“You’d have to know where they are to cut them,” I reply. “You’d have to think of it first, from the moment you decide to step foot on the property.”
“He didn’t,” she says as the front door opens. “Score one point for unpremeditated.”
Then Marino fills the doorway, his foot propping open the storm door behind him. His face is stubbly and keyed-up, his big hands gloved in latex that I can see the dark hair of his wrists through.
Behind him through the space in the door he wedges open, I notice crime scene investigators in BDUs, one of them taking photographs, another working a laser-mapping station.
One woman, one man — NEMLEC, I suspect. I don’t know them at a glance. A number of the small neighboring jurisdictions have experts and special equipment, the training and purchases funded by grant money, but there’s little violent crime. Some police in the area have never been to my headquarters.
“All ready and waiting for you, Doc.” Marino slides a pack of cigarettes from a pocket and shakes one out. “Two Concord detectives plus a crime scene guy from Watertown and me. Everybody else I ran out. It’s not a spectator sport.”
“It will be,” Lucy says. “The FBI is on its way.”
“I said no to calling them yet, not when the Doc hadn’t even gotten here.” He flips open a lighter and a flame spurts up. “They’ll just make things worse right now and my main interest has been to protect the scene.”
“They don’t need you to call and they don’t need your permission. Granby’s already making statements to the press and there may have been a couple Feebs at Minute Man Park when we drove past. They’ll be closing in whether you’ve invited them or not.” Lucy checks to make sure her SUV is locked. “I give it a couple hours before they’re here taking over.”
“The kind of money and suspicious shit we’re already seeing is going to hand this to them on a silver platter anyway.” He sucks in as much smoke as he can. “The murders will be small potatoes to them.”
The tip of the cigarette glows bright orange as he holds it the way he always has, midway, with the lit end tucked in toward his palm. Downwind of him I pick up the acrid toasted smell of burning tobacco. It’s a ritual hard for me to watch.
“I think we’re talking about some really serious white-collar crime.” He flicks the filtered butt with his thumb to knock free the ash. “And that’s without seeing the half of it yet. Some areas are locked up behind steel doors like a friggin’ bank vault.”
“So you’ve not gotten into those,” Lucy says.
“Some things I wasn’t going to disturb until the Doc got here. Anything to do with the bodies we haven’t touched.” He’s starting to show his irritation with her, what was already there and it’s rapidly breaking the surface. “But you’ll see when you get inside. The place looks like a front for something.”
“Since when are we smoking?” I ask him. “I thought you quit for good after the last time you quit for good.”
“Don’t start.”
“That’s what I should be saying to you.”
“A couple drags and I put it out.” He talks as he blows smoke sideways out of his mouth.
Like the old days, I can’t help but think. Smoking at a crime scene, holding a cigarette with gloves on, bloody gloves, it didn’t matter back then. What I wouldn’t give for a lungful of my favorite poison and if I knew I had only an hour left to live I’d light up. I’d sit on the steps with Marino and drink beer and smoke the way we did during tough times and tragedies.
“How many?” I ask him. “You told me three. Have you found any others?”
Lucy and I step up on the stone veranda, where I notice small rustic tables and rocking chairs, a place to relax with no evidence anybody does. The furniture is neatly arranged and glazed with rainwater and I have a feeling that private discussions don’t occur at Double S unless they’re behind closed doors and thick glass with sound masking. I can’t shake what Lucy implied about the sunporch being built as recently as last spring about the time the D.C. murders began, serial crimes that now involve DNA tampering and an FBI division chief who may have directed it and has threatened at least one colleague of mine.
“We’re going to hang for a minute so I can fill you in. One male, two females.” The cigarette wags as Marino talks and he plucks it out, squinting as he exhales a stream of smoke. “We were worried at first there might be more victims in other parts of the building or on other areas of the property since we haven’t been able to search some of the locked-up spaces. Plus it’s a huge place, with all these walkways connecting everything like spokes on a wagon wheel. Friggin’ unbelievable. If you put them end to end, they’re probably a mile long. And there’s golf carts so a fat load like Dominic Lombardi never had to walk,” he adds and I notice he uses the past tense.
“Nobody has keys?” Lucy asks.
“Yeah, and I wasn’t going to touch them until you do your thing since they’re in a puddle of blood under a dead body.” He says this to me, not her. “But based on conversations with a couple of the ranch hands, it’s three fatalities total. Everybody else is accounted for except the asshole who did it.”
“And nobody saw anything,” I suppose.
“That’s what they’re saying. Of course it’s bullshit.”
“IDs?” I notice Marino is in the same clothes he had on before dawn this morning when he showed up at my house in the pouring rain.
I can smell his excitement and stress, his musky male odor that turns rancid if he goes without sleeping or bathing and works nonstop. In another eight or twelve more hours he’ll stink so strongly of sour sweat and stale cigarettes, one will pick him up at ten paces.
“Dominic Lombardi. Or Dom, as he goes by, like the champagne. I guess this will be a bad year for Dom,” Marino says. “And hold on about the other one.”
He digs into a pocket, the latex glove resistant against the fabric, the cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, one eye screwed shut. He flips pages in a notepad, holds it some distance from his face because he doesn’t have reading glasses on.
“I can’t pronounce this worth shit. Jadwiga Caminska. They call her Ika. His administrative assistant. That’s their expensive white SUVs here in the lot. Dom and Ika were visually identified preliminarily by the investigators from Concord PD, who you’ll meet,” he says to me. “They’ve been here before, this past Friday night late when Lombardi reported a possible intruder.”
“Was there one?” Lucy asks.
“Maybe.” He looks at her. “They searched every nook and cranny, spotted a shadow on a video recording picked up by a security camera at the main barn. Like somebody careful about the cameras because he knew what to look for and then cut the wires. Those quadrants on the video displays went black while Lombardi was at his desk at around midnight.” Marino doesn’t take his eyes off her. “He was so appreciative he promised to donate ten grand to the Concord PD Christmas fund, cash withdrawn from his bank two days ago, the withdrawal slip in his desk drawer but no sign of the money and Concord PD never got it.”
“The same amount found in the envelope under the footbridge,” Lucy says.
“You’d make a good cop.”
“Been there, done that.” Lucy stares back at him as if they’re in a standoff.
“So the killer probably stole it and any other cash he could grab.”
“Sounds like a reasonable deduction.” Lucy crosses her arms staring at him, goading him into confronting her about what I suspect she did.
Marino crushes the cigarette against a stone column and sparks go out as ashes drift down. He tucks the butt in a pocket, blowing one last stream of smoke off to the side away from us. Maybe Lucy was never invited to visit Double S but that doesn’t mean she’s never been here.