A half dozen Concord police cruisers and unmarked cars are parked on a spacious tarmac and I notice an expensive white Lincoln Navigator and a white Land Rover that I suspect belong to Double S. Marino’s SUV has the windows cracked, his rowdy German shepherd crated in back whining and pawing frantically like a jailbreak because he knows it’s us.
“Marino lets him sleep in his bed, too,” Lucy says. “The dog’s totally worthless.”
“Not to him,” I reply. “And you’re one to talk. You and Janet cook fresh fish for Jet Ranger and dehydrate vegetables for his treats, the most spoiled bulldog on the planet.”
“We won’t get into who spoils her dog.”
We walk around to the tailgate of Lucy’s SUV, backed in close to a glass and stone sunporch that’s detached from the main building and set alone in the midst of evergreens like a palaver hut. Through its open blinds I see modern leather furniture, a sofa and two side chairs, and a slate table with magazines loosely stacked. There are two coffee mugs and one small plate with three or four brown cupcake liners and a crumpled blue paper napkin on top. I notice what look like chocolate crumbs on the table near the plate and it doesn’t appear the other person drinking coffee was eating. The housekeeper didn’t clean up after whoever it was.
Lucy continues to describe the ranch to me, telling me the detached sunporch isn’t original to the property.
“The office building is red oak,” she explains, “and this is new pine lumber painted to match it, built in the spring, coincidentally about the time the murders in Washington, D.C., began. There are cameras everywhere but not here.”
“Coincidentally?” I repeat.
I scan the roof, the entrance, the single glass-paned door leading inside the small outbuilding and see no sign of a security system. There’s no alarm keypad visible inside a small space with a sitting area and what looks like a half bath.
“I’m simply pointing out the timing.” Lucy opens up the back and we collect coveralls, safety glasses, sleeve guards, and nitrile gloves with extended cuffs.
Then she checks her phone again as I pull out personal protection kits that include HEPA respirators, antimicrobial towelettes, and biohazard trash bags because I have no idea exactly what to expect.
“It’s on Twitter.” She scrolls with her thumb. “A massacre in Concord.”
“I hope that word didn’t come from Bryce, for God’s sake.” I worry about reporters calling him and he blurts out to them what he did to me.
“I suspect he came up with the word because he got it from the Internet. Let’s see, rumors and misinformation posted as news feeds.” Lucy continues to scroll. “It’s all over and has been for the better part of an hour, USA Today, Piers Morgan, Reuters, and everybody and their brother retweeting. Multiple fatalities at international financial company, at least three homicides, possibly robbery related. Now, I wonder who released that. Well, it gets worse. FBI denies link to MIT death from earlier today, Gail Shipton, who was suing Double S. No evidence there’s any connection, Boston Division Chief Ed Granby states, and hello? Who’s suggested a connection? ‘At this point her cause of death is unknown and hasn’t been ruled a homicide,’ Granby says.”
“I don’t know what it is he thinks he can deny since he knows nothing about her case,” I reply as my bad feeling returns like a muscle spasm. “Benton wouldn’t have passed on something he shouldn’t when he knows I’ve not officially released anything about Gail Shipton and won’t until certain test results are in.”
“It’s not Benton,” Lucy says. “It’s his douchebag boss who’s scripting what he wants people to think.”
CODIS has been tampered with and Granby threatened the chief medical examiner of Maryland and now he’s manipulating the media about my cases here. I feel a flare of anger and a growing sense of alarm.
“He’s basically speaking for you and our office. So why do you think that is?” She looks at me and I know what she overheard in the bay when I was talking to Dr. Venter, and Benton has given her information, too.
We lean against the bumper to pull on latex boot covers with a heavy-duty tread, what I prefer when a scene is extremely bloody.
“To manipulate,” Lucy then says. “It’s got to do with the DNA screwup, doesn’t it?”
“I’m afraid it may be more than a screwup.”
“Granby’s got a special interest. Maybe he’s protecting people with money so he can make sure he doesn’t sail off into the sunset with nothing but a government pension.”
“Be very careful what you say, Lucy.”
“He came up with Martin Lagos for a reason,” she says. “If you’re going to tamper with DNA and need a profile to swap, why this kid who disappeared seventeen years ago? Why would Granby think of him?”
“We don’t know for a fact who thought of him.”
“Saying it was Granby, why would he? Let me answer for you. He probably knows Lagos is dead, which is why he’s never shown up and why I can’t find him in any database. If you’re going to steal someone’s identity, it’s helpful if that person never shows up to complain about it.”
“Granby was with the Washington field office at the time,” I reply. “He may remember Gabriela Lagos. It was a sensational case.”
“No kidding he’d remember it. The question is, was he involved in some way? Is there a reason it would suit his purposes to make people think her missing son is the Capital Murderer?”
“What I know for a fact is something is profoundly wrong with the DNA analysis in Dr. Venter’s case, Julianne Goulet. The stain on the panties she was wearing couldn’t have been left by a man. Martin Lagos didn’t deposit vaginal fluid and menstrual blood and what this suggests to me is someone tampered with the DNA in CODIS and didn’t bother to check what the stain was comprised of or it would have been apparent the profile wasn’t going to work for a male.”
“That sounds like the stupid mistake a macho FBI dick like Granby would make. You’ll know for sure he’s got a special interest if he shows up here. A division chief doesn’t bother with a crime scene or get his hands dirty,” Lucy says. “And he’ll be here, you watch. I’m sure he considers it his turf and he needs to control it because he’s got an agenda, a rotten one.”
“At the moment it’s my turf.”
Lucy stares at the outbuilding with the coffee cups inside where somebody was having a private conversation before three people died.
“A handy little place to chat.” She peers through a window. “If you want to come out here and talk about incriminating activities, criminal activities” — she moves to another window, cupping her hands around her eyes — “there’s no telephone inside to bug. And it looks like we have commercial-grade sound masking. See the small white speakers in the ceilings? They’re probably in the ductwork, too. Similar systems are installed in courtrooms these days so when lawyers approach the bench no one can hear what’s being said.”
She begins pointing out cameras on the roof, over the mahogany front door of the office building, and on copper lampposts along the sidewalk and the driveway.
“Weatherproof, infrared high-res that automatically switch from color to black-and-white in low light like what we’ve got now,” she says. “Not wireless though. See the cables? You know what the problem with cables is? They can be cut. What’s interesting though is it doesn’t look like they were.”