Dust by Patricia Cornwell
“Bingo,” he says sarcastically. “One more present to piss us off.”
“That’s not why he left it.” Benton is matter-of-fact.
He doesn’t look surprised or particularly interested as Marino pulls out a wallet. He opens it and produces Gail Shipton’s driver’s license.
“If he took her someplace first, explaining why her clothes are gone, then why leave this here?” Marino studies the license, his jaw muscles clenched. “Why not throw it in a dumpster somewhere?”
In the photograph she’s in her late teens or early twenties when her hair was much shorter and she had bangs. She’s wearing heavy framed glasses that mask her prettiness, and her expression is self-conscious, her smile frozen, her eyes askance. She doesn’t have the open, friendly face of someone who is accessible or warm, but perhaps the camera made her shy.
“His motivation isn’t about pissing us off,” Benton says as Marino goes through the wallet’s compartments. “It’s about showing off, and what he does is deeply personal. It’s about what he feels and not about us.”
“How is leaving her pocketbook showing off?” Marino asks.
“It’s brazen. He’s assisting with the ID. He’s helping us because that gives him a rush.” Benton says and it tells me he’s found the victims’ IDs in the other cases.
“I don’t see it,” Marino says.
“It sounds like you’re talking about some sort of psychopath, like a serial killer.” Machado looks impressed and at the same time incredulous. “I’m sure as hell not passing that up the chain unless we’re sure.”
“I wouldn’t suggest you pass anything up the chain or anywhere else right now,” Benton replies.
“The trial that’s about to start is what we should be considering, you ask me,” Machado says in a tone meant to remind us that his police department is in charge. “You know, maybe someone wanted her dead. I don’t know why you’d be thinking some sort of deranged psychopath. I sure don’t want a rumor like that getting out. If we’re going to involve the FBI, there need to be some ground rules.”
He stares at Benton and I can imagine Machado’s unspoken thought. The FBI hasn’t formally been invited into this investigation. Benton is being given free rein as a courtesy simply because he showed up. He’s my husband and they know him and I sense doubt again. I have a feeling Marino has been badmouthing him to Machado, flaunting himself, by disparaging Benton.
“Credit cards.” Marino leaves them in their slots. “AmEx, Visa, ATM, maybe she had others. No cash. We’ll process this for DNA, for prints.”
“Then if she had cash, he took it, which seems to argue against someone killing her because of the trial coming up,” Machado considers. “Not that I’m an expert in professional hits but taking her money doesn’t fit with what I know. Usually you don’t want any connection with the victim, am I correct?” He directs this at Benton. “Just offering that thought as a possibility since Gail Shipton was involved in a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit.”
“Hit men usually don’t steal.” Benton watches Marino go through the handbag, his gloved fingers lightly touching items by the tips and edges, impacting as little surface area as possible.
A compact. Lipstick. Mascara. Black ballpoint pens. A pack of tissues. Throat lozenges. A round hairbrush.
“I’m just putting it out there,” Machado says. “It sure as hell is convenient for the defendants that she’s suddenly dead.”
“Usually contract killers have as little physical contact with their targets as possible,” Benton replies. “They don’t conspicuously leave evidence such as a tool or a pocketbook for the police to find. They have no interest in showing off or attempting to impress those working the case. Quite the contrary. Typically, they don’t want to draw attention to themselves and they’re not delusional.”
“This guy’s delusional?”
“I’m saying successful contract killers aren’t.”
Marino lifts out a black notebook, pocket-sized, with a green elastic band around it that he slips off.
“So that brings us back to the possibility that what happened to her could be random,” Machado says. “A motive that involves robbery.”
Marino flips through pages that look like graph paper, white with a fine grid, as if intended for math or diagrams. The notebook is filled with small, neat handwriting and precise columns of dates and numbers that seem coded and mysterious. The writing ends midway through the notebook with an entry made in black ink:
61: INC 12/18 1733-1752 ( <18m) REC 20-8-18-5-1-20
“If you don’t mind?” I take a picture of it with my phone in its military-grade case that is similar to Gail Shipton’s phone and similar to Lucy’s.
“Looks like a log of some sort. Maybe something the lawyers were making her keep track of.” Marino tucks the notebook back inside the handbag and next produces a small sheet of stickers, each one red with a white X in the center. “Got no idea.” He tucks the stickers back inside.
I think of the last telephone call Gail Shipton received, the one from a blocked number.
I interpret the note as meaning the call was INC, or incoming, yesterday at 5:33 p.m., ending slightly less than eighteen minutes later, which was when Gail would have been behind the Psi Bar, standing near a dumpster in the dark.
While I can’t be certain how to interpret the rest of the entry, REC may indicate the call was recorded, and it’s possible the string of numbers is an encryption, and I imagine Gail Shipton ending the call and pausing long enough to make the entry in her notebook. Maybe she used a flashlight app on her smartphone so she could see what she was doing, and I continue forming an impression of her. Possibly introverted and insecure. Precise, deliberate, possibly rigid and obsessive-compulsive.
I imagine her preoccupied with her niggling, coded recordkeeping and not necessarily aware of what was going on around her. Was a car parked back there? Did someone pull up and she paid no attention? What I do know is that she called Carin Hegel next and the connection was quickly lost. At around six p.m. Gail must have encountered her killer.
“When you looked at Gail’s phone,” I say to Marino, “did you notice if there were any recordings on it? Video or audio, for example?”
“Nothing like that. Just incoming and outgoing calls, e-mails, text messages,” he replies distractedly as he listens to Machado and Benton go at it with each other politely but stubbornly.
“She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Machado asserts. “She ducked out of the bar to make a phone call and there he was, sitting in his car.”
“That part I don’t accept,” Benton replies.
“And he saw her, an easy target, a victim of opportunity.”
“She was exactly where he knew she’d be.”
“How do you know robbery wasn’t a motive?” Machado is getting testy.
“I’m not saying he didn’t take money or souvenirs.” Benton repeats what he’s said several times now. “Human behavior isn’t just one thing. There can be a mixture of traits and inconsistencies.”
“He may have taken her jewelry,” I point out. “Unless she wasn’t wearing any, not even earrings. Of course we don’t know what she had on when she was abducted.” I don’t hesitate to use that word now.
“So he took her money and possibly her jewelry. Probably kept her clothing, too,” Marino says as the dispatcher comes back over the air. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he left his DNA on her wallet, maybe on her purse. And the pipe cutter,” he adds sarcastically.
“Thirty-three,” Marino answers his radio.
The dispatcher informs him that the owner of the pickup truck is a fifty-one-year-old male named Enrique Sanchez. He works maintenance for MIT. He has no outstanding warrants and no prior arrests except for a DUI reckless-driving charge in 2008. He’s been contacted and is en route. Benton doesn’t say I told you so. He says nothing.
“I need to head to my office,” I let everyone know as I walk over to my field case.
&nbs
“I’ll get the evidence to the labs expeditiously but if you don’t mind I’ll leave my case here,” I say to Marino. “We’re going to walk back to the office and I’d rather not carry it. I figure you can bring it when you come by during the autopsy. Benton’s shoes and luggage are in your SUV and those will need to be dropped off, please.” I’m careful not to sound like I’m giving him orders.
The cruiser stops behind the black pickup truck and a uniformed officer climbs out. He has a notepad in hand and the name on his shiny steel nameplate is G. B. Rooney.
“I didn’t want any of this going out over the air,” he says to Marino and Machado. “The call I responded to earlier? The one on Windsor?”
“Man, you got to be more specific than that,” Machado says.
G. B. Rooney pauses with uncertainty, his eyes cutting to Benton and me.
“They’re okay. Benton Wesley with the FBI. Dr. Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner,” Marino introduces us in a blasé way as I realize that G. B. Rooney is car 13.
Earlier this morning he responded to the call about my prowler and then he wasn’t answering his radio for a while.
18
Tall and thin, somewhere in his early forties, he sounded out of breath when he finally resumed contact with the dispatcher at around five forty-five a.m.
I remember my surprise that car 13 would be in Tech Square when moments earlier it had been several miles away on the Harvard campus, in my neighborhood. I figured the officer had abandoned that call when the possible car break-ins were reported, but G. B. Rooney offers a different story.
“I hadn’t gone two blocks when I noticed a subject inside a parked vehicle behind the Academy of Arts and Sciences on Beacon Street,” he explains. “It’s the area where the prowler was spotted running and he fit the description, at least close enough that I figured I’d better check him out.”
The way he says it piques my curiosity. Already I can tell that Rooney thought there was something unusual about this person and I can sense Benton’s quiet attention. The area Rooney described is very close to our house.
“Tall, slender, young, white. Dark pants and sneakers, a black hoodie with Marilyn Monroe on it,” Rooney recites like a police report. “I waited until he drove off and then I tailed him but not conspicuously. He headed directly to the projects on Windsor, which is why I happened to be in that location where the car breaks occurred, possibly gang-related. A lot of them in that area, kids going through parking lots and stealing what they can, plus vandalism. I’m in one parking lot and they’re in another one, smashing out windows or coming back for more. Unbelievable.”
“I’m assuming you ran the guy’s plate,” Marino says.
“A 2012 Audi SUV, blue, registered to a twenty-eight-year-old male with a Somerville address near the hockey rink at Conway Park – Haley Davis Swanson,” G. B. Rooney says.
“What?” Marino looks sucker punched. “Haley Swanson?”
“He has an uncle that lives in building two of the projects there on Windsor.”
“Haley Swanson is a man?” Marino’s eyes are bugging out of his head.
“I agree it’s an unusual name for a male. A family name, he told me. He goes by the nickname Swan.”
“This isn’t making a damn bit of sense.” Marino is thoroughly frustrated now.
He looks angry enough to have a stroke.
“Did you talk to this guy?” It’s Machado who asks. “Did you find out why he was parked behind the Academy of Arts and Sciences at the back of the woods there?”
“He told me he’d picked up coffees at Dunkin’ Donuts, the one on Somerville Ave, and one of them spilled so he pulled over to clean it up. There were two coffees in the front seat and one of them had spilled so he wasn’t making it up.”
“Did you ask what he was doing in the projects at the exact same time we’re working a death scene over here?”
Rooney looks confused. “I didn’t mention the death scene over here.”
Machado asks nothing further and I suspect I know why. He’s waiting to see if the officer volunteers that Haley Swanson was a friend of Gail Shipton’s. Machado wants to know if Rooney is aware that Haley “Swan” Swanson is the person who reported her missing and posted her disappearance and photograph on the Channel 5 website.
“What else do you know about him?” Machado then asks.
“He works for a local PR firm.” Rooney flips another page of his notepad.
It doesn’t appear he’s aware of the connection. It would seem that Haley Swanson didn’t mention Gail Shipton to Officer Rooney and that’s more than a little suspicious. Swanson had reported her missing and now it seems he might have been hiding behind my wall, watching my house? It seems illogical. Why would he have coffees? It doesn’t add up that he stopped for coffees and then decided to leave his car on Beacon Street and travel on foot through the rainy dark to spy on me.
“Was he wet when you talked to him? Did it look like he’d been out in the rain?” I ask Rooney, and Benton watches us with no expression but he’s listening carefully.
“He didn’t appear to be wet,” Rooney says. “I got the name of where he works.” He flips back several pages. “Lambant and Associates in Boston.”
“They specialize in crisis management.” Benton is scrolling through e-mails on his cell phone. “What in the legal world is known as spin doctoring in the court of public opinion.”
“I wonder if Gail Shipton retained them,” I suggest. “Maybe that’s how she became acquainted with Haley Swanson.”
“The firm’s well known to our Boston field office.” Benton doesn’t directly answer me. “They represent wealthy high-profile defendants, white-collar mainly, corrupt politicians, organized crime figures, an occasional celebrity athlete who gets involved in a scandal.”
He looks long and hard at Marino, then Benton says, “Recently Lambant and Associates handled the class-action suit relating to the pickup truck you had problems with, Pete. The case was thrown out of court. No damaging press, no harm done. In fact, the plaintiffs ended up looking like the bad guys for driving irresponsibly off-road in extreme conditions, souping up the rear axle, the frame, et cetera.”
“Total bullshit.” Marino’s face turns bright red. “Like your average person can afford a spin-doctoring firm. As usual, the little guy gets screwed.”
I’m afraid he’s going to launch into his truck tirade again. But he manages to control himself.
“I’m simply suggesting Swanson might know who you are,” Benton adds. “If he worked on that case for his firm, he would have come across your name since you were one of the plaintiffs.”
“It looks like we got a lot to check out here.” Machado is making notes. “Starting with the exact nature of Swanson’s relationship with Gail Shipton. And where he was around the time she went out to make her phone call last night and disappeared. And why he reported her missing and hasn’t bothered to show up at the department and give us whatever information he’s got. I’d say we might have a suspect.”
Benton doesn’t comment. His attention drifts back to the railroad tracks.
“We’ll check with the Psi and find out if anyone remembers who she was with and if it was Swanson and do they know him,” Marino says.
“You want my personal opinion?” Rooney leans against the hood of his cruiser and digs his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “It’s not politically correct but I feel I should say it. I’m not sure he’s a male. I don’t know the extent of it but if you heard him talk you might think he’s a female. He could pass for one anyway. It wasn’t something I could question him about, obviously. If he had gender reassignment or is taking hormones, I couldn’t exactly ask and
“Does he present himself as a female?” Machado inquires.
“All I can tell you is at first I thought he was one. When I questioned him in the projects, I said, ‘What’s a nice young lady like you doing here at this hour?’ He didn’t correct me, and I’m pretty sure he had a bra on. He definitely has breasts. He claimed he has an uncle who lives over there, a Vietnam vet, disabled, right there in the middle of all the drug-related crime we know goes on. And that was my other suspicion. Maybe Swanson’s got a side business going, maybe that’s why he can afford an expensive, brand-new SUV. I pushed him pretty hard about what he was doing there and he said he sometimes drops by to see his uncle before heading into Boston to work and he brings coffee. His story checked out. He does have a disabled uncle who lives there. I got his name, and all of it will be in my report.”
“Get it to me ASAP,” Marino snaps, and he feels foolish.
He talked to Haley Swanson around one a.m. and had no idea about any of this.
“That’s it?” Machado asks Rooney. “He offered no clue why he was driving around Cambridge? Or why he was parked near Harvard on Beacon Street? You sure it’s because he spilled coffee as opposed to him maybe casing the neighborhood? He mention Dr. Scarpetta’s house or knowing where it is?”
“Why would he care about where we live?” Benton asks.
Rooney gives both of us a blank look as he shifts his position on the cruiser’s hood, careful his duty belt doesn’t scratch the paint.
“Someone was prowling around your house this morning and I had units looking, that’s why,” Marino answers before I can, and Benton stares at me and then he stares at the railroad tracks again. “Like maybe this guy’s been spying on the Doc,” Marino adds with satisfaction, pleased he might know something about me that Benton doesn’t.
“It’s not a PR guy who’s possibly dealing drugs in the projects,” Benton says as if there can be no debating it. “That’s not who you need to be worried about. The type of person you’re looking for doesn’t kill people and then report them missing and give his damn name to a detective he asks for by name.”