“Why would you look?” I ask.
“Because of the truck.”
“The one broken into.” I fix my attention on the black pickup he’s slowly circling as he talks.
“It’s out of place here,” he says. “It’s not related to the construction going on. It’s someone’s personal truck improperly parked here so of course that would get my attention instantly.”
He stands still and stares across the field at me.
“That’s assuming the tool was used on the gate’s lock and chain.” I watch Marino and Machado give up with the shovel and decide on the hacksaw.
“He used this tool,” Benton says. “And he wanted us to find it, and when the labs examine it you’re going to see I’m right. We’re his audience and he wants us to know everything he’s gone to the trouble to do. That’s part of the thrill —”
“‘Gone to the trouble’?” I interrupt him, getting angry because he’s scaring me and for an instant I feel the flare of heated fury that I work so hard to bury.
Then I will myself to feel nothing at all. It’s not helpful to react the way a normal person would. I banish what will interfere with my clinical discipline and reason, I run it off and far away from me. After all these years I’m good at emptying myself out.
I watch Marino rummaging inside his big scene case, what’s actually a portable tool chest. I take a deep breath. Calmer now, Gail Shipton enters my mind again. It would make sense if she’s the link. If so, it would mean she had some connection with her killer even if she didn’t know him, even if they’d never met, as Benton has said.
16
The tool has a red fiberglass handle and a metal blade. It looks similar to a wrench and is capable of cutting through hard metals like brass, copper, and steel.
Marino is able to tell us that at a glance. He takes photographs of the tool with the rock on top of it, a chunk of native stone about the size of a softball. Then he moves the rock out of the way. He picks up the tool.
“Okay, so where’s the lock and chain?” The tool is overwhelmed by Marino’s big gloved hands.
He turns it, studying it, careful not to destroy evidence like fingerprints, which I suspect aren’t there.
“If he wanted us to find the damn tool he used, you might think he’d leave the lock and chain, too, right?”
Marino places the tool in an evidence bag.
“You know, if he’s going to jerk us around, the more the merrier, right?” Marino’s mood has gone from somber to sour and sarcastic.
The first death scene he’s worked as a cop in a decade and he’s feeling lost and pushed around. Benton is making him feel small and Marino is spoiling for a fight.
“My point is we shouldn’t assume this was used by him.” He loudly tears off a strip of evidence tape. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe you strayed off the beaten path and found something unrelated.” He directs this at Benton, staring at him with an open challenge mixed with something else. Doubt.
Then Marino looks at me as if expecting I’ll take his side. Or maybe he’s trying to figure me out, figure Benton out, because Marino doesn’t know what to think. It’s just the three of us standing near a bulldozer on a construction site and I wonder how Benton is going to communicate what Marino needs to know. Benton can’t be forthright and Marino won’t make it easy even if he believes him. And I anticipate he won’t, not at first.
“Maybe somebody broke into a truck, which wouldn’t be unusual,” Marino goes on in the same snide tone. “Vehicles get broken into all the time. Maybe that’s all there is to it, plain and simple.”
“I suggest you also collect the rock,” Benton says. “He touched it. Most likely he had gloves on but he might not have, depending on his mind-set at this point.”
“Who the hell are you talking about?”
“The person you’re looking for. What’s not a question is he handled the rock. He picked it up and placed it where it was. We should check it for DNA, for any residue, that might have been transferred on it.”
“Jesus friggin’ Christ. You got to be kidding me.”
“He drove the body here,” Benton says as if there can be no question. “He parked in this lot first.” He points to the parking lot next to the dorm. “He got out of his vehicle, walked into this construction site, broke into the truck’s storage box and took the tool. After that he drove the body to the lot over there.” He points again, this time to the parking lot where I was on the phone for the past hour or so.
The pedestrian gate is still wide open, stirred by the wind, and I remind Benton of the risk. That parking lot is across the street from the MIT police station. The killer — and I’m openly calling him that without reservation — would have had to drive over the curb and the sidewalk.
“There was a chance the police might see him,” I conclude.
“There was no chance of that,” Benton says flatly. “This person is calculating and he watches. He spies. He thrives on risk, on the thrill of taking a chance, and he manages to look like he belongs wherever he is, assuming you see him at all. He pulled into that lot, cut off the lock and chain from the gate. He placed the body on a sled of some sort that flattened the grass, gouging out clumps of it, as he dragged it to the infield and posed it.”
“Why?” Marino stares hard at him, then looks at me, almost rolling his eyes.
“Because it aroused him and is symbolic. We don’t know exactly why. We never do but what you’re seeing are the hieroglyphics on the wall of his deviant psyche.”
“Now I’m thinking total crap.” Marino defiantly places his hands on his hips. “Whatever happened to her isn’t the fucking Da Vinci Code. She’s as dead as hamburger and I don’t give a shit about his psyche.”
“You need to pay attention,” Benton says to him. “He spent time posing the body, walking around, looking at it from different angles. This is what gets him high, a game that gets more daring and out of control. He has his methods and everything he does has meaning to him, but he’s like a top spinning toward the edge of the table. Close to spinning off, a crash waiting to happen.”
“How the hell can you know that based on what’s out here?”
“I know his type and what I’m seeing tells me he’s killed before and will again.”
As Benton describes all this I think of the Vicks-like ointment we recovered from blades of grass not far from where the body was found. I imagine the killer looking at the posed body from different angles, admiring his work, as Benton just described. The final act, a murderous triumph out on a soggy playing field in the dark, and he applies more of the vapor rub, breathing in its sharp, penetrating odor so he doesn’t forget his purpose or make mistakes, or maybe he’s already making them. Like a racehorse running powerfully, single-mindedly, but on the brink of stumbling or striking a hurdle or flying over a cliff.
“When he was done he returned to this spot, cleaned off the tool, and left it,” Benton says. “He left it for us.”
“It might not have been noticed over here,” Marino continues to argue. “This construction site’s not all that convenient to where the body was left.”
“He knew we’d find it eventually.”
“Why would he give a shit?” Marino angrily yanks off his gloves. “And how the hell could he know what was in the truck’s storage box? We’re supposed to believe the pipe cutter came from there? How does that make any sense at all? It wouldn’t be smart. Start with that. What if it hadn’t been in there? What if he’s parked out here with a dead body in his car and then doesn’t have a tool to cut the chain off the gate?”
“He gathers intelligence,” Benton says patiently. “This isn’t an impulse crime, Pete. It was premeditated carefully, with a motive he had in mind that’s not his real reason for killing her. He did it because he wanted to, because he’s driven by an overwhelming compulsion. That’s not the way he sees it but it’s the reality we’re dealing with.”