“Does the SD card come with the radio, or was it added after-market?” I inquire.
“Added. A lot of storage space, in other words. What I’m curious about is if the files were periodically downloaded elsewhere, like onto his home computers. If we can get hold of them, we might know what this is about.”
Lucy is saying that the video files she has looked at so far don’t tell us much. She has reason to suspect the dead man has a home computer, possibly more than one of them, but she hasn’t found anything that might tell us where he lived or who he is.
“What’s stored on the hard drive and SD card go back only as far as February fifth, this past Friday,” she continues. “I don’t know if that means the surveillance just started, or more likely, these video files are large and take up a lot of space on the hard drive. They probably get downloaded somewhere, and what’s on the hard drive and SD card gets recorded over. So what’s here may be just the most recent recordings, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others.”
“Then these video clips were probably downloaded remotely.”
“That’s what I would do if it were me doing the spying,” Lucy says. “I’d log in to the webcam remotely and download what I wanted.”
“What about watching in real time?” I then ask.
“Of course. If he was being spied on, whoever’s doing it could log on to the webcam and watch him as it’s happening.”
“To stalk him, to follow him?”
“That would be a logical reason. Or to gather intelligence, to spy. Like some people do when they suspect their person is cheating on them. Whatever you can imagine, it’s possible.”
“Then it’s possible he inadvertently recorded his own death.” I feel a glint of hope and at the same time am deeply disturbed by the thought. “I say ‘inadvertently’ because we don’t know what we’re dealing with. For example, we don’t know if he intentionally recorded his own death, if he’s therefore a suicide, and I’m not ready to rule out anything.”
“No way he’s a suicide,” Marino says.
“At this point, we shouldn’t rule out anything,” I repeat.
“Like a suicide bomber,” Lucy says. “Like Columbine and Fort Hood. Maybe he was going to take out as many people as he could in Norton’s Woods and then kill himself, but something happened and he never got the chance.”
“We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I say again.
“The Glock had seventeen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber,” Lucy tells me. “A lot of firepower. You could certainly ruin someone’s wedding. We need to know who got married and who attended.”
“Most of these people have extra magazines,” I reply, and I know all about the shootings at Fort Hood, at Virginia Tech, at far too many places, where assailants open fire without necessarily caring who they kill. “Usually these people have an abundance of ammunition and extra guns if they’re planning on mass murder. But I agree with you. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a high-profile place, and we should find out who got married there yesterday and who the guests were.”
“I figure you’re a member,” Marino says to me. “Maybe you got a contact for getting a list of members and a schedule of events.”
“I’m not a member.”
“You’re kidding.”
I don’t offer that I haven’t won a Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer and don’t have a Ph.D., just an M.D. and a J.D., and they don’t count. I could remind him that the Academy may not be relevant anyway, because nonmembers can rent the building. All it takes is connections and money. But I don’t feel like giving Marino detailed explanations. He shouldn’t have called Briggs.
“Good news and not so good about the recordings.” Lucy reaches over the back of the seat and hands me her iPad. “Good news, as I’ve pointed out, is it doesn’t appear anything’s been deleted, at least not recently. Which could be an argument in favor of him being the one doing the spying. You might speculate that if someone had him under surveillance and has something to do with his death, that person likely would have logged on to the web address and scrubbed the hard drive and SD before people like us could look.”
“Or how about remove the damn radio and headphones from the damn scene?” Marino says. “If he was being stalked, hunted down, and whoever’s doing it whacked him? Well, if it was me, I’d grab the headset and radio and keep walking. So I’m betting he was the one doing the recording. I don’t believe for a minute someone else was. And I’m betting this guy was involved in something, and whatever the reason for the spy equipment, he was the only one who knew about it. What sucks is there’s no recording of the perp, of whoever whacked him, which is significant. If he was confronted by someone while he was walking his dog, why didn’t the headphones record it?”
“The headphones didn’t record it because he didn’t see the person,” Lucy replies. “He wasn’t looking at whoever it was.”
“Assuming there was a person who somehow caused his death,” I remind both of them.
“Right,” she says. “The headphones pretty much pick up whatever the wearer is looking at, the camera on the crown of his head, pointing straight out like a third eye.”
“Then whoever whacked him came up from behind,” Marino states conclusively. “And it happened so fast the victim never even turned around. Either that or it was some kind of sniper attack. Maybe he was shot with something from a distance. Like a dart with poison. Aren’t there some poisons that cause hemorrhaging? May sound far-fetched, but shit like this happens. Remember the KGB spy poked with an umbrella that had ricin in the tip? He was waiting at a bus stop, and no one saw a thing.”
“It was a Bulgarian dissident who worked for the BBC, and it’s not a certainty it was an umbrella, and you’re getting deeper into the woods without a map,” I tell him.
“Ricin wouldn’t drop you in your tracks, anyway,” Lucy says. “Most poisons won’t. Not even cyanide gas. I don’t think he was poisoned.”
“This isn’t helpful,” I answer.
“My map is my experience as a cop,” Marino says to me. “I’m using my deductive skills. They don’t call me Sherlock for nothing.” He taps his baseball cap with a thick index finger.
“They don’t call you Sherlock at all.” Lucy’s voice from the back.
“It’s not helpful,” I repeat, looking at his big shape as he drives, at his huge hands on the wheel, which rubs against his gut even when he’s in what he considers his fighting shape.
“Aren’t you the one always telling me to think outside the box?” Defensiveness hardens his tone.
“Guessing isn’t helpful. Connecting dots that might be the wrong dots is reckless, and you know it,” I say to him.
Marino has always been inclined to jump to conclusions, but it’s gotten worse since he took the job in Cambridge, since he went to work for me again. I blame it on a military presence in our lives that is as constant as the massive airlifters flying low over Dover. More directly, I blame it on Briggs. Marino is ridiculously enamored of this powerful male forensic pathologist who is also a general in the army. My connection to the military has never mattered to him or even been acknowledged, not when it was part of my past, not when I was recalled to a special status after 9/11. Marino has always ignored my government affiliations as if they don’t exist.