. They can’t deal with our part in it, mainly ask the same question time after time.”

  “If their loved one suffered.”

  “That’s it,” Dr. Hunter says. “Rather much the only thing her father asked me. He wanted a copy of the death certificate but not the autopsy report. Neither he nor his wife came over here. The body was returned to London along with what few personal effects she had. But he didn’t want to know the details.”

  “Unusual for a doctor.”

  “Not for a father.”

  “What did you say when he asked?”

  “I said she suffered. I never lied. You can’t lie.”

  Stump enters Win’s mind.

  “You tell someone what he wants to hear, that his loved one didn’t suffer, and then what happens if the case goes to court and the defense finds out you said that?” Dr. Hunter says. “He catches you in a lie—albeit a well-intended one. And your credibility’s impeached. Now, then. I’ll give you what I’ve got. Isn’t much.”

  His chair quietly hums as he drives toward a doorway. “Dug up what I could find when I heard about all this on the news. Figured somebody was going to ask, and I figured right.” In the hallway. “All this mess in my closets, under beds . . .” Fades out. Then comes back. “A few things from those days because we knew better back then.”

  He parks his scooter, a Bankers Box on his lap, keeps talking. “In the first place. Harvard really wasn’t all that gung-ho about having a department of legal medicine or they’d still have one. There were a few of us pathologists who liked the investigative part, were only too happy to do autopsies, be crime doctors, as some people called us. But we held on to our own records, to whatever we deemed important or wanted to use for teaching purposes, knowing full well that when we went out the door, there wasn’t going to be anybody left who gave a damn about our legacy. By the way. You see her on YouTube?”

  Lamont. Which makes Win think of Stump again.

  “Can’t believe what people do these days,” Dr. Hunter says. “Glad I’m not your age. Happy to be trekking along on the downslope. Not much to look forward to except home movies made by strangers, and, well . . . one of my grand-daughters’s in Iraq. And I’m supposed to be in a retirement home with a lot of my friends, those left, anyway. Been on the list five years, my number recently came up. Can’t afford it because I can’t sell my house. Not so long ago, people were fighting over it.” He indicates the computer on his desk overlooking the river. “I call it a cyber-pandemic. Once the flood-gate opens, and you know the rest.”

  “I’m sorry. . . .”

  “Monique Lamont, I mean. The second one’s worse than the first. Go log on.” A wave of his hand, indicating the computer again. “I get Google alerts for all sorts of things. The DA, crime, city council, because I like to keep up with what’s going on in Middlesex County. Since I happen to live in it.”

  Win goes over to the computer, logs on to the Internet, doesn’t take him long to find the latest video clip making the rounds.

  The Commodores singing, “Ow, she’s a brick house . . .” As Lamont in a
hard hat, other officials, and construction workers inspect tons of collapsed concrete ceiling slabs inside a tunnel near Boston’s Logan Airport.

  Then a voice-over from one of her old campaign ads: “Getting to the bottom of it, demanding justice.” As Lamont stoops over, inspects a section of a twisted steel tieback, her fitted skirt hikes up to her buttocks.

  Dr. Hunter says, “Obviously, from that road construction disaster last summer, the Big Dig, when that tunnel collapsed and crushed that car, killed the woman passenger. Never was a fan of Monique Lamont, but now I’m starting to feel sorry for her. It’s not right to do that to somebody. But that’s not why you’re here. If I knew the answer to Janie Brolin, the case would have been solved when I was working it. My opinion now is the same as it was. A domestic homicide staged to look like a sexual homicide.”

  “Staged by her boyfriend. Lonnie Parris?”

  “They’d been heard arguing in the past, if my memory serves me well. Reports from neighbors of the two of them going at each other. So that morning, maybe he comes to pick her up for work. They get into it. He strangles her, then stages it to look like some sexual predator did it. Flees the scene and has the misfortune of having a close encounter of the vehicular kind.”

  “All I found about him was a newspaper article, couldn’t find his case file. Assume Cambridge has it, since it was a Cambridge case. Did you do his autopsy?”

  “I did. Multiple trauma. What you’d expect if you were run over.”

  “Run over? As opposed to being struck while you’re upright?”

  “Oh, he was run over, for sure. More than once. Some of his injuries were postmortem, indicating to me he’d been dead on the road for a while, long enough for a couple more cars to run over him before somebody finally felt a bump, decided it might be a good idea to get out and check. This was early in the morning. Dark out.”

  “Possible he might already have been dead before he was run over?”

  “You mean staged to look like an accident? It’s possible. All I can tell you is he wasn’t stabbed and he wasn’t shot. He certainly suffered massive trauma, especially to his head, while he was alive.”

  “I just find it interesting that he called the police from Janie’s apartment after supposedly walking in and finding her murdered,” Win says. “Then he disappears before the police show up. And not even twenty-four hours later, he’s dead in the middle of a road. Not hit while he was standing. But run over because he was already on the pavement.”

  “We did the best we could. Didn’t have the wizardry you do these days.”

  “We don’t have wizardry, but certainly there are capabilities that didn’t exist when you were working these cases, Dr. Hunter. I’m wondering”—pointing at the Bankers Box—“what you’ve got.”

  “Mostly the same old records in here you’ve probably already seen. The Cambridge records included. But the best stuff—well, it would have been somewhat unseemly for me to walk out the door with it when I retired. Specifically, pathological specimens. When the Department of Legal Medicine was disbanded in the eighties, our specimens stayed behind, no doubt were thrown out eventually. I wish I still had Janie Brolin’s eyes. Quite fascinating. Used to pass them around in wet labs. It was anybody’s guess.”

  “What about her eyes?” Win asks.

  “As you might expect, during her autopsy, I shone a bright light into her eyes, wondering if I might discover anything on gross examination that would account for her blindness. And I discovered strange shiny brownish specks over the corneas, what I suspect was the sequela of a disease process that caused her blindness. Or maybe she was suffering from some undiagnosed neurological degeneration that might result in an altered distribution of pigmentation. To this day, don’t know. Well, not useful for your purposes, anyway. A medical curiosity that’s more to my taste.”

  “May I?” Win gets up, walks over to the Bankers Box.

  “Be my guest.”

  Win carries it back to the hearth, takes off the lid. The expected paperwork and photographs, and a plastic airtight food container.

  “Been around a long time, hasn’t it?” Dr. Hunter says. “Tupperware. That and Ball glass jars. Staples in the morgue.”

  The lid is labeled with the case number that by now is so familiar: WT218-62. Inside are a syringe with a bent needle and a small vial that Win holds up to the light.

  An oily residue in it, and what looks like tiny flecks of tarnished copper.

  NINE

  After a quick stop at the labs to drop off the syringe and vial, he checks on Nana.

  “Brought your car back,” he says loudly. “Door unlocked. Alarm off. At least I can take some comfort in consistency. Because everything else is chaos, Nana.”

  All this as he carries groceries into her kitchen, not realizing she has a visitor. Poor Mrs. Murphy from Salem. Quite the irony that Nana has clients from what is literally called “The Witch City,” where the police department emblem features a witch flying on a broom. No joke.

  “I didn’t realize you were with someone.” He sets down the bags, starts putting things away.

  Groceries from a real grocery store, where he paid full price.

  “How you doing, Mrs. Murphy?” he asks.

  “Oh, not so good.”

  “Looks to me like you’ve lost some weight.”

  “Oh, not so much.” The ever-morose Mrs. Murphy, all three hundred pounds of her.

  Has a glandular condition, she says. It’s no better, she says. Does everything Nana tells her, and for a while, not so bad. Then the psychic vampire shows up again, drains her life force while she’s asleep, and she’s too depressed and tired to exercise or to do anything but eat.

  “I know,” Win says. “I work for a psychic vampire. It’s hell.”

  Mrs. Murphy laughs, slapping her huge thighs. “You’re such a funny one. Always cheer me up,” she says. “I told you to get away from her, though. You seen her movies? Oh, whatever they’re called. Same thing the presidential candidates are doing. You-Two or something. Anyway, I keep up with you and that big case you’re suddenly doing. I remember that case, don’t you?” Nodding at Nana. “It was like someone doing that to Helen Keller when she was young, only, of course, nobody killed Helen Keller. Thank God.”

  “Thank God,” Nana agrees.

  “I remember thinking it was like Alfred Hitchcock. Not an original thought. A lot of people said that at the time. Sort of like Wait Until Dark, where you imagine this poor blind girl struggling to dial the phone, struggling to get help, and she can’t even see the phone, much less the killer. Not knowing which direction to run because she can’t see anything. How terrifying is that? Well, I’ll be going so you can spend some time with your boy,” Mrs. Murphy says to Nana.

  Win helps Mrs. Murphy out of her chair.

  “Such the gentleman, that one.” She opens her pocketbook, pulls out a twenty-dollar bill, leaves it on the table, points her finger at Win. “I still got that daughter of mine, you know. Lilly’s a fine one—and not dating anybody at the moment.”

  “I’m so busy right now, I’m not fit for a lady, especially one as fine as your daughter.”

  “Such a gentleman.” She says it again, enters a number on her cell phone, says to whoever answers, “I’m coming out now. What? Oh, no. It’s better if I wait in the driveway. I’m too tired to walk around the block, honey.”

  She leaves, and Nana opens the refrigerator, takes a look at what Win just bought.

  “All sorts of wonderful things, my darling,” she says, opening a cupboard, checking in there, too. “What’s happened with your friend?”

  “It was easier to stop at Whole Foods. That roasted chicken is right off the rotisserie, and the wild rice salad—you need some grain. Has nuts and dried cranberries. I filled your car with gas, checked the oil, you’re all set.”

  “Sit down for a minute,” Nana says. “See this?” Points to a large gold locket she’s wearing around her neck, one of about ten other chains
with charms and symbols he doesn’t understand. “I have a piece of your hair in this locket from when you were a baby. And now I’ve added a piece of my hair. Maternal energy, my darling. Your grandmother protecting her grandson. There are angels walking the earth. Don’t you fear.”

  “If you run into one, send her my way.” He smiles at her.

  “What happened with your friend?”

  “What friend, and what makes you think anything happened?”

  “The one who’s caused a darkness in your heart. It’s not what you think it is.”

  “Nothing’s ever what I think it is,” he says. “That’s what makes life interesting, right? Gotta go.”

  “England,” she says.

  He stops in the doorway. “That’s right. Janie Brolin was from England.” It’s been all over the news.

  Lamont and Scotland Yard, the dynamic duo. Who knows? Maybe they’ll save what’s left of the world.

  “No,” Nana says emphatically. “It’s not about that poor girl.”

  Outside, he puts on his motorcycle gear while Mrs. Murphy watches, her big fake-leather pocketbook looped over the crook of a corpulent arm.

  “You look like one of those shows,” she says. “Star Trek. I used to love Captain Kirk. Now he does those travel commercials. Isn’t that an irony? Captain Kirk doing travel commercials, I guess staying in hotels where no man’s stayed before.” Laughing. “For ninety-nine dollars. Nobody sees the irony except me.”

  Win puts on his helmet, says, “You want to hop on the back and I’ll give you a ride?”

  She guffaws. “Don’t make me wet my pants! My Lord in heaven. A whale like me on a itty-bitty jet ski.”

  “Come on.” He pats the back of the seat. “Hop on. I’ll take you to your car.”

  Her face goes slack. Then something soft and sad in her eyes, because he means it.