“I recall a suggestion of scandal that never surfaced publicly.” I sensed someone was trying to manipulate my office from the moment I informed the police that Gabriela Lagos was a homicidal drowning and the focus became her only child, the son she was raising alone.
The fifteen-year-old boy had vanished. When a warrant was issued for his arrest I got aggressive phone calls from the mayor’s office and my longtime friend Senator Frank Lord warned me to watch my back.
“Clearly she’d been dead for three or four days in the middle of summer, the air-conditioning turned off, possibly deliberately to escalate decomposition,” I tell Benton. “Suffice it to say she was in very grim shape. Fresh contusions weren’t readily apparent but they were there, and the typical fingermark pattern I expect in homicidal bathtub drownings when victims are lifted by the ankles, causing their heads to submerge. Almost always there’s significant bruising around the lower legs and also over the hands and arms from violently striking the sides of the tub as the victim flails helplessly.”
“Christ, remind me not to go that way,” Benton says from his position against the fence, sitting on his heels, his forearms on his knees, while we wait for Marino.
“The pattern was harder to see because of the advanced decomposition.” The details rush back at me like remembered bad dreams. “And my deputy chief had neglected to incise those areas of discoloration to look for hemorrhage and he misinterpreted contusions as postmortem artifacts.”
“I know all about his negligence.” Benton flicks more bits of broken stick.
“Jerry Geist.” My tone turns disparaging.
“It’s hard to forget a pompous old fart like that.”
“For a number of reasons she easily could have been signed out as an accident.”
“If you hadn’t been involved, she would have been.” Benton reminds me I had quite a fight on my hands.
The prosecutor was adamant that a jury would never convict Martin Lagos, a juvenile, assuming he was ever found and taken into custody. The physical evidence wasn’t strong and I disagreed. It was plenty strong. A healthy young woman who wasn’t impaired with drugs or alcohol didn’t accidentally drown in a tub filled with water so hot that her entire body was scalded. There was no sign of a seizure, stroke, aneurysm, or myocardial infarct, and she shouldn’t have had fresh bruises. She was murdered and it was my belief that whoever was involved had attempted to obscure the crime.
“Dr. Geist wanted the death signed out as an accidental drowning and I wouldn’t let him.” I haven’t thought of him in years.
He was in his sixties at the time, an old-school pathologist, blatantly misogynistic and quite happy when I resigned and he didn’t have to answer to me anymore. I remember feeling he was inappropriately influenced by anyone who was powerfully connected and I strongly suspected he maneuvered behind the scenes to force me out of office.
“He maintained the skin slippage and blistering were due solely to the bad condition she was in when in fact her entire body was covered with full-thickness burns,” I explain. “It was apparent to me that after she was dead someone refilled the tub with scalding tap water, probably to hasten decomposition and obscure injuries. That and turning off the air-conditioning in July made for a tough case that Dr. Geist debated with me disrespectfully and inappropriately.”
“He was an arrogant little bastard.” Benton runs his fingers through his unruly hair as the wind kicks up.
A high-pressure front has followed the retreating storm and sharp gusts blast along miles of tracks stretching out like sutures. In the distance I make out the figure of Marino walking his dog.
“Why would Martin Lagos’s name come up now?” I ask.
“His DNA was supposedly recovered in the third case, Julianne Goulet, on the panties the killer dressed her in, which were identified as belonging to the victim from the week before, Sally Carson.” Benton gets to his feet, shaking out his legs the way he does when his knees are bothering him.
“Identified how?”
“Visually. Her husband recognized them, lingerie he’d bought for her that he recalled she had on when she left the house, when he saw her last. We never got her DNA from them.”
“That’s unusual if she had them on when she was abducted and murdered.”
“Maybe you’re beginning to see it from my point of view. We didn’t get Sally Carson’s DNA but we got Martin Lagos’s. Supposedly.”
“Yes, you’ve said that twice now. Supposedly.”
“The killer dresses his most recent victim in the panties of the last one,” Benton says. “Totally textbook. I’ve written about it.”
“And for some reason in the third case, Julianne Goulet, he left his DNA.”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to look.”
“Are you thinking it was left deliberately?”
“I’m thinking someone did,” he says.
Benton puts his coat on as he stares off in the direction of Marino, whose advance is in fits and starts. Quincy tugs him like a sled dog, following the scents of God knows what, finding clumps of weeds to mark.
“We can’t locate Martin Lagos,” Benton continues to explain. “The theory is he created a new identity, possibly as long ago as when he vanished. He had one close friend who I strongly feel helped him disappear or was involved in Gabriela’s murder and we don’t know where this friend is either. But nobody’s listening to me.”
“What about forensic age progression to predict what Martin might look like now?”
“Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“You have? By yourself?” I continue to be dismayed by the way he refers to himself now as if he’s completely alone in this investigation.
“We’ve searched mug shots that include police departments, prisons, plus the Bureau’s national repository of surveillance, passports, driver’s license photos, you name it, and also whatever else Interpol might have. Black notices, for example, the unidentified dead,” he says. “Nothing, not even remotely.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
Benton doesn’t answer me, and Marino is nearing the other side of the tunnel now.
“You don’t think he’s alive,” I say in a quieter voice because I don’t want Marino to overhear a word.
“I don’t,” Benton replies. “No matter what name Martin Lagos might go by or how he might have tried to alter his appearance, his facial landmarks should be the same. The spacing between his mouth and nose, the width of his eyes, measurements like that.”
It sounds like something Lucy would say.
“Everything makes me suspect he’s not been around for the past seventeen years, which is why we can’t find him,” Benton adds. “It’s possible he’s dead. He may have committed suicide or he may have been murdered.”
“Maybe Lucy can help.” I suggest what I’m beginning to suspect has happened already. “The computer programs she’s created using neural networking recognize objects and images much the way the brain does. I know that she’s been doing research with irises, facial features, and other biometric technology. Of course I’m sure you know what she’s been doing; maybe know more than I do,” I add pointedly.
“A forensic app.” He stares down the tracks, watching Marino get closer. “With a potential of being used in vehicles manned and unmanned. In other words, possibly drones targeting people of interest, a handheld way of searching almost anything you can think of, assuming you have access to databases that are off-limits to most people.”
“If you can give Lucy the most recent photograph. Or a video or a recording of his, whatever you’ve got.” The forensic app may have been on Gail Shipton’s phone.