Recovered from a locked chest in a closet in Dawn’s apartment were guns believed to have been removed from Fielding’s collection, and his wedding band. Also in this same trunk a martial-arts carry bag, I’m told, and inside it, a black satin sash, a white uniform, sparring gear, a lunch bag filled with rusty L-shaped flooring nails, and a hammer, and a pair of boys Adidas tae kwon do shoes believed to be the ones Mark Bishop was wearing while practicing kicks in his backyard the late afternoon he was killed. Although no one is quite certain how Dawn lured the boy into lying facedown and allowing her to play some gruesome game with him that included “pretending” to hammer nails into his head, or more specifically, the first nail.
“The one that went in right here,” Marino continues speculating, pointing to the space between the back of his neck and the base of his skull. “That would have killed him instantly, right?”
“If we must use that phrase,” I reply.
“I mean, she probably helped him in some of Fielding’s Tiny Tiger classes, maybe?” he continues to spin the story. “So the kid’s familiar with her, looks up to her, and she’s hot, I mean really good-looking. If it was me, I’d tell the kid I’m going to show him a new move or something and to lie down in the yard. And of course the kid’s going to do what an expert says, what someone teaching him says, and he lies down and it’s almost dark out and then boom! It’s over.”
“Someone like that can never get out,” I reply. “She’ll do more and do it worse next time, if that’s even possible.”
“Denying everything. She’s not talking, except to say Fielding did it all and she’s innocent.”
“He didn’t.”
“I’m with you.”
“She’s going to have a hard time explaining what’s in her apartment,” I point out, as I continue going through photographs. Marino must have taken hundreds.
“She’s good-looking and charming and smart as hell. And Fielding’s dead.”
“Incriminating.” I’ve said this several times as I look through the photographs on the iPad. “Should be very helpful to the prosecution. I’m not sure why you think the case will be a problem.”
“It’s going to be. The defense will pin it all on Fielding. The psycho bitch will get a dream team of big-shot lawyers, and they’ll make the jury believe Fielding did all of it.” Marino leans closer to me, and the slope of the bed changes again, and Sock is snoring quietly, not interested in his former owner or her rat hole, which has a dog bed in it, Marino shows me.
He leans close to me, clicking through several photographs of the dog’s plaid bed and several toys, and I indicate I’d rather look at the photographs myself. He and Sock are on top of me, and I’m feeling smothered.
“I just thought I’d show you, since I’m the one who took them,” Marino says.
“Thank you. I’ll manage. You did a very good job with the photographs.”
“Point is, it’s obvious the dog stayed here.” Marino means Sock stayed in Dawn Kincaid’s rat hole. “And also with Eli and with Fielding,” he adds. “To give her credit, I guess she liked her dog.”
“She left him in Jack’s house with no heat and all alone.” I click through photographs that are overwhelmingly incriminating.
“She doesn’t give a shit unless it suits her. When it doesn’t, she gets rid of it one way or another. So she cared about him when it suited her.”
“That’s the more likely story,” I agree.
I look at photographs of an unmade double bed, then other pictures of a tiny bedroom shockingly filled with junk, as if Dawn Kincaid is a hoarder.
“Plus, she had another reason to leave him,” Marino goes on. “If she leaves the dog at Fielding’s house, then maybe we think he’s the one who killed everyone, then killed himself. The dog is there. His red leash is there. The boat that was probably used to dump Wally Jamison’s body is there, and Wally’s clothes and the murder weapon are in Fielding’s basement. The Navigator with the missing front plate is there. You’re supposed to think Fielding was following you and Benton when you left Hanscom. Fielding’s deranged. He’s watching you. He’s following you, trying to intimidate you, or spying, or maybe he was going to kill you, too.”
“He was dead by the time we were followed. Although I can’t be exact about time of death, I’m calculating he’d been dead since Monday afternoon, probably was murdered not long after he got home to Salem after leaving the CFC with the Glock he’d removed from the lab. It was Dawn in the Navigator tailing us Monday night. She’s the one deranged. She rode our bumper to make sure we knew we were being followed, then disappeared, probably ducked out of sight in Otwahl’s parking lot. So eventually we’d think it was Jack, who in fact already had been murdered by her with a pistol she probably gave to her boyfriend, Eli, before she murdered him, too. But you’re right. It’s likely she’s tried to set things up so all of it got blamed on Jack, who isn’t around to defend himself. She set up Jack and made it look like he was setting up Johnny Donahue. It’s terrifying. “
“You got to make the jury buy it.”
“That’s always the challenge, no matter the case.”
“It’s bad the dog was at Fielding’s house,” Marino repeats. “It connects him to Eli’s murder. Hell, it’s on video clips that Eli was walking the dog when he was whacked.”
“The microchip,” I remind him. “It traces back to Dawn, not to Jack.”
“Doesn’t mean anything. He kills Eli and then takes the dog, and the dog would know Fielding, right?” Marino says, as if Sock isn’t inches away from him, sleeping with his head on my leg. “The dog would be familiar with Fielding because Dawn was staying over there in Salem, had the dog at Fielding’s house some of the time or whatever. So Fielding kills Eli, then takes the dog as he walks off, or this is what Dawn wants us to think.”
“It’s not what happened. Jack didn’t kill anyone,” as I conclude that Dawn’s apartment has the same brand of squalor that I observed at Fielding’s house in Salem.
Clutter and boxes everywhere. Clothes piled in mounds and strewn in odd places. Dishes piled in the sink. Trash overflowing. Mounds of newspapers, computer printouts, magazines, and on a dining-room table, a large number of items tagged and placed there by police, including a GPS-enabled sports watch that is the same model as one I gave Fielding for his birthday several years ago, and a Civil War military dissection set in a rosewood case that is identical to one I gave him when he worked for me in Richmond.
There is a close-up of a pair of black gloves, one of them with a small black box on the wrist, what Marino describes as lightweight flexible wireless data gloves with built-in accelerometers, thirty-six sensors, and an ultra-low-profile integrated transmitter-receiver, only I have to infer all this, sift it out of his mispronunciations and mangled descriptions. The gloves, which were closely examined by both Briggs and Lucy at the scene, are clearly intended for gesture-based robotic control—specifically, to control the flybot that Eli had with him when he was murdered by the woman who had given him the stolen signet ring he was wearing when his body came to the CFC.
“Then the flybot was in her apartment,” I presume. “And did Benton offer you any coffee?”
“I’m coffeed out. Some of us haven’t been to bed yet.”
“I’m in bed working. Doesn’t mean I’ve slept.”
“Must be nice. I’d like to stay home and work in bed.” He takes the iPad from me and searches through files.
“Maybe we could adjust your job description. You can stay home and work in bed a certain number of days each year, depending on your age and decrepitude, which we’ll have to evaluate. I suppose I’ll be the one to evaluate it.”