Dust (2 page)

During a feverish epiphany I saw the meaning of everything, life the colliding of God particles that make up all matter in the universe and death the absolute reverse of it. When I spiked a temperature of 103.8 it became even clearer, explained simply and eloquently by the hooded man at the foot of my bed.

If only I’d written down what he said, the elusive formula for nature giving mass and death taking it away, all of creation since the Big Bang measured by the products of decay. Rust, dirt, sickness, insanity, chaos, corruption, lies, rot, ruin, shed cells, dead cells, atrophy, stenches, sweat, waste, dust to dust, that at a subatomic level interact and create new mass, and this goes on infinitely. I couldn’t see his face but I know it was compelling and kind as he spoke to me scientifically, poetically, backlit by fire that gave off no heat.

During moments of astonishing clarity I realized what we mean when we talk of forbidden fruit and original sin, and walking into the light and streets paved in gold, of extraterrestrials, auras, ghosts, and paradise and hell and reincarnation, of being healed or raised from the dead, of coming back as a raven, a cat, a hunchback, an angel. A recycling crystalline in its precision and prismatic beauty was revealed to me. The plan of God the Supreme Physicist, who is merciful, just, and funny. Who is creative. Who is all of us.

I saw and I knew. I possessed perfect Truth. Then life reasserted itself, pulled Truth right out from under me, and I’m still here, held down by gravity. An amnesiac. I can’t recall or share what at last I could explain to devastated people after I’ve taken care of their dead. I’m clinical at best when I answer the questions they ask, always the same ones.

Why? Why? Why!
 

How could someone do something like this?
 

I’ve never had a good explanation. But there is one and I knew it fleetingly. What I’ve always wanted to say was on the tip of my tongue, then I came to and what I knew was replaced by the job I’d just done. The unthinkable images no one should ever see. Blood and brass in a hallway lined with bulletin boards decorated for the holidays. And then inside that classroom. The children I couldn’t save. The parents I couldn’t comfort. The reassurances I couldn’t give.

Did they suffer?
 

How quick would it have been?
 

It’s the flu doing this,
I tell myself. There’s nothing I haven’t seen and can’t deal with and I feel the anger stir, the sleeping dragon within.

“Trust me, you don’t want anybody else taking care of this. There can’t be even one damn thing that gets screwed up,” Marino perseverates and if I’m honest with myself, I’m glad to hear his voice.

I don’t want to miss his company the way I just did. There was no one else I would take to a frenzied media carnival on a scale that was incomprehensible, the streets overwhelmed for miles by TV vans, production trucks, and pole-mounted satellites, the thudding of helicopters incessant, as if a movie were being filmed.

Were the shots close range
?
 

The anger again and I can’t afford to rouse it, the dragon within. It was better Marino wasn’t with me. I just didn’t feel like it. I know what he can handle and he would have blown apart like glass shattered by vibrations too intense to hear.

“All I can tell you is I got a gut about it, Doc,” his familiar voice says but he sounds different, stronger and more sure of himself. “Some sick fuck out there just getting started. Maybe got the idea from what just happened.”

“From what happened in Newtown, Connecticut?” I don’t see how he can possibly leap to such a conclusion and he needs to stop bringing it up.

“That’s the way it works,” he says. “One sick fuck gets the idea from some other sick fuck who shoots up a movie theater or a school for attention.”

I imagine him driving the dark streets of Cambridge in this weather. No doubt he doesn’t have his seat belt on and it will be a waste of breath for me to tell him now that he’s a cop again. How quickly he returns to his old bad habits.

“She wasn’t shot, was she?” I ask him pointedly to derail an inappropriate and awful subject. “You’re not even sure she’s a homicide, isn’t that right?”

“It doesn’t appear she was shot,” Marino verifies.

“Let’s not confuse things by comparing it to what just happened in Connecticut.”

“I’m sick and tired of assholes getting rewarded by the media.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“It makes it worse and more likely to happen again. We shouldn’t release their names and should bury them in a damn unmarked grave.”

“Let’s stick with the case at hand. Do we know if she has obvious injuries?”

“Nothing at a glance,” he says. “But she sure as hell didn’t wrap herself up in a sheet and walk out there on her own two bare feet and lay down and die in the rain and mud.”

Marino’s bypassing my deputy chief medical examiner, Luke Zenner, or any of my forensic pathologists at the CFC isn’t about my being the most qualified even though I am. It’s about Marino stepping back into his earlier life so he can be who he was when we first met. He no longer works for me. He gets to summon me on command. That’s the way he figures things and he’ll remind me as often as he can.

“I mean, if you really don’t feel up to it…” he starts to say and it sounds like a challenge or maybe he’s goading me.

I don’t know. How can I judge anything right now? I’m worn-out and famished. I can’t stop thinking about boiled eggs with butter and coarsely ground peppercorns, and hot fresh baked bread and espresso. I would kill for a chilled glass of freshly squeezed blood orange juice.

“No, no, the worst is past.” I reach for the bottle of water on the nightstand. “Let me get myself together here.” I don’t move beyond taking a big swallow, the thirst no longer unquenchable, my lips and tongue no longer as dry as paper. “I had cough syrup before I went to bed. Codeine.”

“Lucky you.”

“I’m a little groggy but fine. It’s not a good idea for me to drive, certainly not in this weather. Who found her?”

Maybe he already told me that. I press the back of my hand to my forehead. No fever. I’m sure it really is gone, not just Advil suppressing it.

“A girl from MIT, a guy from Harvard out on a date and decided to find a little privacy in her dorm room. You know Simmons Hall? That huge building that looks like it was built out of LEGOs on the other side of the MIT baseball and rugby fields,” Marino says.

I can tell he has a police scanner with the squelch turned up loud. In his element, I’m sure. Armed and dangerous with a detective’s badge on his belt, driving an unmarked police vehicle equipped with lights and a siren and God knows what else. In the old days when he was a cop, he used to trick out his police vehicles like he does his Harleys.

“They noticed what they thought at first was a manikin in a toga lying in the mud at the far end of the field inside the fence that separates it from a parking lot,” says the Marino from my past, Marino the detective. “So they walked inside an open gate to get a closer look and when they realized it was a female wrapped in a sheet with nothing on under it and that she wasn’t breathing they called nine-one-one.”

“The body is nude?” What I’m really asking is if it’s been disturbed and by whom.

“They claim they didn’t touch it. The sheet’s soaking wet and I think it’s pretty obvious she’s naked. Machado talked to them and says he’s confident they’ve got nothing to do with whatever happened to her but we’ll swab them for DNA, do backgrounds, the whole nine yards.”

He goes on to say that Cambridge detective Sil Machado suspects the woman is a drug overdose. “Which may be related to the weird-ass suicide from the other day,” Marino adds. “As you know there’s some bad stuff on the streets and it’s causing huge problems around here.”

“Which suicide?” Unfortunately there have been a number of them while I was out of town and ill.

“The fashion-designer lady who jumped off the roof of her Cambridge apartment building and splattered the plate-glass windows of the first-floor health club while people were inside working out,” he says. “It looked like a spaghetti bomb went off. Anyway, they’re thinking it could be related.”

“I don’t know why.”

“They think it could be drugs, some bad shit she got into.”

“Who’s
they
?” I didn’t work the suicide of course and I reach down for the stacks of cases on the floor by the bed.

“Machado. Also his sergeant, his lieutenant,” Marino says. “It’s gone straight up the chain to the superintendents and the commissioner.”

I set files on the bed, what must be at least a dozen folders, printouts of death reports and photographs my chief of staff Bryce Clark has been leaving on the sunporch for me daily, along with provisions he’s been kind enough to pick up.

“The concern is it could be the same really bad meth or designer-type shit – in other words, some latest version of bath salts that’s been hitting the streets around here. Maybe what the suicide lady was on,” Marino tells me. “One theory is that Gail Shipton, if it’s her who’s dead, was with someone doing some really bad drugs and she ODed so he dumped her body.”

“This is your theory?”

“Hell no. If you’re dumping a body why do it in a damn university playing field like you’re displaying it to shock people? That’s my point, the biggest threat we’ve got to watch for these days. Do something sensational enough and it will be all over the news and get the attention of the president of the United States. I think whoever dumped her body at Briggs Field is a bird of that kind of feather. He’s doing it for attention, to be headline news.”

“That could be part of it but probably not all of it.”

“I’m texting you a few photos that Machado texted me.” Marino’s deep voice continues in my ear, a rough voice, a rude, pushy voice.

“You shouldn’t text while you drive.” I reach for my iPad.

“Yeah, so I’ll write myself a ticket.”

“Any drag marks or other indications of how the body ended up where it is?”

“You can see in the photos it’s real muddy and unfortunately any drag marks or footprints probably got mostly washed out by the rain. But I haven’t been there yet and looked for myself.”

I open the photographs he just e-mailed and note the soaked grass and red mud inside Briggs Field’s fence, then I zoom in closer on the dead woman wrapped in white. Slender, flat on her back, her long wet brown hair neatly arranged around a young pretty face that is tilted slightly to the left and glazed with rain. The cloth is wound around her upper chest like a bath sheet, like the big towels people wrap up in while they’re lounging at a spa.

Recognition stirs, and then I’m startled by the similarity to what Benton sent me several weeks ago when he took a considerable risk. Without authorization from the FBI he asked my opinion about the murders he’s working in Washington, D.C. But those women had plastic bags over their heads and this one doesn’t. They had designer duct tape around their necks and a bow attached, and that’s a pattern unique to the killer and it’s absent here.

We don’t even know that she’s a homicide,
I remind myself, and I shouldn’t be surprised if she died suddenly and a panicky companion wrapped her in a bedsheet, perhaps one from a dormitory, before leaving her outside, where she’d be found quickly.

“I suspect someone pulled their car into the parking lot close to the fence, opened the gate, and dragged or carried her in,” Marino continues as I stare at the image on my iPad, disturbed by it on a level that’s out of reach, a deeply intuitive place, and I try to reason away what I’m feeling but I can’t, and I can’t say a word about it to him.

Benton would be fired if the FBI knew what he’s done, sharing classified information with his wife. It doesn’t matter that I’m an expert whose jurisdiction includes federal cases and it would have made sense for me to be consulted anyway. Usually I am but for some reason I wasn’t. His boss, Ed Granby, has little use for me and would take delight in stripping Benton of his credentials and sending him packing.

“That one gate wasn’t locked,” Marino says. “The couple that found her said it was shut when they got to it but not locked. The rest of the gates are secured with chains and padlocks so nobody can get in after hours. Whoever’s responsible either knew that one wasn’t locked or used bolt cutters or had a key.”

“The body’s been deliberately posed.” The phantom pain of a chronic headache makes my head feel heavy. “On her back, legs together and straight, one arm gracefully resting on her belly, the other extended, the wrist bent dramatically like a dancer or as if she passed out on a fainting couch. Nothing is disarrayed, the sheet carefully arranged around her. Actually, I’m not sure it’s a sheet.”

I zoom in as close as I can before the image begins to deconstruct.

“It’s a white cloth at any rate. Her positioning is ritualistic, symbolic.” I’m sure of it, and the flutter in my stomach is fear.

What if it’s the same thing? What if he’s here? I remind myself that the D.C. cases are fresh on my mind because they’re why Benton isn’t home right now and it wasn’t that long ago when I went through the scene photographs and autopsy and lab reports. A body wrapped in a white cloth and positioned modestly and rather languidly by no means suggests this case is connected to the other ones, I tell myself repeatedly.

“She was left like that on purpose,” Marino is saying, “because it means something to the sick asshole who did it.”

“How could anyone get the body out there without being seen?” I focus my attention where it belongs. “On a playing field in the heart of MIT apartment buildings and dorms? Start with the idea that we may be dealing with someone familiar with the area, possibly another student, an employee, a person who lives or works around there.”

“Where she was dumped isn’t lit up at night,” he says. “Behind the indoor tennis courts, you know the big white bubble, then the athletic fields. I’ll pick you up in thirty, forty minutes. Pulling up to the Psi Bar now. Closed of course. No sign of anyone, no lights on. I’ll take a look around outside where she might have been using her phone, then head over to your house.”