A small, fiery woman with short chestnut hair and an attractive face that doesn’t look remotely threatening until she talks, she bothered to put on a dark cashmere jacket with a dramatic collar and large silver buttons and black slacks and boots.
“Everything said is going to be said right here in front of all of us.” She sounds more like a judge than a lawyer.
“This is a joke.” But Granby doesn’t think it’s funny and his nervousness transitions to fear that’s palpable.
I watch him get wound tighter like a spring about to snap and it occurs to me he might run.
“I thought you might like to see this.” Benton hands him the printout of the call sheet. “I know it was a long time ago but you might remember giving Dr. Geist a telephone call. He was the medical examiner in Gabriela Lagos’s drowning, a homicide that you wanted him to decide was an accident.”
Granby stares at the sheet of paper he holds, staring at it as if he doesn’t know how to read.
“We have evidence her crime scene was tampered with,” Benton says and he illustrates what he means, mentioning the air conditioner turned off, the scalding-hot water in the tub, the spilled wax, the tidying up.
“And her son Martin had a broken arm so it wasn’t him gripping both of her ankles to drown her,” Benton adds. “I can show you the contusions on her lower legs, the two sets of fingertip bruises, if you’d like to see them.”
Granby is so dumbfounded he doesn’t notice that the young bearded man in the plaid shirt and sweater-vest is furiously taking notes and that the very pretty blond young woman next to Lucy is holding a digital recorder that she makes a point to say is running. Janet has made this point several times by announcing that she’s recording our conversation and if any party present refuses consent, speak up now or consent is implied. Granby doesn’t speak up but I do. I tell Ed Granby who Janet and Carin are, that both of them are lawyers, and then I make it clear why they’re here right now.
“Forensic evidence links the murders of Gail Shipton, Haley Swanson, Dominic Lombardi, and Jadwiga Caminska with those in D.C., despite your protestations to the contrary,” I say, to his visible shock. “Fibers, a mineral fingerprint, and we’ve only just begun, and I happen to know for a fact that a DNA profile in CODIS was tampered with. The sample you got a profile from and then changed to Martin Lagos came from a female, from a mixture of fluids including menstrual blood.”
“This will be dealt with through the proper channels, my channels. I certainly don’t trust your channels or anything about you, for that matter.” Carin Hegel looks at him and the agents standing behind him. “I’ve already left a message for the attorney general,” she starts to say and this is when Granby runs.
The call sheet he was holding flutters to the floor as he bolts through the door leading into the open bay, flinging it open so hard it bangs against the wall, and he gets as far as the parking lot, where Marino is climbing out of his SUV. When he sees all of us emerging from the building he does what he used to do when he was a Richmond cop.
“Whoa! Where are we going in such a hurry?” Marino says loudly as Granby runs toward his car.
In several big strides Marino intercepts him, grabbing him by the back of his belt and lifting him off the asphalt so that only his toes touch. Granby flails powerlessly as Marino uses his other hand to pat him down for a weapon, a pistol he finds in a shoulder holster under Granby’s suit jacket. Marino hands the gun to Benton.
“I’ll put you down when you quit tussling,” Marino lets Granby know sweetly.
“Get your fucking hands off me!” he screams, and his agents do nothing to intercede.
They stand back watching their boss’s humiliation with blank expressions on their faces, smart enough to know which side to take, which isn’t his anymore.
“Tell us who and where he is, Ed.” Benton gets close to him in my well-lit parking lot filled with white crime scene trucks. “It’s not Martin Lagos or you wouldn’t be trying to get him indicted for murder and I suspect he’s not around to defend himself and hasn’t been since he disappeared. Did you help get rid of him or did his friend Daniel Mersa do it?”
Granby stares mutely at him from his tiptoe position. His arms and legs go completely still as if he’s wilted and Marino sets him down squarely on his feet but keeps a grip on the back of his belt.
“Where is he?” Benton asks. “Do you want him to murder someone else?”
Granby stares at him with dead eyes.
“You really don’t give a shit, do you,” Benton says and I hear his disappointment again.
“Go to hell,” Granby says quietly, dully.
“You have a chance to make this right,” Benton says what I already know won’t move any part of Ed Granby.
I know about desperation that turns hard and empty, then as cold as outer space. I know where it leads and I know where it ends.
44
A train whistle makes a mournful sound, dissonance in a minor key, somewhere to the west of me.
It’s a different train I hear on a distant rail line, not the candy-apple-red circus train with gold lettering that bakes brightly in a wintry Florida sun on a switch of railroad tracks flanking parking lots that as recently as last night were crowded with people eager to be thrilled and entertained by aerialists, acrobats, clowns, animal trainers, and of course the lions, tigers, camels, and most of all the elephants, smaller than African ones but big, gray, and sad.
A homeless man named Jake who parks himself behind the arena most days tells Lucy and me the reason elephants sway from side to side is they’re trying to touch each other because they’re lonely and when granted wide-open spaces they bark, growl, rumble, and trumpet as they bump and nudge each other playfully like children. They are good to their mothers and take care of one another and can signal members of their pack from great distances with vibrations and odors that humans can’t hear or smell. Elephants are very intelligent and sensitive and he’s seen them cry.
If we allowed them to live freely the way Jake lives freely, our new friend says, we could utilize them to find water in the desert and detect sinkholes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and all sorts of danger, including evil people, and by following the example of the elephant we’d do better dealing with death. I’ve commented that it would be a very good thing if humans were more respectful of death and less afraid of it but I haven’t mentioned to Jake what I do for a living or that I have good reason to know what I’m talking about.
I have yet to hint that my niece and I are loitering behind the arena near the circus train because we’re waiting for a detective friend and my FBI profiler husband to clear a rather ghastly scene, a killer’s lair, which like the elephant’s is a train car only elephants don’t hurt anyone. Jake hasn’t a clue that his two new snowbird acquaintances aren’t in Miami simply to spend the holidays with family but are involved in the very homicide investigation that relates to the very circus he’s had his eye on since he was born, according to him. I’ve said nothing and I won’t.
I’d rather chat about elephants and he considers himself the keeper of them, claiming he’s studied them when the circus is in town for as long as he’s been disabled, which was 1985, when his charter boat was hit by a tanker in the middle of the night, breaking almost every bone in his body and requiring countless surgeries. The arena wasn’t here in 1985 so I don’t know if the story is true or if any of his stories are. But I believe what he says about elephants and the cold-blooded young man who performed acrobatic tricks on the backs of them until just yesterday when he was led away in handcuffs, escorted from the bright red train by a plainclothes posse that included Benton and Marino, whose pictures were in The Boston Globe and all over television this morning.