Unzipping the body pouches, I leave them open just long enough for me to attach labeled tags to the severed end of each rope that binds her. I return to the cabin, grateful to be out of the wind and dropping temperature, and I don’t bother putting my wet clothes back on but stay in the liner. It fits me like an oversized gray union suit.
I put on my jacket and buckle myself back into my seat, and I let Labella know I’m pinching their liner and promise to return it after I’ve cleaned it. Kletty pulls in the anchor, and Labella starts the engines, and Marino sits across the aisle from me, trying to figure out his five-point harness as I try to figure out the order of things.
I envision someone on a boat tying a large fender around the dead woman’s neck, then tying a second line around her ankles and attaching the other end of it to a dog crate filled with bags of cat litter. I imagine all this being pushed overboard as a two-thousand-pound reptile appears, dragging fishing gear, bamboo, and monofilament lines that might have been little more than an irritant until he whacked into the crate, impaling it with the pole. Now he has hundreds of pounds dragging him down and tightening the fishing lines around his left flipper.
“What a strange world,” I decide. “The one thing he for sure didn’t anticipate.”
I’m talking about the killer. I believe whoever dumped this woman’s body is also responsible for her death. I will work this case as a homicide unless the facts prove me wrong.
“In my opinion?” Marino raises his voice above the thundering engines. “I think she was dumped overboard pretty close to where she was found.”
“You might be right,” I reply, as we speed back toward Boston’s inner harbor. “The way the body was tethered, she couldn’t have been dragged very far without being pulled apart.”
“Five thirty-four-pound bags soaked with water, and when that shit gets wet it weighs even more and sticks together like concrete,” Marino says. “So it’s not like something that was going to dissolve and leach out of the bags anytime soon. Plus, the weight of the crate. We’re talking at least one-sixty, maybe two hundred pounds, pulling on the body. A hell of a lot of stress on her neck.”
“Any idea how long she’s been in the water?” Labella turns around in his chair, the boat slapping up and down as we speed through the bay.
“Probably not long.” I think about Channing Lott’s trial, about the timing. “The big question’s going to be where she died and where she’s been since.”
“It doesn’t look like her,” Marino says to me, and there’s no need for him to elaborate.
I know what he’s conveying, and the thought crossed my mind, too, at first, but only briefly, only long enough to be face-to-face with her. She isn’t remotely familiar. I’ve studied photographs of Mildred Lott, a very young fifty, shapely and fit, with long blond hair and all the perfections her financial status could afford. I know about her every surgery, liposuction, and injection, having familiarized myself with records the police provided for me after she disappeared from her Gloucester home last March.
“I have no idea who she is, but it’s not her,” I inform Marino, the Boston skyline straight ahead. “I don’t need to wait for DNA to tell us that.”
“Someone’s going to make a stink about it being her until we let everyone know otherwise,” he predicts.
“We won’t be letting anyone know anything until she’s identified and it’s safe to release information that’s not going to help whoever did this.”
“If she’d been torn into pieces and we couldn’t recover her? Everyone would believe it’s Mildred Lott.” Marino is thinking about my appearing in court today. “People would be sure of it.” He’s saying a jury would. “They’d believe she turned up after all these months, and maybe that’s the point of the way she was rigged. To also rig the trial, to booby-trap it so the case falls apart at the last minute.”
He’s referring to the notorious antics of Jill Donoghue, and as I understand it, I’m the last witness the defense is calling before resting a case that’s been spectacularly highlighted in the news.
“You got to admit the timing’s unusual. In fact, it’s damn scary,” he says. “I’m not sure it isn’t deliberate.”
“Channing Lott is in jail,” I remind him. “He has been since April. And it’s not his missing wife.” I stress that. “It’s someone else.”
twelve
IT’S THREE MINUTES PAST ONE WHEN WE REACH THE Longfellow Bridge connecting Boston to Cambridge.
On the other side, MIT’s playing fields and buildings have lost their charm, are squared shapes of dull grass, dark brick, and washed-out limestone beneath a thick tarp of gray clouds. Trees waiting for fall are suddenly skeletal, as if they’ve flung their parched leaves in despair, and the Charles River is roughly stirred by a blustery wind that matches my own agitation.
I read the text message again, wondering why I think it might say something different this time:
Just back in session after adjourning for lunch. Still on for 2. Sorry.—DS
I refrain from answering Dan Steward, the assistant U.S. attorney whose fault it partly or maybe mostly is that I’m being dragged into court at what couldn’t be a worse time or for a more ridiculous reason.
From now on I’ll communicate with him by phone or in person. Not in writing again ever, I promise myself, and I can’t get over it. How awful. I’m thinking in headlines, and most of all I’m worrying about the dead woman in the van behind us. She deserves my complete attention right now and won’t get it. This is wrong.
“I’ve always lived over a microscope,” I comment to Marino. “Now I live under one, every bit of minutiae open for examination and opinion. I don’t know how we’re going to do this.” I tuck my phone back inside my jacket pocket.
“You and me both. I got no idea who to call first, and I’m sure as hell not doing what the Coast Guard said and bringing in the FBI right off the bat, just hand it over to them on a silver platter because Homeland Security says so.” He is talking nonstop, and about something else. “A jurisdictional cluster fuck. Jesus Christ, could be half a dozen different departments claiming this one.”
“Or not. That’s the more likely story.”
“A cluster fuck if I ever saw one.”
Cluster fuck seems to be his favorite new expression, and I suspect it came from Lucy. But who knows where he got it.
“The FBI will want the case because it’s going to be big news. No way this won’t be high-profile, maybe a national headline. A rich old lady tied to a dog crate and dumped in the harbor. Assumed to be Mildred Lott. Then, when it turns out it’s not, it will be an even bigger story.”
“‘A rich old lady’?”
“You mind holding these?” He hands me his Ray-Bans. “Talk about the weather turning to crap. I got to go to the eye doctor, can’t see worth shit anymore. Need a perscription instead of just using over-the-counter.”
I’ve given up telling him the word is prescription.
“Now my distance vision sucks, too.” He squints as he drives. “Pisses the hell out of me, everything blurry, can’t remember what they call it. Presbyphobia.”