Dust by Patricia Cornwell
“I’m not sure I can spell it out. But I can tell you what worries me and that I’m alone in it.” Sticks break as he steps farther from the tracks. “I don’t want you hurt and I don’t want Lucy hurt. Granby will hurt you if he can. He’ll hurt all of us and I hope to hell Marino doesn’t say anything about the phone to him or to anyone at my office. Dammit. Why does he have to stick his nose in it? He shouldn’t have called my office and there will be hell to pay if he turns over the phone to them.”
“He won’t. Marino hates the FBI.”
“Maybe he should.”
“I need to know what you’re alone in.” I will make him tell me. “Whatever you’re up against, I’m up against. All of us are.”
“Now that he’s murdered here, you’re up against it, that’s for sure.”
“There can’t be any secrets, Benton. The hell with the FBI. This is us. This is people who are dying. Fuck the FBI.” I can’t believe I said it but I did.
“Marino probably just got me fired but I don’t give a shit. We can’t let Granby get away with this.”
“We won’t, whatever it is, but you have to talk to me.”
Benton sits on his heels, his back against the fence, about to tell me what he believes he shouldn’t.
“They think they know who it is and I’m going to give you the information because anything you hear from them you can’t trust. It’s probably a lie.” He continues to refer to the FBI as if he isn’t the FBI. “These cases now involve you directly and I’m not going to let the Bureau do this to you. You’re right. I promised that would never happen again and it won’t.”
“Do what?”
“They’ve done enough to you, to both of us.”
“What’s happened, Benton?”
He goes on to explain that his colleagues at the BAU are certain they know who the Capital Murderer is and Benton is just as certain that they’re badly mistaken. Or, as he puts it, dead wrong, because the theory is more wrong than mistaken, that’s what he’s getting at, and the implication is what he’s been alluding to for weeks. It’s about trust. It’s about a possibility that couldn’t be more shocking or disheartening.
“It’s too damn obvious, too good to be true,” he says. “Someone this calculating wouldn’t leave his DNA, leave it so conspicuously you could see it. You didn’t need any special lights or presumptive tests to find it right away. It doesn’t feel right and it’s been my experience that when something doesn’t feel right almost always it isn’t.”
“Who does the FBI think it is?”
“Martin Lagos,” Benton replies, and hearing the name gives me a strange feeling at first. “He disappeared seventeen years ago after murdering his mother, I should say ‘allegedly.’ He was fifteen at the time. The Bureau has his name but not him because nobody can find him. I’m the only one who’s not convinced, not even slightly. Warren, Stewart, Butler, Weir, all of them think I’m nuts,” he says, referring to colleagues at the BAU.
I feel astonished and I feel something else. I realize the name Lagos is familiar. I don’t know why. I can’t conjure it up.
“How could the FBI know his identity and not release it to the public?” I ask. “If the public is informed about who you’re looking for, someone might come forward and tell you where he is.”
“He can’t be tipped off that he’s been connected to the D.C. murders. That’s the reasoning, not mine but Granby’s. Martin Lagos has no clue the FBI knows it’s him; that’s the operational theory. When the timing is right Granby will hold a press conference, a big one.”
“Why Ed Granby and what will make the timing right?” I stare down the long stretch of empty railroad tracks, looking for Marino.
“His reasoning is the first victim was from Cambridge so there’s a strong local interest and our division has been involved from the beginning. When enough time has passed and no one else is caught and he doesn’t strike again information will be released to the public.”
“It appears he’s already struck again.”
“That’s the problem Granby faces. Assuming I’m right, the evidence won’t point to Martin Lagos because it can’t,” Benton says. “Not in this case or any other, if there are more.”
“I have no idea what you mean by that.”
“Nothing else will come up to divert attention away from Martin, not now or down the road or even in the past. His DNA won’t be found again but nobody else’s will either. That’s what I’m afraid of. The three D.C. cases will be exceptionally cleared and closed and certain parties can move on to what’s next because I believe that’s what Granby wants for reasons I don’t understand. But I sense it. And I’ve been looking into it on my own while I’ve been gone these past three weeks.”
“And what have you discovered?” I ask.
“There’s no record of Martin Lagos, not a trace of him.” Benton picks up a stick and starts breaking it into pieces. “He’s a Red Notice and has been since he disappeared. For seventeen years Interpol has circulated information about him and not one sighting or lead has turned out to be legitimate.”
“Then it’s been considered from the start that he might be living in another country.” I can’t imagine any other reason for Interpol to be involved.
“It’s supposed he was well equipped to manage abroad in Europe or South America,” Benton replies. “A substantial amount of money was missing from the house, and Martin spoke French, Spanish, and Italian in addition to English.”
“By the time he was fifteen?” Lagos. I know the name but am drawing a blank.
“It’s how his mother raised him. They spoke several languages at home and he was an experienced traveler. Extremely bright but troubled. Isolated, bullied at school, didn’t participate in group sports or anything social. Straight A’s, a computer nerd until his freshman year of high school when his grades began to suffer. He became more withdrawn, depressed, got into alcohol, and then his mother was murdered.”
“He’s believed to have killed her where and when?”
“Fairfax, Virginia, in July of 1996.” Benton flicks pieces of wood, kicks them with his finger like tiny footballs.
“His mother had something to do with rare art and the White House.” It comes back to me and I’m confronted with images of her suddenly vivid in my memory.
Bloated and discolored by decomposition, her skin and hair slipping off her body. Her teeth bared in a face that was blackish red and grotesquely swollen. Nude and partially submerged in scummy water.
“Gabriela Lagos was your case,” Benton says.
21
I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia then but I didn’t do her autopsy. My northern district office took care of Gabriela Lagos and I didn’t realize there was a significant problem until her body had been autopsied and released.
I remember driving to a Fairfax, Virginia, funeral home and the displeasure of the people who worked there when I showed up with a crime scene case. The body wasn’t viewable but that didn’t mean I should further mutilate it by incising reddish areas that I suspected were bruises.
I spent long hours with Gabriela Lagos, looking at her body after reviewing the reports and photographs of what was a sensational death, an incredibly troubling one, and I felt the way Benton does right now. I was the odd person out. I was convinced she was a homicide disguised to look like a natural death or an accident.
“She was a Washington insider, divorced from a former minister of culture at the Argentinian embassy, an art historian who was vibrant and quite beautiful,” Benton says. “A curator at the National Gallery, and she also oversaw exhibits at the White House, authenticating new acquisitions for the First Family, which at the time was the Clintons.”
“I recall a suggestion of scandal that never surfaced publicly.” I sensed someone was trying to manipulate my office from the moment I informed the police that Gabriela Lagos was a homicidal drowning and the focus became her only child, the son she was raising alone.
The fifte
“Clearly she’d been dead for three or four days in the middle of summer, the air-conditioning turned off, possibly deliberately to escalate decomposition,” I tell Benton. “Suffice it to say she was in very grim shape. Fresh contusions weren’t readily apparent but they were there, and the typical fingermark pattern I expect in homicidal bathtub drownings when victims are lifted by the ankles, causing their heads to submerge. Almost always there’s significant bruising around the lower legs and also over the hands and arms from violently striking the sides of the tub as the victim flails helplessly.”
“Christ, remind me not to go that way,” Benton says from his position against the fence, sitting on his heels, his forearms on his knees, while we wait for Marino.
“The pattern was harder to see because of the advanced decomposition.” The details rush back at me like remembered bad dreams. “And my deputy chief had neglected to incise those areas of discoloration to look for hemorrhage and he misinterpreted contusions as postmortem artifacts.”
“I know all about his negligence.” Benton flicks more bits of broken stick.
“Jerry Geist.” My tone turns disparaging.
“It’s hard to forget a pompous old fart like that.”
“For a number of reasons she easily could have been signed out as an accident.”
“If you hadn’t been involved, she would have been.” Benton reminds me I had quite a fight on my hands.
The prosecutor was adamant that a jury would never convict Martin Lagos, a juvenile, assuming he was ever found and taken into custody. The physical evidence wasn’t strong and I disagreed. It was plenty strong. A healthy young woman who wasn’t impaired with drugs or alcohol didn’t accidentally drown in a tub filled with water so hot that her entire body was scalded. There was no sign of a seizure, stroke, aneurysm, or myocardial infarct, and she shouldn’t have had fresh bruises. She was murdered and it was my belief that whoever was involved had attempted to obscure the crime.
“Dr. Geist wanted the death signed out as an accidental drowning and I wouldn’t let him.” I haven’t thought of him in years.
He was in his sixties at the time, an old-school pathologist, blatantly misogynistic and quite happy when I resigned and he didn’t have to answer to me anymore. I remember feeling he was inappropriately influenced by anyone who was powerfully connected and I strongly suspected he maneuvered behind the scenes to force me out of office.
“He maintained the skin slippage and blistering were due solely to the bad condition she was in when in fact her entire body was covered with full-thickness burns,” I explain. “It was apparent to me that after she was dead someone refilled the tub with scalding tap water, probably to hasten decomposition and obscure injuries. That and turning off the air-conditioning in July made for a tough case that Dr. Geist debated with me disrespectfully and inappropriately.”
“He was an arrogant little bastard.” Benton runs his fingers through his unruly hair as the wind kicks up.
A high-pressure front has followed the retreating storm and sharp gusts blast along miles of tracks stretching out like sutures. In the distance I make out the figure of Marino walking his dog.
“Why would Martin Lagos’s name come up now?” I ask.
“His DNA was supposedly recovered in the third case, Julianne Goulet, on the panties the killer dressed her in, which were identified as belonging to the victim from the week before, Sally Carson.” Benton gets to his feet, shaking out his legs the way he does when his knees are bothering him.
“Identified how?”
“Visually. Her husband recognized them, lingerie he’d bought for her that he recalled she had on when she left the house, when he saw her last. We never got her DNA from them.”
“That’s unusual if she had them on when she was abducted and murdered.”
“Maybe you’re beginning to see it from my point of view. We didn’t get Sally Carson’s DNA but we got Martin Lagos’s. Supposedly.”
“Yes, you’ve said that twice now. Supposedly.”
“The killer dresses his most recent victim in the panties of the last one,” Benton says. “Totally textbook. I’ve written about it.”
“And for some reason in the third case, Julianne Goulet, he left his DNA.”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to look.”
“Are you thinking it was left deliberately?”
“I’m thinking someone did,” he says.
Benton puts his coat on as he stares off in the direction of Marino, whose advance is in fits and starts. Quincy tugs him like a sled dog, following the scents of God knows what, finding clumps of weeds to mark.
“We can’t locate Martin Lagos,” Benton continues to explain. “The theory is he created a new identity, possibly as long ago as when he vanished. He had one close friend who I strongly feel helped him disappear or was involved in Gabriela’s murder and we don’t know where this friend is either. But nobody’s listening to me.”
“What about forensic age progression to predict what Martin might look like now?”
“Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“You have? By yourself?” I continue to be dismayed by the way he refers to himself now as if he’s completely alone in this investigation.
“We’ve searched mug shots that include police departments, prisons, plus the Bureau’s national repository of surveillance, passports, driver’s license photos, you name it, and also whatever else Interpol might have. Black notices, for example, the unidentified dead,” he says. “Nothing, not even remotely.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
Benton doesn’t answer me, and Marino is nearing the other side of the tunnel now.
“You don’t think he’s alive,” I say in a quieter voice because I don’t want Marino to overhear a word.
“I don’t,” Benton replies. “No matter what name Martin Lagos might go by or how he might have tried to alter his appearance, his facial landmarks should be the same. The spacing between his mouth and nose, the width of his eyes, measurements like that.”
It sounds like something Lucy would say.
“Everything makes me suspect he’s not been around for the past seventeen years, which is why we can’t find him,” Benton adds. “It’s possible he’s dead. He may have committed suicide or he may have been murdered.”
“Maybe Lucy can help.” I suggest what I’m beginning to suspect has happened already. “The computer programs she’s created using neural networking recognize objects and images much the way the brain does. I know that she’s been doing research with irises, facial features, and other biometric technology. Of course I’m sure you know what she’s been doing; maybe know more than I do,” I add pointedly.
“A forensic app.” He stares down the tracks, watching Marino get closer. “With a potential of being used in vehicles manned and unmanned. In other words, possibly drones targeting people of interest, a handheld way of searching almost anything you can think of, assuming you have access to databases that are off-limits to most people.”
“If you can give Lucy the most recent photograph. Or a video or a recording of his, whatever you’ve got.” The forensic app may have been on Gail Shipton’s phone.
It may be a project the two of them were working on and Benton may be suggesting that Lucy has been helping him by searching databases she isn’t legally allowed to access. Government databases, for example.
“The most recent photo is when he was fifteen, his birthday,” Benton says. “Just four days before his mother died. Age progression, facial recognition, came up with nothing. There’s no match to be made because he’s dead. That’s what I believe even if I can’t prove it yet.”
If Lucy has been helping him, it not only would be in direct violation of FBI regulations but it would be a violation far more serious. She’s not su
Lucy conducting clandestine data searches for Benton reinforces just how much he doesn’t trust those around him. It would explain why she scrubbed Gail Shipton’s phone. If this forensic app he just mentioned was discovered, someone might question what it was being used for. Any hint that it was capable of searching classified law enforcement repositories could lead right to Lucy and also to Benton and to very big trouble. Both of them could face criminal prosecution. Benton would never encourage such a thing with her unless he was certain he had no choice.
“Do we have a clue about why Martin Lagos might have killed his mother?” I don’t recall being told a motive at the time and I don’t want to ask him for further details about what he and Lucy have done.
“We have a purported one. Supposedly she began sexually abusing him when he was six.” The sun is directly in Benton’s face as he turns toward the river, which we can’t see from here, then his eyes are back on Marino, who’s entering the tunnel now.
“Where did the information come from if she’s dead and he’s vanished?”
“A computer disk. At the time of his mother’s murder we got information off a disk the police discovered hidden in his bedroom. His computer’s hard drive was missing. Presumably removed by him,” Benton says. “A spy video camera may also have been missing, used to film his mother bathing, based on what Martin wrote in his diary.”
“Wasn’t Granby in Washington back then?” I have an instinct, an unpleasant one of how this is looping around.
Granby can’t resist reminding anyone who will listen that he was an assistant special agent in charge in D.C. and what an exciting time it was when everything wasn’t about 9/11 and the war in the Middle East. During a dinner not long after he moved here he asked what I remembered about him from when I was the chief of Virginia and I told him I was sorry if we’d met then and I didn’t recall it. I could tell I offended him. Then he seemed relieved.