Dust (24 page)

“I’m standing right here.” Lucy sets the pizza box on a desk. “There’d better be vegan or I really will kill you, Bryce.”

“Wish Anne a good morning for Benton, who’s standing right behind you,” Bryce says to me. “I mean, really?” He directs this at Anne. “Sauce, mushrooms, broccoli, spinach, eggplant.” He counts on his fingers for Lucy’s benefit. “And let’s see. Presto!” He opens the lid. “Two boring slices just for you.” He hands her a paper plate, making sure he flaunts his leather bracelets. “Do you like?” He holds up his wrist. “Totally made by hand with a dragon clasp. In brown and royal blue because, what can I say? Ethan is way generous. And Anne? Lucy says good morning to you through me and I’m wishing you a good morning through her.
Point taken?
”

Anne is unable to refrain from talking about people as if they’re not in the room but it’s hard to take offense. She’s one of the least provocative people I’ve ever met, with her gentle face and demeanor and her plain-speaking and practical manner. No amount of ragging by Marino has ever gotten a rise out of her and even Bryce’s silly compulsive blather doesn’t pluck at her nerves.

She opens Gail Shipton’s scan for me, 3-D images of the head and thorax appearing on a flat screen.

“J.Crew,” Bryce shows off more bling. “And this one is almost over the top, but far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth.” He plucks at a black leather cuff with a stainless-steel chain. “To go with…” He pulls a necklace out of his sweater, black leather with some sort of tribal metalwork, and then he places a slice of pizza on a plate and presents it to me.

The first bite is an explosion of pleasure. My God, I’m starved. I’ve eaten half the slice before I can talk.

“This is what’s significant.” I wipe my fingers on a napkin. “Starting with a fairly dense material that fluoresces in UV. Some kind of dust that was all over her.”

I point out intense white areas on Gail Shipton’s scan, the residue in her nostrils and mouth. The vague, dark, air-filled space in the pleural cavity is the small pneumothorax in the upper lobe of the right lung, I go on to explain. Clicking on a different image, a cross section of the thorax and a coronal section, I can see the problem more clearly.

“The buildup of air in the closed space would have put pressure on the lung, making it impossible to expand,” I explain to Benton and Lucy.

“Making it harder to breathe,” she says.

“Even I know that,” Bryce exclaims.

“She already had some problems breathing,” Lucy informs me. “She would get winded. She sighed a lot as if it were hard to catch her breath.”

“I’m not sure I see what you’re talking about.” Benton puts on his reading glasses. “And would a pneumothorax kill someone?”

“If left untreated, it would have caused her severe respiratory distress,” I reply. “It would have put pressure on her heart and other major vessels.”

“I’m still trying to see it.” Benton leans over me, peering at the flat screen, and I feel his breath in my hair.

“This black area here,” Anne helps him out. “That’s air density. See? It’s the same inside and outside the chest. And it’s not supposed to be like that.”

“There should be no black area at all in the pleural space,” I add. “This lighter area here in the soft tissue of the chest is hemorrhage. She suffered some type of trauma that collapsed her lung. The first order of business is to find out how she got that.”

Inside the anteroom I grab protective clothing from shelves. It’s half past noon.

I put on booties, a face shield, and gloves. Lucy and Benton do the same but I know when he doesn’t plan to stay long. He’ll learn what he can from Gail Shipton’s body and then he’s got Bureau swords to clash with and maybe something more. I can always sense when a dark front has rolled through him. It’s as if the air has shifted the way it does before a storm, and I think about the DNA and what Dr. Venter told me.

“Is there anything on the news?” I ask Lucy.

“Just what he mentioned.” She looks at Benton to see if he has anything to add. “About an hour and a half ago nine-one-one got a call about an active shooter in Concord. Police responded and said there’s no gunman and nothing further.”

“Where in Concord?”

“Minute Man Park, where there were a bunch of schoolkids.”

“And Medflight responded?”

“That’s pretty much all there is to it,” Benton speaks up. “A suspicious person in dark clothing was spotted running through the park. Supposedly a car backfire on Liberty Street was mistaken for gunshots. Kids were screaming, teachers panicking, thinking it was another Newtown.”

“Did they catch the person?” I ask.

“They didn’t.”

“And that’s the whole story.” I look at him.

“I doubt it. Area-wide emergency radio communications between departments tell me NEMLEC is responding to something but the FBI hasn’t been called. I don’t know what it is. They might not know what it is at this point. Granby’s being pushy about meeting with you.”

“Why is he going through you?” I feel myself getting stubborn. “He needs to call my office.”

“He’s decided I shouldn’t be there,” Benton says. “That’s the latest.”

“You schedule a meeting and then aren’t invited,” I reply. “That’s choice.”

“He should work on not being so subtle,” Lucy says. “What a tool.”

I push a hands-free button with my elbow and steel doors automatically swing open to the sounds of running water and steel instruments clicking and clacking against cutting boards. An oscillating saw whines, then grinds loudly through bone. Voices of doctors and autopsy technicians blend in a low murmur and I detect decomposing blood and fermentation. I smell burnt flesh.

Natural light filters through one-way glass windows and banks of high-intensity lamps in the thirty-two-foot ceilings blaze as my staff works at stainless-steel sinks and portable tables along a wall. Luke Zenner is finishing an autopsy at his station, number 2, next to mine, where Gail Shipton’s body holds its rigid pose still wrapped in plasticized sheets. The bag was removed from her head, probably by Dr. Adams when he charted her teeth.

She’s not looking quite as pristine now that she’s in a warmer place and tampered with by a forensic dentist who had to break the rigor in her jaw to force open her mouth. Her lips are drying, beginning a slow retraction as if she’s snarling at the violation, what couldn’t be a more necessary or degrading one.

“Glad to see you’re still in the land of the living,” Luke’s vivid blue eyes look at me through large safety glasses, his blond hair covered with a colorful surgical cap.

“It’s not exactly the land of the living in here,” Lucy says. “’Tis the season.” She stares at the charred body on Luke’s table, the chest cavity empty and bright cherry red, the ribs showing through curved and white.

“What about a CO level?” I ask him.

“Sixty percent.
Ja, in der Tat, meine Freundin,
” says Luke, whose first language is German. “He was still breathing when he caught his house on fire. Smoking and drinking, his STAT alcohol point-two-nine.”

“That will do it.”

“The thought is he passed out and the cigarette started smoldering on the couch.” Luke wipes his bloody gloved hands on a bloody towel and calls out to Rusty on the other side of the room, asking him to close up for him. “One big drunk tank in here today, what I’ve come to expect right before the holidays.” Luke pulls off his bloody apron and drops it in the biohazard trash. “Dr. Schoenberg is up next. How’s that for a twist of fate? A shrink with poor coping skills.”

I signal Harold that I need some help.

“I’m not sure there isn’t some cause and effect at work.” Moving a surgical cart close, I retrieve a pair of scissors and begin cutting through tape. “You took care of one of his patients last week, Sakura Yamagata, the woman who jumped off the roof of her apartment building.”

“Good Lord.” Luke’s eyes widen. “The twenty-two-year-old so-called fashion designer, thanks to her biopreneur molecular millionaire daddy who basically bought a career for her? Most recently he paid half a million dollars to some reality star to make a personal appearance at a fashion show and endorse his daughter’s label, which is a horror. In the inimitable words of Bryce, all high-tech drama and no story, or the Jetsons meet Snooki.”

“How do we know all this?” I ask.

“Googled it,” Luke says. “Amazing what’s out there about our patients.”

“I’ve notified tox to check for hallucinogens such as mephedrone, methylone, MDPV in her case.”

“Good idea, and we’re going to need to talk when you’ve got a minute. I fear this Dr. Schoenberg’s going to be high-maintenance.”

“Vitreous, blood, urine, liver, no stone unturned.” I fold the sheets and hand them to Harold. “Not to mention his gastric. Had he eaten recently? Did he order food at the pub? Maybe he didn’t go there to drink but to eat alone and calm down before he went back home to patch things up with his wife. Maybe he was trying to sort through why it wasn’t his fault that a patient killed herself right in front of him.”

I remove the ivory cloth from Gail Shipton’s body, nude except for the pale peach panties she has on, an expensive, high-thread-count cotton, Swiss-made. The wound on her left upper chest is so faint it easily could have been missed.

The circular skin discoloration is a very faint pink and no bigger than a dime. Under a hand lens I can see the puncture in the middle of it made by a barbed shank that penetrated her right lung, collapsing it.

“Have you come across this before?” I ask Benton as if my question is hypothetical, a teaching exercise, nothing more than a quiz.

What I can’t allude to is the D.C. murders. I don’t want to alert any members of my staff that Gail Shipton likely is the victim of a serial killer who has terrorized our nation’s capital for the past eight months. It will be up to Benton to open that door.

“It looks like an insect bite.” He studies the magnified wound, his disposable gown rustling against me. I feel his warmth. I sense his intensity.

Then his hazel eyes peer at me above his surgical mask and I see what’s in them. He hasn’t encountered this before. The injury is new to him.

“I don’t know what it is, not firsthand,” he says. “Obviously an insect couldn’t penetrate her lung. Do you think it could be an injection site?” he asks and I don’t think that.

We may have discovered how the killer controls his victims. It’s possible this attention-seeking psychopath has inadvertently left a peephole into his modus operandi. I see what the bastard did. I have a better idea what kind of cowardly brute he is.

“It’s not an injection site.” I hold Benton’s gaze and it’s my way of communicating that I’m not going to tell him what caused the wound. Not in front of an audience.

Gail Shipton was shot with an electrical weapon, a stun gun, and not the type the average person can buy on the Internet for home protection. She may have been shot more than once but this wound to her chest is where one of the probes struck her bare skin and the dart penetrated her chest wall and lung. If other probes struck clothed areas of her body, I might not see any injury. Since we don’t have what she was wearing at the bar last night I can’t look for tears.

Stun-gun shocks are silent. The victim is completely incapacitated while wire-attached darts deliver 50,000 volts. It’s like going into a cadaveric spasm or instant rigor mortis while you’re alive, if such a gruesome thing were possible. You can’t speak and you can’t stand up. The most threatening injury can come from dropping like a falling tree and striking your head.

“Do you mind if I borrow your office?” Benton holds my stare. “I’ve got some calls I need to make and then maybe Bryce could drop me by the house so I can get my car.”

“Harold?” I push up my face shield. “If you’ll get Anne in here, please? I’ll be right back and we’ll get started.”

“Sure thing, Chief.”

I escort Benton back to the anteroom as if he needs to be shown the way or maybe people assume I want a moment alone with my husband. He removes his protective clothing, pulling apart the papery tie of his white gown, heaping it into a bright red biohazard trash can.

I tell him the truth, a cruel one with even crueler implications.

“If she was killed by the Capital Murderer, then he’s using an electrical weapon, a type of stun gun, on his victims. At least he did on this latest one,” I explain. “And not just any model. The type used on her fires cartridges with wires and weighted probes that anchor into flesh like fishhooks. In other words, he has the sort of weapon I associate with law enforcement.”

“Unless he bought it on the street.” Benton sits down on a bench and pulls off his shoe covers. “Which wouldn’t be hard. And, for that matter, there’s not much you can’t get online.”

“Certainly that’s possible. But he knew what to get and what it does.”

Benton takes off his gloves and surgical mask, reaching for the trash. “Sadism and control,” he says as he folds his safety glasses and gives them to me. “Just the anticipation of being shocked would be terrifying.”

“It would be.” I return his glasses to a shelf lined with different sizes of glasses and a spray bottle of disinfectant.

“That’s why they don’t fight him.” He stares off as if seeing a vision, a horrible one.

“Paralysis lasted only as long as he squeezed the trigger unless you’re as unlucky as I suspect she was. Or maybe what happened to her was unintentionally merciful. Maybe he used an electroshock weapon and her premature death spared her from a tortured one. Maybe that’s why there’s no bag, no frilly tape or bow.”

“He didn’t get to the best part and his ritual was aborted.” Benton rests his arms on his knees and stares at his bare hands, tapered and graceful like a musician’s and pale because of where we live. He fingers his simple platinum wedding band, turning it slowly.

“We’ll see what the autopsy says but if he shot her with a stun gun while she was in the dark parking lot it might be why she suddenly got quiet when she was talking to Carin Hegel,” I add and I tell him about the recorded telephone conversation Lucy played for me.

I describe the sound of a car engine behind the Psi Bar and Gail Shipton saying
“I’m sorry? Can I help you?”
And then nothing. I sit down next to Benton shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, my papery cocooned feet next to his borrowed black sneakers.

“It would explain Gail not talking anymore,” I suggest. “She would have dropped her phone and been unable to say a word. But she didn’t collapse to the ground or she’d have scrapes, contusions, possibly serious injuries if she struck her head. Something prevented her from falling when her muscles locked up.”

“He may have caught her and maneuvered her into his car.” Benton plays it out, staring down at his hands solemnly as if he’s just discovered he’s been missing something important all along. “She was going to be disoriented and she wasn’t likely to struggle if it meant being shocked again. Obviously she didn’t scream or that would have been on the recording Lucy’s not supposed to have and hasn’t turned over to the police.”

“Not everybody screams and some people black out. If she had underlying cardiac disease or damage, she may have gone into arrest.” I’m not going to get into what Lucy has or hasn’t done.

At the moment I’m not interested in her usual violations of protocols and splintering of rules. I’m more worried about Benton’s FBI boss doing that and then some.

“If she died of a heart attack, that would be a major cheat for whoever this is,” Benton says as we get up and I know what he’s feeling.

I can see it in the tightness in his face and the haunted shadows in his eyes that are the ghosts of every savaged person whose case he’s worked. He has to bring them back from the dead to be their champion. He has to know what they were like before some predator ripped their souls from them. He can’t let the victims go. They are a crowd inside him, a disembodied population that by now is vast.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Please try not to be.” I look at him and touch his hand. “You can’t know something if it hasn’t presented itself. You can’t conjure it up from thin air.”

“There must be some trace of what he’s been doing to them and I missed it.”

“If anybody missed it, the medical examiners did. Maybe he didn’t use a stun gun on the others.”

“Their lack of injuries make me think he subdued them in a similar way.” He collects his blazer and coat from a hook on the wall.

“If they were shocked through clothing, especially layers of it, there’s a good chance the darts wouldn’t have left a mark or at least not one that would have been noticed.”

“Witnessing a victim’s panicky death as she’s suffocating is part of the thrill,” he says. “It would suck for him if she had a heart attack. That would be his coitus interruptus and would frustrate and infuriate him. He was interrupted and his compulsion wasn’t satisfied. Dressed up with no place to go and she cheated him. He’d studied her and yet she did the unexpected. She had the gall to die before he could finish killing her. He’ll do something again. He’ll do it soon. I didn’t calculate this.”

“Why would you?”

“It’s really important.” He works his arms into the sleeves of his blazer. “It might explain a lot of things. He goes through only part of the ritual because the fantasy isn’t there. It was ruined by her when she behaved in a way he didn’t expect and then had the audacity to die on him.”

“I’m going to do my best to find that out.”

“Maybe that’s why he dug into the Vicks while he was out there with her body. He was having a harder time than usual, was thrown off his game by what he didn’t anticipate. He was angry and distracted, trying to regain his focus. She didn’t let him finish. She robbed him. That’s the way he looks at it. The flower of evil never bloomed and he’s an enraged bull.”

“We have to see what her body says.”

“He’s losing his way and his control,” he says as if Armageddon is about to start. “It always happens. I didn’t think it would happen this fast with him when in fact it was already in the works, which is why he came back here. Christ. He’s here because he’s straying out of bounds and he has no insight, guided by a force he doesn’t understand, the malignant one that owns him, and this is home. This is where it started and will end. Something will.”

What Benton is seeing he can’t stop. He’s tense all over as if he’s the one being shocked.

“Decompensating, getting more caught up in his deviant violent fantasies, ones he doesn’t even know are sick and unjustified. He doesn’t see himself as cruel. It’s everybody else’s fault.” He stares off without blinking. “He thinks he’s as normal as you and me. He thinks what he does makes sense,” he says as Anne walks in to suit up. “I’m going to get my car. I’ll tell Granby if he wants to meet with you at three it has to be here at the CFC.”

“Yes, with me,” I repeat because Benton has been uninvited. “What time is Bryce interviewing the candidate for Marino’s job?” I ask Anne.

“Three of course.” She eyes Benton curiously. “I could tell him to push it back to five.”

“If there’s even the slightest chance I can stop by,” I reply. “Is this a necessary case discussion or politics?” I ask Benton as he opens the door. “And maybe I’m not inclined to meet since he doesn’t want you to attend,” I add and I go cold inside.

The hell with Ed Granby.
 

“I’m not interested in his damn politics and agendas,” I add, feeling more offended by the minute. “FBI jurisdiction and all that goes with it has nothing to do with the CFC.”

I can’t stand the idea of Granby wasting my time and I won’t be able to look at him without thinking of vaginal fluids and menstrual blood that couldn’t possibly have been left by Martin Lagos. I’ve never been fond of Benton’s boss and now I want nothing to do with him until I discover the truth of what happened in CODIS. If Granby instructed someone to alter a DNA profile, I want to know why and I want him to get the trouble he deserves.

“Well, that’s the problem as I understand it.” Benton stands in the doorway, looking at me. “Marino basically indicated I worked the MIT scene when we hadn’t officially been invited in by Cambridge. And next the Cambridge superintendent called with his tail feathers ruffled. So Granby’s trying to sort it out. That’s what he says. And I can’t be there since I’m the problem.”

“And it’s not his real reason,” I reply.

“I can see Marino’s social skills haven’t gotten any better,” Anne remarks. “Why does he have to be such a jerk?”

“It’s always sensitive,” Benton adds because it takes nothing to get local police pissed off at the almighty Bureau. “Granby wants to know what you know,” he says to me and that’s really what the meeting is about.

“Know what I know?” I’d be amused if it were anybody else. “In general? That could take a while.”

“Like the rest of his life if he wants to know what you know,” Anne says.

“He says it’s to clear things up about why I was with you at Briggs Field when no one has officially asked for our help.” Benton tells me more of Granby’s mendacious blather.

“Did you happen to pass on your theory about our case from this morning, the one that’s caused ruffled feathers?”

“I do my job and report to my supervisor,” Benton says with a straight face that doesn’t hide what he really feels.

Granby has been alerted that Gail Shipton’s murder may be connected to the ones in D.C. and if he tampered with evidence he’s got to be paranoid and know he has a problem. Of course he’d like to meet with me and hear all the details and of course he doesn’t want Benton present.

“I have a feeling I’m going to be busy at three,” I decide. “I just realized I will be. You know what? It just isn’t possible to meet today or tomorrow either. I’ll get Bryce to look at my calendar when I have a chance.”

Benton meets my eyes and smiles and then he leaves.

“Well, you’re back with a vengeance.” Anne plucks protective clothing off shelves.

“Not because of anything I did,” I reply. “This party wasn’t thrown in my honor. I just happened to wander in.”

“Did I hear something about a stun gun?”

“You didn’t hear anything at all.”

“Harold says you need me,” Anne says. “What exactly would you like me to do?”

“Assist. He can help Luke while you help me. We’ve got to do an angiography and scan her again to see if my suspicion is right and she has an underlying cardiac problem that made her susceptible to sudden death. I’d like whatever is said about this case to stay between us for now. I’d like whatever you just heard to stay in this room, please.”

“Loose lips.” She zips hers and throws away the imaginary key. “Not from me. What are you thinking?”

“We may be dealing with a killer who has some connection to law enforcement or has access and an interest,” I answer.

“A killer cop?”

“I don’t know and not necessarily. But not just anyone can acquire the type of stun gun used on her. Either he got one illegally or has law enforcement ties or someone close to him does.”

“That’s what caused her pneumothorax? I almost said
I’m shocked.
I don’t think we’ve ever had a stun-gun injury before.”

“That’s because most people don’t die from them.”

“I dated this guy for a while, a rookie cop. Part of their training is they have to be shot with one.” She puts a gown on over her purple scrubs. “He told me it doesn’t hurt as much as it scares the shit out of you.”

“You know what it feels like when you whack your funny bone? Imagine that times a thousand all through your body for five seconds or longer. It’s about as painless as having a grand mal seizure.”

“So my guess is if you do that to someone once, they’re not going to resist you and risk a second dose.”

“Unless they’re high on coke or PCP. Were you aware that Lucy was picking up Benton in Washington and bringing him home a few days early as a surprise?” I can ask Anne anything and she won’t repeat it or make judgments.

“Bryce told me. I think a lot of people knew and were really pleased,” she says. “We felt bad about what you’d been through in Connecticut and then you got the flu. It’s almost Christmas and Benton was gone and tomorrow’s his birthday. It may surprise you but people here think all you do is work and we want you to have a little ease now and then and be happy.”

I realize how much I need to talk. I can’t stop thinking about Granby’s outrageous suggestion that the Capital Murderer is influenced by what Benton has published and therefore these sadistic deaths are partly Benton’s fault. So he should retire and the Bureau shouldn’t be involved in profiling anymore; it’s outdated and dangerous. Granby is trying to poison him and he knows how to do it, and I’m trying to be my objective, calm self but I’m seething inside.

“People here knew Lucy was flying Benton home today,” I say to Anne. “His FBI colleagues knew, his damn boss knew, and his hotel in northern Virginia and whoever saw the flight plan Lucy filed also knew.”

I try to work through it, any possibility of how the killer might have been aware that Benton was flying home today, but I’m as unconvinced as I was when he first suggested it. He’s upset and bruised. He’s blaming himself. I have to understand but I can’t listen to it. And it doesn’t matter anyway. Whatever the killer knew doesn’t make any of this Benton’s fault. How dare Granby suggest anything to the contrary? How dare he invalidate Benton’s accomplishments and real sacrifices?

“Why?” Anne asks.

“Lucy knew Gail Shipton.”

“I’ve gathered that.”

“Benton is concerned that whoever killed her may have had some idea he would be here when her body was found, that maybe he timed it with Benton in mind.”

“That’s creepy.” I can tell she doesn’t buy it, not even slightly.

“I’m wondering if Lucy may have said something to Gail.”

“And then Gail told the person who intended to murder her? Said hey, Benton’s coming home, why don’t you do it now? And is this Benton’s theory?”