“Reported anonymously from a pay phone,” Benton says. “It didn’t happen.”
“He certainly sounds suicidal and extremely vulnerable.”
“I believe he was murdered and that certain people know it, which is why it was safe to steal his genetic identity.” He peruses the introspective writings of Martin Lagos, idly moving pages on the table the way one does when something has been read many times.
“What could be better?” Ed Granby needs to go to prison, I think angrily, and maybe no punishment is bad enough for him. “Someone missing who’s wanted and you have inside knowledge that he’s dead. The problem with taking a step like that is only a very limited number of people would have the information.”
“Granby had to know it to instigate the DNA being altered. He had to feel it was a sure thing to take a chance like that.”
“He’s behind all of this. He’s why at least seven more people are dead.” I check my emotions, which have moved well beyond a visceral response to raw vengeance.
I ask about the friend named Daniel and if Martin ever made those secret video recordings he mentions in his diary.
“We don’t have them if he did,” Benton says. “But he references them several times up until about a week before her murder. I suspect her sexually provocative bathing was recorded and would have fueled a budding killer’s violent fantasies.”
I want to know if we have a physical description of Daniel and if we know where he is.
“Dark hair and eyes, white, don’t know what he’d weigh now,” Benton says.
“Thin if he’s hooked on MDPV.”
“He’s probably about five-six or — seven, based on pictures from his high school and college yearbooks.”
“Can you give them to Lucy?”
“I just did.”
“Small and dark like the young man giving the elephant the bath,” I remind him of the photograph we found in Lombardi’s bedroom.
“Let’s see what Lucy can do with it. Why do you say Martin couldn’t have killed his mother? Not that I doubt it but I need everything solid I can get.”
I move a photograph close, Martin puffing out fifteen candles on a chocolate birthday cake, July 27, 1996, four days before he vanished and his mother was drowned.
“This is why,” I reply.
A boy who’s grown too fast for his bodyweight to catch up with his limbs, he’s rawboned and awkward, with big feet and hands, in a tank top and baggy shorts, his ears cupped out from his closely shorn head, his upper lip dirty with facial hair. I zoom in on his right arm encased in its clean white plaster cast that only one person has written on: “Remember not to do what I say, bro. HA! HA! HA!” His friend Daniel wrote it boldly in red Magic Marker, and next to his flamboyant signature is a bright blue cartoon figure that looks like a fat Gumby doing a cartwheel.
“Martin didn’t drown his mother.” I’m sure of that. “He couldn’t have gripped both of her ankles with only one good arm.”
“He looks reasonably strong. And when his adrenaline kicked in? You don’t think he could do it with one arm?”
“He didn’t. Two hands were used.” I hold up both of mine as if I’m gripping something hard. “Her injuries make that patently clear. He didn’t kill her but that doesn’t mean he didn’t agree to it and witness her murder from the best seat in the house.”
As I study Martin’s forced smile and eyes that look haunted, I imagine someone taking the photograph of him on his birthday. Based on the way he’s looking at the camera as if he’s been ordered to, I suspect his mother did.
“Do we know how he broke his arm?” I ask.
“I know he liked to skateboard. That’s as much as I can tell you without calling his mother back, which I don’t want to do right now.”
“Maybe skateboarding with his friend Daniel. His only friend,” I reply.
“Daniel Mersa. He mentions him throughout his diary and that bothered me then but not nearly as much as it started bothering me a few weeks ago when I heard about the DNA results that we now know were tampered with.”
“He must have been interviewed after she was murdered.”
“The police couldn’t find him at first,” Benton says and I think of Dr. Geist’s comment about the boys. “When they finally did, his mother gave some convenient excuse that he’d been visiting her sister in Baltimore and the sister corroborated this of course. When Daniel eventually was questioned he claimed he had no idea what happened to Martin’s mother. He said Martin wasn’t doing well in school, the girls didn’t like him, he was depressed, getting into alcohol, and that was as far as the questioning went seventeen years ago.”
“It went as far as somebody wanted it to go,” I reply.
“Granby,” Benton says.
“I strongly suspect some relatively competent and self-assured person visited the scene before her body was found and turned off the air-conditioning, filled the tub with scalding water, rearranged the bathroom, removing the hidden video camera, possibly taking Martin’s computer hard drive, not realizing there was a backup hidden in his bedroom. Kids wouldn’t think of so many details, although it wasn’t a perfect job. It’s pretty obvious.”
“Granby’s pretty obvious,” Benton says.
“I don’t know how you’d prove it at this stage.”
“I probably can’t prove he did the tampering at the scene. But it probably was him especially if it was amateurish.”
“You have the call sheet at least,” I reply. “He called Dr. Geist about Gabriela Lagos the day before anyone except those involved should have known she was dead.”
“Let’s print a hard copy of that.”
I text the document identification number to Lucy and ask her to print it. I don’t say what it is or give a reason and I ask her to bring it downstairs. She texts me back that we have company coming and I have an idea why Benton wants the hard copy. I have a feeling I know what he’ll do with it and while some people would enjoy it, Benton won’t.
“After Gabriela was murdered and before her body was found somebody alerted Granby that there was a problem,” Benton then says. “Otherwise I don’t see how he could have known in advance. Someone who knew what Daniel had done, someone powerful who Granby would want to help.”
“Then Daniel must have told whoever it is.”
“Of course,” Benton says. “He’s a kid who’s just killed his best friend’s mother, a prominent Washington woman who collected art for the White House.” Benton continues to run information through his mental database while I run it through my own. “Daniel made a call because he would have needed help to get away with it.”
“The person at the center of this, all roads leading to the same source.” I think of an octopus again. “How old was Daniel then?”
“Thirteen.”
“That surprises me. I would have assumed he was the older of the two.”
“He was the dominant one in the relationship,” Benton says, “overly controlling and organized, a risk taker and show-off with an excessive need for stimulating his senses and a very high threshold for pain. He doesn’t feel pain or fear the way other people do.”
I can well imagine Daniel coercing Martin into extreme feats with the skateboard that may have resulted in a broken arm and other injuries and humiliations.
“Martin was two years older and two grades ahead of him but had very poor self-esteem, very bright but not particularly gifted athletically,” Benton explains. “He was a loner.”
“Had they been friends for a long time?”
“Apparently their mothers were very close.”
“How convenient that Martin’s mother was an art expert who put together exhibits and acquired masterpieces for the First Family.” I envision the stolen works in Lombardi’s bedroom.