“He identified himself. He told me what happened.” She stares down at her hands tightly clasped in her lap.
“And you told him you were in New Hampshire. Even though it wasn’t true.”
She nods yes.
“You lied.”
She nods again.
“Why?”
“I’ve been falsely accused.” Again she says this to me. “I thought that’s why he was calling, that the police were coming after me. I wanted to buy myself time so I could figure out what to do. I panicked.”
“And you didn’t change your story about where you were even after Detective Machado informed you of the real reason he was calling,” Marino says.
“It was too late. I’d already told him . . . I was scared. So scared I was stupid.” Her voice shakes badly, tears spilling. “And then all I could think about was Jamal. I wasn’t thinking about the lie or why I told it. I’m sorry. I’m not a bad person. I swear to God I’m not.”
She digs into her pocketbook and finds a towelette. Tearing open the packet she wipes ruined makeup off her eyes, her face and I smell the fresh scent of cucumber. She suddenly looks years younger, could pass for twenty but probably is closer to thirty. A career as a high school psychologist requires college then a master’s degree. She’s been married three years. I calculate she’s twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
“This is a nightmare. Please let me wake up from it.” She stares at me.
Then she looks at the items I took out of the bags her husband carried in, the food, the drugs. Her attention fixes on the drugs.
“Your husband had prescriptions filled at a CVS this morning,” I say to her. “Including one for Klonopin.”
“For stress,” she says.
“His stress?”
“And recently mine. Both of us.”
“Can you tell me what’s been going on with him?” I’m deliberate about what tense I use. “If he’s been anxious, stressed it’s helpful if I know why. A drug screen will tell us exactly what he has in his system. But if you have information I’d appreciate it.”
My mention of a drug screen startles her. Apparently she hadn’t thought of it.
“Klonopin,” she says. “I saw him take one this morning when we got up, and he said he was almost out. That he planned to stop at CVS while he was running errands.”
“Might he have taken anything else?” I ask.
“I . . . I don’t know. I wasn’t around him . . . I left at about seven.”
I think of the damp paper towels in the trash, the drawers wiped clean. Not a week goes by that I don’t see a heroin-related death in my morgue.
“What about street drugs?” I ask and then Marino jumps in.
“The slightest residue and a drug dog’s going to hit on it,” he says. “I got a K-nine. Maybe I should go get him.”
If the situation weren’t so tragic I would laugh. Quincy couldn’t tell the difference between heroin and baby powder. I text Anne to check Jamal Nari carefully for needle tracks, for damage to his septum, to do it right now.
“Has your husband ever been on prescription pain medications?” I ask Joanna.
“His back,” she says. “A bicycle accident when he was in his twenties, and he has ruptured disks.”
“OxyContin?”
She nods as my suspicions continue to gather. It’s not unusual for people who abuse OxyContin to switch to an opiate that’s less expensive. On the street an 80-milligram pill can cost as much as eighty dollars while a bag of heroin might go for a fraction of that price.
“He’s been clean and sober for over ten years,” Joanna says to me.
“But he’s been under stress? Do you know why?”
“He was shutting me out. He’d disappear and not tell me where he was going or where he’d been.” She continues to stare at the prescriptions on the kitchen counter.
“Was it you who cleaned the inside of all the drawers?” Marino asks and she doesn’t answer. “Did Jamal do it or you?”
“I don’t know. He might have. I told you he’s been paranoid, worried someone’s out to get him.”
“Coke? Heroin? What was he using?”
“Nothing. I’ve told you, nothing.”
“Nothing?” Marino drops his notepad, the pen on the coffee table. “Then who were you worried might find something?”
“The police,” she says. “We’ve been worried about it for days. That’s why I was so sure about the reason for the call. I thought it was about that.”
I glance at my phone as a text message lands.
“About what exactly?”
Old scars on legs were covered with tattoos. That’s as much as Anne can tell at this point but it’s enough.
Nari used to mainline drugs and attempted to disguise the needle tracks with tattoos. At a glance there’s nothing fresh that would indicate current drug abuse. But it doesn’t mean he was finished with that part of his life.
Have you scanned him yet? I write back.
Getting ready to.
“I’m not following you about the police,” Marino pushes Joanna.
“Because they’ve been after us before for no good reason! They’d like nothing better than to make it stick this time! Do you have any idea what it’s like to go through that?”
“The FBI did that.” Marino makes that point again. “It wasn’t us.”
She wipes her face and I smell cucumber again. I remember the odor of bleach and I ask her. Did she or her husband use something with chlorine in it, maybe bleach to clean out the drawers and she says no. I tell her the paper towels in the trash will be tested in my labs and she looks dejected but she doesn’t change her answer about bleach. She’s allergic to it. She breaks out in hives. They never have it in the house.
“Jamal thought someone was following him, stalking him,” she says. “Someone wearing a cap and dark glasses was riding his bumper. He thought it was the FBI again. One night he got up to use the bathroom and there was a face looking through the window. After that we frosted the glass in there and started closing all the curtains.”
“When did he start feeling this way?” Marino picks up his notepad, begins taking notes again.
“A few months ago.”
“That’s why you suddenly decided to move?”
“No.” She tells us the boy she’s been seen talking to is Leo Gantz.
He’s fifteen years old, a freshman at Emerson Academy where Nari taught music and Joanna is a psychologist. A nationally ranked tennis player, Leo Gantz has a scholarship and an abusive father. In January Leo was sent to her office because of his behavior. He’d started sneaking alcohol. He keyed a car and was “mouthing off” to his teachers. In early May he was suspended from the tennis team after showing up at practice drunk and hitting the coach with a ball hard enough to bloody his nose.
“He started having too much spare time because he didn’t have practice anymore and now school’s out,” Joanna explains. “He was bored, lonely. He started riding his bike past our house all the time. Angie . . .”
“Angelina Brown,” Marino says. “Your upstairs neighbor.”
“Yes,” Joanna replies. “She would see him from her window. Her desk is in front of her window and she would see him riding back and forth in front of the house.”
“Maybe he was the one stalking your husband? Did that ever occur to you?”
“Leo doesn’t have a license yet or access to a car.”
“Was he ever inside this apartment?”
I glance down at a text message from firearms examiner Liz Wrighton as Joanna goes on to say that she always talked to Leo outside. He was never in here.
“I tried to help him.” Her tone turns to iron, and I don’t let on that what I’m reading is stunning, both extremely good and awful.
We have a high-confidence ca
ndidate. That’s Liz’s cautious way of saying we got a hit in the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, NIBIN. A comparison of digital images from New Jersey and the frag Machado dropped off at her lab shows that the measurements, the lands and grooves match. The same gun was used.
A sniper. Three victims who seem to have nothing in common.
“And there’s no reason, absolutely nothing I ever did except care about him.” Joanna’s eyes blaze. “Except to treat him nice, to be helpful and that’s what he does to thank me!”
CHAPTER 11
THE CHARLES RIVER SHINES deep blue in the midafternoon sun, barely ruffled by a light breeze. Sycamores, weeping willows and Bradford pears that have lost their flowers and I remember when they fell like snow, covering sidewalks and drifting into the street. For a while I drove to and from my office in a blossomy storm that made me happy.
I look out my side window at rowers leaning their backs into long slender oars, slicing through the water in blade-like sculls. The DeWolfe Boathouse is to our right, and on our left the stair-step-shaped Hyatt Hotel, then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s spreading campus. In Marino’s SUV again, headed to the CFC, and we’re on the subject of the cell phone signals picked up when Joanna Cather claimed to be in New Hampshire this morning.
She absolutely wasn’t. Not at any time. She was telling us the truth about her lie. At shortly after seven A.M. she drove out of her cell area in Cambridge, her phone’s signal picked up by FCC-registered antenna towers along I-90 East and Massachusetts Avenue, then I-93 South. Her final destination was Gallivan Boulevard in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester where she and her husband had planned to move today.
They’d rented a two-story shingle-sided Colonial with a stone cellar, a sunporch, a garage, hardwood floors and a security system. Marino has shown me photographs of the listing on the Internet, a handsome house with character built in the 1920s. The asking price is $4,000 per month, unfurnished, utilities not included, a lot of money for the high school faculty couple. The Realtor’s name is Mary Sapp and Marino has left a message for her to call him as soon as possible.
“I got a hunch about it.” He’s switched to another topic, the timing, why the killer struck now. “I think their suddenly deciding to move triggered something so to speak. And the reason they decided to skip town is also why Nari wiped down the drawers. I think Leo Gantz’s accusation opened a can of worms in more ways than one.”
His story is ruinous no matter the outcome. Consensual sex and it’s Joanna’s word against his. As she was telling us what she called a bald-faced lie, I sensed she has feelings for him. Not just hateful ones.
“Nari was worried the police were going to show up with a search warrant any minute,” Marino says, “and while they were at it bust him for drugs.”
“His wife claims he’s clean,” I remind him. “His needle tracks are old.”
“He could be snorting or smoking.”
“Tox will tell.”
“Plain and simple there was something he didn’t want the cops to find a trace of and I’m putting my money on heroin. The cops being Cambridge, in other words yours truly,” he adds. “A complaint of sex with a minor and we were going to be called.”
But Cambridge PD hasn’t been. Leo’s unemployed father began threatening Nari and his wife but didn’t call the police.
“Wait and see. This is about money,” I reply. “Leo’s father probably figures they got a big settlement after suing the school. The irony is they haven’t gotten a dime.”
I had Lucy check. Motions are still being filed in Jamal Nari’s discrimination suit against Emerson Academy. Depositions have been scheduled, a trial date set, the usual game of chicken that only the lawyers win. The information can be found in legal databases but it hasn’t been in the press. If Leo Gantz’s father has been paying attention he could easily infer that Nari and his wife recently had come into money. The new Honda alone was enough to cause assumptions.
“If it had been me showing up to investigate whether she and Leo had sex inside the apartment I would have done everything I just did.” Marino is suddenly watching his mirrors. “You know me. No stone unturned.”
There was no cushion unturned either. Before we left the apartment he searched it again, looking under the mattress, the furniture and rugs, and inside pillows, whatever might be a hiding place. He scoured the Honda SUV and the rented Suburban. Marino processed everything that didn’t move for prints, for trace evidence.
He swabbed for DNA and when he sprayed a chemical reagent on the guitars they luminesced faintly and for a brief duration. So did the two empty guitar cases on the bed and the Bankers Box that looked rifled through plus the condoms, the Imodium under the sink. All of it glowed the whitish blue false positive for blood, a typical reaction to bleach.
He’s looking in the mirrors, an angry expression on his face. He slows down.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“I don’t believe it.” He slows even more, almost to a crawl. “The same asshole,” he says.
I LOOK IN MY side mirror and recognize the pickup truck we saw earlier today when Marino confronted the young man with the leaf blower. Gray with a lot of chrome, a Super Duty truck, an older one in mint condition.
It passes us in the right lane, a HANDS ON MECHANICS logo and phone number on the door, and the driver is light-skinned with short dark hair. I don’t see anybody with him or evidence of lawn care equipment.
“That’s not who we saw earlier, the kid with the leaf blower,” I puzzle. “Is it the same plate number?”
“Pretty damn sure.”
“The truck we saw on my street had Sonny’s Lawn Care on it.”
Marino holds up his BlackBerry, showing me the photograph he took this morning. The license tag is the same as the one on the gray truck that just passed us. The phone number is also the same. The truck is far ahead of us now, in the right lane with its right-turn signal on.
“A magnetic logo,” Marino decides. “The type that’s removable, has to be. What was on there this morning definitely said Sonny’s Lawn Care with the phone number under it. Maybe he’s got more than one business that share the same phone line.”
“Then why not advertise everything on the same sign?”
“Maybe the jerk-off kid has nothing to do with it,” Marino then says. “Maybe he just happened to be clearing off a sidewalk near where the truck was parked.”
It would explain why he wasn’t concerned about Marino storming around like a maniac, taking a picture of the license plate and threatening him, I think but don’t say.
“You ever seen this same truck in your neighborhood before today?” he asks.
“Not that I recall but that doesn’t mean anything. I’m rarely home during the day.”
Marino watches the gray truck turn right onto the Harvard Bridge, and I can tell he’s deliberating whether to follow it. Instead we swing left onto Audrey Street and into an MIT apartment building parking lot where we stop.
“It’s probably nothing but I’m not taking any chances,” he says. “And I don’t want whoever’s driving it to think we’re paying attention.”
“You slowed down so he could pass us,” I remind him.
“He doesn’t know it had anything to do with him.”
I’m not convinced of that. Marino was reminded of the incident this morning and got angry all over again. Had the driver of the pickup truck been observant and able to read lips he certainly would have seen Marino glaring and cursing. But I don’t mention that either as I scan our surroundings, the MIT athletic fields and football stadium just ahead. Across the river the old buildings of Back Bay are dark red brick and gray roofed.
In the distance the skyline of Boston is dominated by the Prudential Tower with its radio mast rampant like a jousting lance, and the Hancock is slightly taller, the shapes o
f clouds reflected in its glass. Far off the light changes the way it does over great expanses of water, the Charles flowing northeast into the harbor, then sweeping around Logan Airport and the barrier islands before emptying into bays and finally the sea. I’m reminded of what a beautiful spring day it is, the sky bright blue, the trees and grass a vibrant green.
Right now Benton and I should be on the plane to Fort Lauderdale, and I think about a condo he rented on the ocean, my birthday surprise. Knowing his taste it will be extremely nice, and then I force such thoughts from my mind because nothing good comes from imagining what isn’t going to happen. I already know our week away will be postponed, and for us that’s the same as being canceled. Our taking time off isn’t about accumulating vacation days. It’s about bad things stopping long enough for us to have nothing to worry about.
I send him a text. You OK? Heading to my office. We need to talk.
“I got a gut feeling something isn’t right.” Marino is still on the subject of the truck. “I was only a few blocks from where Nari was shot, not to mention near your house where someone left pennies on your wall that might have been polished in a tumbler like cartridge cases.”
He calls the dispatcher on his portable and asks her to run the plate number.
“Let’s see what happens.” He rechecks the photographs on his BlackBerry. “How about dialing the number for me.” He reads the number that was on the truck.
“It’s not a good idea to have my phone involved.”
“Caller ID’s blocked on it.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want a record of my calling a number that’s unrelated to what I’m responsible for. If there’s an issue it’s hard to explain. And attorneys are always looking for issues.”
More to the point I’m not Marino’s assistant. I don’t answer to him and I’m not his partner either. But he can’t seem to remember that. I recite the number back to him and he enters it. A few seconds later a phone rings twice and someone picks up.