“I’ve got a weather tarp,” an officer volunteers.
“Would you mind? That, towels, anything. And if you could direct your lights in the water for me so I can see what I’m doing?”
I drop in the rake and the silver handle seems to bend in the refracted light, and I touch the body with the frame of the net. I maneuver it flatly against the waist and nudge gently, and the body moves easily. Inching my way along the ledge, I guide the body toward the shallow end and it stops at the steps, the left shoulder barely brushing the rough concrete. From there Rand Bloom is within reach, and I refrain from saying who he is until we are turning him over and pulling him out.
“What?” someone says.
“Who the hell?” says another.
“It’s not Joe?”
“Then where is he? That’s his car. I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know what Joe Henderson looks like or why his car is here,” I answer. “I just know this isn’t him.”
Benton returns to the pool deck, the rain pounding all around us, the wind tearing at our soaking wet hair and clothing, and I catch the lights peripherally before I turn to look. An orange rigid-hulled Coast Guard boat races through the darkness, blue lights strobing, charging toward the dark sailboat heaving on the angry sea.
WATER POURS FROM UNDER the body as we ease it onto the spread-out orange weather tarp.
Freedman hands me cloths he got from somewhere, microfiber, probably car shammies that are useless. I let the rain rinse the salt water off my hands and clothes. There are no lights in the pool or on the deck, only our flashlights, and in the glare of them Rand Bloom’s dead face looks more deformed, more grotesque.
The small vertical slit in the front of the denim shirt lines up with the stab wound I find midchest after undoing several buttons, a single-edged blade that was twisted. His assailant was facing him, and I envision a tactical kill, the knife thrust under the breastplate into soft tissue, angled up into the heart, and I open my medical case. I get out thermometers, a ruler for scale, and the temperature of the body is barely ten degrees warmer than the water.
I take photographs, aware that the Coast Guard boat is alongside the sailboat, blue lights sparking. Then I get Luke Zenner on the phone. I hear music in the background over the splashing rain.
“I realize you’re not on call,” I say right off, and I can see flashlights in the distance as Guardsmen board the sailboat.
“Not a problem.” What Luke means is he’s not been drinking and is fit for service, and I explain where I am and why.
“I need you to come in for this, Luke.”
“I hope you’re headed to the airport and down to Florida . . .”
“We’re not.”
“But you want me to do the case tonight?”
“Yes and I’m recusing myself.”
“Of course. Whatever you need.”
“It’s best I’m not there at all, not even as a witness,” I say and Benton is on his phone again, his back to everyone.
I can see him staring out to sea as he talks.
“That’s fine.” Luke is moving away from the music. “Do you mind if I ask why?”
“I met Rand Bloom earlier today.”
“And you’re certain that’s who it is?”
“We’ll verify his ID but yes. I’ve had brushes with him in the past, adversarial ones,” I reply. “I can’t be objective . . .”
“Can you hold, Kay? It’s Marino. Probably about this.”
I hold as I watch Benton in the dark yard, in the pouring rain, both of us drenched to the skin, and I can’t help but think about how this day began and how it’s about to end, from bad to worse and what will be next? It’s almost midnight and something else occurs to me as I look around at the thick darkness, the rain splashing on the pool and the pulled-back cover and the granite deck. We were inside the house earlier, and I ask Freedman why no one turned on the outside lights.
“We tried.” He hugs himself against the billowing rain. “It appears all of the exterior bulbs have been removed.”
“Removed?”
“I assumed because no one’s living here and the grounds probably aren’t shown after dark. Well I’m sure as hell not assuming anything now,” he says, and then Luke is back in my earpiece.
“I guess Benton got hold of him,” he says of Marino. “You definitely want this done now.”
“Since it’s the third death today that seems to be connected somehow,” I reply. “Yes.”
“I ask because Marino wants to come in after he goes through Rand Bloom’s apartment. He wants me to give him a couple hours.”
“He needs to look for sources of DNA. A toothbrush, for example, and he shouldn’t witness the autopsy either,” I reply. “He can’t be objective. Neither of us can. He almost got into a fight with Bloom this afternoon. I don’t want you to wait for him and I don’t want him present,” I emphasize.
“Is there something personal I should know about? I don’t mean to be presumptuous but if there is it will come up, and it’s better that I prepare.”
“I didn’t know Rand Bloom personally.” I’m not going to admit that I didn’t like him.
In fact I might have hated him, and I watch Benton end his call and look directly at me.
“I have a feeling this is fairly straightforward,” I say to Luke. “A stab wound midline to the center chest, posterior to the sternum. The water temp is fifty-one degrees, ambient air seventy-eight now because it’s a lot warmer than it was this afternoon. The body temp is seventy-six. He would have cooled quickly in cold covered water and I estimate he’s been submerged four or five hours at least. Witnesses will help with when he was last seen alive. Marino and I saw him drive off this afternoon about four. I’m wondering if he left us and came straight here.”
“Rigor?” he asks.
“Delayed by the cold water and just beginning to form.”
“A wound like that and I suspect he bled out internally,” Luke says. “I’ll measure how much blood is in his chest cavity and check carefully for any signs of drowning.”
“If the blade penetrated his heart or a major vessel, his survival time would have been minutes. If there’s any sign of drowning then that likely means he was stabbed very near the pool, possibly on the deck. He would have taken some agonal breaths and that’s about it.”
“What about blood around the pool?”
“If there was it’s gone now,” I reply as the rain boils on the deck, and Benton is by my side, the blue lights flashing by the sailboat. “It’s a monsoon here.” I end the call and meet Benton’s eyes. “Please don’t tell me there’s another one.”
“The sailboat,” he says.
“Who?” I ask.
“Joe Henderson,” he answers. “He’s been found alive.”
“THE SAME PERSON WE saw in the gray pickup truck,” Benton says, and we’re trotting back to his car, splashing through puddles in the pitch-dark. “Based on what Henderson says I don’t see how there can be any doubt.”
At around seven P.M. Joe Henderson pulled up to the Rosado house where a gray pickup truck was parked but he saw no sign of the driver. He got out of his Tahoe and noticed the back door ajar the same way we did, and the instant he pushed it open all the way while calling out if anyone was home he was pepper sprayed. A pillowcase was yanked over his head, his wrists bound in flex-cuffs behind his back, and he felt a gun barrel jabbed into the small of his neck.
“The only thing the person said was you don’t have to die,” Benton continues to relay what the Coast Guard told him.
“Male or female?”
“He told the Coast Guard he doesn’t know but assumes male.”
“Based on?”
“His impression.”
“An easy one since he was overpowered. So he assumes it had to be a man
.”
“I agree.” Benton digs into his pocket, turning it inside out because it’s soaking wet.
“How did this person get him down to the beach?” I can’t imagine being able to navigate the steep stone steps if I couldn’t see.
“It wasn’t raining then and it wasn’t dark.” Benton points the remote and the Audi’s locks click free. “The pillowcase didn’t have holes for his eyes. But it was left open at the bottom so he could breathe and he was able to look down and see his feet.”
“What about the other person’s feet?”
“They were behind him. He had no further details except that this person took his phone. The bigger point is whoever it is doesn’t hesitate to kill an insurance investigator and a fourteen-year-old girl. He may have picked off three unsuspecting people with a high-power rifle. But he didn’t kill a cop.”
“Why?” I grab open my door and duck inside. “Does Henderson have any idea?”
“No. He was forced into a dinghy with an outboard motor and taken to the sailboat where he was locked inside the salon. He heard the dinghy leave and managed to get the pillowcase off his head. He estimates he was in the salon several hours when he heard the Guardsmen and started kicking the door and screaming.”
“Why go to the risk and the trouble?” I ask. “Why not kill him and leave his body in the pool too or dump it in the ocean?”
“Whoever we’re dealing with is sending a message.” Benton turns on the heat, both of us chilled despite the dramatic rise in temperature. “This person has his own code about who he kills.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I believe he wants us to believe it.”
“He?” I have to seriously question it. “The person in the cap and glasses who was tailgating us earlier? I couldn’t tell the gender.”
“I couldn’t either,” he admits, and then we say nothing as water drums the undercarriage of the car, the earth cooler than the air which moils with fog.
A woman, and I don’t want to think it. Not for a moment do I believe Lucy could have transformed into such a monster but I worry what she knows. I keep my troubled thoughts to myself, back on the highway now, the wipers pumping hard. My phone rings. I glance at caller ID.
Bryce Clark.
“I think you need to hear this from me,” he says instantly and with self-importance that’s supposed to come across as somber.
“What is it, Bryce?”
“You sound as if you’re inside a metal drum being beaten with sticks.”
“Go ahead.”
“The scrubs.”
“What scrubs?”
“That Lucy found on the roof. You know at the Academy of Arts and Sciences?”
“What about them?” I ask.
“Well due to the urgency of the situation, that someone may have been spying on you and maybe it was the same person who shot Jamal Nari? Anyway we had the jacket and cap worked up ASAP and ran the profile through the database . . .”
I interrupt, “What profile?”
“From swabbing inside the cap, there was DNA and we got a single donor profile. I don’t know how to tell you this, Doctor Scarpetta.”
“For God’s sake, Bryce.” Of all times for his drama, and I have no patience left.
“Before you jump to conclusions, Lucy knows how to handle evidence without contaminating it.”
“Her DNA was on the clothing she found on the roof?” My troubled thoughts begin to throb deep inside my psyche, and my chest feels tight.
“Yes and no.”
“Low copy number DNA and she could have breathed on the clothing and that would explain it,” I reply in a steady voice I have to force. “What do you mean yes and no?”
“Skin cells on the band inside the cap and Lucy says it’s impossible they came from her,” Bryce says.
“Then the simple way to resolve this is to get a buccal swab and do the comparison that way instead of using a database match.”
“We did and it’s not hers,” he replies. “That’s what I mean by yes and no.”
“Now I’m really confused.”
“It matches in our computer but not when you do a direct comparison in our lab.”
“Are you suggesting that something’s wrong in CODIS?”
“We didn’t get as far as the FBI’s database. I’m talking about ours. Everyone who works here has their DNA in our database for exclusionary purposes,” he says. “We do that so . . .”
“I know why we do it,” I almost snap at him.
“Lucy’s DNA profile in our database is wrong,” he says. “Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
“It can’t be a corrupted data file because that would assume a false positive, a false match with evidence turned in.” I know exactly what he’s getting at.
A corrupted file wouldn’t have gotten a match with the clothing found on the roof or with anything else for that matter. Corrupted data result in a nonmatch and not a false one, and there’s another thought that begins to nag at me. If someone’s agenda is to sabotage or frame Lucy then this person isn’t trying very hard.
“You’re implying our database has been tampered with,” I say to Bryce.
“And Lucy swears nobody could do that.”
“It sounds like somebody did.”
“She says with all of the encryption . . . ? Well I can’t explain it the way she does. I mean, hello? Greek? Half the time I’ve got no idea what she’s talking about but she swears the only person who would know how to access those DNA files and alter them the way it was done is her.”
“That’s probably not a smart thing to say,” I reply. “And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t start a rumor like that.”
“Me start rumors?”
“I mean it, Bryce.”
“Are you coming in tomorrow?”
“It depends on if we can get out—”
“I checked earlier,” he interrupts much too cheerfully. “And the weather’s perfect in Florida and nothing has been canceled out of Logan. You can still make it for your birthday on the seven A.M. flight. I mean a tad late but you know what they say? Better late than never.”
“Not Miami, not my birthday, I’m talking about getting out on Lucy’s helicopter.” My God, does he have no EQ at all? “We’re meeting with Jack Kuster at the Morris County Sheriff’s Department, a firearms expert. We’ve got to figure out exactly how the killer is doing it.”
“If you don’t mind my saying it? All the screwy stuff with Lucy? Maybe she shouldn’t—”
“I do mind you saying it,” I reply.
CHAPTER 38
TWO DAYS LATER
MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY
ROTOR WASH AGITATES THE green canopies of trees, their heavy limbs thrashing beneath our skids. The pale undersides of leaves flash like the palms of upset hands and the wooded hillside abruptly opens, leveling into the airfield.
It’s Saturday, June 14. The late afternoon is clear and hot, the storm front having finally moved out around two P.M. We got delayed because of weather and reasons I don’t trust and silently obsess about. My mind is caught on the search of Rand Bloom’s apartment and what turned up, the sniper rifle with a powerful scope, the solid copper ammunition and a jar full of old pennies including ones dated 1981, the year Lucy was born.
The cartridges weren’t hand-loaded. They weren’t polished. Neither were the pennies and there was no sign of a tumbler. Bloom’s apartment door was open because the lock had been picked by someone skilled who left scarcely a tool mark. Marino believes what he found inside was planted, the scenario a familiar one like the teal green scrubs on the roof, like Lucy’s tampered-with DNA profile in the CFC database.
Someone didn’t try very hard.
Test fires and analysis will verify the rifle isn’t the one we’re looking fo
r, Marino is quite sure, and that’s not the bigger problem. The manipulations are relentless now and although no one is offering it outright there are darkening suspicions about Lucy. She hasn’t been herself of late. Even Benton says it and we’re not the only ones aware that she’s been acting oddly and in secret, her whereabouts unaccounted for much of the time. Janet has confirmed it.
When I got her on the phone several hours ago she told me that Lucy has been gone often in recent months with no explanation and making large purchases without discussion. The Ferrari and before that she got rid of one helicopter and bought a different one. She said that what Lucy told me about not wearing the ring anymore wasn’t quite true. Yes, Janet’s father got it back—because Lucy returned it to Janet.
Added to that are other escalating events. Someone figured out a way to send tweets that couldn’t be traced, committed fraud with my credit card, hacked into the CFC computer. Now Rand Bloom is dead and items inside his apartment are supposed to make us leap to more conclusions or fill us with more doubt about a former federal agent, my niece. I look over at her. She’s the master of her own ship, her fine motor skills impeccable, her focus keen and unflinching.
I don’t know what I would do if her seat were empty, if wherever I looked I didn’t see her anymore. Should something happen . . . I don’t finish the thought.
“I’ll tell them we’re overnighting. A top-off with Jet-A no prist,” I say into my mic and Lucy doesn’t answer.
We hover taxi over frantic grass, an orange wind sock twitching wildly as we churn lower and slower toward runways that intersect in an irregular X. There is no wind except ours. The afternoon is hot and dead calm in Morristown, where I’ve been many times before, never imagining one day it would be for this.
But you should have imagined it. The sotto voce that comes from some deep part of me intrudes upon my consciousness again. If someone wants to get you badly enough it will happen. I imagine a weapon trained on us even as I’m thinking this, ready to shoot us out of the sky with no qualms or regrets as I lightly hold the grip of the cyclic, what most people call the stick.