“She was at the Psi Bar last night,” I reply. “Who might she have been with?”
“She didn’t say when I talked to her. I didn’t ask because I didn’t care. If she was with this PR person, she wouldn’t have mentioned it anyway, not if she felt it was something she needed to hide, like most everything about her conniving, dishonest life. People are stupid thinking you’ll never find out. I don’t know why people are so fucking stupid,” she says and I can’t tell if she’s more angry or hurt or if she feels embarrassed that Gail might have fooled her about anything at all.
“I’m calling Swanson a he because that’s what’s on his driver’s license, although there seems to be some question about his gender. An officer who confronted him early this morning described him as having breasts.”
“If Gail knew him, she didn’t mention it to me for good reason. Maybe this Swanson person is someone she met through a mutual acquaintance,” Lucy adds and it seems an allusion to something else, something unpleasant and bad.
“He also called nine-one-one to say Gail was missing and when he was told he’d have to come to the department to fill out the report he posted the information on Channel Five’s website instead. Then he called the police again and asked to speak to Marino,” I let her know as the first drops of rain begin to fall. “All of these actions might make sense if Haley Swanson was with Gail in the bar and she went outside to take your call and never came back.”
“Lambant and Associates may have been doing PR for someone else and that’s how they met.” Lucy seems to be working it out in her head more than anything else.
I continue to be struck by how dead the relationship is to her. It’s as dead as Gail Shipton and that’s the dark art of Lucy’s emotional sleight of hand. She can love one minute and feel nothing the next, not even anger or pain, because after a while those, too, will pass and what she’s left with is what I called her magic friendship hat when she was a little girl who spent most of her time alone. Where’s so and so? I would ask and she’d shrug and reach into her imagined hat and come up empty-handed. Poof, she’d say and then she’d cry and then it would go away, as far away as her mother who has never loved her.
33
Distant thunder rolls in waves of reverberating drumming and a slow starting rain hits the windshield in drops the size of quarters. I tell Lucy that someone may have been spying on me since I came home from Connecticut.
“He was behind the house at around five-thirty this morning when I took Sock out,” I explain. “It’s believed it might have been Haley Swanson.”
“Believed by who?”
“The police. Marino certainly is convinced.”
“Why?”
“Where Swanson’s SUV was spotted and the early hour certainly makes it appear it could have been him,” I reply. “The officer who talked to him believes it was.”
“Did Swanson admit to it when he was questioned? Did he say he knows who you or Benton are and was near your property at five-thirty this morning?”
“No. But I don’t think he was asked that directly and one might expect him not to admit it if he was stalking me or casing our property. Especially if this is someone who has a lot to hide.”
“You mean if he’s the Capital Murderer.”
“I have no real basis to know any such thing but I don’t believe it.”
“What about the description of the hooded sweatshirt with a face on it, what supposedly looks like Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe?” Lucy asks.
“I didn’t notice the person had on something like that. He also was bareheaded but it could be he didn’t have his hood up.”
“Was it raining?”
“My impression was he wasn’t dressed for the weather or at least wasn’t wearing rain gear.”
“Somebody revved up and overheated, excited and in overdrive. He might not have cared that it was raining and he probably wasn’t Haley Swanson,” Lucy says.
“When he was questioned by the police he didn’t look like he’d been out in the rain. It probably wasn’t him behind the wall but I don’t think the person intended to hurt me.”
“Not yet and that’s always your default,” Lucy says. “You don’t want to think that what you do might draw dangerous people to you.”
“He’d had opportunity if that’s what he wanted.”
“It’s more likely he wasn’t ready and you had your Sig, let me guess.”
“All he had to do was shoot me with a stun gun if that’s who we’re talking about. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had a gun. I would have been on the ground.”
“You don’t know who it was,” Lucy says flatly. “Just because Haley Swanson was in your neighborhood doesn’t mean it was him and it probably wasn’t. And just because Marino’s decided Swanson is the man spotted running through Minute Man Park doesn’t mean anything either. I’m not jumping to conclusions.”
“None of us should.”
“Marino’s basing it on a sweatshirt, deciding Swanson’s the killer because of a hoodie.”
“That’s not the only reason but we need to be careful,” I reply.
“Do you have any idea where Swanson lives?”
“Near Conway Park. Apparently he’d stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Somerville Ave first,” I repeat what Officer Rooney said.
“If he left the Dunkin’ Donuts and headed to the projects on Windsor it would make sense for him to have passed right behind the Academy of Arts and Sciences and within blocks of your house. He probably was taking Park to Beacon.”
“And I assume his name hasn’t come up in case discussions with Carin Hegel.”
“No, but I’m not surprised. If I’ve never heard of him, she probably hasn’t either.”
“When he called nine-one-one he asked to speak to Marino. I’ve assumed Gail might have mentioned him because you might have mentioned him,” I add what I know she won’t like to hear.
“I never talked about Marino with her” is her emphatic answer and then I remember Benton’s remarks to him this morning at MIT.
He infuriated Marino by reminding him that his pickup truck with the design flaw cost him a lot of money after a failed class action suit. Lambant and Associates represented the dealership and spun stories that blamed the owners for being bad drivers and causing the damage. This was all very recent and it’s possible Haley Swanson might have known who and what Marino is because of that. I suggest the scenario to Lucy.
“What it doesn’t explain,” I add, “is why Haley Swanson would call nine-one-one and think to ask for him specifically.”
“If he was desperate it would explain it,” Lucy says. “If he talked to a nine-one-one operator and got nowhere? Next he calls back and asks for a detective by name.”
“Did you ever discuss Marino with Carin Hegel?”
“I didn’t discuss him or any of us but it’s not exactly a secret where I work and who my friends and family are,” Lucy says. “All of us are law enforcement or former law enforcement or criminal justice, and Gail sure as hell had reason to be aware that I’m surrounded by people she needed to worry about. She’d wandered into a really bad airspace and she’s probably better off dead. She had nothing to look forward to except what I was going to have to do about it and it’s a shame she put me in that position. But she did.”
I look at her and she seems unbothered and sure of herself and her convictions as she drives with one hand on the wheel, the other on the four-wheel-drive gearshift, resting on it, her fingers curled around the carbon-fiber knob inside her carbon-fiber cockpit with instruments and joysticks worthy of an aircraft.
“What was it you felt you were going to have to do exactly?” I inquire.