“Obviously an indoor cat. A girl. What’s your name?” I wrap her in a clean towel, and she doesn’t resist me. “I see. You’re not going to say.”
She’s thin and dirty but seems in relatively good shape, her claws very long and curled and needle-sharp.
“Well, it didn’t get out of the house on its own.” Benton looks at me, and he knows what just happened. “And she certainly wouldn’t have abandoned it.”
Peggy Stanton wouldn’t have put her cat outdoors and then left town, and his rage is simmering.
“So who let her cat out?” He pulls off his white hood and runs his fingers through his hair. “Someone who has no regard for human life but wouldn’t hurt an animal.” He bends over to take off his boot covers. “Had it been left in the house, it would have starved to death. So he came back. He let himself in. He knew her alarm code. And he had her keys.”
“There was an open bag of treats on the counter.” The cat has tucked its head under my chin and is purring. “Treats to lure her so he could let her out, perhaps?”
“Where are these treats?” Machado takes off his boot covers, and they are wet and dirty from walking outside.
I indicate the bags of evidence I’ve set on the entryway table.
“If he needed to lure the cat, then he wasn’t someone familiar,” Benton says.
“Did she run from you?” I ask.
“Came right up to us when we were inside the garage.”
“Well, she seems very friendly but maybe wasn’t with him. Maybe she sensed something that made her wary,” I reply, as I wonder what I’m going to do with her.
I’m not leaving her here.
“It looks like the electrical panel was recently modified.” Benton says this to me and ignores Douglas Burke, and I know when he’s seething. “A subpanel that doesn’t meet code. In the basement.”
“Hooked up to what?” The cat rubs against my ear, purring.
“To nothing. No slots left in the main panel. It looks like she had someone come in, maybe a handyman, maybe an electrician, but what was done is substandard. It appears she intended to install something that would need to be connected to a breaker.” Benton won’t look at Burke, practically has his back to her. “A new cable runs from the subpanel along the wall to a new outlet.”
“Work that’s recent; how recent?” Burke asks, and it’s Machado who answers, but he doesn’t answer her.
He explains to me that there is a work area in the basement, a large table with paintbrushes, cookie cutters, wooden utensils, and a rolling pin.
“Like she was going to do baking down there,” she says, and he describes a portable sink on casters, and I don’t know what he means.
“A portable sink?” I puzzle. “Connected to a faucet? Why would she bake in the basement? Why not use her kitchen?”
“More like a plastic basin on a stand with wheels. I can show you if you want,” Machado says.
“Yes, before I take all this off.” I mean the protective clothing. “She doesn’t seem to mind my holding her, so I don’t think she’ll mind if we look. There’s a basement door that leads outside?”
“What the firefighters came in.”
“We can go down and then out from there.”
“The sink or basin looks pretty new, right there in the area where the new outlet is.” He puts on clean boot covers. “Lots of pieces of cut wire scattered around. Black, white, green, number-six wire like you’d hook up to a pole circuit, to the neutral and ground bars,” he explains. “But whatever she planned to hook up, she didn’t get around to it. I’m thinking maybe she was going to put in an oven, but I agree it’s a strange place to bake cookies or whatever. We need to find who did that electrical work.”
twenty-six
THE RAIN HAS STOPPED, THE NIGHT COLD AND FLOODED, as I drive home alone, just the cat with me.
Benton asked Burke to give him a lift to the CFC so he could get his car, but I don’t believe that’s the real reason. They will have words. He will let her know what he thinks of her being on pseudoephedrine, on speed, and laying into me aggressively, and the hell with her allergies. What she did was out of line. I don’t give a damn about the reason, and neither will he, and he’s enraged by what he overheard, and he should be.
It’s not that I don’t understand why Burke needs to know about Marino, but I wouldn’t have pushed the way she did, were I the investigator. It was wrong. It was badgering. It was bullying. There can be only one answer to how she knew what to confront me with, and I imagine her talking to Benton and have no doubt what he felt compelled to reveal. He couldn’t lie or evade, of course not. I tell myself I can’t blame him for being honest, and he couldn’t truthfully say Marino has never shown a potential for violence—specifically, sexual violence—because he has.
But Burke didn’t need the gory details, questioning me as if she wanted to envision it, as if she intended to humiliate and overpower, to do exactly what Marino did, and that’s what troubles me. I worry what her motive is, and I’m amazed by the way events recede so far into the past that they round a bend and end up in front of us again. What Marino did five years ago is directly in my face, so close I can touch it, I can hear it, I can smell it like a posttraumatic flashback. Nerves that were numb have come alive, tingling and smarting as I drive, and I will get past it, but I won’t forgive Douglas Burke. I blame her for willfully inflicting injury when it wasn’t called for, wasn’t warranted, certainly wasn’t needed to prove her goddamn point.
I follow Massachusetts Avenue through Harvard Square, the cat curled up in the towel on my lap, and it bothers me that I don’t know her name. The need to know it obsesses me, because she’s had her name for quite some time, likely since she was a kitten, and I don’t want to call her something different, something wrong. She’s been through enough.
Out in the weather and God knows what traumas she’s sustained and how lonely and hungry and uncomfortable she’s been, and I imagine Peggy Stanton putting food and water into bowls in the kitchen. I imagine her collecting her pocketbook and keys, going out somewhere and fully intending to return home. But the next time the door opened, it wasn’t her coming in.
A stranger using her house key, and he probably entered through the kitchen door so he wouldn’t be seen by the neighbors or by anyone on the street. This person who somehow abducted and killed her entered her alarm code and walked from room to room, leaving lights on in some of them, and I continue to be suspicious about the flowers and who they were from. I’m bothered by the car key found in the Lalique bowl, where I feel this person deliberately left it.
Left it for whom?
Flowers with no card. Fresh flowers that were never thrown away. Food and any perishables in the kitchen were cleaned out, but not the flowers, and I keep going back to that as I think of the key placed in the entryway near a door I doubt the killer used.
Who were these things left for, really?
I unlock my phone and call Sil Machado because I can’t call Marino.
“It’s Dr. Scarpetta.”
“What a coincidence.”
“Why a coincidence?”
“What’s going on, Doc?”
“I’m pondering her car being inside the garage.” I head north to Porter Square.
“Already delivered safe and sound to your bay. Why? What’s up?”
“The key you found inside the house,” I say. “For sure it’s her car key?”
“Yeah. I unlocked the driver’s door with it just to take a quick look but didn’t touch anything or try to start it.”
“That’s good. And what about the keychain?”
“I got the key, the keychain. Yeah.”
“I’d like to see them at some point.”
“Just a key and the pull-apart chain and an old black compass I’m thinking may have belonged to one of the little girls,” he says. “A Girl Scout compass. Maybe her little girls were Girl Scouts. Or Brownies, I guess. How old’s a girl got to be to go from a Brownie to a Girl Scout?”