“Your dog vanished three days before your wife did,” I say to him.
“Yes.” He clears his throat.
“Did Jasmine ever show up?”
“Two days after Millie disappeared, Jasmine was found wandering several miles north of our house, close to the Annisquam River,” he says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s cat. “In an off-leash walking area with a lot of brush and boulders above Wheeler Street. Some people out with their dog found her.”
“Do you think she’d been loose the entire time she was missing?” I ask.
“Couldn’t have been, not for the better part of a week in the rainy raw weather, down in the low forties at night, without food or water. She was in too good of shape to have been out that entire time. I think whoever took her changed his mind. Jasmine can be aggressive, unpredictable, isn’t fond of strangers.”
Someone who has no regard for human life but wouldn’t harm an animal.
“The Ransom of Red Chief.” Channing Lott’s laughter is hollow, and what is significant to me is the chronology.
Most likely Peggy Stanton’s cat got out or was put out after her owner had disappeared and possibly already was dead, yet Mildred Lott’s dog vanished before any crime had occurred.
“It’s been suggested that my wife might have drowned accidentally.” He gets around to asking my opinion about that, and I can’t possibly have an answer. “Or maybe took her own life.”
He goes on to describe the theories, which have been endless and far-fetched, some of them recited by Donoghue in court. Mildred Lott was drunk or on drugs and wandered outside and fell into the ocean or deliberately went into the frigid water to drown herself. She was having an affair and ran off with whoever it was because she feared her husband’s wrath. She’d been stashing millions of dollars in offshore accounts and is now living under an assumed identity in the Caribbean, on the Mediterranean, in the South of France, in Marrakech. Alleged sightings of her have been all over the Internet.
“I’m interested in your opinion.” He presses me for one. “A person drowns either accidentally or is murdered or commits suicide? Wouldn’t the body turn up eventually?”
“Bodies in water aren’t always found,” I reply. “People lost at sea, people who go overboard from ships or get pulled under or swept away by strong currents, for example. Depending on whether the body gets hung up on something—”
“Eventually there would be absolutely nothing left?”
“Whatever is left has to be found, and it isn’t always.”
“But if my wife fell into the ocean, perhaps stumbled over rocks or fell off our dock, wouldn’t you expect her to show up?” He persists bravely and not easily.
His eyes are bright with sorrow that seems real.
“In a case like that, generally, yes,” I answer.
“Al, if you would?” Lott says, without looking at him.
Al Galbraith opens his briefcase and withdraws a manila envelope he pushes across the table to me, and I don’t open it. I don’t touch it. I won’t until I know exactly what it is and whether it is something I should see.
“A copy of the security camera recording,” Lott explains. “The same thing the Gloucester detectives, the FBI, the lawyers have. What the jury saw. Twenty-six seconds. Not much but it’s the last images of her, the last thing Millie did before she vanished in thin air. She’s opening a back door of our house at exactly thirteen minutes before midnight on that Sunday, March eleventh. She’s dressed for bed, and there’s no damn reason for her to go out into the backyard at that hour. Certainly she wasn’t letting Jasmine out. Jasmine was still missing. It was cold, quite overcast and windy, and Millie walked out of the house not at all dressed for the weather and seemed to be a bit panicked.”
At this point, he turns to look at his colleagues.
“It’s still not the right choice of words. A word I’ve struggled with, trying to precisely describe the look on her face, her body language.” He seems sincerely at a loss and genuinely pained. “How would you describe it?” he asks his chief executives. “Urgent, distressed, alarmed?”
“I don’t get that when I watch it,” Galbraith says, as if he’s said it before.
It sounds flat. It sounds rehearsed.
“Only that she appears to have a purpose,” Lott’s chief of operations says. “She emerges from the house as if she has a reason, is directed. I wouldn’t think of the word panic when I look at the video, but it’s very quick and not all that clear, except she’s saying something to someone.”
“I’d describe the look as urgent, yes.” Shelly Duke nods. “But not upset and definitely not panicked.” She directs this to Lott. “I don’t think she looks frightened the way someone might if they’re worried a bad person is lurking around or trying to break in.”
“If she’d been frightened and worried someone was trying to break in,” Lott replies, and I detect annoyance and impatience beneath his charm, “she wouldn’t have turned off the alarm and gone out into the dark at that hour. Not when she was there alone.”
He’s the type to get frustrated with people not as smart and determined as he, and that would be almost everyone.
“Millie was very security-conscious,” Lott says to me. “She absolutely didn’t go out of the house that night because she heard a noise, was scared of someone or something. Most assuredly not. That was the last thing she would have done. When she was scared, she called the police. She certainly didn’t hesitate to call nine-one-one. I’m sure you’ve talked to the Gloucester police and are aware they were quite familiar with her and our property. In fact, several officers had been to the house just days before when Jasmine disappeared.”
I tell Channing Lott I’m very sorry but I have people waiting for me. I’ll be happy to review the security footage, although it’s unlikely I’ll have anything to add that hasn’t already been observed by others who have viewed it. I push back my chair because I feel he’s making a case for his innocence and I don’t intend to be manipulated.
“It just nags at me.” He makes no move to leave. “Who was it? Who could she have been talking to? You see the prevailing theory, and one that the prosecution continued to beat like a drum, is she was talking to me. She’s come out into the yard and is saying something to me.”
“A theory based on what?” I ask him, and I probably shouldn’t be asking him anything further. “Is there audio on the security video?”
“There isn’t, and you can see her only from the side. You can’t really make out how her lips are moving, not clearly. So to more precisely answer you, Dr. Scarpetta, the theory, like all of the theories about me, is based on nothing but the prosecution’s, the government’s, determination to win their case.”
He looks angry. He looks wronged, and it’s not lost on me he won’t refer to Dan Steward by name.
“I’m sure you saw all over the news that the prosecution suggested I wasn’t really traveling,” he says. “That my being in Tokyo the night Millie disappeared was a ruse somehow, that I actually was back here and in collusion with whoever I supposedly hired to murder her. The point the prosecution made relentlessly is my wife would never have left the house late at night unless the person she heard was someone she completely trusted.”
“Exactly right, she wouldn’t if she didn’t know who it was,” Shelly Duke agrees.
“Yes, that we all knew about Mrs. Lott,” Al Galbraith says. “Considering the position she had in life, she was keenly aware of the risks. I don’t want to use the word paranoid.”