I envision the footprints along the railroad tracks, leading into the MIT campus while it was still raining and away from campus some time later. Our house is barely two miles from where Gail Shipton’s body was left and if her killer is even mildly well informed, he would have known there was a good chance I would respond to the scene. He may have been watching. He may have been behind the wall, observing lights go on inside my house, and he may have seen Marino pull up, and then he would have seen me taking Sock out.
I felt the presence of what very well may be the killer. I heard him back there, and then I saw him and he ran. Fleet of foot, with running gloves on, he returned to MIT to watch the rest of it. My arrival, the helicopter landing, his spectacle being worked, and as Benton has suggested, the killer left a final time before dawn along the train tracks to retrieve his car.
“The simplest of motives, the oldest on the planet. Money,” Marino said to me moments ago. “We know who it is and he’s probably not gotten far, maybe is hiding out on someone’s farm in a shed or a barn, and we’re calling out cops from area departments and will do door-to-door searches until we find him.”
When he said we he meant NEMLEC.
“Haley Swanson robbed Double S and something got out of hand and he killed everyone,” Marino said and I know damn well that’s not the whole story or even part of it, maybe not any of it.
This isn’t a robbery gone as badly as one could. I’m convinced the police are wrong about what they suspect very early into an investigation that will be taken over by the FBI if it hasn’t been already. Minute Man is a national park and therefore the jurisdiction of the Feds, who will use that one location as justification for horning in, and it’s hard for me to imagine that Benton isn’t mobilizing. He won’t wait for an invitation by Concord PD or Marino and NEMLEC or anyone including his boss, who won’t want Benton around, but that won’t stop him. Gail Shipton was suing Double S and she’s dead and now people at Double S are dead. Benton will be thinking about the Capital Murderer while what I continue to see is the hologram of an octopus on plastic bags over the heads of those women in D.C.
I envision powerful tentacles shimmering in rainbow hues, a sea creature known as a bottom dweller, with rubbery flexibility and grace, and a master of camouflage, squeezing into impossible spaces, four pairs of arms leading to an intelligent beaked head. The invertebrate has been used as a symbol for evil empires that abuse power and take over. Fascist governments, conspiracists, imperialists, Wall Street. Dr. Seuss depicted the Nazis as an octopus.
The metaphor may be a coincidence or maybe it’s not. The killer may view himself as a far-reaching superhuman with a stranglehold on whatever he decides to dominate, but I’m seeing him as something far more banal and poorly designed, like multiple devices hooked up to a single electrical source that leads to an overload, to sparks, to fire and an explosion.
An octopus connection, a dangerous way to plug too many cords into one outlet, and a circuit blows, which is what I think has happened. I feel the rage and arrogance of someone silent and swift as I’m reminded of the railroad tracks and the killer who fled along them in running gloves, leaping from tie to tie in the slippery dark, a Nijinsky from hell who’s a prima donna but not necessarily as masterfully balanced as he believes, not emotionally, not mentally.
“Supposedly the suspect showed up at the office building,” I continue relaying to Lucy what Marino summarized for me. “It’s believed the door was unlocked and he slipped in and killed the first three people he saw.”
“Who are they?” Lucy asks as we follow Massachusetts Avenue, a Christian Science church on one side, the dark brick buildings of Harvard Law School on the other.
I’m noticing a lot of police cars.
“So far they’re unidentified.” I check my e-mail for emergency-response-system alerts.
“If they’re Double S employees, how can we not have names?”
“Marino says the bodies don’t have any form of identification on them, that apparently the killer stole their wallets. The police may have an idea but nothing’s verified.”
“But other people work there.” Lucy says it as if she knows and she would.
She’s a witness in the lawsuit against Double S. She’s been deposed and as recently as this past Sunday spent hours going over the case with Gail Shipton and Carin Hegel. Lucy has a grasp of the details. She probably knows more about Double S than most. She would make sure of it.
“Three people is what I’ve been told unless there are other bodies they’ve not found yet,” I reply. “And Public Safety’s alerting area police departments and schools that there’s a manhunt.”
“Great,” Lucy says. “Everyone will think it’s a damn terrorist attack.”
“At least three dead in what appear to be planned executions,” I read what’s been publicized so far.
“Where the hell did that come from? Who’s handing out press releases? Let me guess.”
“Harvard, MIT, BU, and all grad schools are shutting down. Essential personnel only at McLean Hospital.” I scan through alerts landing in my e-mail. “The FBI —”
“Here we go,” Lucy cuts me off in disgust. “They’re not wasting any time, meaning pretty soon they’ll be crawling all over everything.”
“Special Agent in Charge of the Boston Division, Ed Granby —”
“More of his propaganda,” Lucy interrupts.
“He’s asking the public for information about the young male seen fleeing Minute Man Park and to review any photos or video anyone might have taken,” I relate.
“Good luck. Concord people aren’t exactly into community policing unless you’re driving your ATV over wetlands or stepping on protected plantings.” She makes a typical acerbic snipe about where she lives.
“The victims are a man and two women. That’s all Marino had,” I add. “We’re going to have to dig into whatever information Carin Hegel’s got. Her client Gail Shipton’s dead and now people from the firm she was suing are dead.”
“Carin’s not going to have anything that will help,” Lucy says.
We roar through Porter Square, its shopping center off to our right, and then the post office, churches, and a funeral home.
“She was working a straightforward case that’s anything but,” Lucy adds.
More police cars pass us with no flashing lights or sirens. Cambridge, Somerville, Quincy. NEMLEC, I think.
“If she wasn’t scared before, now she’s got to be,” Lucy says.
I mention I ran into Hegel at Boston’s federal courthouse last month. She told me she was sequestered in an undisclosed location until the trial was over and she referred to Double S as a gang of thugs.
“Do you know where she is?” I catch a glint of a smile playing across Lucy’s face as if what I’ve been saying is somehow amusing.
Maybe it’s shifts of light in an afternoon that’s turned volatile, gray clouds, churning and flat on top like anvils, far off over the ocean and outer harbor. It’s stopped raining along the South Shore and South Boston and I look up at the clouds closest to us, the wind continuing to shift around crazily like a compass in a store selling magnets. Building storm cells are ragged underneath, trailing down like ripped gauze, more heavy rains coming. Thank God the scene we’re headed to is indoors.
“Is it possible she’s in danger?” I push my point.