The fibrous red material on the bottom of her feet and under her nails looks identical to what he’s finding inside her car.
“If you want that level of detail, I might have to send a sample to a lab where they specialize in wood analysis.” He continues painting UV inside the Mercedes. “It goes without saying in trace amounts like this you can’t exactly count the rings.”
“I’d settle for type of tree. Pine, redwood, cypress, cedar. It does look a lot like mulch.”
Soft-sided carrying cases are set down close to me, scientists unpacking the cyanoacrylate monomer and cabling.
“Hardwood shredded mulch as opposed to mulch made from bark,” I specify.
“There’s no bark I can see,” Ernie tells me.
“Sort of like shredded wheat,” I describe, as I look at it. “Fibrous, hairy. Almost like cotton. Not milled like wood that’s sawed or cut with machines. But extremely fine. Without magnification it almost looks like soil, like dirt, like fine coffee grounds. Only dark red.”
“No, it’s not milled. It’s totally irregular. A red-colored mulch, and usually mulch is made from scrap pallets and other wood that’s chip-ground.” His head is ducked in the driver’s side. “Not popular with a lot of people, because it bleeds in the rain and the dye masks treated lumber, which you don’t want in your yard, certainly not near your vegetable garden. Recycled CCA, chromated copper arsenate, and whatever this stuff is, it doesn’t have a trace of CCA, that much I can say. Assuming it’s the same stuff you found on the body. I did find iron oxide, which could be from a dye or from good ole dirt.”
I tell him it would be very helpful if he could examine what he’s finding inside her car, to do it as quickly as possible. It might be quite important, I add, and he promises when he gets back to his lab he’ll take a look with the stereomicroscope, the polarized light scope, the Raman spectrometer.
He’s confident he’s going to find the same chemical fingerprint, he explains, the same interference colors and same birefringence he saw when he took a look at the reddish material I collected from Peggy Stanton’s body.
“Red-stained wood but not stained all the way through.” I study another stub he hands to me. “If it were ground up and sprayed with dye, would it look like this?”
“Maybe. I do know when I examined what Dr. Zenner submitted to me yesterday, I noted that some of the fibers are charred,” Ernie says. “And that I don’t necessarily expect to find in mulch. But it completely depends on what it’s made from. Scrap wood from a torn-down building where there may have been a fire, for example? I also found charcoal and a lot of minerals mixed in.”
“The question is whether the charcoal, the minerals are indigenous to this mulchlike material or are from dirt on a floor or carpet.”
“That’s exactly the question.” Ernie stands up and straightens his back as if it’s stiff. “You start looking at the world through a microscope and you see salt, silica, iron, arsenic, insect pieces and parts, skin cells, hair, fibers, a holy horror.”
“It certainly appears he drove her car.” I feel sure of it. “Wherever he took her must have this reddish debris on the floor, on the ground.”
“Maybe a landscaping business or an area where a lot of red-colored mulch is used. Golf courses, apartment complexes, a park. Or maybe a place they manufacture mulch. Did you see anything like this around her house?”
“No. She stepped in it wherever he took her, and he did, too, and he tracked it into her car. This splintery material would work its way into clothing, carpet, skin, hair, and stick to everything like Velcro.”
“Some synthetic fibers on the leather seats,” he lets me know as he looks. “Probably from clothing, and a fair amount of white hair everywhere.”
“Her hair was white. Long. Shoulder length.”
“A little bit of these same wooden fibers.” He finds more of them. “Possibly transferred from clothing. Hers or some other person’s.” He turns a knob on the ALS’s panel, changing wavelengths, and the light turns green-blue.
I put my goggles back on, the orange filter blocking light not absorbed by the evidence, and I return to the car. Ernie is painting the steering wheel, the dash, the console, and the seat belt’s metal buckle and tongue, areas that will be swabbed for DNA next. Some smudges light up, nothing discernible, no latent prints we can do anything with, and I’m not surprised.
Maybe we’ll get lucky when the car is fumed inside and out with cyanoacrylate, better known as superglue, but I don’t want to get my hopes up. I can’t imagine a killer driving Peggy Stanton’s Mercedes or exploring her house and not wearing gloves or covering his hands or wiping things down after the fact, but I also know better than to project what I think onto someone else. Bad people can be incredibly stupid, especially arrogant ones who have never been caught and aren’t in a database.
“I always feel like the abominable snowman in this damn stuff,” Sil Machado complains, as he walks up. “Or maybe the Pillsbury Doughboy.”
Ernie explains what we’ve found as another text message lands on my phone. A third one from Lucy, who wants to see me upstairs.
“I saw nothing like that anywhere inside her house,” Machado lets Ernie know. “Not in the basement. Not in the garage. Not in her yard. No red mulch. Not even old mulch. You got a minute?” he says to me. “Actually, I’m going to need more than one.”
“I was just heading up to take care of a few things,” I reply. “Come on.”
twenty-nine
HE SAYS HE WOULD HAVE GOT HERE SOONER, BUT LUKE called him earlier this morning, asking questions about Howard Roth. Apparently, Luke told Sil Machado it was urgent.
“Did he explain why?” I walk us through the evidence bay.
“Yeah, he said you don’t think Howie fell down the stairs.”
“Howie?”
“What people called him,” Machado replies.
“I’m not suggesting he didn’t go down the stairs. I’m suggesting he might have had some help,” I clarify. “His injuries aren’t consistent with a typical fall.”
“Dr. Zenner said you think maybe somebody beat the shit out of him.”
I hope Luke didn’t say it like that, and I take off the Tyvek and drop it in the trash.
“So I shot right back over to his place.” Machado yanks off his coveralls, booties, and gloves, as if he hates them. “And I admit I didn’t look through things the first time thinking homicide. But if ever there was an obvious scenario I’ve seen? A known drunk has an accident and there’s blood on the steps he fell down, I’m telling you, Doc, I don’t make assumptions. But this was straightforward. I’m still blown away you’re thinking he might be a homicide.”
“Who found him?”
“A buddy, a guy who works maintenance at Fayth House just a few blocks away. Said he had the day off, dropped by for a beer. Apparently, Howie did some odd jobs over there. General labor, when he was sober enough.”
Machado hands me a transparent plastic bag that has a check inside it. I again press the button for the elevator, which seems to be stuck on my floor.
“This was in his toolbox. I didn’t look the first time because he’s an alcoholic who fell down the stairs into the basement, right? I mean, that’s where his body was found. He was in his underwear like he’d been in bed. And he’s got scratches, a gash on his head, broke ribs, is banged up like he went down the steps, and like I said, there’s blood on them and at the bottom of them.”
Peggy Stanton’s choice of a design for her personal checks is folk art reminiscent of Charles Wysocki Americana, a brick house with a white picket fence, a horse and buggy going past.
“Every indication is he took a fall so there was no reason for me to go rooting around inside an old toolbox,” Machado says. “Not unless I was looking for something in particular, which I wasn’t at first.”
“He may have gone down the stairs, but he may have been injured first,” I reiterate, and now I’m more convinced of it because of the check
.
It’s handwritten in black ink, made out to Howard Roth for one hundred dollars.
“I don’t think it’s likely the fall is what killed him,” I add. “He died from hemorrhage and possibly respiratory distress caused by blunt trauma so severe segments of his rib cage separated from his chest wall with as many as two to four fractures per rib. He has severe underlying lung injury.”
The check’s memo blank has been filled in with “home repairs.”
“He has blunt-force trauma to the back of his head. Do we know how he really got that?” I ask.
“Couldn’t hitting concrete steps do all of it?”
“I’m very concerned,” I tell Machado, as we wait for the elevator to budge from the top floor. “More so now that there’s a connection between Peggy Stanton and him.”
“Easy to imagine. The basement door right next to the bathroom.” He’s not going to stop defending his initial belief that Howard Roth is an alcohol-related accident. “I figure he gets up in the middle of the night? Drunk. Opens the wrong door, and one small step for man, one huge tumble.”
Printed in the check’s upper-left corner is the bank account holder’s name, Mrs. Victor R. Stanton.
“Where was the toolbox?” I ask.
There’s no address or telephone number on the check, and I continue looking at it. I can’t take my eyes off it.
“Oh, geez, Doc. You got to picture it in your head, okay? This old run-down place, really small, a real shit can.”
“I’m going to need to review the scene photographs.”
Her signature is Peggy Stanton, and it’s not a good forgery.
“A dark pit, a dump,” Machado is saying. “One naked lightbulb and six concrete steps leading down, with a rope for a railing. The toolbox was down there. I guess he carried the check around with him in his toolbox.”
“He’s making the rounds in Cambridge. Maybe stopping by her place because he wanted his money. Obviously he never cashed the check.” I tap-tap the button for the elevator, which hasn’t moved, someone holding open the door, no doubt.
My impatience reminds me of Marino.
“Fayth House is a residential nursing home,” I then say. “It might be worth checking on whether Peggy Stanton did any volunteer work there. It could be how she connected with him and why she would have trusted him to do an occasional job for her. A hundred dollars isn’t insignificant. I’d say he did more than rake her yard or unclog a drain.”
I think of the substandard wiring that was recently done in her basement as the elevator takes forever to descend.
“What else do we know about him?” I ask.
“Apparently, he was a mechanic in the Army. Served in Iraq when we first went over there, and didn’t do so good after the fact. Came home with a traumatic brain injury, a TBI from an explosive blast. Was discharged, moved back into his Cambridge house, couldn’t hold a job, wife left him seven years ago. A lot of drinking.”
“His STAT alcohol was point-one-six,” I repeat what Luke told me over the phone earlier, our discussion about his problematic case quite brief and frustrating.
Neither Machado nor Luke took the case as seriously as I wish they had, because it seemed so obvious.
“His level of intoxication would have made him more vulnerable to anyone who wanted to hurt him,” I add. “If he’s cirrhotic, he’s also going to bleed excessively. I’ve not gone over his autopsy findings in detail yet. But I will.”
“He pretty much drank up his pension every month and made money any way he could,” Machado says. “All these garbage bags in his house, nothing much else, just bag after bag like a hoarder. Filled with cans, bottles that he obviously was turning in for money, probably digging through trash cans, taking them out of peoples’ recycling bins that they leave curbside.”
The check is dated this past June first, and I tell Machado I seriously doubt Peggy Stanton was still alive then.
“If she was,” I add, “she wasn’t in her own house, since it appears the last time it was accessed was April twenty-ninth, according to the alarm log.”
“Obviously someone was able to get enough of her information to impersonate her. Must have stolen some of her blank checks, got her PIN number for the ATM because there are some cash withdrawals, nothing abnormal but enough so you think she’s alive and well. He got the code to her alarm, who knows what all? Any signs of torture?” he asks, as the elevator doors finally slide open.
“She has some strange brownish areas that I’m not sure about.” I describe them. “No obvious injuries or marks I’d immediately associate with torture. But not everything leaves a mark.”
“Probably just scared the shit out of her and she told him whatever he wanted, believing he wouldn’t hurt her.”
“Did you talk to Howard Roth’s wife?” We ride up in what Marino calls “the slowest boat in China.”
“Yesterday. She came down here and ID’d a photograph, and I talked to her for a while and then called her back as I was driving here. Apparently, he’s a regular in Cambridge. In fact, I think I’ve seen him walking around, and a couple of guys I work with know about him. Doing the odd job, a pretty decent handyman, and honest, harmless, according to the ex. But she couldn’t stay with a drunk,” Machado says. “No car. Driver’s license is expired. A real sad case.”
I return the envelope to him, and he verifies that personal checks and checkbooks he found inside Peggy Stanton’s house are like this one, exactly like it, he says.
“That’s the other thing I find really interesting,” he adds. “She had all her bank statements in a file drawer, you know, with all her canceled checks? Years’ worth of them, but only through this past April.”
“Because someone began intercepting her mail.” We get out on the seventh floor, where Toby seems to be having difficulty pushing a cart loaded with boxes. “Are you considering that Howard Roth killed her?”
“It’s always smart to consider everything. But it wouldn’t make sense to think he had anything to do with it.”
“He had something to do with it even if he wasn’t aware of it,” I reply, as we follow the corridor toward the computer lab. “Are you the one holding the elevator door open forever?” I say to Toby, when we get to him.
“Sorry about that. I’m having trouble with a stuck wheel, then it turned over when I was pushing it out.”
“I thought you were off today.”
“Well, with Marino not here, I thought it was good to come in.” He’s not looking me in the eye and I notice the boxes are computer supplies.
Machado and I walk off, and I comment, “It says a lot that she continued using her husband’s name when he’s been dead thirteen years.”
Toby pushes the cart behind us, stopping every few steps to straighten out the wheel.
“Maybe she didn’t want people to know she lived alone,” Machado supposes. “My girlfriend’s like that, doesn’t have her address or phone numbers on her checks. Doesn’t want her information out there so someone can just show up at her door, doesn’t want strangers calling. Of course, being with me and hearing all my stories about what goes on has made her a little paranoid.”
“Why do you think he didn’t cash the check? Based on your description, he could use every penny he got.”
“I’m betting he tried and couldn’t,” Machado says. “A handyman who basically would go around Cambridge collecting bottles and cans, doing anything anybody might hire him for. I seriously doubt people paid him with checks.”
We walk through Lucy’s open door, and she’s at her desk, surrounded by large flat-screen monitors, and Toby pushes the cart in after us. He begins stacking the boxes against the wall.
“You want these anyplace special?” he asks her.
“Just leave them.” She says it like an order, staring at him.
“Raking leaves, yard work, home repairs, even electrical, and he’s not licensed in anything, according to his ex-wife. Probably paid in cash,” Machado is saying to m
e.
“He probably wasn’t mailing invoices to people,” I point out.
“No sign of anything like that in his house.”
“Then why did she owe Howard Roth money? Why didn’t she pay him at the time he did the work? Maybe it was for a job he hadn’t finished?” I suggest.
“I’m thinking what you are,” Machado says. “The work in the basement. Nothing hooked up yet. Maybe he drops by a couple times to finish and no one’s answering the door. Maybe he leaves a note in her mailbox.”
“Maybe.”
“And whoever is impersonating her sends him a check. The perp had to have his address.” Machado’s talking to me and looking at Lucy.
“Howard Roth, forty-two years old, died over the weekend at his central Cambridge home.” She reads what she’s just pulled up. “Bateman Street. You can Google it.”
“So maybe that’s how, and he gets the check in the mail,” Machado says. “He has no account at Peggy Stanton’s bank and nothing that might inspire a teller to hand over a hundred bucks to him.”
“Her bank would have her signature card on file, and it’s not a great forgery.” I sit next to Lucy.
“I agree with you there.”
Machado pulls up a chair and unzips his briefcase.
“If you put her signature and this one side by side?”
He slides out two plastic bags, and Toby is taking his time.
“So maybe some teller pulled up her signature card and got a bad feeling, wouldn’t cash it for him, plus his driver’s license isn’t valid, like I said. And that might be what the bank was calling about,” Machado says. “There are a couple messages on her answering machine from Wells Fargo, asking her to call. First one in early June, about the time the check was mailed to Howie.”
“How do you know it was mailed?” Lucy scans information scrolling by on every screen, what I recognize as files her search engines are finding.
I can’t tell what they are. I can’t decipher what I’m seeing, and that’s deliberate, because I’m not alone.