Dust (21 page)

“And you decided to work on a project together just like that.” Caffeine dulls the edges of a headache that’s lingered since Marino woke me up. I realize I need a lot of coffee badly and I push my chair back.

“I don’t know why.” She toys with her cheap cup, turning it in slow circles on the table. “Sometimes I’m stupid, Aunt Kay.”

“You’re never stupid but all of us have trusted people we shouldn’t.”

“I felt bad for her at first because it was a terrible story she told, growing up poor in California, her father an alcoholic who killed himself when she was ten. Her mother has early Alzheimer’s and is taken care of by a sister who’s mentally challenged. Then Gail trusted people to manage everything she has and next thing it’s gone.”

I get up to start a refill of generic stuff that right now tastes wonderful.

“I thought her areas of expertise could be helpful,” Lucy says. “Unfortunately I was basing my assessment on her having made a lot of money from really cool phone apps when she was a teenager.”

“You related because it sounded like you. A kid, a prodigy, who’s suddenly incredibly wealthy with everyone trying to take advantage including your own mother who was never there until you had money. You support her, and the more you do, the worse she is.”

“Who? My mother?” Lucy says sarcastically.

“That’s a lonely place to be.”

“She’s dating some rich Venezuelan twice her age. Did I mention that? Lucio something or other, owns a lot of Miami real estate, South Beach, Golden Beach, Bal Harbour, hosted some TV show when he was young, recently got a Lap-Band so he’ll look good for his new
mujer fatal
. It’s confusing. She calls both of us
Luce
.”

“The misfortune of having my sister as your mother.” It has left Lucy with a vulnerability that I don’t think will ever heal. She trusts completely, and when she’s hurt she goes after the enemy with an energy that’s dazzling.

“She’s not making much of a living anymore after putting a vampire in the children’s book before last and more recently a kid with magical powers who constantly recites these clunky rhyming spells,” Lucy says.

“I haven’t read them.”

“I do out of self-defense. She should write her autobiography.
Fifty Shades of Dorothy.
That would sell.”

“One of these days you’re going to give up hating her.”

“I think Grans is really getting old.”

“My mother’s been old for quite a while.”

“Seriously. She shouldn’t be driving. She goes to Publix with that huge white Chanel pocketbook that’s a hand-me-down from Mom and then can’t find her car so she walks around pushing her grocery cart and clicking her key until headlights go on. It’s a miracle she hasn’t been mugged.”

“I need to call her.”

“The word
need
is never good. I hope you never use it when you’re talking about me,” Lucy says.

“I’ll call her and she’ll tell me how bad she feels and what a terrible daughter I am.” I fill the water filter pitcher at the stainless-steel sink. “That’s what it was like over the weekend right after I got back.”

“Did she know what you were doing in Connecticut?”

“She saw it on the news.” I’m not going to get into what my mother said about it, almost blaming me while bemoaning the fact that I never save anybody’s life. I should work in a funeral home. She said what she’s said before.

“Tell me more about your work with Gail.” I pour water into the Keurig’s reservoir.

“All she was supposed to be doing at this stage was bench-testing, which has dragged on for a reason,” Lucy explains. “Months and months of troubleshooting while she’s secretly worked on copies of my apps, adding features and edits that I would never permit. She assumed I wouldn’t find out.” She takes a swallow of coffee and leans back in her chair. “Her programming is now nonexistent. Nobody should have it.”

“They will anyway. If you’re talking about biometric technology, specifically facial-recognition software that’s used by domestic drones, it won’t be you who stops that sort of scary progress.”

“And it won’t be me who puts digital eyes in the sky to target our own citizens or law enforcement or politicians. The problem is it won’t just be our government doing it. Imagine criminals having access to drone surveillance technology.” She brings that up again. “Something small enough to fly through an open window and hover at a thousand feet if you want to scout out where a target lives or follow people in their car or orchestrate a huge heist or a home invasion or assassinate someone. I’d rather be figuring out ways to combat nightmares like that. Which reminds me. The missing guy Benton’s told you about? The kid who disappeared seventeen years ago?”

I don’t respond one way or another.

“You don’t have to answer,” she says. “I know Benton would tell you because he has to tell someone he can trust besides me. Things aren’t good for him at the Bureau.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Age progression, facial recognition. Put it this way: Martin Lagos isn’t in any database anywhere on the damn planet. So the idea that he’s suddenly a serial killer leaving his DNA? Forget it. I can run a search like that from my phone.”

“Is yours identical to the one Gail was carrying? The one Marino has in his possession?”

Lucy unclips it from her flight suit’s waist belt and places it on the table. It looks like an everyday smartphone except for the black rubbery military case it’s in.

“Perfectly normal,” Lucy says. “It’s just a phone with the usual apps on the home screen.”

“So it appears.” I remove my second cup of coffee as the Keurig stops sputtering.

“You can’t see what’s running in the background. The good stuff.”

“Dangerous stuff?”

“As is true of everything, it’s all about how it’s used. I have the IP of the phone Gail had in her possession and would maneuver around her lame attempts at security. Everything on it also ended up on my phone, my tablet, my computer, so when she altered something I was developing with her I could see every keystroke.”

“You didn’t trust her in the least.” I return to my chair.

“Hell no. That ended about the time I got deposed.”

From where I’m seated I’m staring dead-on at Lucy’s massive matte black SUV, a stealth bomber on wheels with the ultra-luxury of a private jet.

“Did she trust you?” There’s so much I want to ask.

“I never gave her a reason not to.”

“You stopped trusting her last summer and obviously didn’t end the relationship then because you decided against it.”

“I was going to do it very soon.”

“Is what was going on with her why you’re driving an armored vehicle these days?”

She looks at her SUV as if it’s a child or a pet she loves. “I didn’t get it for any particular reason.”

“Who else have you pissed off besides pig farmers, Lucy?”

“Al-Qaeda doesn’t like me. The Aryans don’t. Gay bashers, male chauvinists, supporters of the Defense of Marriage Act, Jihadists, and pretty soon Double S wasn’t going to want to be my friend anymore,” she says and the thought seems to please her. “And, yes, there’s a long list of pig farmers and most recently a foie gras farm in New York State. That hellhole should have been burned to the ground as long as the geese got out first. Marino’s probably not happy with me now that we’re going down the list. SUV envy. His new po-lice vehicle is a V-six, mostly plastic.” She says it cynically, angrily.

“Exactly what does he know?”

“Exactly nothing and I don’t intend to explain a damn thing. He has no idea I watched him in real time when he picked up her phone behind the Psi. He hasn’t got a clue and he never will, right?” Lucy looks at me.

“It won’t come from me. It should come from you.”

“It shouldn’t come from anyone,” she says with a bite. “This is Marino playing cops and robbers after years of feeling like a lackey.”

“I hope you never put it that way to him.”

“When I realized Gail was missing —”

“When was that? I didn’t text you until about five-thirty while Marino was driving me to Briggs Field. When did it occur to you to access her phone?” I sound like I’m interrogating her. I don’t try to disguise it.

“Midnight,” she confirms what Benton told me, “when my search engines were alerted about a posting on the Channel Five website. I immediately locked in the GPS location of her phone, which was the Psi, which I called and was told she’d left at least six hours ago. Right off I knew it was bad and I activated the video camera and left it in an auto mode. It has a motion-detection zooming lens with a speed dome pan that could pick up whatever was going on until I got here.”

“You were going to retrieve the phone as soon as you flew back.”

“Yes.”

“But Marino got there first.”

“I watched him.” Lucy seems angry with herself more than anything else. “I wish I’d thought to turn the video camera on when I was talking to her late yesterday afternoon but I had no reason to suspect anything was wrong.”

She gets up and pours her coffee into the sink.

“If I’d had even the slightest reason to be concerned, I would have looked.” She leans her back against the sink. “I could have seen her and whatever happened when she was outside the bar. It was a blitz attack, I’m sure of that. Had she even a second or two warning, she could have activated the camera herself and whatever was going on would have live streamed on my phone instantly. An In Case of Emergency or ICE one-touch app was all she had to press but she didn’t. It was right there on her home screen and it didn’t enter her mind.”

“After your conversation with her she called Carin Hegel and the connection was lost,” I encourage her to tell me what she knows about it.

“Within twenty-four seconds.” Lucy drops her cup into the trash and sits back down.

“That’s the part I don’t understand,” I reply. “One might have expected Gail would have said something, indicated someone came up to her, that perhaps she was interrupted or startled. According to Carin, the call was dropped. She continued talking and didn’t realize Gail wasn’t there.”

“It wasn’t dropped.” Lucy picks up her phone from the table. “The call wasn’t ended until Carin did it and by then Gail had been separated from her phone.” She enters a password on the touch screen.

“How could that happen without Carin hearing something? A protest, a scream, people talking or arguing?”

Lucy clicks on an audio file.

“Carin Hegel,” the lawyer’s familiar voice answers on a recording Lucy must have made secretly.

“Hey. Anything new since I just saw you? Let me guess. They’ve filed another twenty motions to waste our time and run up my bills.” Gail Shipton’s voice is softly modulated, high-pitched, and girlish.

I don’t detect the anger running deep that I would expect to be there. She should have despised Double S and been chronically resentful and stressed, especially when she’s referencing the expenses they’ve been deliberately causing.

“Replay that, please,” I say to Lucy and she does.

Gail Shipton sounds too calm. I detect a note of artificiality, like a pedestrian actor reciting a line woodenly. I notice because I’m listening for anything off. Lucy starts the recording again.

“Carin Hegel.”

“Hey. Anything new since I just saw you? Let me guess. They’ve filed another twenty motions to waste our time and run up my bills.”

“Unfortunately you’re not completely wrong,” Hegel says.

“I’m at the Psi Bar and stepped outside but it’s still kind of loud,” Gail Shipton says. “I’m sorry? What can I help you with?”

“I wanted to give you a heads-up about your latest bill that just crossed my desk,” Hegel’s recorded voice continues.

A pause and there’s no response.

“It’s considerable, as you might expect this close to trial.”

Another pause.

“Gail? Are you there? Damn,” Hegel sounds impatient. “I’m going to hang up and try you back.”

“And she did,” Lucy says to me. “But Gail didn’t answer.”

She replays the first part of the recording.

“I’m sorry?” Gail’s voice says. “What can I help you with?”

“She’s not talking to Carin.” Lucy replays the same sound byte, turning up the volume.

“I’m sorry? Can I help you?”
 

I listen for background noise and can hear the distant rhythm of music from inside the bar. If Gail was talking to someone in the parking lot, I can’t tell. I don’t hear anything except the faint music, New Age, which is what the Psi Bar typically plays when I’ve been there.

“How long have you been recording Gail’s phone conversations?” I ask.

“Easy to do when it’s my device she’s talking on. Now listen,” Lucy says. “I’ve cleaned it up, separated any background noise from the music in the bar and enhanced what’s there, pinpointing the timing and sequence of precisely when it was introduced. Which was before she called Carin.”

She plays the enhanced recording, an earlier one, and I hear the distinct noise of a car engine idling. Then I hear something else. I hear my niece.

“…We’ll get something drafted when I get back from D.C.,” Lucy’s recorded voice says. “Now’s not the time to start a problem, in light of the trial, even if you don’t think it’s going to happen. You don’t need even the appearance of a problem with me.”

“Why would there be? They’ll settle. Don’t you worry and everything will be fair,” Gail says sweetly, what sounds insincere to me, and I hear what else is there.

The rumble of an engine. A car idling nearby in the dark behind the bar and if Gail notices, she doesn’t seem concerned, not even slightly nervous.

“A V-eight,” Lucy says to me. “Decent horsepower, four hundred maybe, a sizable sedan or SUV.”

SUV mud tires for off-roading,
I remember Benton said. Someone involved in high-risk activities and sports who doesn’t hesitate to break into a pickup truck or drive through a golf course.

“Not a performance car, definitely not that kind of high-rev sound,” Lucy says. “It was there the entire time she was talking to me which means it was out back when she left the bar to take my call. She has no interest, possibly little or no awareness until this.”

Lucy clicks on a file, playing the same sound byte I’ve heard before.

“I’m sorry? Can I help you?”
 

“She’s not saying this to Carin. She’s saying it to someone else,” Lucy explains decisively. “You can tell. Her tone changes. It’s very subtle as if someone has walked up to her, someone who intends to speak to her, someone doing so comfortably, calmly.”

“This person is approaching her even though she’s on the phone. He doesn’t hesitate to interrupt her,” I consider. “And she doesn’t sound alarmed or guarded.”

“She doesn’t sound friendly either,” Lucy replies. “I don’t think the person was familiar to her but she’s not afraid of whoever it is. She sounds polite but not threatened. And here’s the other thing, if I enhance the background noise at the beginning of the conversation with Carin? I’ve separated everything out except the car.”

She plays a clip and I hear the rumble of an engine. That’s all I hear, just that low steady noise of a large gas-powered engine idling.

“Then she speaks to someone,” Lucy says.

“I’m sorry? Can I help you?”
 

“But what you didn’t hear is a car door shutting,” Lucy explains. “Whoever was back there must have gotten out of his vehicle and approached her but he left his car door open or at least didn’t shut it all the way or we’d pick it up as an audio event. There’s absolutely no fluctuation in the sound measurement. Whoever he is he’s quiet as hell and she doesn’t seem the least bit startled, just politely curious but cool.”

Lucy plays the sound byte again.

“I’m sorry? Can I help you?”
 

“He masquerades as something that causes no suspicion at first.” I can see it.

Dressed a certain way with an impeccable rehearsed approach that’s worked for him on at least three other murderous occasions, and also many more times than that when someone stalked had no clue what a close call it was. Offenders like this thrive on dry runs. They encounter potential victims and get off on the fantasy until they finally consummate the act by abducting and killing someone.

“You’re thinking her death isn’t isolated.” Lucy watches me intensely. “Is that what Benton thinks after prowling around Briggs Field? You examined her at the scene. She was murdered, not just possibly but definitely? Is what happened to her something you recognize? Or Benton does?”

“Who else might have known about these capabilities, about the technology you and Gail had been working on?”

“Whoever attacked her didn’t have the slightest idea.” Lucy stares intensely at me. “It’s got nothing to do with what happened to her and I repeat that emphatically. Would you grab somebody carrying a device like this? If you knew?” She indicates her phone on the table.

“If I knew, I’d be wary,” I agree. “I’d worry about being recorded.”

“And if the point was to steal the technology, the phone wouldn’t have been left on the pavement,” Lucy says. “Whoever grabbed her wasn’t interested in it, didn’t have a clue about a drone phone.”

“I have no idea what that is.”

“It’s basically a handheld robotic device and not evidence in this case.”

“Marino has decided it is.”

“He’s full of shit.”

“It appears you surreptitiously made recordings —”

“Because I couldn’t trust Gail and was trying to get to the bottom of it. I was almost there.”

“And now Marino doesn’t trust you and you don’t trust him. I don’t want you having a problem with him,” I say it again.

“He can’t prove a damn thing. I saw everything he did. By the time he so cleverly bypassed the password with the analyzer I programmed and taught him how to use, I was ten steps ahead of him. I was seeing him and he wasn’t seeing a damn thing I didn’t want him to.”

“He says apps, e-mails, voice mails that were on the phone earlier are gone.”

“Once he picked it up, there were certain precautions to take.”

“I don’t believe he’ll cut you any slack, Lucy. It might be the opposite, in fact. He’ll want to show everyone he doesn’t have favorites and the past is past.”

“The phone can go to the CIA, I don’t care. No one can prove anything. And I don’t have to worry about her sick shit or anything else getting into the wrong hands. It won’t now.”

“Sick shit that could be motive for murder?” I ask.

“No way. Whoever killed her didn’t realize the importance of the device she was talking on when he approached her. It was just a phone.”

Lucy looks at me and beneath her indignation I detect disappointment and hurt.

“She wasn’t a good person, Aunt Kay. She tried to screw me. She tried to screw Carin. At the end of the day Gail didn’t care about anybody but herself and she had even less than she did before. I don’t mean money.”

“What exactly is a drone phone?” I ask.

The bay’s buzzer sounds and its intrusion is loud and grating.

“My idea was domestic usage that actually could help people,” Lucy explains. “It could save lives. Imagine controlling drones with your phone, not military unmanned aircraft but smaller ones. For aerial filming of real estate, sports events, highway and weather monitoring, wildlife research, activities that aren’t safe for pilots.”

She becomes animated as she talks about what gives her joy and it is always inventions and machines that she finds more compelling than a sunset or a storm.

“That was the point and then she headed off in a bad direction or maybe that was her intention all along.” Her mood goes back to dark. “Paparazzi photos, violating privacy in the worst way. Hunting animals. Hunting people. Spying. Acts of aggression committed by civilians for the worst of reasons.”

I watch the bay door begin to crank up and the narrow bar of daylight in the opening space beneath it isn’t as bright as it was earlier.

“Something happened to her.” Lucy sounds hard and unforgiving. “It may have happened to her before we met but eventually it owned her. That I know for a fact. I would have helped her if she’d asked but instead she tried to hurt me.”

I feel the damp chill of the late-morning air seeping in as my phone rings and I look to see who it is. The Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Henri Venter, and I answer.

“It’s not a great signal in here,” I say to him right off. “Let me call you back on a landline.” I get up and go to a phone on the wall next to the coffee cart.

I dial his number. “How are you, Henri?”

“Fighting over grant money, short half my staff it seems because of the flu and the holidays, and they sent us the wrong HEPA filters in this big order that just came in. I’m fine. What can I do for you, Kay?”

I start by telling him there is a sensitive situation with the DNA in the three D.C. cases and that we have what appears to be a related homicide in Cambridge. The Capital Murderer may now be in Massachusetts.

“This is extremely confidential on multiple fronts. And there may be a problem at the federal level,” I add in a way that conveys my meaning.

“I saw on the news there was a body at MIT,” Dr. Venter says. “No details other than that. A bag from that spa shop was over her head, I presume? And fancy duct tape?”

“No bag or duct tape but she was wrapped in an unusual white cloth and asphyxia is in my differential.”

“That’s interesting,” he replies. “Because in the case here, Julianne Goulet, I believe she was suffocated but not necessarily with the plastic bag that was taped around her neck. Her postmortem artifacts were perplexing and I found bluish fibers in her airway, her lungs. What I’m wondering is if he had some sort of cloth over her.”

“Lycra.”

“Yes.”

“And while she violently struggled to breathe, she inhaled fibers and clawed and these same fibers ended up under her nails,” I suggest.

“Precisely. I believe the bag and fancy tape were added as some sort of creepy adornment after the fact. Just like the white cloth and the way the body was posed. That’s just my opinion of course.”

“Henri, when our DNA analysis is done I’d like to compare it with your initial results in the Goulet case and not with what’s in CODIS.” I get to the most important point. “Or maybe a better way to put it is I don’t want to compare any DNA profile we get with what’s in CODIS now.”

“In it
now
?”

“I’m not questioning the integrity of CODIS overall, just this one sample in the case your office handled, Julianne Goulet and the DNA profile your labs recovered from panties she had on. I’m wondering if there was some sort of entry error when the profile was uploaded into CODIS,” I explain, and Lucy’s eyes are riveted to me.

“My Lord.” He understands what I’m implying. “This is quite disturbing.”

The bay door is annoyingly loud, and in the widening space I see the hearse rumbling on the other side, a Cadillac with a Christmas wreath attached to the front grille.

“As I understand it this DNA profile from the panties on Goulet’s body has been matched with a suspect, someone who’s been missing for seventeen years and is believed at least by some to have been dead that long.” I continue to give him enough to illustrate the ugly picture of tampering.

“I know nothing about a suspect,” Dr. Venter says.

“The FBI has one.”

“No one has told me that or attempted verification with our records. And that would be mandatory when there’s a match in CODIS. The lab that did the original analysis has to confirm and what you’re suggesting is outrageous.”

“I understand the stain in question was blood?” I inquire.

“That’s not exactly right. We analyzed a mixture of fluids comprising a stain on the panties Julianne Goulet had on,” he recalls. “These panties are believed to have come from the previous victim, a woman whose body was found in Virginia a week earlier. I’m trying to think of the name.”

“Sally Carson.”

“Yes.”

“But the profile on the panties didn’t turn out to be hers,” I inform him, “which is odd since they were identified as having been worn by her when she left the house before she vanished. Apparently her DNA wasn’t recovered at all.”

“I don’t know anything about the Carson case. It was Virginia’s and nobody’s talking.”

“For a reason that’s not a good one, I fear.”

“I’m pulling up the actual report from the Goulet case but I’m quite sure the DNA wasn’t hers either because of course we have her blood card, her profile. So we’d know if it was her DNA on the panties she was dressed in, probably postmortem. As you’re aware, we routinely use certain biospectroscopic methods for different body fluids, mainly looking for ribonucleic acid markers, the same techniques you use. So I can tell you exactly what those fluids were and if there was more than one profile mixed in but I’m fairly sure there wasn’t. What I remember is it all came from a single source, the same person.”

I wait as he finds what he needs in his database and the motor of the bay door completely stops. In the big square opening I see feathering clouds and farther-off ones that are building. The long black hearse noses forward slowly, propelled by its quiet engine, new and sleek, what funeral workers proudly call a landau coach.

“I have the report in front of me.” Dr. Venter is back. “Vaginal fluid, urine, and menstrual blood all from the same individual. We have only the identifier we assigned when we uploaded the profile into CODIS. As you would expect, we don’t know who it is.”

I’m surprised by the information and unfortunately I’m not. I inform him that Sally Carson’s autopsy report indicates that she was having her period when she was abducted and murdered. It’s possible if not probable that the stain on the panties Julianne Goulet’s body had on should have matched Carson’s DNA. But it didn’t, most likely because somebody tampered with a profile in the FBI’s database CODIS. I suspect but don’t say it openly that Carson’s profile was substituted for Martin Lagos’s, which would explain why it appears he left “blood,” as Benton referred to it, on the panties Julianne Goulet’s dead body had on.

“I’m looking at what we have and we definitely weren’t notified about a DNA match,” Dr. Venter says darkly. “We should have been sent the suspect’s profile to compare with our records and we weren’t.”

“A suspect’s profile from DNA analysis that I have reason to suspect was originally done in Virginia seventeen years ago,” I say. “A male who hasn’t been seen since, I’m told.”

“A male?” he exclaims. “A male certainly didn’t leave vaginal fluid and menstrual blood.”

“Exactly. Now you see the problem.”

“Virginia also should have been notified for a verification,” Dr. Venter says.

“I’m not checking with Virginia. Last summer their former lab director was hired as the new director of the FBI’s national labs. She got quite a promotion. I don’t know her personally.”

“This is extraordinarily disturbing,” Dr. Venter says. “I did the Goulet autopsy myself and frankly have had some concerns about the way it’s being handled even before knowing any of this. The one who used to be with the D.C. division back in your Virginia days and now is in Boston…Well, you might not have encountered him back then.”

“Ed Granby.”

Lucy hasn’t taken her eyes off me.

“In not so uncertain terms he threatened me,” Dr. Venter replies. “He said I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the DOJ and I would be if I leaked a word about the Goulet case, that he was taking extreme measures to prevent copycat crimes.”

“So he continues to say.” Then I bring up the fluorescing residue in Gail Shipton’s case that doesn’t seem to have been found in the others. “I’m just making certain you didn’t see anything like that,” I add.