“I was about to tell Carin the truth.” Wipers sweep the glass and more thunder sounds in a guttural rumble that ends with a sharp crack. “She would have fired Gail as a client but that wasn’t good enough.”
“After what you’ve told me, I don’t blame you for being angry.”
“I was building a case and needed to prove it and I waited because nothing was enough,” Lucy says. “I was stupid. That’s why you can’t hate anyone. That’s why even when I feel it I put a stop to it. I try really hard to put a stop to it but I didn’t with her and that was a mistake. Hate makes you stupid.”
Wind blows across the surface of a gray body of water beyond Lucy’s window. On my side are rows of small houses that bring to mind Monopoly’s Baltic Avenue or regimented developments I associate with military bases.
“The two of you met her at the Psi, had a few drinks, and, next thing, you’re working on a project together,” I point out. “You may not have heard of Gail Shipton some eight months ago but maybe she’d heard of you. Maybe she was aware the Psi is a place you frequent.”
“I probably shouldn’t frequent any place. It’s not smart.”
“Maybe it wasn’t chance she sent drinks to your table last spring.”
“It wasn’t chance but it didn’t turn into what it became until later,” Lucy says. “She was running out of what money she had left and then by summer Double S was doing everything it could to escalate her legal fees. She was going under and was too proud to tell anyone. But Double S knew. They knew exactly how much money she had left and how quickly they could go through it. Then they had her where they wanted her.”
I feel the deep rumbling thunder and smell rain in the fresh moist air blowing through the open vents. Lucy doesn’t like recirculating air and she doesn’t like being hot and I smell expensive new leather and the clean grapefruit scent of the cologne she wears, the same cologne I bought her for Christmas and have yet to wrap.
“Who was there when you were deposed?” I ask. “Did you meet anyone from Double S?”
“Just their dirtbag lawyers.”
Light shimmers in rolling clouds and shines on wet pavement, the eerie light of storms, and I ask nothing more. The rain’s not as heavy as we drive farther west and the view opens up to a huge spread of shallow water, sandbars, and conservation land.
“What about Gail?” I ask. “Where was she when you were being deposed?”
“She was sitting at the table the entire time.”
“What was her demeanor?” My suspicions are gathering.
“Something I didn’t trust,” Lucy says and she should have distrusted her sooner but I don’t say it. “She wasn’t a good actor. She wasn’t a good anything anymore.”
As we get closer to Concord, woods are interspersed with clearings, pastureland and dormant plowed fields that look like faded corduroy. Homes and barns are tucked back from the turnpike in this old-moneyed part of the world where people keep a few chickens or goats or designate land for preservation to get another tax write-off. Peace and conservation foundations and famous cemeteries flourish and cutting down a tree is close to a felony. Single-serving bottled water has been banned because plastic is a sin and Lucy’s fuel-guzzling vehicle must be appallingly offensive to her Concord neighbors. Knowing her, that might be why she got it.
In minutes we’re crossing Main Street in the center of a town where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott’s homes can be toured and their graves and those of Thoreau and Hawthorne can be visited. Shops and restaurants are small and quaint and at every corner there are monuments, historic markers, and battlefields.
Through pastures and over a river we follow Lowell Road, bearing right onto Liberty Street, where we pass Minute Man National Park. I notice people out sightseeing and staff in Colonial period dress as if nothing happened earlier. They seem oblivious to unmarked cars and plainclothes law enforcement prowling the grounds. They pay no attention to a television crew. Channel 5 again. I recognize Barbara Fairbanks talking into a microphone on a wooden footbridge, maybe the one the killer raced across and into a group of children he scared and scattered.
The road we’re on bends to the left and the woods get impenetrably dense, the typical forests of New England, with thick canopies and no undergrowth. In about a mile and past an open field, electric gates are frozen in the open position and SS is posted on a stone pillar with no street address. Lucy slows and turns in. She rolls her window down as we stop next to a Concord cruiser parked just inside. I retrieve my credentials from my bag, handing the thin black wallet to her as she digs into a pocket for her CFC badge.
“Cambridge Forensic Center. Lucy Farinelli. I have Dr. Scarpetta with me.” She displays our IDs and badges to the officer, who could pass for twenty. “How are you doing?”
“You mind if I ask what you’re driving?” He bends down, his admiring face in her open window.
“It’s just an SUV.” She returns my creds to me.
“Yeah, right. And I’m driving the space shuttle. Care if I look?”
“Follow me up.”
“Can’t do that.” The officer is equally enthralled with the SUV’s driver. “I’ve got to make sure nobody comes in who’s not supposed to and have already turned away half a dozen reporters. It’s a good thing the weather’s crappy or they’d have news choppers up. My name’s Ryan.”
“Have you been inside?”
“It’s pretty unbelievable. I’m thinking someone crazy who escaped from MCI.” He refers to the nearby medium security men’s prison. “How fast can this thing go?”
“Tell you what, Ryan, come by when you’re not busy and I’ll let you test-pilot,” Lucy says as I try to get Marino on the phone.
She shoves her beast of a vehicle back into gear and we begin to follow a paved driveway that’s more like a road. Ahead are acres of manicured paddocks, maintenance sheds, small barns, and the big red one Lucy mentioned. On either side of us are straight rows of peeling birch trees, a scattering of dead leaves clinging to their branches and stuck to the wet blacktop. Marino answers my call and I tell him we’re two minutes out.
“Park in front and I’ll meet you at the door,” he says. “I’ve got your scene case. Make sure you cover up good, Doc. It looks like someone spilled a vat of borscht in here.”
34
Past outbuildings and a small natural pond, the two-story timbered headquarters is set on the highest point of immaculate grounds. It fronts paddocks and pastureland and is connected by covered walkways to the rest of a compound that’s not visible from the long paved drive unless one follows it to the end where it bends around. Lucy explains the layout to me. I no longer ask her how she knows.
The steeply pitched roof is copper tarnished like an old penny and there are thick stone columns on either side of the veranda. Beveled leaded transom windows are over the heavy front door, with big windows across both floors and I imagine a clear view of rolling fields, sheds, barns, and people on the grounds if the shades aren’t drawn like they are right now. I think of security cameras that would detect an uninvited guest.
It’s no longer raining, as if Double S can buy its own weather, and I tilt my head back and feel the chilled moist air on my cheeks and pushing through my hair. I can see my breath just barely. The sky is turgid and dark as if it’s dusk instead of almost two p.m., and I imagine what Benton is doing and what he knows. He’ll be here soon. There’s no way he won’t be and already I’m looking for him.
I follow the rows of silvery birch trees that in warmer months meet in a canopy over the long black driveway, my eyes moving past the quiet muddy-green pond, then the empty brown paddocks behind gray split-rail palings. Horses will be in the main barn because of the weather, an angry colliding of warm and cold fronts that could hammer down sleet or hail. Beyond the fencing and a meadow fringed in switchgrass are heavy woods that lead to the park where a fleeing man in a hoodie frightened children and teachers hours earlier. I estimate it’s not even a mile as a crow flies. Already I suspect that Double S’s intruder wasn’t one.