Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Copyright © Cornwell Entertainment, Inc. 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover design and photography © Henry Steadman

Patricia Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007552498

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Dedication

To Staci

LEGAL DEFINITIONS of “DEPRAVED HEART”

Void of social duty and fatally bent on mischief.

MAYES V. PEOPLE, ILLINOIS SUPREME COURT (1883)

Depraved indifference to human life.

PEOPLE V. FEINGOLD, COURT OF APPEALS OF NEW YORK (2006)

The dictate of a wicked, depraved and malignant heart;

Un disposition a faire un male chose; may be either

express, or implied in law.

WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND (1769)

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

SYLVIA PLATH, “LADY LAZARUS,” 1965

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Legal Definitions of “Depraved Heart”

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

One Week Later

Read on for an exclusive extract of the next book in the series, Chaos …

About the Author

Also by Patricia Cornwell

About the Publisher

1

I gave the vintage teddy bear to Lucy when she was ten and she named him Mister Pickle. He sits on the pillow of a bed made military tight with institutional linens tucked into hospital corners.

The chronically underwhelmed little bear stares blankly at me, his black thread mouth turned down into an inverted V, and I must have imagined he’d be happy, yes grateful if I rescued him. It’s an irrational thing to think when we’re talking about a stuffed animal, especially when the person having these thoughts is a lawyer, a scientist, a physician presumed to be coolly clinical and logical.

I feel a confusion of surprised emotions at the unexpected sight of Mister Pickle in the video that just landed on my phone. A fixed camera must have been pointed down at an angle, possibly from a pinhole in the ceiling. I can make out the smooth fabric bottoms of his paws, the soft swirls of his olive green mohair, the black pupils in his amber glass eyes, the yellow Steiff tag in his ear. I remember he was twelve inches tall and therefore an easy companion for a speeding comet like Lucy, my only niece, my de facto only child.

When I found the toy bear decades ago he was toppled over on a scarred wooden bookcase filled with musty-smelling obscure coffee table tomes on gardening and southern homes in a boutique-y area of Richmond, Virginia, called Carytown. He was dressed in a dingy knitted white smock, and I stripped him. I repaired several tears with sutures worthy of a plastic surgeon and placed him in a sink of tepid water, shampooing him with antibacterial color-safe soap, then drying him with a blow dryer set on cool. I decided he was male and looked better without smocks or other silly costumes, and I teased Lucy that she was the proud owner of a bare bear. She said that figured.

If you sit too still too long my Aunt Kay will rip your clothes off and hose you down and gut you with a knife. Then she’ll sew you up and leave you naked, she added gleefully.

Inappropriate. Awful. Not funny really. But after all Lucy was ten at the time, and her childish rapid-fire voice is suddenly in my head as I step away from decomposing blood that is brownish red with watery yellow edges on the white marble floor. The stench seems to darken and dirty the air, and flies are like a legion of tiny whiny demons sent by Beelzebub. Death is greedy and ugly. It assaults our senses. It sets off every alarm in our cells, threatening us with our very lives. Be careful. Stay away. Run for the hills. Your turn could be next.

We’re programmed to find dead bodies off-putting and repulsive, to avoid them literally like the plague. But embedded in this hardwired survival instinct is a rare exemption that is necessary to keep the tribe healthy and safe. A select few of us come into this world not bothered by gruesomeness. In fact we’re drawn to it, fascinated, intrigued and it’s a good thing. Someone has to warn and protect those left behind. Someone has to take care of painful unpleasantness, to figure out the why, how and who and properly dispose of rotting remains before they further offend and spread infection.

I believe that such special caretakers are created unequally. For better or worse we’re not all the same. I’ve always known this. Give me a few strong Scotches and I’ll admit I’m really not quote normal and never have been. I’m not afraid of death. I rarely notice its artifacts beyond what they have to say to me. Odors, fluids, maggots, flies, vultures, rodents. They contribute to the truths I seek, and it’s important I recognize and respect the life that preceded the failed biology I examine and collect.

All this is to say that I’m unbothered by what most people find upsetting and disgusting. But not by anything that has to do with Lucy. I love her too much. I always have. Already I feel responsible and to blame, and maybe that’s the point as I recognize the plain vanilla dorm room in the recording that’s just ambushed me. I’m the master designer, the authority figure, the doting aunt who put her niece in that room. I put Mister Pickle there.

He looks pretty much the same as when I spirited him away from that dusty Richmond shop and cleaned him up at the beginning of my career. I realize I don’t remember the last time I saw him or where. I have no idea if Lucy lost him, gave him away or has him packed in a closet. My attention flickers as loud spasms of coughing sound several rooms away inside this beautiful house where a wealthy young woman is dead.

“Jesus! What is this? Typhoid Fucking Mary?” It’s Cambridge Police Investigator Pete Marino carping, talking, joking with his colleagues the way cops do.

The Massachusetts state trooper whose name I don’t know is getting over a “summer cold” supposedly. I’m beginning to wonder if what he really has is whooping cough.

“Listen meat puppet. You fucking give me what you got? You get me sick? How about standing over there.” More of Marino’s bedside manner.

“I’m not contagious.” Another salvo of coughing.

“Jesus! Cover your fucking mouth!”

“How am I supposed to do that with gloves on?”

“Then take them off dammit.”

“No way. It won’t be me leaving DNA in here.”

“Oh really? Coughing doesn’t spray DNA from one end of the house to the other every time you hack up your toes?”

I tune out Marino and the trooper, keeping my eyes on the display of my phone. Seconds tick by on the video and the dorm room stays empty. Nobody is there but Mister Pickle on Lucy’s military-looking uncomfortable, ungenerous bed. It’s as if the white sheets and tan blanket have been spray-painted on the narrow thin mattress with its single flat pillow, and I hate beds made as tight as a drum. I avoid them every chance I get.

My bed at home with its plush Posturepedic mattress, its high-thread-count linens and down-filled duvets is one of my most cherished luxuries. It’s where I rest finally, where I have sex finally, where I dream or better yet don’t. I refuse to feel shrink-wrapped. I won’t sleep trussed up and restrained like a mummy with the circulation cut off in my feet. It’s not that I’m unaccustomed to military quarters, government housing, lousy motels or barracks of one sort or another. I’ve spent countless hours in unwelcoming places but it’s not by choice. Lucy is a different story. While she doesn’t exactly live a simple spartan life anymore she also doesn’t care about certain creature comforts the same way I do.

Put her in a sleeping bag in the middle of the woods or a desert and she’s fine as long as she has weapons, technology and can bunker herself against the enemy, whatever that might be at any given moment. She’s relentless about controlling her environment and that’s another argument against her having a clue she was under surveillance inside her own dorm room.

She didn’t know. Absolutely not.

I decide the video was filmed sixteen, at the most nineteen years ago with high-resolution spy equipment that was ahead of its time. Megapixel multicamera input. A flexible open platform. Computer controlled. Facile software. Concealable. Remotely accessible. Definitely New Millennium research and development but not an anachronism, not faked. It’s exactly what I would expect.

My niece’s technical environment is always ahead of its time, and in the mid- to late 1990s she would have known about new developments in surveillance equipment long before other people did. But that doesn’t mean Lucy is the one who installed covert recording devices inside her own dorm room while she was an intern for the FBI, still in college and as excruciatingly private and secretive as she is today.

Words like surveillance and spy dominate my internal dialogue because I’m convinced what I’m looking at wasn’t recorded with her knowledge. Much less her consent and that’s important. I also don’t believe it was Lucy who texted this video to me, even if it appears to have been sent from her In Case of Emergency (ICE) cell phone number. That’s very important. It’s also problematic. Almost no one has her ICE number. I can count on one hand the people who do, and I carefully study the details in the recording. It started playing ten seconds ago. Eleven now. Fourteen. Sixteen. I scrutinize images filmed from multiple angles.

Were it not for Mister Pickle I might not have recognized Lucy’s former dorm room with its white horizontal blinds shut backward like a nappy fabric or fur rubbed the wrong way, a habit of hers that’s always driven me a little crazy. She routinely shuts blinds with the slats verso, and I gave up saying it’s like wearing your underwear inside out. She argues that when the closed slats curve up instead of down it’s impossible to see in. Anybody who thinks that way is vigilant about being watched, stalked, spied on. Lucy wouldn’t let someone get away with it.

Unless she didn’t know. Unless she trusted whoever it was.

Seconds tick by and the dorm room is the same. Empty. Silent.

The cinder block walls and tile floor are primer-white, the furniture inexpensive with a maple veneer, everything plain and practical and prodding a remote part of my brain, a pain-saturated part of my memory that I keep sealed off like human remains under poured concrete. What I’m seeing on my phone’s display could be a private psychiatric hospital room. Or a visiting officer’s quarters on a military base. Or a generically bland pied-à-terre. But I know what I’m looking at. I’d recognize that moody teddy bear anywhere.

Mister Pickle always went where Lucy did, and as I look at his poignant face I’m reminded of what was going on with me during the long lost days of the 1990s. I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia, the first woman to hold that position. I’d become Lucy’s caretaker after my selfish sister Dorothy decided to unload her on me. What was presented as a short impromptu visit turned into forever and the timing for when it all began couldn’t have been worse.

My first summer in Richmond and it was under siege as a serial killer strangled women in their own homes, in their own beds. The murders were escalating and becoming increasingly sadistic. We couldn’t catch him. We didn’t have a clue. I was new. The press and politicians thundered down on me like an avalanche. I was a misfit. I was chilly and aloof. I was peculiar. What kind of woman would dissect dead bodies in a morgue? I was ungracious and lacked southern charm. I wasn’t descended from Jamestown or the Mayflower. A backslidden Catholic, a socially liberal multicultural Miami native and I’d managed to anchor my career in the former capital of the Confederacy where the murder rate per capita was the highest in the United States.

I never got a satisfactory explanation for the reason Richmond won the prize when it came to homicide and what sense it made for the cops to brag about it. For that matter I didn’t understand the point of Civil War reenactments. Why would you celebrate the biggest thing you ever lost? I quickly learned not to give voice to such skepticisms, and when asked if I was a Yankee I said I didn’t follow baseball closely. That usually shut the person up.

The exhilaration of being one of the first female chiefs in the United States quickly lost its thrill and the brass ring I’d grabbed tarnished fast. Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia felt more like a stubborn old war zone than a bastion of civility and enlightenment, and it didn’t take long for the truth to become abundantly clear. The former chief medical examiner was a misogynistic bigoted alcoholic who died suddenly and left a disastrous legacy. No seasoned board-certified forensic pathologist with a decent reputation wanted to take his place. So a bright idea occurred to the men in charge. What about a woman?

Women are good at cleaning up messes. Why not find a female forensic expert? It doesn’t matter if she’s young and missing the requisite experience to head a statewide system. As long as she’s a qualified expert in court and minds her manners she can grow into the position. How about an overeducated detail-addicted work-obsessed perfectionistic Italian woman who grew up dirt poor, has everything to prove, is turbo-driven and divorced with no kids?

Well no kids sort of until the unexpected happened. My only sister’s only offspring Lucy Farinelli was the baby on my doorstep. Except this baby was ten years old, knew more about computers and all things mechanical than I did or ever would, and she was a tabula rasa when it came to appropriate behavior. To say Lucy was difficult is like saying that lightning is hazardous. It’s a statement of fact that will always be a given.

My niece was and is a challenge. Immutably and incurably. But as a child she was impossible and uncivilized. She was a genius aborigine, angry, beautiful, fiery, fearless, remorseless and untouchable, overly sensitive and insatiable. Nothing I might have done for her could have been enough. But I tried. I tried relentlessly against all odds. I’ve always feared I’d be a lousy mother. I have no reason to be a good one.

I thought a stuffed bear might make a neglected little girl feel better and possibly loved, and as I watch Mister Pickle on the bed of Lucy’s former dorm room in a surveillance video I didn’t know existed until one minute ago, a low voltage shock settles into a generalized calm. I go flatline. I focus. I think clearly, objectively, scientifically. I must. The video playing on my phone is authentic. It’s crucial I accept that. The footage wasn’t Photoshopped or manufactured. I know damn well what I’m seeing.

The FBI Academy. Washington Dormitory. Room 411.

I try to pinpoint precisely when Lucy was there as an intern first and later a new agent. Before she got run off the job. Basically fired by the FBI. Then ATF. Then became a mercenary special operator disappearing on missions I don’t want to know about before starting her own forensic computer company in New York City. Until she got run out of there too.

Then has become now, a Friday morning in the middle of August. Lucy is a thirty-five-year-old extremely rich technical entrepreneur who generously shares her talents with me, with my headquarters the Cambridge Forensic Center (CFC), and as I watch the surveillance video I’m in two places. Back in time and here in the present. They’re connected. A continuum.

Everything I’ve done and been has pushed forward slowly and unstoppably like a landmass, propelling me into this marble foyer spattered with putrid blood. What’s gone before has brought me exactly where I am, limping and in pain with a badly injured leg and a decomposing dead body near me on the floor. My past. But most importantly Lucy’s past, and I envision a galaxy of bright swirling shapes and secrets in a vast inky void. Darkness, scandals, deceptions, betrayals, fortunes won and lost and won again, bad shootings, good ones and near-misses.

Our lives together started with hopes and dreams and promise, and incrementally got worse and better and finally not so bad and then pretty good until it all went to hell again this past June when I almost died. I thought the horror story was over forever and no longer foremost on anybody’s mind. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. It’s as if I outran a speeding train only to be hit by it coming the other way around a bend in the tracks.

2

“Has anybody asked the Doc?” The voice belongs to Cambridge Police Officer Hyde. “I mean marijuana could do that, right? You smoke a lot of weed and get high and have some bullshit brainstorm like how about I change a lightbulb while I’m naked? That sounds smart. Right? Ha! Real damn smart, right? And you fall off the ladder in the middle of the night when no one’s around and crack your head open.”

Officer Hyde’s first name is Park, a terrible thing to do to a child and he gets called every insulting nickname imaginable and returns the favor. To make matters worse Officer Park Hyde is pudgy and short with freckles and kinky carrot-red hair like a bad parody of Raggedy Andy. He’s not in my line of sight at the moment. But I have excellent hearing, almost bionic like my sense of smell (or that’s the joke).

I imagine odors and sounds as colors in a spectrum or instruments in an orchestra. I’m good at singling them out. Cologne for example. Some cops wear a lot of it and Hyde’s masculine musky fragrance is as loud as his voice. I can hear him in the next room talking about me, asking what I’m doing and if I’m aware that the dead woman was into drugs, was probably a psych case, a whacko, a frequent flying loony tune. The cops are wandering around bantering as if I’m not here, and Hyde leads the charge with his boisterous clunky snipes and asides. He doesn’t hold back, especially when it comes to me.

What’s Doc Mort found? How is Chief Zombie’s leg after you know …? (whisper, whisper) What time is Count Kay returning to her coffin? Shit. I guess that’s not a good thing to say considering what went down two months ago in Florida. I mean do we know for a fact what really happened at the bottom of the sea? We sure it wasn’t a shark that got her. Or maybe she speared herself accidentally? She’s okay now, right? I mean that really had to fuck her up. She can’t hear me, right?

His words and not-so-quiet whispers are around me like shards of glass that glint and cut. Fragments of thoughts. Ignorant banal ones. Hyde is the master of dumb nicknames and comes up with dreadful puns, and I remember what he said as recently as last month when a group of us met at the Cambridge watering hole Paddy’s to toast Pete Marino’s birthday. Hyde insisted on buying me a round, on treating me to a stiff drink, maybe a Bloody Mary or a Sudden Death or a Spontaneous Combustion.

To this day I’m not sure what the latter is but he claims it includes corn whiskey and is served flaming. It might not be lethal but will make you wish it were he must have said five times. He dabbles in comedy, occasionally does stand-up in local clubs. He thinks he’s quite entertaining. He’s not.

“Is Doctor Death still here?”

“I’m in the foyer.” I drop my purple nitrile exam gloves into a red biohazard bag, my Tyvek-covered boots making slippery sounds as I move around the bloody marble floor, staring at the display on my phone.

“Sorry, Doctor Scarpetta. Didn’t know you could hear me.”

“I can.”

“Oh. I guess you heard everything I was just saying.”

“I did.”

“Sorry. How’s your leg?”

“Still attached.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“No thanks.”

“We’re making a Dunkin’ Donuts run.” Hyde’s voice sounds from the dining room, and I’m vaguely aware of him and other cops walking, opening cabinets and drawers.

Marino’s not with them now. I no longer hear him and don’t know where he is inside the house and that’s typical. He does his own thing and he’s competitive. If there’s anything to find he’ll be the one who does, and I should be looking around too. But not now. My priority this moment is the image of four-eleven, what we used to call Lucy’s FBI dorm room in Quantico, Virginia.

So far the recording is devoid of people, narration or even captions as it plays on second by second, offering nothing but the static image of Lucy’s empty stark former quarters. I pay attention to the subtle background sounds, turning up the volume, listening though my wireless earpiece.

A helicopter. A car. Gunshots on distant firing ranges.

Footsteps and I listen carefully. My attention beams back into the real world, the here and now inside this historic house on the border of the Harvard campus.

I detect the hard rubbery tread of the uniformed cops walking toward the foyer. They don’t have plasticized covers over their shoes and boots. They aren’t investigators or crime scene techs, not Officer Hyde, not any of them. More nonessential personnel, and there have been plenty of them in and out since I got here about an hour ago, not long after thirty-seven-year-old Chanel Gilbert was found dead in the mahogany entranceway near the big solid antique front door inside her historic home.

How awful that discovery must have been, and I imagine the housekeeper letting herself in through the kitchen door just like she did every morning, she told the police. Instantly she would have noticed the extreme heat. She would have noticed the stench and followed it to the foyer where the woman she worked for is decomposing on the floor, her face discolored and distorted as if she’s enraged by us.

What Hyde said is almost true. Allegedly Chanel Gilbert fell off a ladder while changing lightbulbs in the entryway chandelier. It sounds like a bad joke but it’s anything but funny to see her once slender body in the early stages of putrefaction, bloated with areas of her skin slipping. She survived her head injuries long enough to have bruising and swelling, her eyes slitted and bulging like a bullfrog’s, her brown hair a sticky bloody mass that reminds me of a rusting Brillo pad. I estimate that after she sustained her injuries, she was lying on the floor unconscious and bleeding as her brain swelled, compressing her upper spinal cord and eventually shutting down her heart and lungs.

The cops aren’t suspicious of her death, not sincerely no matter what they discuss or claim. What they really are is voyeuristic. In their own unseemly way they’re enjoying the drama and it’s one of their favorites. Blame the victim. It must be her fault. She did something to cause her own untimely death, a death that was stupid. I’ve heard that word several times too and I’m not at all happy when people close their minds to other possibilities. I’m not convinced this is an accident. There are too many oddities and inconsistencies. If she died at some point late last night or early this morning as the cops suspect then why is decomposition this advanced? As I attempt to figure out time of death what keeps coming to mind is a Marino turn of phrase.

Cluster fuck. That’s what this is and my intuition is picking up on something else. I sense a presence inside this house. A presence beyond the cops. Beyond the dead woman. Beyond the housekeeper who showed up at quarter of eight this morning and made a shocking discovery that ruined her day to put it tritely. I sense something that unsettles me and I have no empirical explanation for it and don’t intend to say a word.

I usually don’t share my so-called gut feelings, my intuitive flashes, not with cops, not even with Marino. I’m not expected to have any impression that isn’t provable. In fact it’s worse than that if you’re me. I’m not supposed to have feelings and at the same time I’m accused of not having them. In other words a catch-22. In other words I can’t win. But that’s nothing new. I’m used to it.

“Ma’am?” An unfamiliar man’s voice but I don’t look up as I stand in the foyer, covered in white Tyvek from head to toe, my phone in my bare hands, the body of the dead woman several feet away near the upright ladder.

Profession unknown. Kept to herself. Attractive in a sharp off-putting way, brown hair, blue eyes based on the driver’s license photo I’ve been shown. The daughter of a juggernaut Hollywood producer named Amanda Gilbert, the owner of this expensive property and on her way to Boston from Los Angeles. That much I know and it explains plenty. Two Cambridge cops and one Massachusetts state police trooper are now passing through the dining room talking loudly about movies Amanda Gilbert has or hasn’t made.

“I didn’t see it. But I saw the other one with Ethan Hawke.”

“The movie that took twelve years to make? Where you watch the kid grow up …?”

“That was kinda cool.”

“I can’t wait to see American Sniper.”

“What happened to Chris Kyle? Unbelievable right? You come home from the war a hero with a hundred and eighty kills and some loser takes you out on the firing range. Sort of like Spider-Man dying from a spider bite.” It’s Hyde who’s saying this as he and the other two cops hover near the staircase at the edge of the foyer, not coming any closer to me or the stench that holds them back like a wall of foul hot air. “Doctor Scarpetta? Like I was saying? We’re making a coffee run. Anything for you?” Hyde has widely spaced yellowish eyes that remind me of a cat.

“I’m fine.” But I’m not.

I’m not even close to fine despite my demeanor as I hear more gunshots and see the firing ranges in my mind. I hear the dull clank of lead slamming into steel pop-up targets. The bright chink of ejected metal cartridge cases bouncing off concrete shooting pads and benches. I feel the southern sun heavy on my head and the sweat drying beneath my field clothes during an era when everything was the best and worst it’s ever been in my life.

“What about a bottle of water, ma’am? Or maybe a soda?” It’s the trooper talking to me between coughs, and I don’t know him but we won’t get along if he insists on calling me ma’am.

I went to Cornell, to Georgetown Law and Johns Hopkins medical school. I’m a special reservist colonel in the Air Force. I’ve testified before Senate subcommittees and have been a guest at the White House. I’m the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts and director of the crime labs among other things. I didn’t get this far in life to be called ma’am.

“Nothing for me thank you,” I reply politely.

“We should just get a couple gallons of coffee in those cartons. Then there will be plenty and it will stay hot.”

“A hell of a day for hot coffee. How ’bout iced?”

“Good idea since it’s still hot yoga in here. I can’t imagine what it was like earlier.”

“An oven. That’s what.” More dreadful coughing.

“Well I think I’ve sweated a couple quarts.”

“We should be wrapping it up pretty soon. An open-and-shut accident, right Doc? The tox will be interesting. You wait and see. She was stoned and when people are high they think they know what they’re doing but they don’t.”

“High” and “stoned” are two different psychoactive states, and I don’t believe weed is an explanation for what happened here. But I won’t give voice to what’s passing through my thoughts as the trooper and Hyde continue their ping-ponging quips and cranks. Back and forth. Back and forth monotonously, tediously. What I really want is to be left alone. To watch my phone and figure out what the hell is happening to me and who’s responsible and why. Back and forth. The cops won’t shut up.

“Since when are you such an expert, Hyde?”

“I’m just stating the facts of life.”

“Look. With Amanda Gilbert on her way here? We’d better answer everything even if there’s not a question. She probably knows all kinds of important people in high places who can cause us heartburn. For sure the media will be all over this if they don’t already know about it.”

“Wonder if she had life insurance, if Mama took out a policy on her unemployed druggie daughter.”

“Like she needs the money? You got any idea what Amanda Gilbert is worth? According to Google about two hundred million.”

“I don’t like that the air-conditioning was turned off. That’s not normal.”

“Yeah and I make my case. That’s exactly the sort of thing people do when they’re stoners. They pour orange juice on their cereal and carry snowshoes to the tennis courts.”

“What do snowshoes have to do with anything?”

“I’m just saying it’s different from being drunk.”

3

They talk to each other as if I’m not here, and I continue looking at the video playing on my phone. I continue waiting for something to happen.

I’m more than four minutes into it and can’t pause or save it. Every key I touch, every icon and menu is nonfunctional and the recording rolls on but nothing changes. The only movement I’ve detected so far are the subtle shifts of light from the edges of the closed slatted blinds.

It was a sunny day but there must have been clouds or the light would be steady. It’s as if the dorm room is on a dimmer switch, bright then not as bright. Clouds moving across the sun I deduce as Hyde and the trooper hover near the mahogany staircase, loudly voicing opinions, making comments and gossiping as if they think I’m obtuse or as dead as the woman on the floor.

“If she asks I don’t think we tell her.” Hyde has stayed on the subject of Amanda Gilbert’s anticipated arrival in Boston. “The air being turned off is a detail we want to keep away from her and for sure keep out of the media.”

“It’s the only thing weird about this. You know that gives me a bad feeling.”

It’s certainly not the only thing weird about this, I think but don’t verbalize.

“That’s right and it starts a shit storm of rumors and conspiracy theories that end up all over the Internet.”

“Except sometimes perps turn off the air-conditioning, turn on the heat, do whatever to make a place hot so they can speed up decomp. To disguise the correct time of death so they can create an alibi and screw up evidence, isn’t that true, Doc?” The state trooper with his Massachusetts accent addresses me directly, his r’s sounding like w’s when he’s not coughing.

“Heat escalates decomposition,” I reply without looking up. “Cold slows it down,” I add as I realize what it means that the dorm room walls in the video are eggshell white.

When Lucy first started staying at Washington Dorm the walls in her room were beige. Later they were repainted. I recalculate my timeline. The video was taken in 1996. Maybe 1997.

“Dunkin’s got pretty good breakfast sandwiches. Would you like something to eat, ma’am?” The trooper in his blue and gray is talking to me again, sixtyish with a belly and he doesn’t look well, his face wasted with dark circles under his eyes.

I have no idea what he’s doing at the scene, what useful purpose he might possibly serve. Besides that he sounds quite ill. But it wasn’t up to me who to invite, and I glance down at Chanel Gilbert’s battered dead face, at her bloody nude body with its greenish discoloration and bloating in the abdominal area from bacteria and gases proliferating in her gut due to putrefaction.

The housekeeper told the police she didn’t touch the body or even get close, and I don’t doubt that Chanel Gilbert is exactly as she was found, her black silk bathrobe open, her breasts and genitals exposed. I’ve long since lost the impulse to cover a dead person’s nudity unless the scene is in a public place. I won’t change anything about the position of the body until I’m certain everyone is done with photographs and it’s time to pouch it and transport it to the CFC. That will be soon enough. Very soon as a matter of fact.

I’m sorry, I wish I could say to her as I scan puddles of blood that are a viscous dark red and drying black around the edges. Something urgent has come up. I have to leave but I’ll be back, I’d tell her if I could, and I’m vaguely aware of how loud the flies have gotten inside the foyer. With doors opening and shutting as cops come in and out of the house, flies have invaded, shimmering like drops of gasoline, alighting and crawling, looking for wounds and other orifices to lay their eggs.

My attention snaps back to the display of my phone. The image is the same. Lucy’s empty dorm room as seconds tick by. Two hundred and eighty-nine. Three hundred and ten. Now almost six minutes and there must be something coming. Who sent this to me? Not my niece. There would be no reason on earth. And why would she do it now? Why after so many years? I have a feeling I know the answer. I don’t want it to be true.

Dear God don’t let me be right. But I am. I’d have to be in total denial not to put two and two together.

“They have vegetarian sandwiches if that’s your thing,” one of the cops is saying to me.

“No thanks.” I keep waiting as I watch, and then I sense something else.

Hyde is pointing his phone at me. He’s taking a photograph.

“You’re not going to do something with that,” I say without looking up.

“I thought I’d tweet it after I Facebook it and post it on Instagram. Just kidding. You checking out a movie on your phone?”

I glance up long enough to catch him staring at me. He has that glint in his eyes, the same mischievous gleam he gets when he’s about to spitball another lamebrain quip.

“I don’t blame you for entertaining yourself,” he says. “It’s kinda dead in here.”

“I can’t do that. I’m too old-school,” the trooper says. “I need a decent size screen if I’m watching a movie.”

“My wife reads books on her phone.”

“Me too. But only when I’m driving.”

“Ha-ha. You’re a real comedian, Hyde.”

“Do you think it’s worth stringing in here? Hey Doc?”

I realize another Cambridge cop has appeared. He starts in about how to handle the blood evidence. I don’t know his name. Thinning gray hair, a mustache, short and squat, what they call a fireplug build. He doesn’t work for investigations but I’ve seen him on the Ivy League streets of Cambridge pulling people, writing tickets. One more nonessential who shouldn’t be here but it’s not for me to order cops off the scene. The body and any associated biological evidence are my jurisdiction but nothing else is. Technically.

Yes technically. Because in the main I decide what are my business and my responsibility. It’s rare I get an argument. Overall my working relationship with law enforcement is collaborative and most times they’re more than happy for me to take care of whatever I want. They almost never question me. Or at least they didn’t used to second-guess hardly anything I decided. That might be different now. I might be getting a taste of how things have changed in two short months.

“In this blood spatter class I went to they said you should string everything because you’re going to get asked in court,” the cop with thinning gray hair is saying. “If you testify that you didn’t bother with it? It looks bad to the jury. What they call the list of NO questions. The defense attorney goes through all these questions he’s sure you’ll answer no to, and it makes you look like you didn’t do your job. It makes you look incompetent.”

“Especially if the jurors watch CSI.”

“No shit.”

“What’s wrong with CSI? You don’t got a magic box in that field case of yours?”

This continues and I barely listen. I let them know that stringing would be a waste of time.

“I figured as much. Marino doesn’t see the point,” one of the cops replies.

I’m so glad Marino says it. That must make it true.

“We could bring in the total station if you want. Just reminding you we have that capability,” the trooper says to me, and then he goes on to explain about TSTs, about electronic theodolites with electronic distance meters although he doesn’t use words like that.

I know your capabilities better than you do and have handled more death scenes than you’ll ever dream of.

“Thanks but it’s not necessary,” I answer without so much as a glance at the hieroglyphics of dark bloodstains under and around the body.

I’ve already translated what I’m seeing, and using segments of string or sophisticated surveying instruments to map and connect blood streaks, swipes, sprays, splashes and droplets would offer nothing new. The area of impact is the floor under and around the body plain and simple. Chanel Gilbert wasn’t upright when she received her fatal head injuries plain and simple. She died where she is now plain and simple.

This doesn’t mean there was no foul play, far from it. I haven’t examined her for sexual assault. I haven’t done a 3-D CT scan of her body or autopsied it yet, and I go through my differential about what I’m seeing as I ask what was in her bathroom, on her bedside table.

“I’m interested in any prescription bottles for drugs. Any drugs including medications such as lenalidomide, in other words long-term nonsteroidal therapy that is immunomodulatory,” I explain. “A recent course of antibiotics also could have contributed to bacteria growth, and if it turns out she’s positive for clostridium, for example, that could help explain a rapid onset of decomposition.”

I inform them I’ve had several cases of that due to a gas-producing bacteria like clostridium where literally I saw postmortem artifacts similar to these at only twelve hours. All the while I’m going into this with the police I keep my eyes on the display of my phone.

“You talking about C. diff?” The trooper raises his voice and almost strangles on his next fit of coughing.

“It’s on my list.”

“She wouldn’t have been in the hospital for that?”

“Not necessarily if she had a mild form. Did you see antibiotics, anything back in her bedroom or bathroom that might indicate she was having a problem with diarrhea, with an infection?” I ask them.

“Gee I’m not sure I saw any prescription bottles but I did see weed.”

“What worries me is if she had something contagious,” the gray-haired Cambridge cop offers reluctantly. “I sure as hell don’t want C. diff.”

“Can you catch it from a dead body?”

“I don’t recommend contact with her feces,” I reply.

“It’s a good thing you told me.” Sarcastically.

“Keep protective clothing on. I’ll check for any meds myself and would rather see them in situ anyway. And when you get back from Dunkin’ Donuts?” I add without looking up. “Remember we don’t eat or drink in here.”

“No worries about that.”

“There’s a table in the backyard,” Hyde says. “I thought we could set up a break area out there as long as we do it before the rain comes. We got a couple of hours before the big storm they’re predicting rolls in.”

“And we know nothing happened in the backyard?” I ask him pointedly. “We know that’s not part of the scene and therefore it’s okay for us to eat and drink back there?”

“Come on, Doc. Don’t you think it’s pretty obvious she fell off a ladder here in the foyer and that’s what killed her?”

“I don’t arrive at a scene supposing anything is obvious.” I barely glance up at the three of them.

“Well I think what happened here is obvious to be honest. Of course what killed her is your department and not ours, ma’am.” The trooper chimes in like a defense attorney. Ma’am this and Mrs. that. So the jurors forget I’m a doctor, a lawyer, a chief.

“No eating, drinking, smoking or borrowing the bathrooms.” I direct this at Hyde, and I’m giving him an order. “No dropping cigarette butts or gum wrappers or tossing fast-food bags, coffee cups, anything at all into the trash. Don’t assume this isn’t a crime scene.”

“But you don’t really think it is.”

“I’m working it like one and so should you,” I answer. “Because I won’t know what really happened here until I have more information. There was a lot of tissue response, a lot of bleeding, several liters I estimate. Her scalp is boggy. There may be more than one fracture. She has postmortem changes that I wouldn’t expect. I will tell you that much but I won’t know for a fact what we’ve got here until I get her to my office. And the air-conditioning turned off during a heat wave in August? I definitely don’t like that. Let’s not be so quick to blame her death on marijuana. You know what they say.”

“About what?” The trooper looks perplexed and worried, and he and the others have backed up several more steps.

“Better to be around potheads than drunks. Booze gives you dangerous impulses like climbing ladders or driving a car or getting into fights. Weed isn’t quite so motivating. It isn’t generally known for causing aggression or risk taking. Usually it’s quite the opposite.”

“It depends on the person and what they’re smoking, right? And maybe what other meds they’re on?”

“In general that’s true.”

“So let me ask you this. Would you expect someone who fell off a ladder to bleed this much?”

“It depends on what the injuries are,” I reply.

“So if they’re worse than you think and she’s negative for drugs and alcohol, that might be a big problem is what you’re saying.”

“Whatever happened is already a big problem you ask me.” It’s the trooper again between coughs.

“Certainly it was for her. When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?” I ask him.

“Why?”

“Because a DTaP vaccination protects against tetanus but also pertussis. And I’m concerned you might have whooping cough.”

“I thought only kids got that.”

“Not true. How did your symptoms start?”

“Just a cold. Runny nose, sneezing about two weeks ago. Then this cough. I get fits and can hardly breathe. I don’t remember the last time I had a tetanus shot to be honest.”

“You need to see your doctor. I’d hate for you to get pneumonia or collapse a lung,” I say to the trooper.

Then he and the other officers finally leave me alone.

4

Eight minutes into the video and all I see is Lucy’s empty dorm room. I again try to save the file or pause it. I can’t. It just keeps playing like life passing by with nothing to show for it.

Now nine minutes into the clip and the dorm room is exactly the same, empty and quiet, but in the background the firing ranges are busy. Gunshots pop and I can see glaring light seeping around the edges of the white blinds closed the wrong way. The sun is directly in the windows and I remember Lucy’s room faced west. It’s late afternoon.

Pop-Pop. Pop-Pop.

I detect the rumbling noise of traffic driving by four floors below on J. Edgar Hoover Road, the main drag that runs through the middle of the FBI Academy. Rush hour. Classes ending for the day. Cops, agents coming in from the ranges. For an instant I imagine I smell the sharp banana odor of isoamyl acetate, of Hoppe’s gun-cleaning solvent. I smell burnt gunpowder as if it’s all around me. I feel the sultry Virginia heat and hear the static of insects where cartridge cases shine silver and gold in the sun-warmed grass. It all comes back to me powerfully, and then at last something happens.

The video has a title sequence. It begins to roll by very slowly:

DEPRAVED HEART—SCENE 1

BY CARRIE GRETHEN

QUANTICO, VIRGINIA—JULY 11, 1997

The name is jolting. It’s infuriating to see it in bold red type going by ever so slowly, languidly, dripping down the screen pixel-by-pixel like a slow-motion bleed. Music has been added. Karen Carpenter is singing “We’ve Only Just Begun.” It’s obnoxious to score the video to that angelic voice, to those gentle Paul Williams lyrics.

Such a sweet loving song permuted into a threat, a mockery, a promise of more injury to come, of misery, harassment and possibly death. Carrie Grethen is flaunting and taunting. She’s giving me the finger. I haven’t listened to the Carpenters in years but in the old days I wore out their cassettes and CDs. I wonder if Carrie knew that. She probably did. So this is the next installment of what she must have put into the works a long time ago.

I feel the challenge and my response bubbling up like molten lava, and I’m keenly aware of my rage, of my lust to destroy the most reprehensible and treacherous female offender I’ve ever come across. For the past thirteen years I hadn’t given her a thought, not since I witnessed her die in a helicopter crash. Or I believed I did. But I was wrong. She was never in that flying machine, and when I found that out it was one of the worst things I’ve ever had to accept. It’s like being told your fatal disease is no longer in remission. Or that some horrific tragedy wasn’t just a bad dream.

So now Carrie continues what she’s started. Of course she would, and I remember my husband Benton’s recent warnings about bonding with her, about talking to her in my mind and settling into the easy belief that she doesn’t plan to finish what she started. She doesn’t want to kill me because she’s planned something worse. She doesn’t want to rid the earth of me or she would have this past June. Benton is a criminal intelligence analyst for the FBI, what people still call a profiler. He thinks I’ve identified with the aggressor. He suggests I’m suffering from Stockholm syndrome. He’s been suggesting it a lot of late. Every time he does we get into an argument.

“Doc? How we doing in here?” The approaching male voice is carried by the papery sounds of plasticized booties. “I’m ready to do the walk-through if you are.”

“Not yet,” I reply as Karen Carpenter continues to sing in my earpiece.

Workin’ together day to day, together, together …

He lumbers into the foyer. Peter Rocco Marino. Or Marino as most people refer to him, including me. Or Pete although I’ve never called him that and I’m not sure why except we didn’t start out as friends. Then there’s bastardo when he’s a jerk, and asshole when he’s one of those. About six-foot-three, at least 250 pounds with tree trunk thighs and hands as big as hubcaps, he has a massive presence that confuses my metaphors.

His face is broad and weathered with strong white teeth, an action hero jaw, a bullish neck and a chest as wide as a door. He has on a gray Harley-Davidson polo shirt, Herman Munster–size sneakers, tube socks, and khaki shorts that are baggy with bulging cargo pockets. Clipped to his belt are his badge and pistol but he doesn’t need credentials to do whatever he wants and get the respect he demands.

Marino is a cop without borders. His jurisdiction may be Cambridge but he finds ways to extend his legal reach far beyond the privileged boundaries of MIT and Harvard, beyond the luminaries who live here and the tourists who don’t. He shows up anywhere he’s invited and more often where he’s not. He has a problem with boundaries. He’s always had a problem with mine.

“Thought you’d want to know the marijuana is medical. I got no idea where she got it.” His bloodshot eyes move over the body, the bloody marble floor, and then land on my chest, his favorite place to park his attention.

It doesn’t matter if I have on scrubs, Tyvek, a surgical gown, a lab coat or am bundled up for a blizzard. Marino is going to help himself and openly stare.

“Bud, tinctures, what looks like foil-wrapped candies.” He hunches a big shoulder to wipe sweat dripping off his chin.

“So I heard.” I watch what’s playing out in my phone’s display, and I’m beginning to wonder if this is all there is, just Lucy’s empty dorm room with the light caught in the slats of the blinds and Mister Pickle looking misunderstood and isolated on the bed.

“It’s in a really old wooden box I found hidden under a bunch of shit in her bedroom closet,” Marino says.

“I’ll get there but not now. And why would she hide medical marijuana?”

“Because maybe she didn’t get it legally. Maybe so the housekeeper wouldn’t steal it. I don’t know. But it will be interesting to see what her tox is, how high her THC is. That could explain why she decided to climb up a ladder and monkey with lightbulbs in the middle of the night.”

“You’ve been talking to Hyde too much.”

“Maybe she fell and that’s really all that happened. It’s a logical thing to consider,” Marino says.

“Not in my opinion. And we don’t know if it was the middle of the night. I frankly doubt it. If she died at midnight or later that would put her death at eight hours or less by the time she was found. And I’m certain she’s been dead longer than that.”

“With it so hot in here it isn’t possible to know how long she’s been dead.”

“Almost true but not quite,” I reply. “I’ll figure it out as we get deeper into the investigation.”

“But we can’t this minute say exactly how long. And that’s a big problem because her mother’s going to demand answers. She’s not someone you guess with.”

“I don’t guess. I estimate. In this case I’m estimating more than twelve hours and less than forty-eight,” I reply. “That’s as good as it’s going to get right now.”

“A powerhouse like her? A huge producer like Amanda Gilbert’s not going to be happy with an answer like that.”

“I’m not worried about the mother.” I’m getting annoyed with Hollywood this, Hollywood that. “But I am worried about what really happened here because what I’m seeing doesn’t add up. The time of death is a free-for-all. The details are arguing with each other. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite so confusing, and maybe that’s the point.”

“Whose point?”

“I don’t know.”

“The high yesterday was ninety-three. The low last night was eighty-two.” I feel Marino’s eyes on me as he adds, “The housekeeper swears she last saw Chanel Gilbert yesterday around four P.M.”

“She swore that to Hyde before we got here. Then she left,” I remind him of that.

It’s not our habit to take another person’s word for anything if we can help it. Marino should have talked to the housekeeper himself. I’m sure he will before the day is out.

“She said she saw Chanel pass her on the driveway, heading to the house in the red Range Rover that’s out there now,” Marino repeats what he’s been told. “So assuming she died at some point after four o’clock yesterday afternoon and was already in bad shape this morning by quarter of eight? That works with what you estimate? Twelve hours or maybe longer.”

“It doesn’t work,” I say to him as I watch my phone. “And why do you continue to refer to her dying in the middle of the night?”

“The way she’s dressed,” Marino says. “Naked with nothing but a silk robe on. Like she was ready for bed.”

“With no gown or pajamas on?”

“A lot of women sleep naked.”

“They do?”

“Well maybe she did, and what the hell are you looking at on your phone?” He confronts me in his usual blunt way that more often than not is plain rude. “Since when are you glued to your phone at a scene? Is everything all right?”

“There may be a problem with Lucy.”

“What’s new?”

“I hope it’s nothing.”

“It usually is.”

“I need to check on her.”

“That’s nothing new either.”

“Please don’t trivialize this.” I look at my phone and not him.

“Thing is I don’t know what this is. What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know yet. But something’s wrong.”

“Whatever you think.” He says it as if he doesn’t care about Lucy but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Marino was the closest thing she had to a father. He taught her how to drive, how to shoot, not to mention how to deal with bigoted rednecks because that’s what Marino was when we first met in Virginia long ago. He was a chauvinistic homophobe who would try to steal Lucy’s girlfriends until he finally saw the error in his ways. Now despite his disparagements and insults, despite how he might pretend otherwise, he is Lucy’s biggest defender. In his own way he loves her.

“Do me a favor and tell Bryce I need Rusty and Harold here right away. Let’s get the body to my office now.” I tilt my phone so Marino can’t see the video playing on it, so he can’t see the empty FBI Academy dorm room with its small green stuffed bear that he’s sure to recognize.

“But you got the truck.” He has an accusing tone in his voice as if I’m keeping something from him, which I am.

“I want my transport team to handle this,” I reply and it’s not a request. “I’m not doing it or going to the office straight from here and neither are you. I need you to help me with Lucy.”

Marino crouches close to the body, keeping clear of the dark sticky blood, swatting at flies, the droning of them constant and maddening. “As long as you’re sure Lucy’s more important than this case? As long as you’re asking Luke to do the post?”

“Is this multiple choice?”

“I just don’t understand what you’re doing, Doc.”

I inform him that either my deputy chief Luke Zenner will do the autopsy or I will when I finally get to the office. But that may not be until this afternoon, possibly midafternoon or the end of the day.

“What the hell?” Marino is getting louder. “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you transporting the body to the office yourself so we can know what the hell happened to her before her Hollywood mother shows up?”

“I have to leave and come back.”

“I don’t see why you can’t take the body first.”

“As I’ve already said my first stop won’t be the CFC. We need to head to Concord and obviously I can’t be driving around with a body in the back of the truck. It needs to go into the cooler right away.” I make that point again. “And Harold and Rusty need to get here now.”

“I don’t get it,” he says yet again, this time with a scowl. “You’re rolling out of here in a freakin’ double-wide and not going straight to the CFC? You got a hair appointment? Getting your nails done? You and Lucy are hitting the spa?”

“You didn’t really just say that.”

“I’m kidding. Anybody can look at you and know I was just kidding. You haven’t bothered with shit for months.” Marino’s voice is flinty with anger, with judgment, and I feel it starting up again.

Blame the victim. Punish me for almost dying. Make it my fault.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” I ask him.

“It means you’ve sort of let yourself go. Not that I don’t understand it. I’m sure it’s not easy moving around, at least not as easy as it was. I’m sure it’s hard to dress, to fix yourself up.”

“Yes it’s been a little difficult to fix myself up,” I reply dryly, and it’s true that my hair could use styling and a trim.

My nails are short and unpolished. I didn’t bother putting on makeup when I left the house earlier this morning. I’m a bit thinner than I was before I got shot. But this isn’t the time or place to pick on me, and that has never stopped Marino, not in all the years I’ve known him. But he’s sunk to an all-time low criticizing my appearance at a death scene while I’m worried sick about my niece. He should simply take my word for it when I say it’s important we get to her right away. He doesn’t trust me the way he once did. And that’s the problem.

“Jesus. Where’s your sense of humor?” he says after one of my long silences.

“I didn’t bring it with me.” I’m so on edge it’s all I can do to control the level of my voice, and the marble floor seems to radiate through my boot, stiffening my right leg.

It aches and throbs like an abscessed tooth. I almost can’t bend my knee, and the longer I stand here the worse everything gets.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to piss you off but you’re not making sense, Doc,” Marino says. “I’m assuming you’re doing her autopsy like right away? Before her mother gets here with a million questions and demands? Isn’t that a little more important than dropping by Concord to check on Lucy? Unless she’s sick or hurt or something? I mean do you know what’s the matter?”

“I don’t. That’s why we need to check.”

“We sure as hell don’t want a problem with Amanda Gilbert and she’s exactly the sort to give us one. And of all times? You don’t need to be causing problems. I’ll just say it because you don’t need …”

“I’m well aware of what I don’t need.” I watch my phone and avoid looking at him.

Marino interrogates and lectures me like this because he can. At one time he was my chief investigator until he decided he didn’t want to work for me anymore. He knows my office routines and protocols. He knows exactly how I think. He knows the way I do things and why. Yet suddenly I’m an enigma. I’m from another planet and this has been going on since June.

“I want her transported now and it can’t be me doing it,” I say to him. “I’ve got to get to Concord. We need to leave as soon as possible.”

“Okay.” He gets up and looks down at the body for a long moment as I stare at the display on my phone.

The title sequence is long gone. The music has stopped. I continue to be confronted with Lucy’s empty dorm room from what seems half a life ago, and my tension and frustration build. I’m being teased, goaded, tortured, and it occurs to me that Carrie would be hugely amused if she could see me now, if she could spy on me the same way she did on Lucy.

“I admit she looks pretty damn bad for falling what? Not even six feet?” Marino says next. “Drugs and then she’s got a lot of occult shit all over the place. So no telling the company she keeps. I agree with you this case has some aspects that don’t add up in a good way.”

“Please make the call now.” I’m riveted to my phone.

I’m vaguely aware of the sound of him walking away, of him getting hold of my chief of staff Bryce Clark as I watch the seconds tick by. Ten minutes into Carrie Grethen’s cinematic gift and already I know I’m being harassed and manipulated, that she’s having sadistic fun at my expense. But I can’t resist.

I don’t know what else to do but watch, to give myself up to it as I linger inside the foyer feeling Chanel Gilbert’s morbid presence and the pain in my leg. I look down at my phone, watching a segment of my niece’s past go by in the palm of my ungloved hand. I smell decomposing flesh and blood breaking down. I’m sweating and chilled as I watch the video and think this can’t be real.

But it is. There can be no question as I recognize the dorm room’s blank walls, the two windows on either side of the bed, and of course Mister Pickle perched on the pillow. I can see the closed door that leads into the dormitory’s fourth-floor hallway, the light shining in from the right where there’s a bathroom. Only VIP guest quarters had private baths. Lucy was a VIP to me and that’s how I mandated she would be treated by the Feds.

She occupied this room from 1995 through 1998, not constantly. But on and off while she finished the University of Virginia, working for the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility (ERF) almost the entire time. Quantico was her home away from home. Carrie Grethen was her mentor. The FBI placed the niece I raised like a daughter into a psychopathic monster’s care, and that decision changed the course of our lives. It has changed absolutely everything.

5

Carrie walks into the room, a submachine gun slung over her shoulder. The Heckler & Koch flat against her waist is an MP5K. K is for kurz, German for short.

The machine gun is designed to fit into a firing briefcase, and familiarity touches the back of my brain. I know this gun. I’ve seen it somewhere. I feel my chest tighten as Carrie leans close to a camera, stares directly into it with wide eyes as cold and bright as a winter sky. Her hair is a bleached silver buzz cut, her narrow fine-featured face compelling the way a machete is, and her tank top, gym shorts, shoes and socks are solid white.

In 1997 she was in her midtwenties although I wasn’t sure of her age at the time. She could pass for much older or younger or ageless or ancient with her lean hard body and blue eyes that rapidly change shadings like a volatile ocean as her dangerous moods shift. She is very pale, as if the sun has never touched her. Her white skin seems to glow like a lampshade, contrasting sharply with the black sling loop around her neck, with the stubby black weapon that is close to the camera now.

An early model with a wooden foregrip, probably manufactured in the 1980s, possibly earlier but I’m uncertain why I know that. I can see the three modes of fire stamped in white over the thumb area. E for semiautomatic mode. F for full auto. The selector is set on S for safe. I know this gun somehow dammit. Where did I see it?

“Greetings from the past.” Carrie’s eyes are deep blue as she smiles, resting a forearm on the machine gun’s receiver. “But you know what they say. The past is never over. It isn’t even past. If you’re viewing my cinematic masterpiece then congratulations are in order. You’re still on this earth, Chief.” The way she says chief sounds odd, possibly edited. “What you should conclude from that is I don’t want you gone yet. Or you would be.

“By the time you watch this can you imagine how many chances I will have had to put a bullet in your head?” Carrie points the machine gun’s short barrel at a camera. “Or better yet? Right here?” She touches the back of her neck at the base of her skull at the level of C2, and a transection of the spinal cord at that junction is instantly fatal.

As I watch her describe this I’m not surprised. It’s the exact injury I encountered in recent sniper shootings that occurred in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Florida when a stealth assassin the press calls Copperhead fired solid copper bullets into the necks of four victims. One of them was Bob Rosado, a United States congressman scuba diving off his yacht in Fort Lauderdale when he was murdered this past June. His teenage son Troy, a budding violent psychopath with a criminal history, vanished at the same time and might also be a casualty. We haven’t found him. We don’t know where he is. He was last seen with her, with Copperhead, with Carrie Grethen.

“There are many different ways to cause death if you’re an expert.” She talks slowly, deliberately in the recording. “And I’m not sure what would be best suited for you. Quick so you have no idea what’s happening? Or drawn out and painful so you have full awareness? Do you want to know you’re about to die or not? That is the question. Hmmm.”

She looks up at the white acoustical tile ceiling with its grayish fluorescent tube lights that are turned off. “I’m probably still giving these options careful consideration. I wonder how close I will have come to ending you by the time you see this. But let’s get started while we’re alone. Lucy will be back soon. This is between you and me. Shhhh!” She holds a finger to her lips. “Our secret.

“I’ve written it all out in a narrative that explains what you’re seeing and hearing.” She holds up sheets of paper filled with typing in the format of a script.

She’s showing off. She wants attention. But from whom? This video clip was sent to me. Yet my gut says I’m not the intended audience. Maybe you can’t be objective anymore.

“There are six hidden cameras here inside four-eleven, Lucy’s cozy little dorm room with all her juvenilia.”

She points the machine gun at movie posters on the wall. Silence of the Lambs and Sneakers. She walks to another wall where a rampant Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park is a black silhouette against a blaze orange background. Lucy’s favorite movies. I went to a lot of trouble to find the posters for her after she began her internship with the FBI.

Carrie walks to the bed and pokes the machine gun’s barrel in Mister Pickle’s forlorn fuzzy face. His wide glassy eyes seem panicked, as if he knows he’s about to die, and I catch myself projecting emotions onto an inanimate object, onto a tiny toy bear.

“She’s a child, you know.” Carrie is in constant motion as she talks. “She may have an IQ that’s two hundred and beyond, well into the uncharted airspace of super genius, but she’s always had the emotional maturity of a toddler. Stunted. Lucy is hopelessly stunted. She has no idea what wizardry is in her room, covering every angle and completely out of sight.

“Imagine how I spend my spare time when she’s not around? I’m always watching.” She points two fingers at her eyes. “Like the billboard in The Great Gatsby. Dr. T. J. Eckleburg peering through glasses, watching over the Valley of Ashes, the moral wasteland of American society with its blind, greedy, lying government.”

I glance up from my phone at Harold and Rusty. They look like Ghostbusters in hooded white Tyvek coveralls, their hands gloved in blue nitrile, respirators over their noses and mouths. They’re debating with Marino how best to get the dead woman inside the pouch and whether it would be a good idea to place a bag over her head. Maybe there’s important trace evidence in her hair. Brain tissue is oozing out of an open fracture in her skull. Some of her teeth may be loose. One was knocked out, a front tooth I recovered from blood on the floor.

“We don’t want to displace anything. No telling what’s sticking to the blood, especially in her hair,” Marino is saying as Carrie’s voice sounds in my ear.

“Once upon a time there was a dorm room that was tiny and tidy,” she reads from her script as Marino unfolds a stretcher and the aluminum legs clack. “It was dimly lit by a gooseneck lamp on the desk, which like the matching chair, the wardrobe, the dresser and twin bed was cheaply built of plywood with a fake wood-grain veneer.”

Carrie walks around the room giving a tour, and I don’t look up from my phone as I tell Marino, Rusty and Harold to bag Chanel Gilbert’s head and also her hands and her feet. After that, wrap disposable sheets round her. I’m fairly certain I’ve collected everything that might not survive the trip to my office but let’s be meticulous. Nothing left behind. Nothing lost. Not a hair. Not a tooth.

“Then you can pouch her and carry her out,” I tell them as Carrie says in the recording: “On top of a hotel-size refrigerator were a Mr. Coffee maker, a jar of generic-brand creamer, a bag of Starbuck’s House Blend, three FBI mugs, a chipped ceramic beer stein with the crest for the Richmond police department”—she picks it up, shows the chip—“a Swiss Army knife, and six boxes of Speer Gold Dot 9 mil ammo that went with the MP5K Lucy stole from Benton Wesley and kept hidden inside this room.”

There’s something strange about the way she said Benton’s name. But I can’t stop the recording. I can’t replay it. If Carrie intended this recording for me then why would she say Benton’s last name as if whoever is listening might not know it? I don’t understand what’s happening but I don’t believe Lucy would steal a gun or anything else from him.

Carrie’s lying about the MP5K and in the process she’s creating a record that suggests both Benton and Lucy violated the National Firearms Act, a felony punishable with serious prison time. The statute of limitations should be up by now. But that depends. Everything depends. This is potentially very bad, and I’m aware of paper rattling less than ten feet away from me.

Harold opens what looks like a plain brown paper grocery bag with no handles. Wisely he decides against it. Chanel Gilbert’s head is a gory mess. Plastic bags are better suited as long as the body is quickly refrigerated, and I say this without looking up.

“As long as she goes into the cooler the minute you get her inside the building,” I emphasize because plastic and moisture are a bad combination, especially when decomposition is advancing.

“I agree,” Harold says. “That’s exactly what we’ll do, Chief.”

He used to work in a funeral home and I halfway wonder if he sleeps in a suit and tie, in dark socks and dress shoes. By his way of thinking he covers up in personal protective clothing anyway. So he may as well be dapper and properly attired underneath Tyvek.

“I think there’s something in her hair. It might be glass.” Light winks on his black-framed glasses, his brown eyes magnified and owlish through the prescription lenses.

“Well duh,” Rusty says, and when he first got here he looked like he always does, a has-been Beach Boy, today in baggy flannel drawstring pants and a hoodie, his long graying hair tied back in a ponytail. “There’s broken glass all over the place.”

“I’m just being careful. It didn’t look like lightbulb glass. But it was just a glance and now I don’t see it.”

“Wrap her up really well. Make sure we don’t lose anything,” I reply as Carrie walks into a small bland bathroom and flips on a light.

“Well I’m just not seeing it.” Harold is looking at the bloody matted hair, walking his gloved fingers through it. “I saw something and now I don’t.”

“I’ll look carefully again later. I didn’t notice anything like glass in her hair,” I reply.

“But wouldn’t you think there might be?” Harold stares up at the light fixture in the ceiling, at the empty sockets where two lightbulbs had been screwed in.

He looks around at the broken glass all over the floor, and then he acts out an imagined scenario at the same instant Carrie is acting out her drama on the video. Harold demonstrates someone changing lightbulbs and suddenly falling backward off the ladder.

“If she had lightbulbs, the chandelier’s glass dome in her hands and they hit the floor at the same time she did it would be like a glass bomb going off. Wouldn’t you expect glass all over her?” he asks as Carrie stares in the mirror over the bathroom sink and gives a big smile to her own reflection, then musses up her very short white-gold hair.

“Just cover her really well and she goes straight into the cooler, and I’ll deal with her,” I repeat my instructions.

I can’t pause the video. It’s as if Carrie has hijacked my phone at the worst possible time, in the middle of a suspicious death scene that should require my full attention.

6

The only way I could stop the recording is to power down my phone and turn it off. I’m not about to do that and it vaguely occurs to me that what’s happening could come back to haunt me. If the police complain that I was on my phone, that I was watching a movie, texting or who knows what? It would be very bad.

“Off to one side of the only door that led in and out of Lucy’s room is a private bath.” Carrie sweeps her hand around it as if she’s Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune, and Rusty shakes open plastic bags and begins covering Chanel Gilbert’s bare feet.

“And the new agents in training didn’t enjoy similar luxury.” Carrie glances down at the script, then back into a hidden camera, and she does this repeatedly. “All of them had roommates. They shared toilets, vanities and showers at the far end of the hall. But young precocious Lucy didn’t mingle with any of those lesser females, all of them older, some with law degrees and Ph.D.s. One was an ordained Presbyterian minister. Another was a former beauty queen.

“An unusual well-educated group with no common sense, no street smarts, and by the time you see this …” She ends the sentence abruptly, awkwardly, and there’s no question the recording has been edited. “I wonder how many of them will be dead. Lucy and I used to make predictions. You see she’d gathered intelligence on every resident on her floor. But she didn’t call anyone by name. She didn’t speak to anyone in passing, and her reserve was correctly interpreted as entitlement and arrogance. Lucy was spoiled. Her Auntie Kay had managed to spoil her rotten.”

Carrie refers to you as if she’s talking to someone else.

She turns a page in her script. “A teenaged civilian with special gifts and special connections, Lucy enjoyed a special status at the FBI Academy that was on a par with a protected witness, a visiting chief of police, an agency director, a secretary-general or in other words a very important person, which Lucy is by merit of her associations and not her accomplishments.

“Her Auntie Kay mandated up front that during her precious niece’s internship and until she turned twenty-one she would have her own room with a bath and a view and a curfew. She would have constant supervision, and she did ostensibly and officially. It was spelled out in her file, a thin unimportant file as I film this. But with time it likely would get much bigger as the federal government wises up to Lucy Farinelli and realizes she must be stopped.”

Where is this file? The question floats up in my mind like a bubble in a cartoon strip. Benton should know.

“But on this bright July afternoon in 1997”—Carrie walks and talks somberly, pensively like the host of a true crime show—“the Academy faculty and staff had no idea that young Lucy’s chaperone, yours truly, was a frequent sleepover and not the harmless eccentric geek who passed her extensive background check, interviews, and a polygraph with flying colors before she was hired to overhaul the FBI’s computer and case management system.

“Even the psychological profilers in the Behavioral Science Unit including their legendary chief somehow missed that I am a psychopath.” She says legendary chief weirdly. “Just as my father was and his father before him.” Her eyes are cobalt in the camera. “I’m actually quite rare. Less than one percent of the female population is psychopathic. And you know the evolutionary purpose of psychopathy now don’t you? We’re the chosen ones who will survive.

“Remember that when you think I’m gone. And oops! I have to stop reading my wonderful little story for now. We have company.”

The whisper of a long plastic zipper, and I glance at Marino as he stands up from a crouched position. The body is a black cocoon on the floor, and Marino, Rusty and Harold yank off their dirty gloves and drop them into the red biohazard bag.

They pull on fresh gloves. When they lift the body it is limp. Rigor mortis was fully developed and has passed, leaving her flaccid. That usually takes a minimum of eight hours, depending on other factors that include the environmental temperature, which is extremely hot, and the state of dress and body size, which are naked and slender with good musculature.

Chanel Gilbert is about five foot seven, maybe 130 pounds, and I suspect she was athletic and fit. She has tan lines from wearing a bathing suit but is pale from the waist down, her belly, hips and legs spared from exposure to the sun. Wearing a wet suit could leave a similar tan pattern, and I’m reminded of what Benton and I always do between scuba dives. We take off our dive socks and pull down our wet suits, tying the neoprene arms around our waists. Our faces, shoulders, chests, arms and the tops of our feet get sun exposure but not much else.

“Do we know if Chanel Gilbert was into sports?” I ask Marino, startled as it dawns on me that she and Carrie Grethen resemble each other physically. “She has well-developed shoulders and arms, and her legs look strong. Are we sure who this is?” I glance at him. “Has anybody talked to her neighbors?”

“What the hell?” He frowns at me as if I just said the world is flat. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking she’s not visually identifiable and we need to be careful.”

“You mean because she’s bloated and rotting with her face smashed in?”

“We should be sure we know who she is. We shouldn’t assume it’s the woman who lived in this house.” I’m not going to mention that the dead woman on the floor could pass for Carrie Grethen’s twin.

I think of my recent sighting of Carrie when she shot me in Florida, comparing that face with the photograph on Chanel’s driver’s license. The two women look eerily similar, and if I dared to suggest this I’ll sound obsessed and irrational. Marino would want to know why the thought has occurred to me now, and I can’t tell him I’m watching Carrie on my phone. Marino can’t know that. No one can. I’m not sure what the legal implications might be but I’m worried the video is a trap.

“What makes you suspect she isn’t the lady who lived here?” It’s Harold who asks as he squats by his scene case, packing it up.

My answer is a question. “Do we have any reason to think she might have been a scuba diver?”

“I’ve not seen any dive gear anywhere,” Marino says as Lucy appears in the video, unaware and casual. “But I noticed some underwater photographs in one of the rooms down the hall. I’ll look around some more after we get her into the van.”

I watch Lucy walking around her private space that Carrie has invaded and violated.

“I need a sample of Chanel Gilbert’s DNA, maybe from a toothbrush, a hairbrush,” I remind Marino but it’s hard to focus as I watch the image of my niece. “And let’s find out who her dentist is and get her charts. We’re not releasing her identity to anyone including her mother until we’re sure.”

“Seems like there’s a little problem with that,” Marino says but I’m no longer looking at him. “Someone alerted her mother, remember? And she’s on a plane headed here from L.A., remember? So if you’ve got any reason to think this isn’t her daughter … Well that will be a real shit show when Mama shows up.”

“Have you found out who might have notified her?” I ask.

“No.”

“Because it wasn’t us,” I repeat what I’ve said before. “I explicitly instructed Bryce not to release anything until I say so.”

“Someone sure as hell did,” Marino says.

“The housekeeper might have after she found the body,” Rusty suggests and it makes sense. “Maybe she notified the mother. That would be expected don’t you think?”

“Yeah maybe,” Marino answers. “Because let me guess. Mama probably paid for everything including the housekeeper. But we need to find out who got hold of her and told her the bad news.”

“What we need to know first and for a fact is who this dead woman is.” I glance up at Marino’s bloodshot eyes, then I look back down at my phone, at Lucy, in workout clothes, her rose gold hair as short as a boy’s.

She could pass for sixteen but was three years older than that when this was filmed, and watching her gives me an indescribable feeling. I feel enraged and sick. I keep reminding myself to feel nothing at all, and I barely glance at Rusty and Harold as they wheel the stretcher out the front door. I’m packing my scene case, tidying up as I watch the video playing on my phone and listen to it through my wireless earpiece.

Multitasking. I shouldn’t be.

Marino has begun walking around the house checking windows and doors, making sure everything is secure before we close up and head out. I’m not done. But I’m not staying. I’ll be back after I’m sure Lucy is safe—after I make damn sure she’s not the one who sent this recording to me.

7

I know my niece. I can tell when she trusts that whatever she’s saying and doing is private and unmonitored.

She believes her conversation with Carrie is between the two of them. It isn’t. I can’t imagine how Lucy would feel if she knew that in a sense I was inside that room with them. I may as well have been there then because I am now, and I feel disloyal. I feel I’m betraying my own flesh and blood.

“How was the gym?” Carrie’s eyes move around the room, finding cameras Lucy can’t see. “Crowded?”

“You should have done weights while you could.”

“Like I told you, I had things to take care of including a surprise.”

Carrie is in the same running clothes but there’s no sign of the machine gun. There’s no time stamp on the recording, only a run time of almost twenty minutes now, and I watch her open the small refrigerator.

“I brought you a present.” She grabs two St. Pauli Girls, pops off the caps and hands one of the green bottles to Lucy.

She stares at it but doesn’t take a sip. “I don’t want it.”

“We can have a drink together can’t we?” Carrie brushes her fingers through her peroxided buzz-cut hair.

“You shouldn’t have brought it here. And I didn’t ask you to.”

“You didn’t need to ask. I’m very thoughtful.” Carrie picks up the Swiss Army knife from the top of the refrigerator, resting the thick red handle in the palm of her hand, flipping open a blade with her thumbnail, and stainless steel flashes.

“You shouldn’t have done it without asking.” Lucy strips down to her sports bra and bikini briefs, and she’s sweating and flushed from exertion. “I get caught with alcohol in my room and I’m fucked.” She drops her clothing into a bamboo hamper I bought for her, grabs a towel and begins drying off.

“You’d better hope they don’t find out you have a gun in here,” Carrie says somberly and for the effect as she studies the knife blade shining thinly, sharply. “A very illegal one.”

“It’s not illegal.”

“Maybe it’s about to be.”

“What have you done? You’ve done something.”

“Well it would be a crime if it’s missing. But what the hell is legal anyway? Arbitrary rules invented by flawed mortals. Benton’s more or less your uncle. Maybe it’s not stealing if you took it from your uncle.”

Lucy walks over to the closet, opens the door, looks inside. “Where is it? What the hell did you do with it?”

“Have you learned nothing in the time we’ve been together? You can’t stop anything I want to do and I don’t need your permission.” Carrie looks directly into a camera and smiles.

I watch Lucy sit on a corner of the desk inside her dorm room, her tan muscular legs dangling. She’s getting visibly upset.

Light seeping around the edges of the closed blinds is different, and just seconds ago Lucy had her running shoes and socks on. Now they’re off. She’s barefoot. The video has been edited heavily, skillfully, and I wonder what has been deleted and stitched together for purposes of Carrie’s propaganda and manipulations.

“You always manage to take whatever you want,” Lucy is saying to her. “You’re always trying to make me do things that are wrong, that are bad for me.”

“I don’t make you do anything.” Carrie walks close, strokes her hair, and Lucy jerks her head away. “Don’t rebuff me.” Carrie is inches from Lucy’s face, almost nose to nose, staring into her eyes. “Do not rebuff me.”

She kisses her and Lucy doesn’t react. She sits stoically, stiffly like a statue.

“You know what happens when you act like this,” Carrie says with an edge that hints of what she’s capable of. “Nothing good and you really must stop blaming everybody for your behavior.”

“Where’s the fucking gun!” Lucy gets up from the desk. “You’d like to get me in trouble, wouldn’t you? You’d like to deliberately set me up for it. Why? Because if you discredit me then no one will believe what I do or say. I won’t get anything I’ve earned and deserve. Not ever. That would be a horrible way to live.”

“How horrible? Do tell.” Carrie’s eyes are bright silvery blue.

“You’re sick,” Lucy says. “Go to hell.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll hide the evidence, carry out the empty beer bottles and get rid of them.” Carrie takes a swallow of the German lager. “So you don’t get sent to the principal’s office.”

“I don’t give a shit about the beer! Where’s the gun? It doesn’t belong to you.”

“You know what they say about possession being nine-tenths of the law. It’s fixable you know. That MP5K is going to shoot so sweet.”

“Do you understand what could happen? Of course you do. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Everything you do in life is about creating leverage, finding dirt that can give you an advantage, and that’s been your MO from the start. Give me the gun. Where is it?”

“In due time,” Carrie says in a syrupy, patronizing tone. “I promise it will turn up when you least expect it. How about a massage? Let me dig my fingers into you. I know exactly how to cure what ails you.”

“I’m not drinking this.” Lucy retrieves the bottle of St. Pauli Girl from the desk.

She pads barefoot into the bathroom and there’s a hidden camera in there too. I watch her on video pour out her beer. I hear it splashing into the sink, and when she glances into the mirror her keenly pretty face is a mixture of sad, hurt and angry but mostly sad and hurt. Lucy loved her. Carrie was her first love. In some ways she was Lucy’s last.

“I don’t trust anything you give me, anything you do.” Lucy raises her voice as she turns on the water full blast, washing the beer away.

She looks in the mirror again and her face is so young, so childlike, and her eyes are teary. She’s trying to be brave, to control her volatile emotions, and she splashes water on her face and dries off with a towel. She walks back into the bedroom as I realize that Carrie must have set up a network of motion-sensitive recording devices that she programmed to override each other when someone moved from room to room. I could see what Lucy was doing in the bathroom but I couldn’t see Carrie. Now I can. I’m watching both of them again.

“That was wasteful. It was ungrateful.” Carrie touches the tip of her tongue to the opening of her St. Pauli Girl bottle, lightly tracing the beveled rim.

She stares into a camera and slowly licks her bottom lip. Her eyes are glassy. They’re almost Prussian blue, changing like her moods.

“Please leave,” Lucy says. “I don’t want to fight. We need to end this without a fucking war.”

Carrie bends over to take off her running shoes and socks. “Can you hand me the lotion, please?” Her ankles are unnaturally pale with prominent blue veins, the skin almost translucent like beeswax.

“You’re not showering here. You need to go. I have to get ready for dinner.”

“A dinner I’m not invited to.”

“You know exactly why that is.” Lucy retrieves a camouflage toiletry bag from the top of the dresser.

Rummaging for an unlabeled plastic bottle, she tosses it to her. Carrie snatches it out of the air like a touchdown pass.

“Just keep it. I don’t use it, no way I would.” Lucy returns to her perch on top of the desk. “The long-term side effects of rubbing copper peptides and other metals and minerals into your skin is unknown. In other words fucking untested. Look it up. But what is known is that too much copper is toxic. Look that up too while you’re fucking at it.”

“You sound just like your annoying aunt.” Carrie’s eyes darken, and it continues to jar me when she refers to me as if I’m not the one watching this.

“I don’t,” Lucy says. “Aunt Kay doesn’t say fuck nearly as often as I do. And while I appreciate you mixing up a batch of your bullshit collagen-producing vanishing cream for me …”

“Vanishing cream? Not hardly.” Carrie’s arrogance puffs her up like a Komodo dragon. “It’s a skin regeneration preparation.” She says it condescendingly. “Copper is essential to good health.”

“It also encourages the production of red blood cells, and that’s the last thing you need help with.”

“How touching. You care about me.”

“Right now I don’t give a shit about you. But why the fuck would you rub copper into yourself? Did you ask a physician if someone with your disorder should apply a topical lotion with copper in it? You keep using shit like that and you’ll have blood pudding sluggishly moving through your veins. You’ll drop dead of a stroke.”

“God you’re becoming just like her. Little Kay Junior. Hello Kay Junior.”

“Leave Aunt Kay out of it.”

“It’s really not possible to leave her out of anything, Lucy. Do you think if you weren’t blood kin you might be lovers? Because I could understand it. I could go for her. Definitely. I would try it.” Carrie touches her tongue to the beer bottle, inserts it into the opening. “She’d never go back. I can promise you that.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I’m just speaking the truth. I could make her feel so good. So alive.”

“Shut up!”

Carrie sets down the beer as she unscrews the cap from the lotion, sniffs the fragrance, swooning. “Ohhhh soooo nice. You sure? Not even a little bit in those hard-to-reach places?”

“For the record?” Lucy swipes ChapStick on her lips. “I’m sorry I ever met you.”

“All this because Miss Beauty Queen was running the Yellow Brick Road the same time we were. A coincidence. And you go nuclear.”

“The hell it was a coincidence.”

“It really was. I swear, Lucy.”

“Bullshit!”

“I swear on the Bible I didn’t tell Erin we’d be out there at three o’clock. And voilà.” Carrie snaps her fingers. “She happens to show up.”

“Running out there all by her lonesome and there we are and she joins us. Ignoring me like I wasn’t there. Focused only on you. Right. What a coincidence.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“Just like she’s happened to show up everywhere else the two of you have fucked each other, Carrie.”

“You want to talk a health threat?”

“You mean you?”

“Jealousy. It’s toxic.”

“How about lying, which is all you ever do. Over and over again.”

“You need to start putting this on every time you go out, even on overcast days in the dead of winter.” The viscous translucent lotion Carrie dribbles into her palm looks like semen. “And you say fuck too much. Vulgarity is inversely proportionate to intelligence and facility with languages. Profuse swearing is generally associated with a low IQ, a limited vocabulary and uncontrollable hostility.”

“Are you listening to me? Because I’m not kidding.” Lucy seems to vibrate with emotion, with fury and pain.

“How about a back rub? I promise you’ll feel better.”

“I’m done with your lying! Your cheating and stealing credit!” Lucy is crying. “Every shitty thing you do! You don’t know what it is to love anybody. You aren’t capable of it!”

Carrie is completely calm no matter what is happening or said, her attention flicking from one concealed camera to another like an exotic reptile reading the air with its forked tongue.

“You’re a cheater-whore!”

“Someday I’ll remind you what you said. And you might wish you hadn’t.” Carrie holds up her hand with a dollop of lotion, smiles brightly.

“I’m scared.” Lucy glares at her, the veins standing out in her neck.

Carrie begins rubbing the lotion on herself, slowly, salaciously on her face, her neck. She clicks her tongue at Lucy as if she’s a dog, waving the bottle of lotion at her as if it’s a bone.

“Come. I’ll put it on you. I’ll rub it in the way you like.” She rapidly rubs her palms together. “I’ll warm my hands and drive my magic potion into your skin. Sort of an improvised nanotechnology.”

“Stay away from me!” Lucy furiously wipes tears with the back of her hand, and suddenly the video stops.

I try to rewind it but I can’t. I can’t replay it. I can’t do anything to it at all.

8

The icons are inert. When I click on the link in my text messages nothing happens.

Then just as suddenly the link isn’t there anymore, as if I deleted any trace of it from my messages. But I certainly didn’t. The recording has vanished before my eyes like a disturbing dream. It’s gone as if it was imagined, and I look around the foyer at the dark dried blood, the shattered glass, the gory area on the floor where the body had been. My attention stops on the upright ladder.

Fiberglass, rubber feet, four steps and a platform on top, perfectly centered, and that begins to bother me like many details in this case. The ladder is set up directly under the light fixture, which at some point shattered over the marble floor. If Chanel really lost her balance I would have expected the ladder to slide, possibly to tilt and tumble over as she fell. I scan feathery marks made by her bloody hair at the perimeter of the putrid crazed blackish mess where her upper body had been. It appears that at some point she moved her head.

Or someone moved it.

We’ve found no footprints, handprints, nothing that might suggest the presence of a second person including the housekeeper who discovered the body. I recall the bottoms of Chanel’s bare feet were completely clean. Once she was down, she stayed down. She didn’t step in her own blood. It doesn’t appear anybody did, and then I begin looking harder at a scene that is increasingly suspicious as I listen for Marino, waiting for him to come back so we can check on Lucy. I halfway expect another alert tone on my phone, another video link to land, and I keep hoping Lucy will call me. I text her at the same time I carefully scan the foyer, focusing on areas of clean white marble, looking for any indication that someone may have washed the floor in an attempt to alter the scene, to stage it.

We haven’t yet checked for latent blood, for a trace residue that might have been left if blood is washed away and we no longer can see it without chemical assistance. I’m not sure the police were going to bother since they seem convinced the death is an accident, and I crouch down by my scene case and open it again.

I find the bottle of reagent. I shake it and start spraying areas of the floor that appear clean. Instantly a rectangular shape and swipe marks fluoresce a vivid blue just inches from the decomposing blood where the body had been. The shape was made by something manufactured, possibly a bucket it occurs to me, and that and other shapes are eerily vivid on the white marble.

Darkness isn’t required for this particular chemical, and sunlight coming through the transom and the ambient illumination don’t interfere with the sapphire blue luminescence. I see it plainly as I notice a pattern of elongated droplets, some as small as a pinhead, what looks like back spatter that impacted at an acute angle. Medium velocity. What I associate with beatings.

I closely inspect a blue mist near where the head had been. Possibly expirated blood, and I think of the missing front tooth I recovered when I first got here. Chanel would have been bleeding inside her mouth, and when she was down on the floor, unconscious and dying, she was exhaling blood mixed with air. It appears someone wiped up this area of the floor, attempting to eradicate anything that might not be consistent with an accidental death.

That’s what it’s looking like but I need to be conservative and cautious. There could be other explanations such as a false positive chemical reaction to something other than blood. Or even if it is nonvisible blood it could have been on the floor for a while. It might be completely unrelated to Chanel Gilbert’s death. But I don’t believe it.

Next I conduct a quick and easy presumptive test, moistening a swab with distilled water, gently rubbing a small area of the rectangular shape that is fluorescing blue. Then I drip a phenolphthalein solution and hydrogen peroxide onto the swab and instantly it turns pink, which is positive for blood. Next I take photographs using a plastic ruler as a scale.

“Marino?” I look for him.

The house is empty except for the two of us. Hyde, the gray-haired Cambridge officer and the state trooper are en route to Dunkin’ Donuts or headed who knows where. I detect sounds in the area of the kitchen. Then I hear a door shut, the thudding distant and muffled, possibly downstairs, and that’s perplexing. I could have sworn everyone was gone, that no one is left on the property except Marino and me. Maybe I’m mistaken, and I listen. I detect more movement in the kitchen area.

“Marino?” I call out loudly. “Is that you?”

“No it’s the boogeyman.” I can’t see him, only hear him, and now the sounds are coming from the hallway beyond the staircase.

“Are you sure there’s nobody here besides us?” I ask the empty foul-smelling air.

“Why?” Slow heavy footsteps coming closer.

“I thought I heard a door shut. I heard something thud. It sounded like it came from the basement.”

No answer.

“Marino?” I swab several other fluorescing stains and the presumptive test continues to be positive for blood. “Marino?”

Silence.

“Marino? Hello!”

I shout to him several more times but he doesn’t answer, and I text Lucy again. Then I call her ICE number and it goes straight to voice mail, and next I try the cell phone line I usually reach her on. She doesn’t answer that either. When I enter her unlisted unpublished home number I get an error tone and a recording.

The number you have reached is no longer in service …

The sound of a door shutting again, distant and muffled. It doesn’t sound like a normal door. It’s too heavy.

Like a vault door slamming.

“Hello?” I call out. “Hello!”

No one answers.

“Marino?”

I look around, standing perfectly still, listening. The house is silent, just the incessant noise of flies. They crawl over blood and circle sluggishly like tiny spotter planes looking for the putrefying wounds and orifices, the rotting flesh where they laid their eggs. Their buzzing sounds angry and predatory, as if they’ve been robbed of their unborn babies and denied a carcass, a food supply that was rightfully theirs. The flies seem louder even though there are fewer of them, and the stench seems just as strong with the body gone but that’s not possible.

My senses are on high alert, in overdrive and the same sensation drifts over me like a noxious vapor. I feel a presence. I feel something evil and curdled inside this house and then I think about what Marino said. Chanel Gilbert was into occult shit, and I don’t know what he meant. Maybe she consorted with the dark side, assuming there really is anything to that, and I remind myself it’s understandable if I’m feeling spied on because Lucy was. I just witnessed it.

“Marino?” I try again. “Marino are you here? Hello?”

I envision the door that leads down to a basement where I’ve not yet been.

I’ve not had the chance to search the house but I’m fairly sure that the door is off the kitchen, which is how I entered when I first got here. I came in the same way the housekeeper had earlier, and I remember noticing the closed door opposite the pantry. It occurred to me it led down into what likely was a laundry area, a cellar, possibly a kitchen for the household staff in centuries past.

I listen carefully and have waited long enough. I’m about to go look for Marino when I hear footsteps again, big heavy ones. I stay where I am and listen as they get closer. Then I see him near the staircase.

“Thank God,” I mutter.

“What’s the matter?” He walks into the foyer and his eyes instantly find the blue luminescent shapes on the floor. “What’ve we got here?”

“Someone may have tampered with the scene.”

“Yeah I’m seeing something. I don’t know what but something. Good idea to spray it down just to be on the safe side.”

“I thought you’d vanished.”

“I checked the basement and there’s no sign of anybody,” Marino says as he looks at the blue luminescence from different angles. “But the door that leads outside? It was unlocked and I know I locked it after I looked around earlier.”

“Maybe one of the other cops did it?”

“Maybe. And let me guess who. See what the hell I deal with?” His thick thumbs are busy on his phone as he sends a text. “That would be stupid, careless as shit. Probably Vogel. I’m asking him. Let’s see what he says.”

“Who?”

“The trooper. You know Typhoid Mary? He’s not thinking straight, probably got the whoop just like you said, should go home and stay home.”

“Why was the state police here anyway?” I ask.

“Nothing better to do. Plus it turns out he’s a buddy of Hyde’s, who probably cued him in about the mother. Whenever Hollywood’s involved you know how people get. Everybody wants to hop on the celebrity train. Well it’s a good thing I tried the basement door. Someone breaks in here because we left a door unlocked and talk about hell to pay?” He checks his phone. “Okay here we go. Vogel’s answered. And he says the door was locked for sure. He dead bolted it from inside. He says it should be dead bolted. It’s not.” Marino types a reply.

“Let’s get out of here.” I carry my scene case past the staircase, into a short hyphen of a dark paneled hallway, heading out the same way I came in. “As soon as we check on Lucy we’ll be back. We’ll look around carefully. Then we’ll take care of the rest of it at my office. We’ll do whatever we need to do.”

“You’ve heard nothing from her?”

“No.”

“I could send …” he starts to say but doesn’t finish.

There’s no point. Marino knows better than anybody that you don’t send police to make a wellness check on Lucy. If she’s home and okay she’s not going to open her gate, and if the police get in without her assistance they’ll set off an explosion of alarms. She also has a lot of guns.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Marino says and now we’re in the kitchen.

It’s been remodeled in the past twenty years or so, the original woodwork replaced by a knotty pine that is lighter than the wide-board floor. I make mental notes of the white appliances, minimalist with hanging stainless steel lamps, and the Shaker-style oak table set with a single plate, a wineglass and silverware facing a window that overlooks the side of the house.

I walk closer to the table set for one, and I get the feeling again as I dig into a pocket for clean gloves and pull them on. I pick up the plate, dinner size with a colorful pattern that depicts King Arthur on a white horse draped in bloodred, surrounded by Knights of the Round Table riding after him, a castle in the background. I turn the plate over and stamped on the back is Wedgwood Bone China, Made in England. I scan the kitchen and spot an empty plate hanger to one side of the door that leads outside.

“This is peculiar.” I return the plate to the table. “This is Wedgwood, in other words a collector’s plate.” I walk over to the empty plate hanger. “It appears this is where it was hanging.” I open cupboards and survey shelves of simple white stoneware, practical, durable, dishwasher and microwave safe, no sign of Wedgwood or anything similar. “Why would you remove a decorative plate off the wall and set the table with it?”

Marino shrugs. “I don’t know.”

He moves to the sink where a cabinet is open underneath. Nearby on the black and white subway tile is a stainless steel trash can. He steps on the foot pedal and pops open the lid, peers inside and gets an astonished angry look on his face.

“What the hell?” he says under his breath.

“Now what?” I ask.

“That moron Hyde. He must have taken the trash when he left. The entire bag of trash without even going through it. What the hell is wrong with him? You don’t dump entire bags of garbage on the labs, and last I checked he wasn’t a detective. See what I mean about what I put up with?”

Marino gets on his phone as I open the door that leads outside, the same door I came in at 8:33 this morning. I know the exact time. I always make a point of knowing.

“What the hell did you do?” Marino is saying nastily, his earpiece winking blue as he holds up his phone so I can see Officer Hyde’s name in the display. “What do you mean you didn’t and you don’t know?” Marino is loud and accusatory. “You telling me it’s not with you or at the labs? That someone else made off with the kitchen trash and you got no idea? You realize what might be in that damn trash?

“Try this on for starters, asshole. It looks like she set the table for herself, meaning she was in here probably not all that long before she died and then something happened because she didn’t get around to eating.” Marino’s face is deep red. “Plus the Doc’s found an indication that someone may have tried to clean up blood in the foyer, maybe staging something. Meaning you need to get your ass back here and secure this place like a damn crime scene. I don’t give a flying fuck what the neighbors think of our tying this place up in a big yellow bow. Do it!”

“Ask him what was in the trash as best he knows,” I say as he continues to chew out Hyde over the phone.

“He doesn’t know.” Marino looks at me as he ends the call. “He says he didn’t touch the trash yet. He didn’t take it and has no idea what was in it. That’s what he says.”

“Well it appears someone took it.”

“He says he’ll find out. Either Vogel or Lapin must have it. Goddamn it!”

Vogel is the state trooper. Lapin must be the gray-haired Cambridge cop I’ve seen writing tickets around here, the one who went to a seminar and is now a bloodstain expert by his way of thinking.

“Maybe check with Lapin?” I ask. “Make sure he did something with the trash? Because this is disturbing.”

“I can’t imagine he would take it.” But Marino calls him next.

He asks him about the kitchen trash. He meets my eyes and shakes his head as he slips a pair of sunglasses out of a pocket of his cargo pants. Vintage wire-rim military aviator Ray-Bans I got him for his birthday last month. He puts them on, blacking out his eyes. He ends the call.

“Nope,” he says to me as he walks to the door that leads outside. “He says he’s not aware of anybody doing anything with the trash yet, and he didn’t touch it. Didn’t see it even. And he sure as hell didn’t take it with him. Well somebody did because it wasn’t like this when I first got here.”

We walk out into the sultry summer morning, the wind light and hot as it stirs the old trees in the side yard.

“Maybe the housekeeper took out the trash before she left.” I suggest the only other possibility that comes to mind. “Did anybody actually see her leave and notice if she had anything in her hands?”

“That’s a good question,” he says as we go down three wooden steps that end on the old brick driveway.

To one side of them flush against the house are two supercans and Marino opens the heavy dark green plastic lids.

“Empty,” he says.

“Garbage collection is weekly, probably Wednesdays here in mid-Cambridge, and today’s Friday,” I reply. “So Chanel Gilbert hasn’t put anything in the cans in several days? That’s a bit odd. Did you notice anything that might suggest she’d been out of town and just got back?”

“Not so far.” Marino wipes his hands on his shorts. “Might make sense though. She comes home and notices a light or two out and decides to change the bulbs.”

“Or that’s not what happened at all. If we consider other evidence we’re finding the story begins to change.” I remind him of what I discovered when I sprayed a reagent in the foyer. “Let’s make sure Lucy’s okay and we’ll get back here and finish up. If Hyde and others are going to secure the perimeter you might want to suggest they hold off searching the house any further until we return.”

“Good thing I have you to tell me how to do my job.”

“I’ve sent a message to my office. We’ll get the CT scan going right away and see if it tells us anything helpful,” I reply.

Parked on the brick driveway in front of my truck is the red Land Rover registered to Chanel Gilbert. I look through the driver’s window without touching anything. On the backseat is a bag of empty glass bottles, all of them the same and unlabeled, and the dash is dusty, the SUV filthy with pollen and trash from trees. Leaves and pine needles clog the space between the hood and the windshield. Cars don’t stay whistle clean around here. If people have garages they use them for storage.

“It looks like it’s been sitting outside for a while. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driven recently,” I start to say as I detect a distant thudding that is rapidly coming closer.

“Yeah.” Marino is distracted, staring at my right leg. “Just so you know you’re walking a lot worse than you were earlier. Maybe the shittiest I’ve seen you walk in weeks.”

“Good to know.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Thanks for pointing it out with your typical diplomacy.”

“Don’t get pissed at me, Doc.”

“Why would I?”

The helicopter is a beefy black twin engine at about fifteen hundred feet and several miles west, flying along the Charles River. It’s not Lucy’s Agusta with its Ferrari blue and silver paint job. I dig my keys out of my shoulder bag and try to walk without a hitch, without stiffness or a limp as Marino’s comments sting and make me self-conscious.

“Maybe I should drive.” He watches me skeptically.

“Nope.”

“You’ve been on your feet way too much today. You need to rest.”

“That’s not happening,” I say to him.

9

Fifteen miles northwest of Cambridge the road is barely wide enough for my big boxy truck.

White with dark tinted windows and built on a Chevy G 4500 chassis it’s basically an ambulance with the caduceus and scales of justice in blue on the doors. But there are no flashing lights. There’s no siren or PA system. I’m not in the business of offering emergency medical care. It’s a little late by the time I’m called, and I’m not expected to engage in high-risk aggressive driving. Certainly not here in the nation’s proud and proper birthplace where the shot was heard ’round the world during the Revolutionary War.

Concord, Massachusetts, is known for its famous former residents like Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson, and for hiking and horse trails and of course Walden Pond. The people here keep to themselves, often snobbishly so, and whelping horns, beacons, flashing red and blue strobes, and breaking the speed limit and outrunning traffic lights aren’t normal or welcome. They’re also not part of a medical examiner’s SOP.

But if I had a siren right now it would be screaming. I’d be encouraging everyone on the road to stay out of my way. It’s just a damn shame about the truck. I wish I were driving something inconspicuous. Even one of the CFC vans or SUVs. Anything but this. Everybody we pass is staring at the Grim Reapermobile, the double-wide, in Marino’s words. It’s about as common as a UFO in this low-crime part of the world where Lucy lives on her spectacular estate. Not that people don’t die around here. They have accidents, sudden cardiac catastrophes and take their own lives like anybody else. But those types of cases rarely require a mobile crime scene unit, and I wouldn’t be driving one if I weren’t coming directly from Chanel Gilbert’s house.

It would have made sense to swap out vehicles but there isn’t time. I don’t have the luxury of taking a shower and changing my clothes. I feel concern that’s fast becoming raw fear, and it ratchets me into a higher gear. Already I’m mobilizing, getting a determined iron-hard attitude edged in stoicism that will break bones. I’ve tried Lucy repeatedly and she doesn’t answer. I’ve tried her partner Janet. She’s not answering either, and their main home number continues to seem out of order.

“I hate to tell you but I smell it.” Marino cracks open his window and hot humid air seeps in.

“Smell what?” I pay attention to my driving.

“The stink you carried out of the house with you and trapped inside this damn truck.” He waves his hand in front of his face.

“I don’t smell anything.”

“You know what they say. A fox can’t smell its own.” Marino routinely butchers clichés and thinks an idiom is a stupid person.

“The saying is a fox smells its own hole first,” I reply.

He rolls down his window the rest of the way, and the sound of blowing air is soft because we’re moving slowly. I hear the helicopter. I’ve been hearing it ever since we left Cambridge and I’ve about decided we’re being followed, possibly by a TV news crew. Possibly the media has found out who the dead woman’s mother is, assuming the dead woman is really Chanel Gilbert.

“Can you tell if it’s a news chopper? It would make sense but sounds bigger than that,” I ask Marino.

“Can’t tell.” He’s craning his neck, looking up as best he can, and sweat is like dew on top of his shiny shaved head. “I can’t see it.” He stares out his side window at big trees, an overgrown hedge, a dented mailbox going by.

A red-tailed hawk circles in the distance, and I’ve always considered birds of prey a good sign, a positive messenger. They remind me to keep above the fray, to have a keen eye and follow my instincts. Another stab of pain knifes through my thigh, and no matter how many times I’ve dissected what happened I can’t figure out what I miscalculated, what I didn’t notice or could have done differently. I was a hawk that got hunted down like a dove. In fact I was a sitting duck.

“The thing is it’s not like her,” Marino is saying, and I realize I didn’t hear what he said right before it. “It’s not like you either, Doc. And I feel a need to point that out.”

“I’m sorry. Now what are we talking about?”

“Lucy and her so-called emergency. I keep wondering if you’ve misunderstood something. Because it doesn’t sound like her. I don’t like that we got up and walked out of a scene that may turn out not to be an accident.”

“It’s not like Lucy to have an emergency?” I glance over at him. “Anyone can have an emergency.”

“But I’m not understanding this and I swear I’m trying to. She texts you from her emergency line and that’s it? What did she say exactly? Hurry here now or something like that? Because like I said that doesn’t sound like her.”

I haven’t told him what the text said. Which was nothing. It was a video link. That’s all. Now it’s gone without a trace and he has no idea about any of it.

“Let me see the text.” He holds out a huge hand. “Let me see exactly what she said.”

“Not while I’m driving.” I dig myself deeper into what’s becoming a pit of lies, and I don’t like the feeling.

I resent the position I’ve been put in and I can’t find my way out. But I’m protecting people or at least that’s my intention.

“And she said what exactly? Tell me her exact words,” Marino badgers me.

“There was an indication of a problem.” I’m careful how I phrase it. “And now she’s not answering any of her phones. Janet isn’t either,” I repeat myself.

“Like I said it doesn’t sound like her. Lucy never acts like there’s a problem or that she needs anyone,” he says and it’s true. “Maybe someone stole her phone. Maybe it wasn’t her who sent the message. How do you know we’re not being set up so we get to her property and find out it’s an ambush?”

“Set up by whom?” I scrutinize my own voice.

I sound calm and in control. My tone doesn’t begin to belie my feelings.

“You know damn well who. It’s the kind of thing Carrie Grethen would do. So she can ambush us, lure us right where she wants us. If I see her I’m shooting on sight.” Marino isn’t making an empty threat. He means it 100 percent. “No questions asked.”

“I didn’t just hear you say that. You didn’t say it and don’t say it again,” I reply, and the diesel engine seems unnaturally loud.

I’m a white elephant on this road. I shouldn’t be on it, not driving a medical examiner’s truck, and I imagine if I saw it and didn’t know why it was headed to Lucy’s neighborhood …

Why isn’t she answering her phone? What has happened?

I won’t think about it. I can’t stand to think about it, and I’m bombarded by images I can’t shake from a video I never should have seen. At the same time I wonder what I really watched. How much footage did Carrie take out of context? How could she have had me in mind as a future audience? Or did she?

How could Carrie have known then what she would do almost two decades later? I don’t think it’s possible. Or maybe I just don’t want to believe she’s capable of executing her schemes so far in advance. That would be scary and she’s scary enough, and I obsessively sift through what’s happened today. I work my own morning like a crime scene, detail by detail, second by second. I dig, excavate and reconstruct as I drive with both hands on the wheel.

The video link landed on my phone at exactly 9:33 A.M., a little more than an hour ago. I recognized the alert from Lucy’s ICE line. It sounds like a C-sharp chord on an electric guitar, and immediately I pulled off my soiled gloves and stepped away from the body. I watched the recording and now it’s gone. Irretrievably gone. That’s what happened. That’s what I want to tell Marino. But I can’t and it’s making matters more difficult with him than they already were.

He doesn’t completely trust me. I’ve sensed it since my near miss in Florida.

Blame the victim.

Only I’m the victim this time, and in his mind it has to be my fault. That suggests I’m not who I used to be. At least not to him. He treats me differently. It’s difficult to pinpoint and define, subtle like a shadow that didn’t used to be there. I see it in front of me whenever he’s around, like the changing shades of blue and gray on a heaving sea. He blocks my sun. He makes reality shift when he shows up.

Doubt.

I think that’s mostly it. Marino doubts me. He hasn’t always liked me and in the beginning of my career he might have hated me and then for the longest time he loved me too much. But throughout it all he didn’t doubt my judgment. There’s plenty he criticizes and harps on but being erratic, irrational or unreliable was never on the list. Not trusting me as a professional is new and it doesn’t feel good. It feels damn terrible.

“The more I think about it the more I agree with you, Doc,” Marino continues to talk as I drive my big truck. “She hadn’t been dead all that long to be in such bad condition. I don’t know how we’re going to explain it to her mother. That and what lit up blue on the floor. A case that started out as no big deal and now there are questions, serious questions. And we can’t answer them. And why? Because for one thing we’re here in Concord and not in Cambridge getting to the bottom of things. How do I explain to Amanda Gilbert that you got a personal call and left her daughter’s body on the floor and just walked out?”

“I didn’t leave the body on the floor,” I reply.

“I meant it figuratively.”

“Literally the body is safely at my office and I didn’t just walk out. There’s nothing figurative about it. Everything has been left as is and we’ll be back soon. And it’s also not for you to explain, Marino, and at the moment I don’t intend to discuss details with Amanda Gilbert. Not to mention we need to confirm the dead woman’s identity first.”

“For the sake of the argument,” Marino replies, “let’s assume it’s Chanel Gilbert because who else would it be? Her mother is going to ask a shitload of questions.”

“My answer is simple. I’ll say we need to confirm identification. We need more details and reliable witness accounts. We need undisputed facts that tell us when her daughter was last seen alive, when she last e-mailed or made a phone call. That’s the missing link. We find that out and I have a better chance of knowing when she died. The housekeeper is important. She’s the one who may have the best information.”

I hear myself using words such as reliable, fact and undisputed. I’m being defensive because of what I sense from him. I feel his doubt. I feel it like a glowering mountain looming over me.

“I’m suspicious of the housekeeper to tell you the truth,” he says. “What if she’s involved and is the one who turned off the air-conditioning?”

“Was she asked about it?”

“Hyde said it was already like that when he got to the house. She didn’t seem to know anything about why it was so hot.”

“We need to sit down with her. What’s her name?”

“Elsa Mulligan, thirty years old, originally from New Jersey. Apparently she moved to this area when Chanel Gilbert offered her the job.”

“Why New Jersey?”

“That’s where they met.”

“When?”

“Does it matter?”

“Right now we have so many questions everything matters,” I reply.

“I got the impression Elsa Mulligan hadn’t worked for Chanel all that long. A couple years? I’m not sure. That’s about as much as I know since she wasn’t still at the house when I got there. I’m passing on what Hyde said. She told him that when she let herself in through the kitchen door she could smell this horrible odor like something had died, and yep something sure had. The house was hot as shit and she got a whiff and followed it into the foyer.”

“Did Hyde feel she was being truthful? What’s your gut tell you?”

“I’m not sure of anything or anyone,” Marino says. “Usually we can at least count on the dead body to tell us the truth. Dead people don’t lie. Just living people do. But Chanel Gilbert’s body isn’t telling us shit because the heat escalated decomp, confusing things and I wonder if a housekeeper would know something like that.”

“If she watches some of these crime shows she could.”

“I guess so,” he says. “And I don’t trust her. And I’m getting an increasingly bad feeling about the case and wish to hell we hadn’t walked out on it.”

“We didn’t walk out on it, and you’ll be the problem if you keep saying that.”

“Really?” He looks at me. “When’s the last time you did something like this?”

The answer is never. I don’t take personal calls in the middle of a scene and interrupt what I’m doing. But this was different. I heard an alert tone from Lucy’s emergency line, and she’s not the sort to overreact or cry wolf. I had no choice but to check on whether something terrible has happened.

“What about the burglar alarm being on when she arrived this morning?” I ask Marino. “You told me the housekeeper turned it off. Are we sure it was armed when she unlocked the door?”

“It was turned off at seven-forty-four, which is when she told Hyde she got there. Quarter of eight is exactly what she said.” Marino takes off his sunglasses, starts cleaning them on the hem of his shirt. “The alarm company log verifies the alarm was turned off at that time this morning.”

“What about last night?”

“It was set, disarmed and reset multiple times. The last time it was armed was close to ten P.M. The code was entered and after that none of the door contacts were broken. In other words it doesn’t appear someone set the alarm and then left the house. It’s like the person was in for the night. So maybe Chanel was still alive then.”

“Assuming she’s the one who reset the alarm. Does she have her own code that only she uses?”

“No. There’s just one and it’s shared. The housekeeper and Chanel used the same dumbass code. One-two-three-four. Sounds like Chanel wasn’t particularly security conscious.”

“With her Hollywood background that would surprise me. I wouldn’t expect her to be trusting. And one-two-three-four is usually the default code when a security system is installed. The expectation is you’ll change the code to something difficult to guess.”

“Obviously she didn’t bother.”

“We need to find out how long she’s lived there, how often she’s in Cambridge. While I didn’t have a chance to look around I can say the house didn’t feel all that lived in.” As I explain this I’m desperate to tell him the truth about why we’re rushing to Lucy’s house.

I want to show him the video but I can’t. Even if I were able to I couldn’t let him see it. Legally I wouldn’t dare. I can’t prove who sent it or why. The video could be a setup, a trap, maybe one cooked up by our own government. Lucy admits on film to being in possession of an illegal firearm, a fully automatic machine gun that Carrie accuses her of stealing from my husband Benton—an FBI agent. Any violation involving a Class III weapon is serious trouble, the very trouble Lucy doesn’t need. Especially now.

Over recent months the police and the Feds have been watching her. I don’t know how closely. Because of her prior relationship with Carrie almost everyone is concerned about what Lucy’s involvement might be with her. Or is Carrie even still alive? That’s the most inflammatory question I’ve been hearing this summer. Maybe Carrie really is dead. Maybe everything happening is being manufactured by my niece, and this thought leads back to Marino. If only I could show the video to him.

I continue arguing with myself that were it possible and prudent there would be no point. I know how he would react. He would be convinced that someone—probably Carrie—is harassing me. He would say she knows exactly how to push my buttons, to stick it to me, and the stupidest thing I could have done is what I’m doing now. I should have stayed put. I shouldn’t have reacted. I’ve let her get the best of me and there must be other nasty tricks to follow.

Let the games begin, I imagine Marino commenting, and I wonder what he’d say if he knew the date it was filmed.

July 11, 1997. His birthday seventeen years ago.

10

I don’t remember it. But birthdays are a big deal and I would have cooked him dinner, one of his favorite dishes, whatever he wanted.

It also was long ago when Lucy was at the FBI Academy, inside her dorm room breaking up with Carrie. Assuming the date is correct on the video file, the two of them had run the FBI obstacle course known as the Yellow Brick Road. Then Lucy worked out in the gym. I have no idea where I was and I don’t know where Marino might have been or what he was doing. So I ask him.

“That’s sure as hell out of the blue,” he replies. “Why do you want to know about my birthday in 1997?”

“Just tell me if you remember.”

“Yeah I do.” He looks over at me as I keep my eyes straight ahead. “I’m surprised you don’t.”

“Help me out. I have no clue.”

“You and me drove to Quantico. We picked up Lucy and Benton and went to the Globe and Laurel.”

The legendary Marine Corps hangout is suddenly vivid in my mind. I see the beer steins around the polished wooden bar, the ceiling covered with law enforcement and military patches from all over the world. Good food, good booze, and a huge seal over the door, the eagle, globe and anchor emblazoned with semper fidelis. We were part of the always faithful, the always loyal, and what went on in there stayed in there. I haven’t been in years, and then I envision something else. Marino drunk. It was ugly. I see him wild eyed in the incomplete darkness of the parking lot yelling, swearing at Lucy, his arms rigidly by his sides, fists clenched as if he might hit her.

“Something was wrong with Lucy that night.” I’m deliberately vague with him. “You two were having a bad time, got upset with each other. That much is coming back.”

“Let me refresh your memory,” he says. “She couldn’t eat anything. She had belly pain. Me? I figured it was her period.”

“Which you didn’t mind saying to her in front of everyone.”

“I thought she was having cramps and PMS. That’s what I remember about my birthday in 1997. I was really looking forward to the Globe but she freakin’ ruined it.”

“I believe she said she’d pulled an abdominal muscle on the obstacle course.” I know Lucy was in pain and I do recall that she wouldn’t let me check her.

“She was weird as a shithouse rat, a real asshole. A worse one than usual,” Marino says.

I remember the two of them shouting at each other by the car. She wouldn’t get in. She threatened to walk back to her dorm, was angry and in tears and now I might know why. She and Carrie had gone out to run the Yellow Brick Road earlier that day and not so serendipitously encountered the new agent in training, a former beauty queen named Erin. Lucy believed Carrie was cheating on her with Erin and it’s all there on film.

More pieces of a puzzle from the past, and I keep going back to my question. How could Carrie have known at the time that one day she would give me a ringside seat to what was going on in my niece’s private life? And would Carrie also have anticipated that I would begin to interpret and in some ways embellish the video even as I watched? Each second of it brought back information I’ve buried and blocked. Other details are new and that’s equally troubling. What else don’t we know about Carrie Grethen?

I think about her obsession with the harmful effects of pollution and the sun. I had no idea about her magical beliefs and pathological vanity. To my knowledge no one has ever mentioned she has a blood disorder, and all of it will hold Lucy in very poor standing with the authorities. She knew these details. Obviously she did because she’s talking about them in the recording I saw. But I’m not aware that she’s ever passed the information along to anyone, and then my mood dips deeper into the dark trough of guilt.

I was the moving force behind Lucy’s internship at Quantico. Carrie was telling the truth when she said I was instrumental in lining it up and had implemented strict guidelines for how the FBI was to deal with my teenaged niece. So I suppose it’s fair to say that it’s my fault Lucy ever met her mentor, her supervisor Carrie. The nightmare that would unfold is because of me. And now it’s unfolding further. And I wasn’t expecting this. And I honestly don’t know what to do except to get to Lucy as fast as I can and make sure she’s safe.

Marino pats his pockets for his cigarettes. This is the third time he’s lit up since we left Cambridge. If there’s a fourth time I might have to give in. I could use a cigarette right now. Badly. I try to shut out images from the video. I try to get past what I felt, which was like a spy, a traitor, a terrible aunt as I watched Lucy and Carrie together intimately and barely dressed, as I listened to Carrie’s disrespectful, disparaging comments about me. I wonder the same thing I always do. How much is deserved? How much is an accurate portrait of who and what I really am?

I’m so tense I might explode to the touch, and my right leg throbs, the ache spreading down my thigh to my calf muscle. Even the slightest adjustment of the accelerator is at a price. When I press the brake as I just did, I pay for it all right, and Marino hunches his shoulder and sniffs his shirt to make sure he doesn’t smell bad.

“It’s not me,” he decides. “Sorry about that, Doc. You stink like a decomp and might want to stay away from Lucy’s dog.”

I drive slowly around blind curves where round convex mirrors are mounted on thick old trees. I look and listen for anything coming.

The sun shines through heavy canopies, painting dapples of light and shadow that reshape themselves like clouds. The wind blusters, ruffling leaves, shaking them like pompoms, and creosote-stained utility poles with sagging black power lines make me lonely for music. The faces of old homes we pass are tired, and New England pines and hardwoods grow chaotically, the earth a thick compost of tangled vines, dead weeds and rotting leaves.

Buildings are paint-peeled. They lean and sag. I’ll never understand why scarcely anyone seems to care about how run-down and unhappy everything looks. Few Concord residents bother with landscaping or grass, and nothing is gated or fenced-in except Lucy’s estate. Dogs and cats wander at will and I have to look out for them when I drive here. In general that’s once or twice a month for dinner, brunch, a hike, or if Benton is out of town I might spend the night in the guest suite Lucy designed and furnished for me.

Up ahead a green snake as bright as an emerald is stretched out on a sunny patch of pavement, its head raised, feeling the vibrations of our approach. I slow down as it begins to undulate across the road, vanishing into the greenness of dense summer foliage. I speed up. Then I slow down for a squirrel, a plump gray one that stands on his hind legs, its whiskers twitching as if it’s scolding me before scampering off.

Next I come to a complete stop to let a panel-sided station wagon pass. It stops too and for an instant we’re at a stalemate. But I’m not backing up. I can’t possibly. It inches past with difficulty. I feel the driver’s unhappy stare.

“I think you’ve just ruined everybody’s day around here,” Marino says. “They’re wondering who got murdered.”

“Let’s hope the answer to that is nobody.” I glance at my phone for another text from Lucy’s ICE line, but there isn’t one as I continue along the road, the road that leads to her, the road I know so well and have come to hate.

Grass and weeds are chest-high up to the edge of the pavement, and heavy tree branches hang low, making visibility even worse. There are few streetlights, and more often than not when I show up I find some poor creature in harm’s way. I always stop. I’ll hurry along a turtle, picking it up if need be and setting it safely in the woods. I routinely watch for rabbits, foxes, deer, escaped ornamental chickens.

I’m on notice for baby raccoons that waddle out of the woods and lounge in the middle of the sun-warmed road, as innocent and sweet as cartoons. The other day after a hard rain I encouraged an army of green frogs to abandon their post. They seemed to grumble as I prodded them. There wasn’t the slightest gesture of gratitude for saving their lives. But then my patients don’t thank me, either.

I rumble over asphalt cracked and crumbling at the edges like a stale brownie, avoiding potholes deep enough to blow out tires and damage wheels, and I envision the low-slung supercars Lucy drives. I marvel just as I always do over how she manages Ferraris and Aston Martins in conditions like this. But she’s as nimble as a quarterback, streaking around anything that might hurt her or get in her way. Slaloming, fast cutting, my Artful Dodger stealthy niece.

Except something got her this time. I can see that instantly as a tight curve brings us to the entrance of her fifty-acre estate. The tall black iron gates are frozen open, and blocking her driveway is an unmarked white Ford SUV.

“Shit,” Marino says. “Here we go.”

I ease to a stop as an FBI agent in khaki pants and a dark polo shirt steps out of the SUV and approaches us. I don’t know him. He doesn’t look familiar. I reach inside my shoulder bag, my fingers brushing against the hard shape of my Rohrbaugh 9 mm in its pocket holster. I find the thin black leather wallet that holds my brass shield and credentials. I roll down my window and hear the loud thudding of the helicopter, a big one, probably the same twin engine I’ve been hearing only now it’s lower and slower. It’s much closer.

The agent is late twenties, early thirties, muscle-bound and poker-faced with veins roping his forearms and hands. He’s possibly Hispanic and definitely not from around here. New England natives in general have a certain way about them that’s typically low-key but observant. When they figure out you’re not the enemy they try to be helpful. This man isn’t going to be nice or accommodating, and he knows damn well who I am even if I don’t know him.

I have no doubt he’s aware that I’m married to Benton Wesley. My husband works out of the Boston Division. Probably this agent does too. The two of them probably are acquainted and may be friendly with each other. I’m supposed to think that none of it matters to the tough guy guarding my niece’s property. But the message he sends is exactly the opposite of what he intends. Disrespect is a symptom of weakness, of smallness, of an existential problem. By acting rude to me he’s showing me what he really thinks of himself.

I don’t give him the chance to make the first move. I open my wallet and display what’s inside. Kay Scarpetta, M.D., J.D. I’m duly appointed to the positions of chief medical examiner of Massachusetts and director of the Cambridge Forensic Center. I’m charged with the duty of investigating the cause of death pursuant to Chapter 38 of the General Laws of Massachusetts and in accordance with the Department of Defense Instruction 5154.30.

He doesn’t bother to read all that. He barely glances at my creds before returning my wallet as he stares past me at Marino. Then he stares at me, not directly in my eyes but between them. The trick isn’t original. I do the same thing in court when I’m faced with a hostile defense attorney. I’m quite skilled at looking at people without looking at them. This agent’s not so good at it.

“Ma’am, you need to turn around,” he says in a voice as flat as the expression on his face.

“I’m here to see my niece Lucy Farinelli,” I reply calmly, pleasantly.

“This property is under the control of the FBI.”

“The entire property?”

“You need to leave, ma’am.”

“The entire property?” I repeat. “That’s rather remarkable.”

“Ma’am, you need to leave right now.”

The more he says “ma’am” the more stubborn I get, and when he said “right now” he pushed me too far. There’s no going back. But I won’t show it and I avoid Marino’s eyes. I feel his aggression and refuse to look at him. If I do he’ll catapult out of the truck and get in the agent’s face.

“Do you have a warrant to access this entire property and search it?” I ask. “If the answer’s no and you don’t have a warrant for the entire property, then you need to move your vehicle and let me through. If you refuse, I’m going to call the Attorney General and I don’t mean of Massachusetts.”

“We have a search warrant,” he says with nothing in his tone, but his jaw muscles are flexing.

“A search warrant for fifty acres including the driveway, the woods, the shoreline, the dock and the water around it?” I know the FBI doesn’t have any such thing.

He says nothing, and I call Lucy’s ICE line again. I almost expect Carrie to answer but she doesn’t, thank God, and I can’t abide another possibility that is worse. What if Lucy sent the video to me? What on earth would that mean?

“You’re here,” Lucy surprises me by answering, and I’m reminded my techno wizard niece has surveillance cameras all over the place.

“Yes we’re at your gate,” I reply. “I’ve been trying you for the past hour. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Lucy says and it’s definitely her voice.

She’s quiet and subdued. I don’t detect a note of fear. What I sense is combat calm. She’s in a mode to defend herself, her family against the enemy, which in this case is the federal government.

“Yes we got here as quickly as we could. That’s what you wanted.” It’s as much of an allusion as I plan to make about the video link that landed on my phone. “I’m glad you let me know.”

“Excuse me?” It’s as much as she’ll say but the implication is loud and clear.

She doesn’t know about the text. She didn’t send it. She wasn’t expecting us to show up like this.

“Marino’s with me,” I say plenty loud. “Does he have permission to be on your property, Lucy?”

“Yes.”

“Very good. Lucy, you’ve just given Cambridge Police Investigator Pete Marino permission. You’ve given me, your aunt, the chief medical examiner permission. Both of us have your permission to be on your property,” I reply. “Is the FBI inside your house?”

“Yes.”

“Where are Janet and Desi?” I’m worried about Lucy’s partner and their little boy. They’ve been through quite enough.

“They’re here.”

“The FBI probably isn’t going to let us inside your house right now,” I inform her of what I’m sure she already knows.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. They should be sorry. Not you.” I stare at the agent, fixing on a point between his eyes and I’m further emboldened by my protectiveness of someone I love more than I can describe. “Meet us outside, Lucy.”

“They won’t like it.”

“I don’t care if they don’t like it.” I stare hard between the agent’s eyes. “You’re not under arrest. They haven’t arrested you, correct?”

“They’re looking for a reason. Obviously, they think they’re going to get me on something, anything. Littering. Jaywalking. Disturbing the peace. Treason.”

“Have they read you your rights?”

“We haven’t gotten that far.”

“They haven’t gotten that far because there’s no probable cause, and they can’t detain you if you’re not under arrest. Head out now. Meet us on the driveway,” I tell her, and we end the call.

Next the game of chicken starts. I hold my ground, sitting in my medical examiner’s monster white truck while the agent stands next to his dwarfed white Bureau SUV. He makes no move to get inside it. He intends to block the driveway, and I wait. I give him a minute, and I wait. Two minutes, three minutes and when nothing changes I shove the gear into drive.

“What are you doing?” Marino looks at me as if I might be a little crazy.

“Moving so traffic can get past.” It isn’t true. The truck is off the street by a good twenty feet.

Nosing forward, I cut the wheel at a tight angle. I park at a slant, almost perpendicular to the SUV, not even three inches from the rear bumper. If the agent backs up he’s broadsiding me. If he pulls ahead and turns around he’s no better off.

“Let’s go.” I cut the ignition.

Marino and I climb out and I lock the doors. Click. I drop the keys into my shoulder bag.

“Hey!” The agent is animated now, giving me direct eye contact, glaring like a vicious dog. “Hey! You’ve got me blocked in!”

“See how that feels?” I smile at him as we move past through the open gate, Lucy’s house about a quarter of a mile from here.

11

“I can’t believe you did that,” Marino says.

“Why not?” The relentless churning of the helicopter is building on my nerves, and I’m struggling.

Lucy’s house is on a rise high above the Sudbury River, and the driveway is steep in this direction. It’s not an easy walk. It’s not possible for me to keep up with Marino’s thoughtless long stride. He seems to forget what happened not that long ago. Maybe because he wasn’t there. Maybe because he’s in denial. It would be like him to suppose he could have saved me, and for his focus to be that instead of what I’m left with and how I feel.

“Well one thing’s for sure. There’s not a single cop in Massachusetts who would tow a medical examiner’s truck,” he says next.

“It weighs almost five tons and could have dead bodies inside. So not a good idea.” I’ve resorted to walking several yards behind him, forcing him to slow down and turn around to talk.

“Yeah no kidding.” He looks back at me, then up at the helicopter. “What the hell? This is what we’ve been hearing since Cambridge? You think it’s the same chopper?”

“Yes.”

“It’s no news crew, that’s for sure. It’s the damn Feds and they followed us from that scene to here. Why? What’s their interest in Chanel Gilbert or us?” he asks.

“You tell me.” Pain shoots through my thigh.

“Obviously they knew we were headed here.”

“I don’t know what they knew.”

“It’s like they escorted us to Lucy’s property.”

“I don’t believe that’s what they’re doing. I got the distinct impression a minute ago that we’re not welcome here. They may have followed us. But they’re certainly not escorting us.” I have to stop for a moment.

I rest my weight on my left leg, and the full symphony of pain in my right thigh subsides to a low drumroll, to the slow sawing of a cello. The high pitches are gone, and it’s those that are intolerable. The rest I’ve learned to live with, the quieter, deeper rhythm of hurt.

“Geez Doc.” Marino pauses. “You all right?”

“I’m the same.”

He stares straight up, and we resume walking. “Something fucking weird is going on,” he decides.

He has no idea how weird it is. “It’s serious. That’s for sure,” I reply.

The chopper is a beefy twin-engine Bell 429. Completely blacked out, Apache-ominous, and I note the mounted gyro stabilized camera under the nose, the thermal imaging system or FLIR that looks like a radar dome on the belly. I recognize the special operations platforms known as cargo racks that are designed to move SWAT or members of the FBI’s elitist Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). There are going to be at least half a dozen agents on bench seats inside the cabin, ready to rappel down and swarm the property on command.

“Maybe they’re spying on you,” Marino says, and his comment reminds me of other types of spying that I can’t stop thinking about.

For an instant I see Carrie inside Lucy’s dorm room. I see her piercing eyes and startlingly short bleached hair. I feel her cold-blooded aggression. I sense her as if she’s within reach, and she might be.

“Then they should think of something a little less obvious than a tactical helicopter.” I continue to say one thing while my mind is on another as we follow a circular driveway long enough to jog on.

In the center are acres of meadowland splashed with wildflowers where huge granite sculptures of fantastic creatures seem to wander and make themselves at home. We’ve already walked past a dragon, an elephant, a buffalo, a rhinoceros, and just now a mother bear with her cubs, sculpted from native stone out west somewhere and set in place by a crane. Lucy doesn’t have to worry about anyone stealing her tons of art, and I watch for her as the monotonous noise continues overhead, rotor blades batting air. Thump-Thump-Thump-Thump.

I’m hot and sticky and hurting as I walk, and the sound is maddening. THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP! I love helicopters except for this one. I feel hateful as if it lives and breathes and we’re personal enemies. Then I do a systems check of myself, concentrating on my hearing, my vision, my breathing, the pain jolting my leg with each step, with each shift of balance.

Focusing keeps me centered and calm, and I feel the hot pavement through the soles of my ankle-high boots, and the sunlight soaking into the soft fabric of my cotton tactical shirt. Sweat is cool as it trickles down my chest, my belly, my inner thighs. I’m conscious of the pull of gravity as I push my way uphill, and my body seems to weigh twice what it does. Moving around on land is heavy and slow, and when I was underwater I weighed nothing at all. I floated.

I floated and floated, drawn deeper into blackness, and it isn’t true what they say about moving toward the light. I didn’t see a light, not a bright one, not the smallest one. It’s the darkness that seeks to claim us, to seduce us like a drugged sleep. I wanted to give in. It was the moment I’ve always waited for, the moment I’ve lived for and that more than anything else is what I can’t get past.

I met death on the bottom of the sea as silt billowed in a cloud and a dark thread fled up from me, dissipating in my bubbles. I realized I was bleeding and had the irrational desire to take the regulator out of my mouth. Benton says I did, that as soon as he’d place the regulator back in I’d pull it out again and again. He had to hold it in place. He had to fight off my grabbing hands and force me to breathe, force me to live.

He’s since explained that removing the regulator is a typical response when one panics underwater. But I don’t remember panicking. I remember wanting to shed my buoyancy control device (BCD), my regulator and scuba tank, to free myself because I had a reason. I want to know what it was. It’s on my mind constantly. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about why dying seemed like the best idea I’ve ever had.

Lucy appears around a bend.

She walks briskly toward us, and the thunderous noise seems suddenly louder. Of course it’s my imagination. But what she’s wearing isn’t. The shapeless old gray gym shorts and T-shirt have the FBI ACADEMY boldly emblazoned on them, and it’s as deliberate as waving a battle flag. It’s like showing up in uniform after you’ve been court-martialed or wearing an Olympic medal after you’ve been stripped of it. She’s flipping off the FBI, and maybe something else underlies her behavior.

I stare at her as if she’s a ghost from the past. I was just watching her teenaged self inside her FBI Academy dorm room, and I almost wonder if my eyes are deceiving me. But the way she’s dressed stays the same, and she could pass for being that young again. It’s as if the Lucy in the videos is walking toward me in real time, a Lucy in her midthirties now. But she doesn’t look it. I doubt she’ll ever look her age.

Her energy is fiercely childlike, her body really hasn’t changed, and her discipline about being fit and vital isn’t vanity. Lucy lives like an endangered creature that twitches at the slightest movement or sound and hardly sleeps. She may be volatile but she’s sensible. She’s steely logical and rational, and as I step up my pace to meet her, the searing pain reminds me that I’m not dead.

“Your limping is worse.” Her rose gold hair flares in the sun, and she’s tan after a recent trip to Bermuda.

“I’m fine.”

“No you’re not.”

The expression on her chiseled pretty face is difficult to read but I recognize tension in the firm set of her lips. I sense her dark mood. It sucks up the bright light around her. When I hug her, she’s clammy.

“Are you all right? Are you really?” I hold on to her a second longer, relieved she’s not injured or in handcuffs.

“What are you doing here, Aunt Kay?”

I smell her hair, her skin and detect the swampy salty odor of stress. I sense her state of high alert in the pressure of her fingers and her constant scan, her eyes moving everywhere. She’s looking for Carrie. I know it. But we aren’t going to discuss it. I can’t ask if she’s aware of the video link sent to my phone or tell her that it appears she was the one who sent it. I can’t let on that I watched a film clip secretly recorded by Carrie. In other words, I’m now an accessory to Carrie Grethen’s spying and who knows what else.

“Why is the FBI here?” I ask Lucy instead.

“Why are you?” She’s going to push for an answer. “Did Benton drop a hint that this was going to happen? Nice of him. How the fuck does he look at himself in the mirror?”

“He didn’t tell me anything at all. Not even by omission. And why all the swearing? Why must you and Marino swear so much?”

“What?”

“I’m just mindful of all the profanity. Every other word is fuck,” I reply as an emotional surge rolls over me.

It’s as if the Lucy I’m facing is nineteen again, and I’m suddenly shaky inside, overwhelmed by the loss of time, by the betrayal of nature as it gives us life and instantly begins to take it back. Days become months. Years become a decade and longer, and here I am on my niece’s driveway remembering myself at her age. As much as I knew about death I really didn’t know that much about life.

I just thought I did, and I’m aware of how I must look as I limp along on Lucy’s property as it’s being raided by the FBI two months after I was shot with a spear gun. I’m thinner and my hair needs cutting. I’m slow and at war with inertia and gravity. I can’t silence Carrie’s voice in my mind and I don’t want to hear it. I feel a stab of pain and suddenly I feel angry.

“Hey. You okay?” Lucy is watching me carefully.

“Yes. I’m sorry.” I look up at the helicopter and take a deep breath, calm again. “I’m just trying to sort through what’s going on.”

“Why are you here? How did you know to be here?”

“Because you sent an urgent message?” It’s Marino who answers. “How else would we know?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You know.” His vintage Ray-Bans bore into her. “You let us know you have some sort of emergency and we dropped what we’re doing. We literally left a damn dead body on the floor.”

“Not exactly,” I reply.

“What?” She seems genuinely amazed and baffled.

“A text message landed on my phone,” I explain. “From your In Case of Emergency line.”

“I promise it wasn’t from me. Maybe from them.” She means the FBI.

“How?”

“I’m telling you it wasn’t from me. So you got a message? And that’s why you suddenly decided to show up here in a crime scene truck?” She doesn’t believe us. “Why the hell are you really here?”

“Let’s focus on why they are.” I glance up at the helicopter.

“Benton,” she again accuses. “You’re here because he tipped you off.”

“No. I promise.” I pause on the driveway, resting for a second. “He indicated nothing to either of us. He has nothing to do with why I decided to rush here, Lucy.”

“What did you do?” Marino has a way of acting as if everybody is guilty of something.

“I’m not sure why they’re here,” Lucy replies. “I’m not sure of anything except I got suspicious early this morning that something was up.”

“Based on?” Marino asks.

“Someone was on the property.”

“Who?”

“I never saw whoever it was. There was nobody on the cameras. But motion sensors went off.”

“Maybe a small animal.” I start walking again very slowly.

“No. Nothing was there and yet something was. Plus someone’s in my computer. That’s been going on for about a week. Well I shouldn’t say someone. I think we can figure out who it is.”

“Let me guess. Considering who’s dropped by for an unexpected visit.” Marino doesn’t disguise how much he hates the FBI.

“Programs opening and closing on their own and taking too long to load,” she says. “The cursor moving when I’m not touching it. Plus my computer was running slow and the other day it crashed. No big deal. Everything is backed up. Everything vital is encrypted. It must be them. They’re not particularly subtle.”

“Anything leaked or corrupted?” I ask. “Anything at all?”

“There doesn’t appear to be. An unauthorized user account was created by someone pretty savvy but no genius, and I’m on top of all that, monitoring unusual log-ins, all e-mails sent, trying to figure out what the hacker or hackers want. It’s not a sophisticated attack or we wouldn’t know about it until it’s too late.”

“But it’s the FBI for sure?” Marino asks. “I mean it would make sense since here they just showed up with a warrant.”

“I can’t say with certainty who’s rooting me. But it’s probably them or related to them. The FBI often uses outside servers when they’re investigating cybercrime. And alleged cybercrime is their excuse for snooping. You know for example if they have reason to suspect I’m laundering money or surfing kiddy porn sites, shit like that. So if it’s them, they’ll say they were investigating me for something totally trumped-up just so they can spy.”

“What about my office?” I ask about the most problematic scenario. “Is it safe? Is there any chance our computers have been breached?”

Lucy is the systems manager and I.T. administrator for the CFC computer network. She does all the programming. She forensically examines all electronic and data storage devices turned in as evidence. While she may be the firewall that surrounds the most sensitive information associated with any death, she’s also the biggest vulnerability.

Should the wrong person get past her, it would be catastrophic. Cases could be compromised before they ever reach court. Charges could be dropped. Verdicts could be overturned. Thousands of murderers, rapists, drug dealers and thieves could be released from prison in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

“Why all of a sudden?” I ask her. “Why the interest right now, assuming it’s the FBI?”

“It started when I got back from Bermuda,” she says.

“What the fuck did you do?” Marino demands with his usual tact.

“Nothing,” she says. “But they’re determined to fabricate a case that sticks.”

“What case?”

“Something,” she says. “Anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already convened a grand jury, in fact you can count on it. In fact I’m convinced. The Feds have the nasty little habit of raiding a place after they’ve already got a grand jury ready to indict you. They don’t base a case on the evidence. They base the evidence on the case they’re determined to make even if it’s wrong. Even if it’s a lie. Do you know how rare it is for a grand jury not to indict someone? Less than one percent of the time. They aim to please the prosecutor. They hear only one side of the story.”

“Where can we talk?” I don’t want to continue this conversation in her driveway.

“They can’t hear us. I just knocked out the audio for that lamp and that one and the next one.” She points at copper lampposts. “But let’s go someplace we don’t have to worry about it. My own personal Bermuda Triangle. They’re watching and all of a sudden we vanish from their radar.”

The agents searching her house are monitoring us on her security cameras, and I feel a rush of frustration. Lucy’s battle with the Feds is as old as wars in the Middle East. It’s a power struggle, a clash that’s gone on so long I’m not sure anyone remembers exactly what started it. She was probably one of the most brilliant agents the Bureau ever hired, and when they eventually ran her off, that should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. It never will be.

“Follow me,” she says.

12

We trudge through bright green grass spattered with poppies as red as blood and brazen with gold sunflowers, white daisies, orange butterfly weed and purple aster.

It’s as if I’m wading through a Monet painting, and beyond a shady fragrant stand of spruces we emerge into a low-lying area I’ve never seen before. It looks like a place of meditation or an outdoor church with stone slab benches and sculpted rock outcrops evocative of a pond filled by running water formed of river stones. I can’t see the house or the driveway from here, nothing but rolling grass and flowers and trees and the constant whomping of the helicopter.

Lucy takes a seat on a boulder while I choose a stone bench in dapples of light shining through dogwoods. Hard unyielding surfaces aren’t my first choice these days, and I sit down very carefully, doing what I can to diminish my discomfort.

“Has this always been here?” I ask, and the light moves on my face as branches move in the wind. “Because I’ve never seen it.”

“It’s recent,” Lucy says and I don’t ask how recent.

Since mid-June, I suspect. Since I almost died. I look around and don’t see any sign of cameras, and guarding her rock garden is another sculpted dragon, this one small and comical lounging on a huge chunk of rose quartz. Its red garnet eyes stare right at me as Marino tries the bench across from mine, shifting his position several times.

“Shit,” he says. “What are we? Cave people? How about wooden benches or chairs with cushions? Ever thought of that?” He’s dripping sweat in the heat and humidity, and he flaps irritably at bugs and checks his socks for ticks. “Jesus! Did you forget to spray out here?” His dark glasses turn on Lucy. “There’s damn mosquitoes everywhere.”

“I use a garlic spray, pet and people safe. Mosquitoes hate it.”

“Really? These must be friggin’ Italian mosquitoes. Because they love it.” He slaps at something.

“Steroids, cholesterol, large people who give off more carbon dioxide than the rest of us,” Lucy says to him. “Plus you sweat a lot. Hanging garlic around your neck probably wouldn’t help.”

“What does the FBI want?” I look up at the helicopter hovering at no more than a thousand feet. “What exactly? We need to figure this out while we have a few minutes to talk privately.”

“Their first stop was my gun vault,” she replies. “So far they’ve packed all of my rifles and shotguns.”

Carrie is suddenly in my mind again. I see her inside the dorm room, the MP5K strapped around her neck.

I ask Lucy, “Do they seem interested in any gun in particular?”

“No.”

“They must be looking for something in particular.”

“Everything I have is legal and has nothing to do with the Copperhead shootings,” Lucy says, “which they damn well know were committed with the Precision Guided Firearm recovered from Bob Rosado’s yacht. They confirmed it’s the weapon two months ago so why are they still looking? If they’re looking for anyone it should be his rotten little shit of a son, Troy. He’s at large. Carrie’s at large. He’s probably the latest Clyde to her Bonnie, and where’s the FBI? Here on my property. This is harassment. It’s about something else.”

“I got a couple shotguns you can borrow,” Marino offers. “And a thumpin’ four-fifty Bushmaster.”

“That’s all right. I’ve got more than they’re bargaining for,” she says. “They have no idea what they’re missing, what they’re walking right past.”

“Please don’t poke a stick at them,” I warn her. “Don’t give them cause to hurt you.”

“Hurt? I think hurt is the point and it’s already started.” Her bright green eyes look at me. “They want me hurt. They intend to leave me unprotected so I can’t take care of my family, my home. They’re hoping all of us will end up defeated, annihilated, at each other’s throats. Better yet, dead. They want all of us murdered.”

“You need something all you gotta do is ask,” Marino says. “With the likes of Carrie on the loose you should have more firepower than just your handguns.”

“They’ll take those next if they haven’t already,” she replies, and it really is outrageous that they listed handguns on the warrant. “Plus they’re bagging up all of my kitchen cutlery, the Shun Fuji santoku knives you gave to us,” she says to me, adding yet another outrage.

As far as we know, Carrie Grethen’s recent deadly rampage includes a stabbing with a tactical knife. There’s no evidence, not even a hint that Lucy had anything to do with it, and her guns and the cutlery are completely inconsistent with the characteristics of the murder weapons. To clean out her gun vault, her kitchen is absurd.

For an instant Carrie’s recent victims parade through my mind, seemingly random people until I realized each of them had a connection to me, even if remotely. They never knew what hit them, except for Rand Bloom, the sleazy insurance investigator she stabbed and left on the bottom of a swimming pool. He would have had a moment if not several of terror, panic and pain.

But Julie Eastman, Jack Segal, Jamal Nari and Congressman Rosado didn’t suffer. They were going about their business one second and then nothingness, annihilation, and I envision the Carrie I saw on video touching the back of her neck between the first and second cervical vertebrae. Even then she knew about the sweet spot for a hangman’s fracture and that such a catastrophic injury literally causes instant death.

She’s back. She’s alive and more dangerous than she ever was and even as I’m thinking this I’m washed over by doubt. What if all of us are being tricked? I can’t prove I’ve seen or heard from Carrie Grethen since the 1990s. She’s left no real evidence that connects her with a crime spree that began late last year. What if it’s not her who sent the video to me from Lucy’s phone?

I look at my niece.

“From the beginning,” I say to her. “What happened?”

Lucy sits on her big rock and explains that this morning at exactly 9:05 her house phone rang.

The number is unlisted and unpublished but that wouldn’t stop the FBI from getting it, and it doesn’t stop her from foiling their efforts and then some. She has communication technology that can easily outsmart anyone attempting to catch her by surprise, and in a matter of seconds she knew the identity of the caller was Special Agent Erin Loria, a recent transfer to the FBI’s Boston Division, thirty-eight years old, born in Nashville, Tennessee, black hair, brown eyes, five-ten, 139 pounds—and as I hear Lucy say this I don’t show my shock.

I don’t let on that I know who Erin Loria is. I don’t react as Lucy goes on to explain that when Erin was in range of the security cameras, facial recognition software verified that she is indeed Erin Loria, a former beauty queen, a graduate of Duke University and its law school before she signed on with the Bureau in 1997. She was a street agent for a while, married to a hostage negotiator who left the Bureau and joined a law firm. They lived in Northern Virginia, had no kids, divorced in 2010, and soon after she married a federal judge twenty-one years her senior.

“Which one?” Marino asks.

“Zeb Chase,” Lucy says.

“No way. Judge NoDoz?”

He’s called that for the opposite reason people might expect, and I remember his small predatory eyes beneath heavy lids as he slumped on the bench, his chin almost on his chest like a black-robed vulture waiting for something to die. It was easy to misconstrue his posture as relaxed or half asleep when in fact he couldn’t have been more alert or aggressive, waiting for attorneys, for expert witnesses to make a miscalculated move. Then he would dive-bomb, snatching them up to swallow alive.

In my earliest years in Virginia when he was still a U.S. attorney, we worked many cases together. Even though my findings usually supported the prosecution, Zeb Chase and I often clashed. I seemed to annoy him and he got only more hostile once he was on the bench. To this day I have no idea why, and I distantly recall that he might just hold the record for the judge who most frequently threatened to hold me in contempt. Now he’s married to Erin Loria who has her own history with Lucy and therefore de facto has one with me. My internal weather vane moves. It points. I can’t tell at what. Maybe I don’t want to know.

“So Special Agent Loria moved to Boston and her husband the judge is still in Virginia,” Marino assumes.

“It’s not like he can pick up and come after her,” Lucy replies and she’s right.

Judge Chase’s duty station would be the Eastern District of Virginia, where he will hold his seat until he resigns, dies or is removed from office. He can’t pick up and relocate to Massachusetts even though his wife did. At least I can be grateful for that.

“Are you certain of the year Erin Loria started with the FBI?” I ask Lucy. “Nineteen-ninety-seven? As in the year you were there?”

“Not the only year I was there,” she says as I think about Erin Loria being married to a federal official who was appointed by the White House.

That’s not good. It’s not good at all. She’ll claim that he has no more influence in her cases than Benton has in mine. She’ll swear His Honor has no professional involvement with her, that both of them stay completely within the legal boundaries and guidelines. Of course it isn’t true. It never is.

“I realize you were at Quantico before and after 1997,” I’m commenting to Lucy as my thoughts continue to slam into each other like billiard balls. “That once you got started with the FBI you never really left.”

“Until they ran me out of Dodge,” she says as if it’s nothing that for all practical intents and purposes she was fired. “Even before I was an agent I was there summers, holidays, most weekends, every spare minute I had. You probably remember. I’d start arranging my classes so I could leave Charlottesville early Thursday morning and not come back until late Sunday. I was at Quantico more than I was in college.”

“Jesus,” Marino mutters. “Erin Loria was there when you were. And it’s not exactly a big place.”

“That’s right,” Lucy says.

“Another blast from the past just like Carrie. What did you step in during that informative time in your life, huh? Some Super Glue-like dog shit that you can’t clean off?”

He means formative, but Lucy and I ignore it. We don’t crack a smile. Not now as we perch on our hard, unforgiving seats in Lucy’s place of meditation, her church, her Stonehenge.

“You step in some special brand of it?” he’s saying. “And you not only still have it on your damn shoes but you’re tracking it everywhere for the rest of us to step in.”

“Which session?” I can’t believe this is happening.

“We overlapped,” she says. “Erin was at Quantico while I was an intern at ERF, while Carrie was there, yes. That’s true. And they were familiar with each other.”

“How familiar?” I ask it blandly.

“Familiar enough.” Lucy doesn’t flinch. “They got pretty friendly.”

“Jesus Christ.” Marino reaches around to his back and scratches another itch, real or perceived. “It’s hard to imagine that’s a coincidence in light of everything else. Whatever you sprayed out here doesn’t work, just so you know. I’ve got bites, big ones. You can see them from friggin’ outer space.”

“Erin and I were on the same floor in Washington Dorm but I don’t remember her very well except she was dismissive of me.” Lucy is talking as Marino continues to claw and swat and bitch. “I didn’t know her firsthand. I didn’t make friends with any of the new agents in training, not in that session, only in my own, which wasn’t until two years later. Mostly I recall that she was Miss Tennessee. It’s as far as she got in her beauty queen career, totally bombed the talent portion of the Miss America pageant, then went to law school, then applied to the FBI Academy. Great for undercover when you look like a Barbie doll, I guess. Well, hey. It gets you married to a judge, I guess. It gets you invitations to White House Christmas parties.”

“You were at Quantico at the same time. Meaning Erin would be familiar with your background beyond what would be in your personnel file.” I allude to the specter of Carrie.

Lucy doesn’t say a word.

“Carrie Grethen,” I’m out with it. “Erin would know about her for a number of reasons. Erin would know exactly who and what Carrie is.”

“Now she would,” Lucy says. “That’s for sure. But in 1997 no one had any idea what they were dealing with. Including me.”

As far as we know, Carrie hadn’t committed murder back then. She wasn’t a Ten Most Wanted criminal. She wasn’t locked up in a forensic psychiatric facility for the criminally insane and hadn’t escaped from it yet, and she hadn’t allegedly been killed in a helicopter crash off the coast of North Carolina. Certainly when she worked at the ERF she wasn’t a known felon or presumed dead, and she and Erin Loria might have been allies. They might have been friends. They might have had an affair and still be in communication, and what a bizarre notion that is to contemplate.

One of the most dangerous fugitives on the planet might be on amicable terms with an FBI agent married to a federal judge who was appointed by the president of the United States. My mind speeds through possible connections, adding two plus two and maybe getting four. Maybe getting five or some other wrong answer. Or maybe there’s no answer period.

But it bothers me considerably that even as Erin Loria was making her way to Lucy’s property barely two hours ago, I was sent a text message that included a link to a covert video recording Carrie made in Lucy’s dorm room while the former Miss Tennessee-turned-FBI-agent was living right down the hall. Worse, Carrie and Lucy argued about her in the recording.

“Hold up a second,” Marino says to Lucy. “Before we drink the Kool-Aid and start imagining all sorts of crazy crap let’s go back to when your house phone rang. Your software collected data on who it was. You discovered Special Agent Loria was leading the charge and then what?”

“Literally?”

“Blow by blow.”

“I knew she was in a vehicle moving fourteen miles per hour along the same road you were just on.” Lucy pulls up her legs, planting her feet on the boulder, wrapping her arms around her bent knees.

None of us can get comfortable in her outdoor church. Except the sun feels good even if the humidity is oppressive, and the stirring air is sluggish but pleasant when it touches my damp skin. It’s the kind of hot heavy weather that promises a violent storm, and one is predicted for this afternoon. I look up at thick dark clouds advancing from the south, and I fix on the helicopter loudly hovering near the water, hanging in the air like a huge black Orca float in a Macy’s parade.

“I knew when she placed the call she was about fifty yards from my gate,” Lucy describes, “and when I asked her what I could help her with she informed me the FBI had a warrant to search my house and any outbuildings associated with it. She ordered me to open the gate and leave it open, and within minutes five Bureau cars including a K-nine were in front of the house.”

“What time did you notice the helicopter?” I continue to watch it hover rock solid, now over dense woods to the left of Lucy’s house, which we can’t see from where we’re sitting.

“About the same time you rolled up.”

“Let me get this straight.” Marino frowns. “For some reason an FBI chopper just happened to be in Cambridge where we were working a case? And next it just happened to follow us here? Okay. Now I’m getting really hinky, you know, one of those really bad feelings that makes my hair stand up …”

“You don’t have any hair,” Lucy says.

“What bullshit are they pulling?” Marino glares up at the sky as if the FBI is God.

“Well they sure as hell aren’t going to tell me,” she says. “I don’t know where they’ve been flying or for what reason, and there hasn’t been time for me to check. After their cars showed up I no longer had privacy. It wasn’t a smart idea for me to check with ATC or tune into their freq to hear who was buzzing around and maybe why. Plus I had a lot of other things to attend to. The K-nine in particular is upsetting—intentionally. What I call being a real asshole.”

“Who?”

“Erin, I can only conclude. If she’s gathered any information about me she realizes that I have an English bulldog named Jet Ranger who’s so old he can hardly walk or see, and to have a Belgian Malinois searching the house would scare the hell out of him. Not to mention scaring Desi. Not to mention hassling Janet to the point she was about to deck someone. This is personal.”

Her green eyes are intense. She holds my stare.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that.” I’m cautious about what I say. “I wouldn’t take any of this personally,” I advise my niece even as I wonder about her. “All of us need to be coldly objective and think clearly right now.”

“It feels like someone is settling a score.”

“I admit I’m wondering the same thing,” Marino says.

“This is planned.” Lucy seems convinced. “It’s been planned for a while.”

“What score and who?” I inquire. “Not Carrie.”

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