Patricia Cornwell
At Risk
To Dr. Joel J. Kassimir, a true artist
1
An autumn storm has pounded Cambridge all day and is set to play a violent encore into the night. Lightning sears and thunder startles as Winston Garano (“Win” or “Geronimo” most people call him) strides through the dusk along the eastern border of Harvard Yard.
He has no umbrella. He has no jacket. His Hugo Boss suit and dark hair are dripping wet and pressed flat against him, his Prada shoes soaked and filthy from a false step out of the taxi into a puddle. Of course, the damn taxi driver let him out at the wrong damn address, not at 20 Quincy Street in front of the Harvard Faculty Club but at the Fogg Art Museum, and that was Win’s miscalculation, really. When he got into the taxi at Logan International Airport, he happened to tell the driver, Harvard Faculty Club, it’s near the Fogg, thought maybe if he referenced both he might sound like someone who went to Harvard or collects fine art instead of what he is, an investigator with the Massachusetts State Police who applied to Harvard seventeen years ago and didn’t get in.
Big raindrops feel like irritable fingers tapping the top of his head and he is overcome by anxiety as he stands on the old red-brick walk in the midst of the old red-brick Yard, looking up and down Quincy Street, watching people spew past in cars and on bicycles, a few on foot and hunched under umbrellas. Privileged people move through the rain and mist, belonging here and knowing they do and where they are going.
“Excuse me,” Win says to a guy in a black windbreaker and baggy, faded jeans. “Your Mensa question for the day.”
“Huh?” He scowls, having just crossed the wet one-way street, a soggy satchel dripping from his back.
“Where’s the faculty club?”
“Right there,” he replies with unnecessary snottiness, probably because if Win were a faculty member or anyone important, obviously he would know where the faculty club is.
He heads toward a handsome Georgian Revival building with a gray slate roof, the brick patio blossoming with wet, white umbrellas. Lighted windows are warm in the gathering darkness, and the quiet splashing of a fountain blends with the sounds of the rain as he follows slick cobblestones to the front door, running his fingers through his wet hair. Inside, he looks around as if he’s just entered a crime scene, taking in his surroundings, making judgments about what must have been a parlor for some wealthy aristocrat more than a century ago. He surveys mahogany paneling, Persian rugs, brass chandeliers, Victorian theater broadsheets, oil portraits and polished old stairs that lead somewhere he’ll probably never go.
He takes a seat on a stiff antique sofa, a grandfather clock reminding him that he is exactly on time and that District Attorney Monique Lamont (“Money La-Mount,” as he calls her), the woman who basically runs his life, is nowhere in sight. In Massachusetts, the DAs have jurisdiction over all homicides and have their own state police investigative service assigned to them, and what that means is that Lamont can bring anybody she wants into her personal squad, meaning she can also get rid of anybody she wants. He belongs to her and she has her ways of reminding him of that.
This is the latest, the worst of all her political maneuvering, and in some instances shortsighted reasoning, or what he sometimes views as her fantasies, all of it radiating from her insatiable ambition and need to control. She suddenly decides to send him way down South to Knoxville, Tennessee, to attend the National Forensic Academy, saying that when he returns he will enlighten his colleagues about the latest innovations in crime scene investigation, show them how to do it right, exactly right. Show them how to ensure that no criminal investigation will ever, and I mean ever, be compromised by the mishandling of evidence or the absence of procedures and analyses that should have been done, she said. He doesn’t understand it. The Massachusetts State Police has CSIs. Why not send one of them? She wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t explain.
Win looks down at the soggy shoes he bought for twenty-two dollars at the vintage clothing shop called Hand-Me-Ups. He notices the beginning of dried water spots on the gray suit he got for a hundred and twenty dollars at the same shop where he’s gotten quite a lot of designer clothing dirt cheap because everything is used, cast off by rich people who easily tire of things or are infirm or dead. He waits and worries, wondering what is so important that Lamont has summoned him all the way up here from Knoxville. Roy, her wimpish, supercilious press secretary, called him this morning, yanked him out of class, told him to be on the next flight to Boston.
Right this minute? Why? Win protested.
Because she said so, Roy replied.
Inside the high-rise, precast Cambridge District Court building, Monique Lamont emerges from the private powder room inside her large private office. Unlike many DAs and others who wade in the world of criminal justice, she doesn’t collect police caps and patches or foreign uniforms and weapons or framed photographs of famed law enforcement officials. Those who give her such mementos do so only once, because she doesn’t hesitate to give them back or away. She happens to like glass.
Art glass, stained glass, Venetian glass, new glass, old glass. When sunlight fills her office, it turns into a prismatic fire, flashing, winking, glowing, sparkling in a spectrum of colors, distracting people, amazing them. She welcomes distracted, amazed people to her rainbow, then introduces them to the nasty storm that preceded it.
“Hell no,” she picks up where she left off as she sits down at her expansive glass desk, a see-through desk that doesn’t deter her in the least from wearing short skirts. “Another damn educational video on drunk driving is not going to happen. Does anybody besides me think outside the box?”
“Last week in Tewksbury, an entire family was killed by a drunk driver,” Roy says from a sofa catty-corner to the desk, looking at her legs when he assumes she doesn’t notice. “That’s far more relevant to citizens than some old murder case from some provincial Southern city nobody around here cares…”
“Roy.” Lamont crosses her legs and watches him watching her. “Do you have a mother?”
“Come on, Monique.”
“Of course you have a mother.” She gets up, starts pacing, wishes the sun was out.
She hates rain.
“How would you like it, Roy, if your ninety-pound elderly mother were beaten savagely in her own home and left to die alone?”
“Oh come on, Monique. That’s not the point. We should be focusing on a Massachusetts unsolved homicide, not one in Hickville. How many times do we have to go through this?”
“You’re foolish, Roy. We send in one of our finest and solve it and get—”
“I know, I know. Huge national attention.”
“The sure, strong hand reaching down to help those less fortunate, less, well… less everything. We get the old evidence, reexamine it—”
“And make Huber look good. Somehow, it will be him and the governor who look good. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise.”
“It will make me look good. And you’re going to make sure of that—”
She abruptly stops talking as the office door opens and coincidentally, maybe too coincidentally, her law clerk walks in without knocking. Huber’s son. It briefly crosses her mind that he’s been eavesdropping. But the door is shut. It isn’t possible.
“Toby?” she warns. “Am I psychotic or did you just walk in without knocking again?”
“Sorry about that. Man, I got too much on my mind.” He sniffs, shakes his shaved head, looks half stoned. “I just wanted to remind you I’m taking off.”