I don’t like to be reminded of what my niece doesn’t tell me. By now I should be callous to her secrets and deceptions or at least no longer give that part of her nature a second thought. Why should I care in the least when so much of what she withholds I’m better off not knowing? I’ve asked myself that for the better part of thirty years, since Lucy was an enfant terrible getting into my computer, my desk, my personal life, into every facet of my being. She knew Gail Shipton and isn’t bothered to see her dead, to see her internal organs, to smell death and feel how cold it is.
“She sent drinks over. Then she pulled out a chair at our table and we started talking. Initially I thought there was something off about her, but around MIT?” Lucy shrugs. “People are a little different. That night was the friendliest I ever saw her for a reason. It was an act.”
“The act of someone who was a walking heart attack,” Anne says. “If you think of the valves as doors, hers didn’t open and close properly. It’s hard to imagine she didn’t feel a fluttering in her chest or maybe angina.”
“She would have just thought it was stress,” Lucy says. “Which is part of Carin’s case against Double S. The stress of what they did to Gail was affecting her health, causing shortness of breath, tightness of the chest, acute anxiety that was crippling her ability to work.”
“If you’re going to make a case about it, then why not get a physical?” Anne asks.
“Gail didn’t want it disproven. She didn’t want a clean bill of health.”
“The irony is she wouldn’t have gotten one. See the narrowing of the mitral valve?” I point it out on the scan. “It may also have been leaky.”
“You get what you get when you pick your victim,” Anne remarks. “Acute physical distress and she probably died on the f’ing bastard.”
“We know she died on him one way or other.” Lucy stares at the 3-D image of Gail Shipton’s damaged heart as if it’s a metaphor for who she really was. “Flawed,” she adds. “Too damn bad you can’t see it in everyone,” she says with a trace of frost.
“Her cause of death is going to be cardiac arrest due to valvular stenosis with contributing factors of a left pneumothorax and acute physical distress due to being shot by a stun gun,” I conclude.
“A homicide by heart disease,” Anne says cynically. “Defense attorneys will have a field day with that one. They’ll say she was ripped off by Double S and died of a broken heart,” she adds as the door suddenly flies open.
Bryce rushes into the room like a turbulent wind, a call sheet in hand that’s filled with his carefully formed, copious script.
“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!” he exclaims as he hands the sheet of paper to me, what I can tell at a glance is information about a case just called in by Marino. “They’ve had a horrible massacre in Concord!”
32
The V-10 sound of Lucy’s SUV is a cross between a Humvee and a Ferrari, a chugging and growling with an underlying two-beat rhythm of thick rubber tread on asphalt, a combination of thrumming and clop-clopping. The massive wheels seem to float over the roughest pavement as if my cognac leather seat is a cloud.
My niece calls her latest acquisition a land crusher with air suspension and I accepted her offer of transportation, having no intention of riding with Rusty and Harold in the large-capacity removal vehicle we refer to as a bread truck. I won’t be ready for them for quite a while and I also wasn’t about to stop somewhere to gas up whatever Bryce found for me in the lot. My docs are overwhelmed with autopsies stacked up and more on the way and I didn’t want to bring one of them to the scene or borrow Anne. Lucy can help me and Marino will be there.
I feel better inside an armored vehicle that brings to mind Darth Vader or Middle Eastern potentates who have galactic wars and bombs and bullets to worry about. I’m relieved to be in Lucy’s SUV. I’m relieved to be with her. The information Marino relayed to me over the phone as we were pulling out of the bay is scant. But it’s ghastly, almost unbelievably so. The 911 call this morning about an active shooter wasn’t completely wrong in its implications that a madman in Concord may have just gone on a killing spree.
But the suspicious person seen running through Minute Man Park late this morning wasn’t there to spray bullets at schoolchildren on an outing. It’s unlikely he knew the children would be there when he fled through acres of forest separating the Revolutionary War battleground from the rolling pastureland, outbuildings and main office and house of Double S, a horse farm and financial firm where at least three people are dead in what Marino described to me as a “Jack the Ripper bloodbath.”
The victims didn’t know what hit them, Marino said, their throats cut while they were getting something to eat or sitting in their chairs. The suspect, who witnesses describe as a young male dressed in jeans and a dark hoodie with an Andy Warhol — like image of Marilyn Monroe on it, burst out of the woods and flew over a wooden footbridge. He leapt through a swarm of fourth graders on a path “scattering them like bowling pins,” in Marino’s words. The man raced across Liberty Street and into a public parking lot thick with cars.
There was so much panic and confusion, no one seemed to know what happened to him after backfires that sounded like gunshots, with children and teachers grabbing one another and running and diving to the ground. When police units and SWAT showed up the man wasn’t to be found. No one recalled a vehicle speeding away or even noticing one shortly after the incident. The Medflight helicopter was turned around and the police probably would have assumed the entire incident was a false alarm were it not for one important detail.
Concord detectives searching the park in the area where the man had been spotted discovered a thick envelope with blood on it and the printed return address of Double S Financial Management. Inside it was ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. The envelope was below the footbridge the man had sprinted across and it’s conjectured he was startled by the crowd of children and teachers blocking the path and in his alarmed confusion dropped what Marino calls getaway cash.
“Three people so far died for ten measly grand, a little over three thousand bucks per, a cheap price for your life but I’ve seen cheaper,” Marino said to me over the phone. “A hoodie with Marilyn Monroe on it and, bingo, Haley Swanson, who’s vanished into thin air, and now he’s been spotted and we know what he is. Jesus, it’s just a damn good thing I was at your house when he was spying behind your wall. Imagine? He kills Gail Shipton and then comes back for more, stalking you, about to grab you from your damn yard. He would have seen me and Quincy getting out of my car.”
Marino wants to believe he’s saved me, and I don’t argue. It doesn’t matter.
“He wouldn’t have had a way to know I was going to show up as opposed to you driving yourself to the scene,” he said, “so that screwed it up for him.”
I didn’t tell him it doesn’t feel right. Marino has his mind made up and he wasn’t going to listen. But I don’t believe the person I saw early this morning intended to harm me while I was outside with my dog. I don’t know what he wanted but he’d had plenty of opportunities during the days and nights I was home alone sick with the flu. And as I think of my feverish dreams and the hooded man in them I wonder if I was having moments of clairvoyance. I was under intense scrutiny. I was obsessively on the mind of a stranger and a part of me knew it.
For sure I’d had the sensation of being watched when I was taking Sock out into the backyard after dark. And if it’s true that Haley Swanson was stalking me or casing my house because he wanted to rob me or worse, why didn’t he? Possibly because he saw I had a gun, I suppose. But I don’t think that’s it either. It may be what Lucy has suggested, that the Capital Murderer had gotten interested in me because of what’s been all over the news, and, yes, one thing could lead to another. Sexual violence begins with fantasy, and what a demented killer might imagine would be fueled by what he sees.