“And she’s saying she doesn’t know if she did that?” I don’t believe the Realtor whoever she is, and Benton is in front of me, saying little but I know he’s listening.
“She says she doesn’t think so.” Freedman steadies himself, going slowly one step at a time, and he sounds breathless, keyed up and winded, his eyes everywhere. “But she might have forgotten. Suddenly she has amnesia.”
“Her loyalty is to the owners.” I have no doubt of that, especially considering who they are. “I suspect the last thing she wants to do is cause them trouble and lose her commission.”
Maybe lose more than that is the thought that follows, and no matter the Realtor’s excuse it strikes me as inconceivable she would check the property daily unless it was being shown that often, which it wasn’t. Freedman says it’s rare anybody looks at the Rosado estate. It’s too expensive for the area and requires a full-time caretaker. Or at least that’s what the Realtor told him but she meant it as a boast not a disparagement, and a suspicion begins to take form.
“Troy,” Benton says as we follow shallow stone steps, mossy and thick with dead leaves, leading steeply down through hardwood trees. “Is she aware of his ever accessing the property? I know what I suspect but did she say anything about it? He goes to school around here and has been in and out of trouble.”
“I don’t remember her saying anything about him.”
“He apparently has a suspended driver’s license”—I pass on what Lucy dug up—“and at one time was using a car service like Uber to get around. All you need is an app on your phone and a credit card on file. You rarely have the same driver twice. The Realtor?” I then ask. “Who is it?”
“A big company that represents a lot of waterfront property here, Gloucester, the Cape, Boston.” Freedman tells me the name of the woman he spoke to and it means nothing.
But the real estate company is the same one Mary Sapp works for. I suggest we find out who the owner is behind any shells and LLCs. I remind them that Bob Rosado is a real estate investor who made a fortune from buying devalued properties and flipping them. Then he went into politics and right out of the box won his congressional seat.
“Yeah I know all about Congressman Rosado and his worthless kid.” Freedman shines his Maglite down at his feet. “A couple of summers ago I picked up Troy for shoplifting at the liquor store near Seaside Park.”
“What happened?” Benton asks.
“His father showed up with the district attorney, that’s what happened.”
“Nothing in other words,” I reply.
“There’s a history of that with them. But if Troy’s got something to do with what happened to Gracie Smithers? If anything’s happened to Henderson? Now we’re talking a different ending to the story. I’ll put him away if it’s the last thing I do. Where the hell is he anyway?”
“I wonder if the Rosados have someone who looks after this place.” I suggest what I’m beginning to think. “Someone who’s in the area now and perhaps has been since the property went on the market. The Realtor said this property needs a caretaker. The question is did she bring that up because the Rosados have one.”
“She didn’t mention it specifically and I got the impression she’s the one looking after things.” Freedman is getting more upset. “I don’t understand. Where the hell could he be?” He’s talking about Henderson. “What made him drop his damn radio? There’s no sign of a struggle. It’s like he just vanished in thin air. It doesn’t make sense he’d get out of his car and leave his coffee in it for that matter.”
ON EITHER SIDE OF the steps is a wall built of the same rough gray stone. The walls get higher the farther down the hillside we go, higher than Benton’s head as the earth levels out.
I smell pungent decaying leaves and dead wood, and the wind carries the clean saltiness of the sea rushing against a rocky beach about fifty feet ahead where the trees and vegetation end. Pebbles clatter and twigs snap as we spread out away from the walled-in steps, shining our lights, searching for any sign of Joe Henderson, for any sign of what might have happened to Gracie Smithers before someone dumped her body in the swimming pool.
Ahead and to my right are the ruins of more walls, perhaps an outbuilding in the property’s long-ago past, and then I detect another odor. I move downwind and it gets stronger. Charred wood, and the narrow beam of my flashlight licks over cinders and partially burned logs in a small clearing where coarse sand surrounds a fire pit that has been used recently. I note that the sand on one side of the pit is disturbed.
Impressions shaped like hands, shoes, indentations and swaths where people may have been sitting, moving around a lot, and a struggle comes to mind. I step closer and gold metal flickers in the sweep of my light. I sit on my heels and pull a pair of clean gloves out of a pocket of my cargo pants.
“Well that answers at least one question.” I brush sand way from a delicate gold chain, a necklace with the name Gracie, the curl of the e embellished with a tiny crystal.
“So she was definitely here in this spot.” Freedman leans close, looking at the necklace in the gloved palm of my hand, shining his light on it.
“Possibly sitting around the fire,” I reply, “and the clasp is broken, which is consistent with what I saw in her autopsy photos. She has a very thin linear abrasion on the right side of her neck that could have been caused by someone forcibly removing a necklace.”
I open my metal case and tuck the necklace inside an evidence envelope, labeling it.
“You mean doing that while she was alive?” Freedman says and his eyes don’t stop moving. “To steal it from her?”
“It could be a souvenir,” Benton offers. “But if so why is it still here?”
“It may have gotten caught on something such as clothing if she were undressing or being undressed, for example,” I suggest.
“So she might have been by the fire making out with Troy Rosado?” Freedman says angrily, and he’s scared.
With each minute that goes by his tension is more palpable. He’s trying to focus on Gracie Smithers’s murder but he’s locked in on Henderson and what awful thing might have happened to him.
“Whatever may have gone on could have been consensual at first,” I reply. “What I do know is she didn’t die here.”
“He could have knocked her unconscious and dragged her down to the water to drown her.” Freedman explores the sand and the cinders, his flashlight probing. He’s sweating profusely, and I’m aware of Benton.
His attention is on the dark horizon, on blooming black clouds volatile with electricity. He keeps looking up and out to sea.
“There’s no evidence she was dragged, no abrasions consistent with that for example.” I collect a sample of sand by the fire pit, a coarse granular granite that’s a tannish gray.
It will contain microscopic traces of charred wood that I don’t expect to be present on the beach, and it’s a reflex for me to anticipate the worst. I’m hardly conscious of it. Whatever might diffuse a jury’s logical conclusions is certain to be asked, and I already expect the question. How can I state for a fact that the sand Gracie aspirated came from the beach? I’ll make sure there can be no confusion, and I envision the delicate fourteen-year-old, a child, and my indignation builds like the thunder cells overhead.
“There’s substantial evidence she drowned, inhaling water and what may be beach sand. I suggest we get this tested for DNA immediately.” I hand the envelope to Freedman but he’s hardly listening to me. “I wouldn’t wait. Get it to CFC first thing in the morning if you can.”
Benton has stepped closer to the shore, his light moving along the water’s edge, waves swelling, heaving onto the brownish rock-strewn sand, fanning out in lacy white foam. The sound of it is loud and pervasive as I creep my light over the beach, illuminating gravel, painting over small rocks that become bigger and then boulders and solid outcrops. Up to a small d
ry tidal pool where only a storm surge could reach, and what shines this time is tinted glass.
Beer bottles perfectly upright in a shallow crevice, the labels facing exactly the same way, and I’m grateful for my nylon boots with their thick tread as I climb massive granite worn smooth. There are four green St. Pauli Girl bottles, the same beer that was in the bar refrigerator, and a spread-out towel and a faux leather jacket with inlays shaped like flowers. It’s zipped up and precisely folded as if it’s on display in a shop. I look at the label inside the collar without disturbing the jacket, a size extra small, and I take photographs.
“I can take care of this unless you want to?” I call out to Freedman, who’s getting more distracted.
“Go ahead.” He hardly looks in my direction.
The wind is gusting, shaking trees and smelling of rain. I pick up the jacket and check the pockets.
“Possibly a house key, a cell phone,” I tell him but he’s hardly listening anymore, and Benton has moved closer to me. “A lip gloss, breath mints, a five-dollar bill, a quarter, a dime, a nickel.” I bag them too. “And four bottle caps.” The beer bottle caps are bent on one side from being pried off the bottles, and that’s deliberate too.
I doubt Gracie Smithers opened the beers and saved the bottle caps, and there’s no bottle opener. It’s not here. I refold the jacket and place it inside a bag. Her blood alcohol was negative. She wasn’t drinking but someone was, and I suspect this person neatly, obsessively arranged the empty bottles, the towel, the jacket, and I think about the guitars on their stands in the apartment on Farrar Street. I think about the boxes of condoms and Imodium in the cabinet, how perfectly they were arranged. Then my thoughts return to the possibility of a caretaker whose job is to do far more than ensure the safety of Rosado’s properties. Troy needs constant monitoring I have no doubt. Someone needs to keep him out of trouble.
“Do you want to get a look?” I raise my voice to Freedman over the heaving surf and wind that’s beginning to howl.
“It’s about to get bad.” He stares in my direction as lightning illuminates dark mountains of clouds and thunder rumbles. “We need to move fast! We don’t want to get caught in this!”
I take more photographs and then I pick up a corner of the towel, blue and white with an anchor design. I wonder where it came from. There were no towels inside the house, and I see what’s under it and the feeling hollows me out, what I felt when I saw the kayak floating in the flooded basement, what I felt when I found seven pennies on my wall, the same date, heads up, each oriented exactly the same way and as bright as brand-new.
The smear of blood is the size of my hand, dark brown with several long light hairs adhering to it. I take more photographs as Benton climbs up to me. I show him what I’ve found and he doesn’t need to tell me that it’s staged. It’s not that the blood and hair aren’t real. It’s not that this isn’t the scene where someone slammed Gracie Smithers’s head against a hard flat surface, a rounded slab of granite rock. But the rest of it is for the benefit of whoever discovered it, and the message gets only worse.
“Like smoking a cigarette after sex.” Benton continues staring off at the sea. “Spreading out a towel over the victim’s blood, sitting on it next to her neatly folded jacket, drinking beer, enjoying the afterglow.”
“It doesn’t sound like something an impulsive nineteen-year-old boy would do.”
“No way,” he says. “Whatever happened between them likely occurred at the fire pit where her necklace was ripped off. I suspect Troy got sexually aggressive with Gracie, a minor, and it was going to cause a real problem this time.”
“Two people are involved in her death?”
“Troy started it and someone far more dangerous, someone in control had to clean up his mess, someone who possibly is paid to clean up Rosado messes and takes pleasure in it. Sexual pleasure,” Benton says.
“Are you thinking about Rand Bloom?”
“I’m not. I’m thinking that Congressman Rosado may have his own personal fixer, his own hired psychopath,” Benton says as Freedman paces the beach, turning up the volume on his radio.
I get swabs and a small bottle of sterile water out of my case.
“Twenty-seven,” Freedman transmits.
“Go to nine,” a female voice sounds over the air, and Freedman moves closer to the rock stairs that lead back up to the tiered acres of the property.
I swab blood. I collect the hairs with plastic tweezers.
“Switching now.” Freedman sounds very tense. “Twenty-seven with you.”
I begin bagging the towel, the beer bottles.
“Affirmative,” Freedman says loudly into his radio, and Benton stands up, his attention fixed on the black horizon.
The thunder is louder and closer, shaking the night, and lightning illuminates thunderheads like a face-off between angry gods. We climb down the rocks to the beach and I collect a handful of sand as the rain begins. It is sudden and cold, falling hard with no warning, and Freedman is busy on his radio as he heads back up the mossy leaf-covered steps, which instantly are wet and as slick as glass.
“We need to find out who that belongs to,” Benton says as he stares out to sea.
The sailboat is moored maybe half a mile offshore, its sails furled, a large vessel, at least sixty feet. In the blinking light of a navigation buoy I can barely make out the crane-like davit, the block and tackle, the loops of rope hanging down from the stern dipping up and down in the heavy surf.
“That’s a strange place to be moored, the ocean not the harbor.” Benton shoves his wet hair off his face, rain drenching us fast. “It looks like it hauls a dinghy but where is it?”
Freedman is halfway up the steps as rain billows in sheets. “The pool!” he yells and he almost falls as he starts to run.
CHAPTER 37
IT WAS THE LAST place the police thought to look, and why would it be foremost on their minds? Benton and I didn’t imagine it either, that the scene where Gracie Smithers’s body was discovered this morning would be a crime scene a second time.
When we reach the saltwater pool the police have pulled the dark green cover and it’s piled on the deck. They stand around the deep end, four uniformed officers and two plainclothes, staring at the body suspended facedown in murky water inches above the sediment-covered bottom. Their collective mood is electrically charged, glimmers of upset flashing, and their aggression rumbles from a deep place, threatening to explode like a bomb going off.
“The cover was all the way on,” an officer explains to us above the din of the heavy rain, his voice as tense as a violin string about to snap. “I figured the Realtor did it after the girl was found but I thought we should check.”
Freedman is struggling out of his jacket, his shoulder holster, and I grip his arm to stop him from jumping in. I shine my light down in the water and the hands floating up are profoundly wrinkled and chalky white, a phenomenon known as washerwoman’s skin, the advanced stages of it. The body has been submerged for a while.
I bend down and dip my fingers in, and the salt water is unheated and chilled, the cover keeping the pool well below the ambient temperature. Hours, I think. Possibly as many as three or four, the dead man clothed in jeans and running shoes, a flash of pale flesh at his ankles, no socks. A loose denim shirt billows up, and I squat at the edge and move my light closer to the surface, and the beam catches an earring, a multifaceted small clear stone in the lobe of the left ear. On the left wrist is a rugged black watch on a black band. His hair is short, dark and curly.
I get up and ask, “Does anybody see a pool skimmer? Anything with a long handle?”
Everyone begins searching at once while Benton stays by my side, and I meet his eyes and don’t say a word. I don’t have to because he knows me. He knows when something isn’t what it seems. I call my investigative unit and Jen Garate answers. I tell her we have another
body from the same location in Marblehead Neck. I inform her tentatively who it might be, and Benton is listening. He steps away to use his phone.
“We need Rusty, Harold, a removal service here right away,” I talk over Jen’s excitement.
“Oh my God. How weird is that? What was he doing there? An insurance person? Oh. I know. The homeowners are afraid of being sued.” Her words tumble out. “But who would kill an insurance person? This is creepy. I’m on my way.”
“I thought you were off.” I remember her leaving for the day.
“Becca had something come up.” Jen explains that she took a colleague’s midnight shift, and then I inform her I don’t need her to come, just a truck to transport the body back to my office.
“You don’t need the scene worked?” Her disappointment is shamelessly obvious over the phone.
“I’m working it,” I reply as I watch Benton walk off the deck into the sopping wet grass, on his phone, splashing rain drowning him out as he talks to someone.
Next I let Bryce know what’s happened. I tell him that whoever does the transport can’t be alone at any time, not even for two minutes. There must be a police presence while the body is being removed and he’s to see to it because the officers at the scene right now are upset and distracted.
“Call dispatch, a lieutenant if you can find one, to make sure that Rusty or Harold or whoever we get is accompanied by armed officers. It’s not negotiable in light of the circumstances,” I say and I end the call.
I tuck my phone back in a pocket and Freedman hands me a leaf rake with a blue net and a long aluminum handle.
“What are you doing?” he asks, and he really has no idea, none of them do, but I won’t explain until I’m sure.
“I’m going to guide him to the shallow end and pull him out,” I reply. “Does anybody have anything we can put him on? I don’t have sheets. I’m afraid I didn’t come quite prepared for this.”