She told me the reason she was still up at that hour, as if it required an explanation, is that she and Marino had been arguing rather fiercely. He refused to stay in her house and she refused to drive him to the CFC to get his car, and she wouldn’t drive him to his home in Cambridge, either. From that I inferred he’d been drinking or wasn’t to be trusted for one reason or another, and as she was telling me this I could hear someone in the background who wasn’t him.
The person was speaking in a low, quiet voice I couldn’t make out while Lucy went on to say that Marino finally agreed to stay in the stable, an outbuilding that really isn’t a stable anymore because she’s converted it into a washing and detailing bay with an underground firing range. Upstairs on the second floor is a guest quarters, an efficiency apartment, and she was moving about as she described this, and I couldn’t hear the other person anymore, and that probably was deliberate.
It’s been a while since I’ve been invited to Lucy’s country home, as she calls her sixty-some acres on the Sudbury River west of Boston, a horse farm she’s spent the past year renovating and retrofitting to handle her collection of gravity-defying machines, the barn converted into a monster garage, the paddock now a concrete helipad. Marino is reasonably okay, and I shouldn’t be worried, Lucy informed me, and the last time I knew she was dating anyone was in early summer, a person she rendezvoused with in Provincetown more than once.
Of course Marino’s upset. He’s angry, Lucy explained, and I couldn’t stop thinking of the gold signet ring she had on yesterday. I didn’t question her. I know when not to, but she seemed so uneasy and guarded, and it occurred to me that whatever she and Marino were fighting about may have nothing to do with the mess he’s in. Maybe he moved into the stable because of who she’s with, someone she doesn’t want to talk about, someone Marino doesn’t approve of, and he’s never hesitated to give Lucy his opinion about choices she’s made.
The CFC seems lonely, Marino’s absence a void that is palpable, and I enter my building through the bay. I don’t see Lucy’s car, whatever she’s decided to drive today, but by now she’s on her way here to help me with what I’ve asked. How to track an imposter on Twitter, and is it possible the person who sent me the video clip and image of a severed ear also pretended to be Peggy Stanton and tweeted Marino? It would seem unlikely, were it not for the timing, everything horrid happening all at once.
I unlock the door to the autopsy floor, pausing at the security desk to check the log. Five cases have come in since late last night, two possible drug ODs, a gunshot homicide, a sudden unexpected death in a parking lot, a pedestrian hit-and-run, the autopsies already under way. I told Luke to start without me and to make sure we discuss Howard Roth at some point. I want to review scene photographs, to examine his clothing and take a look at his body before it’s released. I want as much history as we can find because I don’t believe he got a flail chest from falling down his basement steps.
Through another door I go down a ramp, the evidence bay a walled-off windowless space where my staff are working, all of them in white Tyvek and face shields. They are covered from their scalps to the soles of their feet by the same water- and bacteria-proof flashspun polyethylene barrier used to wrap houses and commercial buildings and boats and cars and mail. Faces behind plastic and cocooned in a sheen of white, scarcely recognizable as people I know, barely people at all, making synthetic crinkly sounds as they move around.
They are setting up cyanoacrylate evaporators with fans and humidifiers around the 1995 pale yellow Mercedes sedan, its doors and trunk open wide, in an area of the bay where the lights have been dimmed. Trace evidence examiner Ernie Koppel has on orange goggles and is using the ALS on the driver’s seat, and I suit up and put on gloves. I ask him what’s been done so far.
“I wanted to go through it with a fine-toothed comb before we fume it,” he says, and while the hood covers his baldness it plumps up his already plump cheeks, his teeth and nose seeming unnaturally large. “You might want to put these on if you’re going to look.” He hands me goggles the same way he always does, as if I don’t know to put them on when using wavelengths that require filters.
Crouching by the open driver’s door, he moves the guide, what looks like a cone-shaped lamp attached to a black cord. He paints ultraviolet light over brown carpet that is stained and worn, and I wonder out loud if there might have been mats and someone removed them. Maybe the killer did when he returned the car to her garage, and I’m not the least bit hesitant about referring to a murderer even though I don’t know why Peggy Stanton is dead. I’ve already decided if toxicology turns up negative I will sign her out as a homicide with a cause of death that’s undetermined.
“There were no mats front or back when the car was brought in,” Ernie says. “I can’t answer if there ever were any, but I have a feeling maybe not based on what I’m seeing.” He directs the light to show me. “Mostly in this area.” He means the driver’s side of the front seat.
Fibers look like snippets of wire fluorescing white, orange, neon green, and rainbow blends as the UV light passes over them. Ernie reaches in with adhesive carbon tape stubs that he gives to me as he finishes with each one. I place them inside screw-cap vials, sealing them in bags I label with the location they were recovered from and other information Ernie gives to me.
“I already went over the back and the passenger’s side.” His coveralls and booties make plastic sounds, and intermittently his voice is muffled when he’s inside the car. “First with white light, then blue, just in case there’s fine blood spatter or gunshot residue. I tried green for latents. UV for semen, saliva, urine. There’s no evidence thus far that anything bad happened in this car. It’s dusty and lonely, if a car can be lonely, like an old person’s car.”
“She wasn’t old, but I think she lived like it.”
“I found what looks like some cat fur, grayish-white,” he says. “On the carpet in back where you might expect someone to put a pet carrier.”
“I’m reasonably sure she had a cat.” I need to talk to Bryce about that, about taking Shaw to the vet.
“It may have been her only passenger,” Ernie supposes. “Typical for what I see in a vehicle usually driven by one person, especially an older person. There’s a high concentration of fibers, hair, other debris transferred to the driver’s area and tracked in and ground into the carpet, which I could cut out, but I’d rather collect what’s obvious first. What I am noticing and what you’ll be most interested in is this stuff here.”
His gloved hand holds out another stub to me.
“You’ll need a lens to see what I’m talking about,” he says. “It doesn’t fluoresce because it’s absorbing the UV and looks black, pretty much like blood does, but it’s not blood. In normal light and under a lens it’s dark red. There’s a fair amount of it in the carpet near the brake and the accelerator, like someone had it on his shoes.”
I step away from the car and take off my goggles. Retrieving a magnifier from a cart, I examine the stub and agree with Ernie that blood wouldn’t look like this. The woody material is familiar.
“I’m thinking the stuff could be mulch,” he says.
“Do you know what kind of wood?”
“The chemical spectra for that may take a day or two. Assuming you want to know if all of it came from the same localized area, from the same tree, for example?”
George and Cybil from trace want to know when they can begin to set up the tent. It will completely enclose the car so no one is inhaling superglue fumes or is exposed to them. I tell them not quite yet.