“Her case isn’t safe but she is,” Lucy says and it occurs to me where Carin Hegel may be staying.
“She’s at your place.”
“She’s safe,” Lucy repeats with the same grim smile playing on her lips, her face in profile, angular and strong, her short rose-gold hair tucked behind her ears. “She’s at the house with Janet. If anybody unwelcome shows up, you’ll be even busier than you are.”
Lucy is openly in touch with the part of her that can kill and has before. It’s not even a deep or unhappy place for her or difficult to reach, and at times I envy her being comfortable with who she is. I follow the firm shape of her right leg down to her booted foot on the accelerator, looking for an ankle holster and not seeing one. She wears a black flight jacket over her black flight suit, lots of pockets for whatever she needs. I have no doubt she’s armed.
In North Cambridge now traffic is typically heavy, eighteen-wheelers and buses in the opposite lane headed toward Boston, where the sky is misty and overcast but not ominous like it is to the west. Directly overhead building white clouds are carried along by patchy gray ones, and where blue shows through it’s glaring, the light strange, the way it gets before violent thunderstorms and hurricanes, what I remember from growing up in Miami.
Nobody gives Lucy’s handcrafted, military-looking SUV a thumbs-up or the finger. They stare at it with an expression that is a mixture of fascinated and puzzled, awed and baffled. Nobody tailgates or tries to cut in front of her. Only oblivious people texting or talking on their phones come anywhere near the big black machine that growls like a jungle cat on paws as huge as a dinosaur’s. She’s careful not to speed. Given an excuse, cops would pull her over because they’re curious.
“The door wouldn’t have been unlocked.” Lucy states this as if there can be no disputing it. “Every exterior door on the property has dead bolt locks and the front door of the office building has a biometric one for fingerprint scans like we have at the CFC. Some stranger didn’t just walk in and kill people at their desks.”
I consider whether I should ask how she knows about the locks at Double S. As usual, I have to weigh my options. They’re always the same. Is my need to know greater than the conflict it could create if Lucy has done something she shouldn’t?
“We’ll see what it looks like when we get there” is what I say.
“Someone let him in. Someone opened the door for him and, if so, it means nobody at Double S was worried about whoever it is.”
“Maybe it’s someone who works there,” I suggest.
“That doesn’t fit with a young guy in a hoodie running through a park with an envelope of cash. It’s not a regular member of the staff and the description isn’t right. Nobody who works at Double S is under the age of forty. Did Marino mention that? Is anybody unaccounted for?”
“He said the partners are out of town for the holidays.”
“There are four. Accountants, investors, lawyers, thieves one and all,” Lucy says. “And they don’t exactly keep regular hours and are hardly ever here. It wouldn’t be unusual if they’re out of town in Grand Cayman, the Virgin Islands, greased up like pigs in the sun, spending their hard-earned money,” she adds as if she despises them.
“Marino didn’t mention anybody missing. And running through a public park with an envelope of cash strikes me as desperate. It strikes me as panicked and unplanned.”
“Ten grand in hundred-dollar bills feels like a payment of some sort.” Lucy tries to figure out the problem of where the money came from and what it was for. “A circumscribed amount that was intended for some purpose.”
On Alewife Brook Parkway we curve through hardwood trees that this time of year are bare. An empty bike path cuts starkly through them like a scar.
“They have an alarm system and cameras everywhere,” Lucy then says. “They could see anybody on the grounds on monitors, tablets, smartphones, whatever was handy. He didn’t worry anyone and that’s why he was able to pull it off. But there’s not going to be a recording of what the cameras picked up.”
“Why do you say that?”
“They’d already know who it is if the DVR recorded it and is still on-site and I’m betting it’s not. Multiple cameras, an IP based surveillance system, and it’s worthless if there’s no recording. Whoever we’re talking about may be desperate or deranged at this point but he isn’t stupid.”
“Have you been there?” I go ahead and ask.
“I’ve never been invited.”
“If you’ve done anything that can be traced,” I say to her, “now might be a good time to think about it. You don’t want to become an issue if there are security camera recordings and you’re on them. Especially with the FBI involved.” I think of Granby and wonder what else this day holds.
What has been unleashed around here and how much of it is his fault even indirectly? He’ll show up at some point and I’d better think fast about appropriating what evidence is mine and making sure he can’t touch it.
“I wouldn’t be on any recordings,” Lucy says. “And if the DVR hasn’t been removed, it would be me looking at it unless the Feebs get there first.” Her snide slang for the FBI that ran her off the job when she was in her twenties, for all practical purposes firing her.
“Good God, Lucy. It’s not a phone you can scrub.”
“The phone is mine. It’s a different situation.”
Her ethics again, I think.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” she says. “But when you look at the way Double S has set things up it will tell you quite a lot about them, a consciousness of dishonesty, of big crime, of huge business where hardly anybody works regular hours, if at all, because their commerce isn’t on the surface. The rumors aren’t new but it’s never been proven. The FBI has dropped the ball repeatedly over the years and I wonder why. Now that people are dead, you wait and see what comes out. And not just about the victims.”
“Who else, then?”
“I feel sorry for Carin,” Lucy says. “It’s not her fault but she’ll have some explaining to do.”
“I don’t want you implicated in anything.” I look at her.
“I’m not the one who will be implicated and all I’ve done is do a high recon or two. The same thing I’d do from the air.” She doesn’t sound the least bit concerned but determined.
“Did you do a flyover?”
“It wouldn’t have been helpful and it would have been too obvious. My helicopter isn’t exactly quiet,” she says. “What I can tell you is if you show up uninvited you’ll never get past the main barn with its perimeter of cameras, supposedly to safeguard extremely valuable Churchill Thoroughbreds with racing pedigrees. The killer didn’t sneak in. And with the people who do keep regular hours at Double S? The housekeeper, ranch hands, a groundskeeper, the full-time chef? Somebody knows damn well who it is and isn’t saying anything.”
“Marino thinks it’s Gail’s friend Haley Swanson, a close friend apparently.”
“The person who posted information about her on Channel Five’s website. I got an alert and saw the name but I don’t know who Haley Swanson is and I’m not aware of Gail having any close friends.” Lucy scans her mirrors, cutting in and out of lanes skillfully, effortlessly, the way she walks along a sidewalk, always in front and aware of what’s around her.
“It seems to me Gail didn’t tell you everything,” I reply pointedly.
“She didn’t have to and I don’t know everything. But I know plenty.”
“He works for the PR firm Lambant and Associates. Maybe Haley Swanson was doing crisis management for Gail.”
“Why would she need that? She wasn’t a public figure and had no public business or even a reputation to lose. Although she was about to,” Lucy adds.