“Was the arm up like it is now when the police got here?”
“Nope. The lot was secure and empty except the gate for foot traffic over there. It was open like it is right now.”
“Is it possible the couple who found the body opened it?”
“I asked Machado that. He says it was already open.” Marino stops the SUV and shifts it into park. “Apparently it’s never locked. Don’t ask me why because it sure as hell wouldn’t stop someone unauthorized from parking in here.”
“Maybe not,” I observe. “But most people aren’t going to drive over a sidewalk and a curb in view of the campus police headquarters. I also expect that cars authorized to park here have stickers. So if you manage to get in without a swipe, you still might get towed.”
Marino kills the engine, switching on his high beams to annoy Rusty and Harold as they open the back of the van. They exaggerate shielding their eyes with their hands, yelling at him.
“Jesus!”
“You trying to blind us?”
“Turn those damn things off!”
“Po-lice brutality!”
“Under one of these trees in the rain and dark, and no one’s going to see anything even if they’re paying attention.” Marino continues telling me what his thinking would have been were he a deranged killer.
Clearly he’s decided that’s what we’re up against and I have my own reasons to worry he might be right. I think of Benton’s cases and I wonder where he is and what he’s doing.
Marino lowers the windows several inches.
“Will he be okay in here?” I ask about his dog.
Quincy is awake, sitting up in his crate and making his usual crying sounds when Marino leaves him.
“I’m not sure what the utility is hauling him around everywhere if he’s just going to stay in the car,” I add.
“He’s in training.” Marino opens his door. “He’s got to get used to things like crime scenes and riding around in a cop car.”
“I think what he’s used to is exactly that — riding around.” I climb out as Rusty and Harold clack open the folded aluminum legs of a stretcher and I’m again reminded that I’ve lost my lead investigator.
A stretcher isn’t going to work in these conditions. But it won’t be Marino giving that instruction. The rain is on and off, barely spitting, the overcast ceiling lifting. I don’t bother pulling up my hood or zipping my jacket as I study the fence separating the parking lot from Briggs Field. An open gate is crisscrossed with yellow ribbons of reflective scene tape.
I imagine someone parking in this lot and having a way to open a gate, perhaps by cutting off the lock. This person then moved the dead body inside the fence, transporting it some fifty yards across grass and mud, leaving it in the middle of a red infield that during baseball season might be a pitcher’s mound. As I look at the scene in the context of its surroundings I think of what Marino said: Some sick fuck out there just getting started. Already I don’t agree with the just getting started part of it.
My intuition picks up on a calculating intelligence, an individual with a decided purpose. He’s not a novice. What he did wasn’t a reaction to the unexpected. It wasn’t an act of panic. He has a method that works for him. Bringing the dead woman here and leaving her the way he did has meaning. That’s what I feel. I could be wrong, and I hope I am as I continue to think about the Washington, D.C., cases I’ve reviewed. What I’m not wrong about is whoever is responsible left evidence out here. They all do. Locard’s exchange principle. You bring something to the scene and you take something away.
“The grass is soaked and the area she’s in is thick mud so you can forget a stretcher,” I tell Rusty and Harold, or Cheech and Chong as Marino rudely refers to them behind their backs. “Use a spine board. You’re going to have to carry her. And bring extra sheets and plenty of tape.”
“What about a body bag?” Rusty asks me.
“We’re going to carefully preserve the position of the body and the way it’s draped, transporting her exactly as she is. I don’t want to pouch her. We’ll have to be creative.”
“You got it, Chief.”
Rusty looks like a refugee from the sixties with his long graying hair and preference for baggy pants and knit beanies, what Marino calls surfer clothes. This early morning he’s outfitted for the weather in a rain jacket with a lightning bolt on the front, faded jeans, tall rubber boots, and a tie-dyed bandanna around his head.
“I guess from now on we don’t have to do what you tell us,” he zings Marino, his former supervisor.
“And I don’t have to bother telling you shit or pretend I like you,” Marino retorts as if he means it.
“Do you have a gun under that jacket or are you just happy to see us?” Harold needles him back, looking like the former undertaker he is, in a suit and tie and double-breasted raincoat, the legs of his creased trousers rolled up to the top of his boots. “I see you brought your K-nine just in case we can’t find the body that’s out there in plain view.”
“The only thing Quincy can find is his doggie bowl.”
“Watch out. Better not piss off De-tect-ive Marino. He’ll write you a parking ticket.”
Rusty and Harold continue with the banter and snipes. They return the stretcher to the van and collect sheets, the spine board, and other equipment as I get my field case out of the backseat and Quincy cries.
“We won’t be very far away. You be a good boy and take a nap.” I find myself talking to a dog again, this one vocal, unlike mine. “We’ll be right over there, just a stone’s throw away.”
I stare up at lighted windows in apartments around us, counting at least twenty people watching what’s going on. Most of them look young and dressed for bed or maybe they’re up studying, pulling all-nighters. I don’t notice anyone on foot loitering nearby, only the officers on the other side of the playing fields patrolling the sidewalk near the fence.
I imagine looking out a dormitory or apartment window at the exact moment someone was moving a dead body through the rain and mud of Briggs Field, virtually right under everybody’s nose. It would have been too dark to discern what was happening except that something out of the ordinary was. But students around here don’t pay attention. Marino’s right about that. They don’t even look when they cross a busy street, their situational awareness almost nonexistent, especially this time of year.
In several days undergraduate students will be numb with exhaustion and headed home for the holidays. The campus will be largely deserted and I can’t stop thinking about the timing, during final exams not even a week before Christmas. And the proximity bothers me, too. Across the street from the MIT police station and within walking distance from the CFC, not even a mile from here.
10
I dig the tactical flashlight out of my bag and shine the diamond-bright beam along the chain-link fence.
For as far as I can see, other gates are secured with padlocks and I don’t know why this one wouldn’t be unless it’s as Marino suggested. Someone used bolt cutters or a key. I paint light over galvanized steel posts, noting multiple scratches where the fork latch would be if the gate were closed.
“Possibly from the chain and padlock.” I point out the damage to Marino. “But this gouge right here?” I move the light closer and a deep scrape lights up like polished platinum. “It looks recently made, possibly by whatever was used to cut off the lock, if that’s what happened.”
“It’s fresh.” Marino has his own flashlight out. “MIT won’t be happy but I’ll make sure we dig up the fence post and get it to the labs in case anything’s ever recovered for tool-marks comparison.”