COPYRIGHT

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Cornwell Entertainment, Inc. 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Cover photograph © 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.

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.

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Source ISBN: 9780007552450

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007552443

Version: 2017-05-08

DEDICATION

To Staci

Wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.

– FRANÇOIS RABELAIS, 1532

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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

Epilogue

Read on for an exclusive extract from the new Kay Scarpetta novel …

About the Author

Also by Patricia Cornwell

About the Publisher

To Kay Scarpetta

From Copperhead

Sunday, May 11

(11:43 p.m. to be exact)

A little verse I penned just for you. Happy Mother’s Day, Kay!!!!

(do turn the page please …)

The light is coming

And the dark

you caused

(& think you saw)

Is gone gone gone!

Frag-

ments of shat-

tered gold

and the Hangman leaves invisibly

Lust seeks its own level Dr. Death

an eye for an eye

a theft for a theft

an erotic dream of your dying breath

Pennies for your thoughts

Keep versethe change

watch the clock!

Tick Tock

Tick Tock Doc!

1
June 12, 2014
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Copper flashes like shards of aventurine glass on top of the old brick wall behind our house. I envision ancient pastel stucco workshops with red tile roofs along the Rio dei Vetrai canal, and fiery furnaces and blowpipes as maestros shape molten glass on marvers. Careful not to spill, I carry two espressos sweetened with agave nectar.

I hold the delicate curved handles of the mouth-blown cristallo cups, simple and rock crystal clear, the memory of finding them on the Venetian island of Murano a happy one. The aromas of garlic and charred peppers follow me outside as the screen door shuts with a soft thud. I detect the aromatic bright scent of fresh basil leaves I tore with my bare hands. It’s the best of mornings. It couldn’t be better.

My special salad has been mixed, the juices, herbs and spices mingling and saturating chunks of mantovana I baked on a stone days earlier. The olive oil bread is best slightly stale when used in panzanella, which like pizza was once the food of the poor whose ingenuity and resourcefulness transformed scraps of focaccia and vegetables into un’abbondanza. Imaginative savory dishes invite and reward improvisation, and this morning I added the thinly sliced core of fennel, kosher salt and coarsely ground pepper. I used sweet onions instead of red ones and added a hint of mint from the sunporch where I grow herbs in large terra-cotta olive jars I found years ago in France.

Pausing on the patio, I check the grill. Rising heat wavers, the lighter fluid and bag of briquettes a cautious distance away. My FBI husband Benton isn’t much of a cook but he knows how to light a good fire and is meticulous about safety. The neat pile of smoldering orange coals is coated in white ash. The swordfish filets can go on soon. Then my hedonistic preoccupations are abruptly interrupted as my attention snaps back to the wall.

I realize what I’m seeing is pennies. I try to recall if they were there earlier when it was barely dawn and I took out our greyhound, Sock. He was stubborn and clingy and I was unusually distracted. My mind was racing in multiple directions, powered by a euphoric anticipation of a Tuscan brunch before boarding a plane in Boston, and a sensual fog was burning off after an indulgent mindless rousing from bed where all that mattered was pleasure. I hardly remember taking out our dog. I hardly remember any details about being with him in the dimly lit dewy backyard.

So it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have noticed the bright copper coins or anything else that might indicate an uninvited visitor has been on our property. I feel a chill at the edge of my thoughts, a dark shadow that’s unsettling. I’m reminded of what I don’t want to think about.

You’ve already left for vacation while you’re still here. And you know better.

My thoughts return to the kitchen, to the blue steel Rohrbaugh 9 mm in its pocket holster on the counter by the stove. Lightweight with laser grips, the pistol goes where I do even when Benton is home. But I’ve not had a single thought about guns or security this morning. I’ve freed my mind from micromanaging the deliveries to my headquarters throughout the night, discreetly pouched in black and transported in my windowless white trucks, five dead patients silently awaiting their appointments with the last physicians who will ever touch them on this earth.

I’ve avoided the usual dangerous, tragic, morbid realities and I know better.

Dammit.

Then I argue it away. Someone is playing a game with pennies. That’s all.

2

Our nineteenth-century Cambridge house is on the northern border of the Harvard campus, around the corner from the Divinity School and across from the Academy of Arts and Sciences. We have our share of people who take shortcuts through our property. It’s not fenced in and the wall is more an ornamental ruin than a barrier. Children love to climb over it and hide behind it.

Probably one of them with too much time on his hands now that school is out.

“Did you notice what’s on our wall?” I make my way across sun-dappled grass, reaching the stone bench encircling the magnolia tree where Benton has been reading the paper while I prepare brunch.

“Notice what?” he asks.

Sock is stretched out near his feet, watching me accusingly. He knows exactly what’s in store for him. The instant I pulled out luggage late last night and began an inventory of tennis equipment and scuba gear he settled into a funk, an emotional hole he digs for himself, only this time it’s deeper. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to cheer him up.

“Pennies.” I hand Benton an espresso ground from whole beans, a robust sweetened stimulant that makes both of us very hungry for all things of the flesh.

He tests it carefully with the tip of his tongue.

“Did you see someone put them there?” I ask. “What about when you were lighting the grill? Were the pennies there then?”

He stares in the direction of the shiny coins lined up edge to edge on the wall.

“I didn’t notice and I’ve not seen anyone. They certainly weren’t put there while I’ve been out here,” he says. “How much longer for the coals?” It’s his way of asking if he did a good job. Like anyone else, he enjoys praise.

“They’re perfect. Thank you. Let’s give them maybe fifteen more minutes,” I reply as he returns to a story he’s reading about the dramatic rise in credit card fraud.

Midmorning slanted sunlight polishes his hair bright silver, a little longer than usual, falling low on his brow and curling up in back.

I can see the fine lines on his sharply handsome face, pleasant creases from smiling, and the cleft in his strong chin. His tapered hands are elegant and beautiful, the hands of a musician I always think whether he’s holding a newspaper, a book, a pen or a gun. I smell the subtle scent of his earthy aftershave as I lean over him to scan the story.

“I don’t know what these companies are going to do if it gets any worse.” I sip my espresso, unpleasantly reminded of my own recent brushes with cyber thieves. “The world is going to be bankrupted by criminals we can’t catch or see.”

“No surprise that using a keylogger has become rampant and harder to detect.” A page rustles as he turns it. “Someone gets your card number and makes purchases through PayPal-type accounts, often overseas and it’s untraceable. Not to mention malware.”

“I haven’t ordered anything on eBay in recent memory. I don’t do Craigslist or anything similar.” We’ve had this discussion repeatedly of late.

“I know how irritating it is. But it happens to other careful people.”

“It hasn’t happened to you.” I run my fingers through his thick soft hair, which turned platinum before I knew him, when he was very young.

“You shop more than I do,” he says.

“Not hardly. You and your fine suits, silk ties and expensive shoes. You see what I wear every day. Cargo pants. Scrubs. Rubber surgical clogs. Boots. Except when I go to court.”

“I’m envisioning you dressed for court. Are you wearing a skirt, that fitted pin-striped one with the slit in back?”

“And sensible pumps.”

“The word sensible is incompatible with what I’m fantasizing about.” He looks up at me, and I love the slender muscularity of his neck.

I trace the second cervical vertebra down to C7, gently, slowly digging my fingertips into the Longus colli muscle, feeling him relax, sensing his mood turning languid as he floats in a sensation of physical pleasure. He says I’m his Kryptonite and it’s true. I can hear it in his voice.

“My point?” he says. “It’s impossible to keep up with all of the malicious programs out there that record keystrokes and transmit the information to hackers. It can be as simple as opening an infected file attached to an email. You make it hard for me to think.”

“With the antispyware programs, one-time passwords, and firewalls Lucy implements to protect our server and email accounts? How could a keylogger get downloaded? And I intend to make it hard for you to think. As hard as possible.”

Caffeine and agave nectar are having their effect. I remember the feel of his skin, his sinewy leanness as he shampooed my hair in the shower, massaging my scalp and neck, touching me until it was unbearable. I’ve never tired of him. It’s not possible I could.

“Software can’t scan malware it doesn’t recognize,” he says.

“I don’t believe that’s the explanation.”

My techno-genius niece Lucy would never allow such a violation of the computer system she programs and maintains at my headquarters, the Cambridge Forensics Center, the CFC. It’s an uncomfortable fact that she is far more likely to be the perpetrator of malware and hacking than the victim of it.

“As I’ve said what probably happened is someone got hold of your card at a restaurant or in a store.” Benton turns another page and I trace the straight bridge of his nose, the curve of his ear. “That’s what Lucy thinks.”

“Four times since March?” But I’m thinking of our shower, the shiny white subway tile and the sounds of water falling, splashing loudly in different intensities and rhythms as we moved.

“And you also let Bryce use it when he places orders for you over the phone. Not that he would do anything reckless, at least not intentionally. But I wish you wouldn’t. He doesn’t understand reality the way we do.”

“He sees the worst things imaginable every day,” I reply.

“That doesn’t mean he understands. Bryce is naïve and trusting in a way we aren’t.”

The last time I asked my chief of staff to make a purchase with my credit card was a month ago when he sent gardenias to my mother for Mother’s Day. The most recent report of fraud was yesterday. I seriously doubt it’s related to Bryce or my mother, although it would fit neatly with the history of my dysfunctional familial world if my good deed were punished beyond my mother’s usual complaints and comparisons to my sister Dorothy, who would be in prison if being a self-consumed narcissist were a crime.

The gardenia topiary was an insensitive slight, since my mother has gardenias in her yard. It’s like sending ice to Eskimos. Dorothy sent the prettiest red roses with baby’s breath, my mother’s words exactly. Never mind that I went to the trouble to send her favorite flowering plant and unlike cut roses the topiary is alive.

“Well it’s frustrating and of course my replacement card will get here while we’re in Florida,” I remark to Benton. “So I leave home without it and that’s not a good way to start your vacation.”

“You don’t need it. I’ll treat.”

He usually does anyway. I make a good living but Benton is an only child and has old family money, a lot of it. His father, Parker Wesley, shrewdly invested an inherited fortune in commodities that included buying and selling fine art. Masterpieces by Miró, Whistler, Pissarro, Modigliani, Renoir and others for a while would hang in the Wesley home, and he also acquired and sold vintage cars and rare manuscripts, none of which he ultimately kept. It was all about knowing when to let go. Benton has a similar perspective and temperament. What he also absorbed from his New England roots are shrewd logic and a Yankee steely resolve that can endure hard work and discomfort without flinching.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how to live well or gives a damn what people think. Benton isn’t ostentatious or wasteful but he does what he wants, and I scan our beautifully landscaped property and the back of our antique frame house, recently repainted, the timber siding smoky blue with granite gray shutters. The roof is dark slate tile with two dusky redbrick chimneys, and some of the windows have the original wavy glass. We would live a perfectly charmed and privileged existence were it not for our professions, and my attention returns to the small copper coins not far from us, flaring in the sun.

Sock is perfectly still in the grass, eyes open and watching my every move as I step closer to the wall and smell the perfume of English roses, apricot and pink with warm shades of yellow. The thick thriving bushes are halfway up the vintage bricks, and it pleases me that the tea roses are also doing especially well this spring.

The seven Lincoln pennies are heads up, all of them 1981, and that’s peculiar. They’re more than thirty years old and look newly minted. Maybe they’re fake. I think of the date. Lucy’s date. Her birth year. And today is my birthday.

I scan the old brick wall, some fifty feet in length and five feet high, what I poetically think of as a wrinkle in time, a wormhole connecting us to dimensions beyond, a portal between us and them, our lives now and the past. What’s left of our wall has become a metaphor for our attempts at barricading ourselves from anyone who might want to harm us. It’s really not possible if someone is determined enough, and a sensation flutters inside my mind, deep and unreachable. A memory. A buried or scarcely formed one.

“Why would someone leave seven pennies, heads up, all the same date?” I ask.

The range of our security cameras doesn’t include the far corners of the wall, which leans slightly and terminates in limestone pillars completely overtaken by ivy.

In the early 1800s when our house was built by a wealthy transcendentalist, the estate was an entire block surrounded by a serpentine wall. What’s left is a crumbling brick segment, and half an acre with a narrow driveway of pavers and a detached garage that originally was a carriage house. Whoever left the pennies probably won’t have been caught on video and I feel the same uneasiness again, a remnant of what I can’t recall.

“They look polished,” I add. “Obviously they are unless they’re not real.”

“Neighborhood kids,” Benton says.

His amber eyes watch me over the top of the Boston Globe, a smile playing on his lips. He’s in jeans and loafers, a Red Sox windbreaker on, and he sets down his espresso and the paper, gets up from the bench and walks over to me. Wrapping his arms around my waist from behind, he kisses my ear, resting his chin on top of my head.

“If life were always this good,” he says, “maybe I’d retire, say the hell with playing cops and robbers anymore.”

“You wouldn’t. And if only that was what you really played. We should eat fairly soon and get ready to head to the airport.”

He glances at his phone and rapidly types what looks like a one or two-word response to something.

“Is everything all right?” I hug his arms around me. “Who are you texting?”

“Everything’s fine. I’m starved. Tease me.”

“Grilled swordfish steaks Salmoriglio, seared, brushed with olive oil, lemon juice, oregano.” I lean into him and feel his warmth, and the coolness of the air and the heat of the sun. “Your favorite panzanella. Heirloom tomatoes, basil, sweet onions, cucumbers …” I hear leaves stirring and smell the delicate lemony fragrance of magnolia blossoms. “… And that aged red wine vinegar you like so much.”

“Full-bodied and delicious just like you. My mouth is watering.”

“Bloody Marys. Horseradish, fresh-squeezed key limes and habanero to get us in the mood for Miami.”

“Then we shower.” He kisses me on the lips this time, doesn’t care who sees it.

“We already did.”

“And we need to again. I feel extra dirty. Maybe I do have another present for you. If you’re up for it.”

“The question is are you?”

“We have a whole two hours before we need to leave for the airport.” He kisses me again, longer and deeper as I detect the distant rapid stuttering of a helicopter, a powerful one. “I love you, Kay Scarpetta. More every minute, every day, every year. What is this spell you have over me?”

“Food. I’m good in the kitchen.”

“What a happy day when you were born.”

“Not if you ask my mother.”

He suddenly pulls back from me almost imperceptibly as if he just saw something. Squinting in the sun, he stares in the direction of the Academy of Arts and Sciences a block north of us, separated from our property by a row of homes and a street.

“What?” I look where he’s looking as the helicopter gets louder.

From our backyard we can see the corrugated metal roof the green color of copper patina peeking above densely wooded grounds. The world’s top leaders in business, government, academia and science routinely speak and meet at the Academy’s headquarters, the House of the Mind as it’s called.

“What is it?” I follow Benton’s intense stare, and the roar of a helicopter flying low is coming closer.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I thought I saw something flash over there, like a camera flash but not as bright.”

I scan the canopies of old trees and the multiangled green metal roof. I don’t notice anything unusual. I don’t see anyone.

“Maybe sunlight reflecting off a car window,” I offer and Benton is typing on his phone again, something brief to someone.

“It came from the trees. I might have noticed the same thing earlier, caught it out of the corner of my eye. Something glinted. A flick of light maybe. I wasn’t sure …” He stares again and the helicopter is very loud now. “I hope it’s not some damn reporter with a telescopic lens.”

We both look up at the same time as the deep blue Agusta comes into view, sleek with a bright yellow stripe and a flat silver belly, its landing gear retracted. I can feel the vibration in my bones, and then Sock is cowering on the grass next to me, pressing against my legs.

“Lucy,” I say loudly and I watch transfixed. She’s done this before but never at such a low altitude. “Good God. What is she doing?”

The composite blades whump-whump loudly, their rotor wash agitating the tops of trees as my niece overflies our house at less than five hundred feet. She circles in a thunderous roar then pauses in a hover, nodding the nose. I can just make out her helmet and tinted visor before she flies away, dropping lower over the Academy of Arts and Sciences, circling the grounds slowly, then gone.

“I believe Lucy just wished you a happy birthday,” Benton says.

“She’d better hope the neighbors don’t report her to the FAA for violating noise abatement regulations.” All the same I can’t help but be thrilled and touched.

“There won’t be a problem.” He’s looking at his phone again. “She can blame it on the FBI. While she was in the area I had her do a recon. That’s why she was so low.”

“You knew she was going to buzz the house?” I ask and of course he did and at exactly what time, which is why he’s been stalling in the backyard, making sure we weren’t in the house when she showed up.

“No photographer or anybody else with a camera or a scope.” Benton stares in the direction of the wooded grounds, of the cantilevered green roof.

“You just this minute told her to look.”

“I did and in her words, no joy.” He shows me the two-word text on his iPhone that Lucy’s partner Janet sent, aviation lingo meaning they didn’t see anything.

The two of them are flying together, and I wonder if the only reason they’re up is to wish me a very loud and dramatic happy birthday. Then I think of something else. Lucy’s twin-engine Italian helicopter looks law enforcement, and the neighbors probably think it has to do with President Obama arriving in Cambridge late today. He’ll be staying in a hotel near the Kennedy School of Government, barely a mile from here.

“Nothing unusual,” Benton is saying. “So if someone was there up in a tree or wherever, he’s gone. Did I mention how hungry I am?”

“As soon as I can get our poor rattled dog to potty,” I reply as my attention wanders back to the pennies on the wall. “You may as well relax for a few more minutes. He was already stubborn this morning and now he’ll only be worse.”

I crouch down in the grass and stroke Sock, doing my best to soothe him.

“That noisy flying machine is gone and I’m right here,” I say sweetly to him. “It was just Lucy flying around and nothing to be scared about.”

3

It’s Thursday, June 12, my birthday, and I refuse to preoccupy myself with my age or how time flees faster with each passing year. There is much to be in a good mood about and grateful for. Life is the best it’s ever been.

We’re off to Miami for a week of reading, eating and drinking whatever we want, maybe tennis and a few scuba dives, and long walks on the beach. I’d like to go to the movies and share a bucket of popcorn, and not get up in the morning until we feel like it. I intend for us to rest, play, to say the hell with everything. Benton’s present to me is a condo he rented on the ocean.

We’ve reached a point in life where we should enjoy a little time off. But he’s been saying that for as long as I can remember. We both have. As of this morning we’re officially on leave, at least in theory. In fact there really isn’t such a thing. Benton is an intelligence analyst, what people still call a profiler. He’s never off his FBI leash, and the cliché that death never takes a holiday is true. I’m never off my leash, either.

The pennies are lit up in the morning glare, fiery and too perfect and I don’t touch them. I don’t recall seeing them earlier lined up precisely straight on the wall, all oriented exactly the same way. But the backyard was mostly in shadows the first time I ventured out, and I was distracted by my pouty dog’s unwillingness to potty and by my landscaping checklist. The roses need fertilizing and spraying. The lawn needs weeding and should be mown before a storm ushers in a heat wave as predicted for tonight.

I have instructions written out for Bryce. He’s to make sure that all is taken care of not only at the CFC but also on the home front. Lucy and Janet are dog nannies while we’re gone, and we have our usual trick that isn’t flawless but better than the alternative of leaving Sock alone in an empty house for even ten minutes.

My niece will arrive and I’ll walk him out the door as if I’m taking him with me. Then I’ll coax him into whatever she’s driving, hopefully not one of her monster machines with no backseat. I asked her pointedly to use her SUV, not that it’s a normal vehicle, either. Nothing my former law enforcement computer genius power-addicted niece owns is for the hoi polloi—not her matte black stealth bomber of an armored SUV, not her aggressive 599 GTO that sounds like the space shuttle. Sock hates supercars and doesn’t like Lucy’s helicopter. He startles easily. He gets scared.

“Come on,” I encourage my silent four-legged friend from his snooze in the grass with eyes wide, what I call playing possum. “You need to potty.” He doesn’t budge, his brown stare fixed on me. “Come on. I’m asking nicely. Please, Sock. Up!”

He’s been out of sorts all morning, sniffing around, acting skittish, then lying down, his tail curled under, tucking his long narrow nose beneath his front paws, looking completely dejected and anxious. Sock knows when we’re leaving him and gets depressed, and I always feel rotten about it as if I’m a terrible mother. I lean over and stroke his short brindle fur, feeling his ribs, then gentle with his ears, misshapen and scarred from former abuses at the racetrack. He gets up, pressing against my legs like a listing ship.

“Everything’s fine,” I reassure him. “You’re going to run around on acres of land and play with Jet Ranger. You know how much you love that.”

“He doesn’t.” Benton reseats himself on the bench and picks up the paper beneath spreading branches of dark green leaves loaded with waxy white blossoms the size of pie pans. “It’s fitting you have a pet that doesn’t listen and completely manipulates you.”

“Come on.” I lead him over to his favorite privacy area of shaded boxwoods and evergreens in thick beds of pine-scented mulch. He’s not interested. “Seriously? He’s acting odd.”

I look around, searching for anything else that might indicate something is off and my attention wanders back to the pennies. A chill touches the back of my neck. I don’t see anyone. I hear nothing but the breeze whispering through the trees and the distant sound of a gas-powered leaf blower. It slowly comes to me, what I didn’t recognize at first. I see it. The tweet with the link that I got some weeks ago. The attachment was an odd note to me and a poem, I recall.

The Twitter name was Copperhead and I remember only snippets of what the poem said. Something about the light coming and a hangman that struck me as the ramblings of a deranged individual. Delusional messages and voice mails aren’t uncommon. My Cambridge Forensic Center email address and phone number are public information. Lucy always traces unsolicited electronic communications and lets me know if there is anything I should worry about. I vaguely recall her telling me the tweet was sent from a hotel business center in Morristown, New Jersey.

I need to ask her about it. In fact I’ll do it now. Her cockpit is wireless, her flight helmet Bluetooth enabled. For that matter she’s probably already landed, and I slide my phone out of a pocket of my jacket. But before I get the chance someone is calling me first. The ringtone sounds like an old telephone. Detective Pete Marino, and I recognize his mobile number in the display, not his personal phone but the one he uses on the job.

If he were calling to say happy birthday or have a nice trip he wouldn’t be on his Cambridge police BlackBerry. He’s careful about using his departmental equipment, vehicles, email or any form of communication for anything remotely personal. It’s one of life’s many ironies and contradictions when it comes to him. He certainly wasn’t like that all the years he worked for me.

“Oh God,” I mutter. “This had better not be what I think it is.”

“Sorry to do this to you, Doc,” Marino’s big voice sounds in my earpiece. “I know you got a plane to catch. But you need to be aware of what’s going on. You’re my first call.”

“What is it?” I begin slowly pacing the yard.

“We got one on Farrar Street,” he says. “In broad daylight, plenty of people around and nobody heard or saw a thing. Just like the other ones. And the victim selection bothers the shit out of me, especially the timing with Obama coming here today.”

“What other ones?”

“Where are you right now?” he asks.

“Benton and I are in the backyard.”

I feel my husband’s eyes on me.

“Maybe you should go inside and not be out in the open. That’s the way it happens,” Marino says. “People out in the open going about their business …”

“What other ones? What people?” I look around as I pace.

Sock is sitting, his ears folded back. Benton gets up from the bench, watching me. It continues to be a beautiful peaceful morning but it’s a mirage. Everything has just turned ugly.

“New Jersey right after Christmas and then again in April. The same M.O.,” Marino says and I interrupt him again.

“Hold on. Back up. What’s happened, exactly? And let’s not compare the M.O. to other cases before we know the facts.”

“A homicide not even five minutes from you. We got the call about an hour ago …”

“And you’re just notifying my office now? Or more specifically, notifying me?”

He knows damn well that the more quickly the body can be examined in situ and transported to my office, the better. We should have been called instantly.

“Machado wanted to secure the scene.”

Sil Machado is a Cambridge PD investigator. He and Marino are also good friends.

“He wanted to make sure there’s not an active shooter still there waiting to pick off someone else. That’s what he said.” Marino’s tone is odd.

I detect hostility.

“The information we’ve got so far is the victim felt someone was after him. He’d been jumpy of late, and that’s true in the two Jersey cases,” Marino says. “The victims felt they were being watched and screwed with and then out of the blue they’re dead. It’s a lot to explain and right now we don’t have time. The shooter may still be in the area even as we speak. You should stay inside until I get there. I’m maybe ten minutes out.”

“Give me the exact address and I’ll get myself there.”

“No way. Not happening. And wear a vest.”

I watch Benton fold the paper and pick up his coffee, his happy demeanor eclipsed by what he senses. Life is about to change on us. I already know it. I look at him, my expression somber as I stop pacing and pour my espresso into the mulch. I did it without even thinking. A reflex. A relaxing cheerful day has ended as abruptly as a plane slamming into a mountain socked in by fog.

“You don’t think this is a case that Luke or one of the other docs can handle?” I ask Marino but I already know the answer.

He’s not interested in dealing with my deputy chief, Luke Zenner. Marino isn’t going to settle for any of my other medical examiners.

“Or we can send in one of our investigators if that would suffice. Jen Garate certainly could handle it and Luke can do the post immediately.” I try anyway. “He’s probably in the autopsy room. We have five cases this morning.”

“Well now you got six. Jamal Nari,” Marino says as if I should know who he’s talking about.

“Shot in his driveway as he was getting groceries out of his car between nine-forty-five and ten,” Marino says. “A neighbor noticed him down on the pavement and called nine-one-one exactly one hour and eight minutes ago.”

“How do you know he was shot if you haven’t been to the scene yet?” I check my watch. It’s eight minutes past eleven.

“He’s got a nice hole in his neck and another one where his left eye used to be. Machado’s there and has already gotten the wife on the phone. She told him some weird shit’s been happening in the past month and Nari was concerned enough to start changing his patterns, even his car. At least that’s what Machado’s passed on to me.” That tone again.

Hostility, and it makes no sense. The two of them go to baseball and hockey games together. They ride Harleys, and Machado is largely responsible for convincing Marino to resign as my chief forensic investigator and go back to policing. This was last year. I’m still adjusting to his empty office at the CFC and his new habit of telling me what to do. Or thinking he can. Like right now. He’s demanding my presence at a death scene as if I have no say about it.

“I’ve already got a few emailed pictures,” Marino explains. “Like I said it reminds me of the lady killed in New Jersey two months ago, the one whose mother I went to high school with. Shot while she was waiting for the Edgewater Ferry, people everywhere and no one heard or saw a damn thing. Once in the back of the neck, once in the mouth.”

I remember hearing about the case and the original suspicion that it was a murder for hire, possibly domestic related.

“In December it was the guy getting out of his car at his restaurant in Morristown,” Marino continues as my mind jumps to the peculiar poem again.

It was tweeted from a hotel in Morristown. Copperhead. My attention wanders back to the seven pennies on the wall.

“And I was there for that one, during the holidays, hanging out with some of my cop buddies, so I went to the scene. Shot once in the back of the neck, once in the gut. Solid copper bullets, high-speed velocities with so little frag we can’t do positive ballistics matching. But there’s a definite consistency in the two cases. We’re pretty sure the same rifle was used, an unusual one.”

We. At some point Marino inserted himself into an investigation that is outside of his jurisdiction. Serial murders, possibly sniper kills or at least that seems to be what he’s implying, and there’s nothing worse than an investigation launched by assumptions. If you already know the answer you torque everything to fit the theory.

“Let’s go slowly until we know exactly what we’re dealing with,” I say to him as I watch Benton watching me and checking his phone.

I suspect he’s skimming through news feeds and emails, trying to find out for himself what is going on. He continues to glance in the direction of the Academy of Arts and Sciences where he saw something flash like a camera flash, only duller. A glint, a flick of light, he said. The lens of a riflescope enters my mind. I think of the low dispersion glass or kill-flash devices used by snipers and competition shooters.

I meet Benton’s eyes and indicate we need to go inside the house slowly, calmly, as if nothing is the matter. I pause on the patio, checking the grill. I cover it with the lid, acting unflustered and unconcerned. If someone is watching us or has a riflescope trained on us there is nothing we can do about it.

Sudden movements or an impression of panic will make matters worse. Lucy and Janet didn’t notice anyone when they did an aerial recon but I don’t put much stock in that. The person could be camouflaged. Maybe he ducked out of sight when he heard the helicopter’s approach. Maybe he’s back.

“You know who Jack Kuster is?” Marino asks.

I tell him I don’t as Benton and I climb the back steps with Sock on our heels.

“Morristown,” Marino says. “Their lead investigator and a master forensic firearms instructor. He’s suspicious we’re talking about a 5R like you see with sharpshooters and snipers who build their own rifles. My buddies there have been keeping me up to speed. And I got a personal interest.”

Marino grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, and loves to attend concerts and sports events at the MetLife. This past February it was the Super Bowl. He claimed his cop friends with the Morris County Sheriff’s Department managed to get tickets.

“There’s copper frag at the scene, more of the same glitter where the bullet exited his body and slammed into the pavement,” Marino says.

“The body’s been moved?” That had better not be what he’s implying.

“Apparently some of the frag’s in blood that flowed out from under his head. Don’t worry. Nobody’s touched anything they shouldn’t.”

Benton shuts the screen door behind us, then the heavy wooden inner door, deadbolting it. I stand in the hallway on the phone while he disappears toward the kitchen. I end the call because someone else is trying me and I look to see who it is.

Bryce Clark.

Then I have him in my earpiece.

“Remember the high school music teacher who made the big stink about being persecuted by the government and ended up having a beer and barbecue with Obama?” Bryce says right off and now I understand. “A real jerk to you, remember? Dissed you right in front of the president? Basically called you a body snatcher and a Nazi who sells skin, bones, eyes, livers, lungs to the highest bidder?”

Jamal Nari. My mood gets worse.

“Did I mention a shit storm?” Bryce says. “It’s already all over the news. Don’t ask me why they released his identity instantly. Waited what? An hour? Maybe ask Marino that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean it’s no secret where Nari lives—or lived—obviously since there were news crews including CNN and Reuters and my fave GMA camped out there when that disastrous PR faux pas happened that landed him at the White House during happy hour. But they’re saying it’s him for sure. How did it happen that they released this all over the planet?”

I don’t have an answer.

“Are you going to the scene or should I tell Luke to head there? Before you answer? My opinion? It should be you,” adds my talkaholic chief of staff. “They’re already tweeting conspiracy theories. And get this? A tweet about a Cambridge man possibly murdered on Farrar Street? It’s been retweeted a million times since nine a.m.”

I don’t see how that’s possible. I recall Marino saying Nari was killed between nine-forty-five and ten. I tell Bryce to get transport to the scene ASAP and make sure they bring a barrier shelter and set it up. I don’t want people gawking and taking pictures with their phones.

“We release absolutely nothing to anyone,” I instruct. “Not one word. Alert the cleanup service, and as soon as we’ve documented the scene I want blood and any other biological material removed as if it was never there.”

“I’ll get right on it,” he says. “Oh yeah! And happy birthday, Doctor Scarpetta! I was going to sing it to you. But maybe later’s better …?”

4

It was a computer error, a terrible blunder. Jamal Nari was mistaken for someone with terrorist ties and suddenly found himself on a No Fly List and under surveillance.

His assets were frozen. The FBI appeared at his home with a search warrant. He resisted, ended up in handcuffs and next was suspended from teaching. This was maybe a year ago. It was all over the news and went viral on the Internet. The public was incensed and he was invited to the White House, which only offended people further. I’d completely forgotten his name. It’s possible I’d blocked it. He was rude to me, a pompous ass.

It happened in the White House basement where there are small rooms collectively called the Mess, elegant with fine linen and china, fresh flowers and rich wooden paneling hung with maritime paintings. I was meeting with the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the NIST, discussing the lack of consistency in forensic disciplines, the inadequate resources and the need for national support. Happy hour and the president appeared to buy a beer for Jamal Nari, who made a point of insulting me.

Another call and Marino lets me know he’s in my driveway.

“Give me fifteen minutes to get my things,” I tell him.

Sock nudges the back of my legs as I follow the paneled hallway hung with Victorian etchings of London and Dublin scenes, then into my kitchen of commercial grade stainless steel appliances and antique alabaster chandeliers. Benton is standing by a counter using one of many MacBooks stationed about, skimming through security camera video footage.

“Any word from your people?” I’m wondering if the FBI’s Boston Field Division has contacted him yet about Jamal Nari.

“It wouldn’t be ours at this stage unless Cambridge invites us. And Marino won’t, and at the moment there’s no need.”

“You’re saying the FBI has no reason to think the shooting is related to Obama coming here today.”

“At this time we don’t but security will be intensified. It could be someone making an anti-Islamist statement because of the timing. The president’s press conference tomorrow in Boston,” Benton reminds me. “He plans to address the hatred, the threats ramping up as we get closer to the Boston Marathon bombing case going to trial.”

“Jamal Nari wasn’t a terrorist. I don’t recall that he was Muslim, either.”

“Perception,” Benton says.

“And Marino’s perception has nothing to do with anything political or religious. He believes this case is connected to ones in New Jersey. If that’s true,” I reiterate, “the FBI certainly has more than a passing interest.”

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with, Kay. The shooting could be self-inflicted. It could be accidental. It could be anything. It might not even be a shooting. I don’t trust what anyone says until you actually see the body yourself.”

“You don’t want to come?” I cover the panzanella with plastic wrap.

“It’s not appropriate for me to show up.”

The way he says it makes me suspicious. I know when Benton is telling me what I should hear and not necessarily what is true.

“Anything?” I ask him about the video recording.

“Not so far, which isn’t making me happy. For sure someone was at our wall. If it was completely missed by our cameras then the person knew exactly how to come and go without being seen or recorded.”

“Unless this really is nothing and whoever did it just happened to miss cameras he didn’t even know about,” I remark.

“A coincidence?” He doesn’t believe it and I don’t either.

The Tuscan salad goes into the refrigerator where the swordfish and pitcher of my spicy Bloody Mary mix will stay. Maybe tonight we can have a nice dinner that was supposed to be brunch. But I doubt it. I know how days like this go. Sleepless, relentless, take-out pizza if we’re lucky.

“Our agents gave Nari a rough time. Doesn’t matter who started it.” Benton gets back to that.

“I’m not surprised. He certainly didn’t strike me as easy or nice.”

“If we rush in uninvited it won’t look good. The media will make something of it. There are protests in Boston and Cambridge tomorrow and a march scheduled on Boylston Street. Not to mention anti-FBI and antigovernment protestors, and even local cops who are bitter about how we handled the bombing.”

“Because you didn’t share information that might have prevented MIT Officer Collier from being murdered.” It’s not a question. It’s a reminder. I’m judgmental about it.

“I can try to get us on the seven p.m. flight into Fort Lauderdale.”

“I need you to do something for me.” I open a cabinet near the sink where I keep Sock’s food, medications, and a box of examination gloves because I hand-feed him. I pull out a pair and give them to Benton. Then I give him a freezer bag. From a drawer I retrieve a Sharpie and a measuring tape.

“The pennies,” I explain. “I’d like them photographed to scale and collected. Maybe they really are nothing but I want them preserved properly just to be on the safe side.”

He opens a drawer and retrieves his Glock .40 cal.

“If Jamal Nari was murdered then his killer wasn’t far from here this morning, not even half a mile away,” I explain. “I also don’t like the fact that you noticed something glinting from the trees, and added to that I got a strange communication last month from someone who mentioned pennies. There was something in it about keeping the change.”

“Directed at you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re just telling me this now?”

“I get whacky communications. It’s nothing new, and this one didn’t seem all that different from other ones—not at the time. But we should be careful. Before you go back into the yard I think it would be a very good idea to get the state police chopper to do a flyover, check the woods, the Academy, make sure there’s no one on the roof or in a tree or lurking around.”

“Lucy already checked.”

“Let’s do it again. I can ask Marino to send some uniforms over there too.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“You might want to book our flight for tomorrow,” I decide. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere today.”

I head upstairs. Sunlight streams through the French stained glass over the landings, illuminating wildlife scenes like jewels. The vivid reds and blues don’t inspire happiness at the moment. They remind me of emergency lights.

Inside our master suite on the second floor I take off my jacket and drop it on the bed, which I’ve not gotten around to making. I was hopeful we hadn’t finished with it yet.

Through windows facing the front of the house I can see Marino leaning against his unmarked dark blue Ford Explorer. His shaved head is shiny in the bright sunlight as if he polishes his big round dome, and he has on wire-rimmed Ray-Bans that are as old-fashioned as his worldview. He doesn’t seem particularly worried about an active shooter at large as he lingers in the middle of our driveway.

I can tell he was off duty when he got the call. His voluminous gray sweatpants and black leather high-tops are what he usually wears for heavy bag training at his boxing club, and I suspect there’s a vest under his zipped-up Harley-Davidson windbreaker. I don’t see Quincy, his rescued German Shepherd that Marino has deluded himself into believing is a service dog. He shows up at most crime scenes these days, snuffles around and typically pees on something disgusting or rolls in it.

Inside the bathroom I wash my face and brush my teeth. Stripping off my drawstring pants and pullover I’m confronted by myself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. Handsome, attractive in a strong way according to journalists, and it’s my belief they’re actually thinking about my personality when they make such comments. I’m small, formidable, generously built, petite, medium height, too thin, sturdy, depending on who you ask. But the fact is that most journalists have no idea what I really look like and rarely get my age right or understand anything about me at all.

I examine the faintly etched laugh and smile lines, the hint of a furrow from frowning, which I try not to do because it makes nothing better. Mussing my short blond hair with gel and adding a touch of lipstick are an improvement. I brush a mineral sunblock over my face and the backs of my hands.

Then I pull on a T-shirt and over that a soft armor tactical vest, level IIIA, coyote tan, mesh lined. In a drawer I find cargo pants and a long-sleeved button-up shirt, navy blue with the CFC crest, my winter uniform when I respond to deaths or related scenes. I haven’t bothered swapping out for lightweight khaki yet. I was going to do it after Florida.

Back downstairs I retrieve my rugged black plastic scene case out of the closet near the front door. I sit on the rug to pull on ankle-high boots that I decontaminated with detergent after I wore them last. I think of when that was, the end of April, a Sunday. The nights were still dipping into the low forties when a Tufts Medical School professor walking a trail in Estabrook Woods got lost and wasn’t found until the next day. I remember his name, Dr. Johnny Angiers. His widow is owed life insurance benefits thanks to me. I can’t undo death but I can make it less unfair.

Grabbing my case, I head down the brick front steps. In and out of sunlight I pass beneath flowering dogwoods and serviceberry with white clusters on the tips of twigs. Beneath them are wild ginger and cinnamon fern, then the old dark red brick pavers of our narrow driveway which is completely blocked by Marino’s SUV.

“Where’s Quincy?” I look at the empty dog crate in the backseat.

“I was at the gym when I got the call,” Marino says. “Raced home on my motorcycle and grabbed my car but didn’t have time to change or deal with him.”

“I’m sure he wasn’t happy.” I think of my own unhappy dog.

Marino taps a cigarette out of the pack.

“Nothing like it after a workout,” I say pointedly at the spurt of the lighter, the toasty tobacco smell.

He takes a big drag, leaning against the SUV. “No nagging about smoking. Be nice to me today.”

“This minute I might just light one up.” I sit inside the SUV and talk to him through the open door.

“Be my guest.” He sucks on the cigarette and the tip glows brighter like a fanned hot coal.

He shakes another one loose, the brown filter popping up. Greeting me like a lost friend. Like the old days. I’m tempted. I fasten my shoulder harness and suddenly Benton is on the driveway striding toward us with purpose.

5

The bright copper coins shine through the freezer Baggie Benton carries. He sealed it with tape that he initialed and labeled.

“What the shit?” Marino’s words blow out in a cloud of smoke. “What are you giving this to me for?”

“Either take care of it or it ends up at the FBI labs in Quantico.” Benton hands him the Baggie and a Sharpie. “Which wouldn’t make any sense. No pun intended. I’ve emailed the photographs to you.”

“What? You auditioning to be a crime scene tech? Reading your crystal ball’s not enough anymore? Well I can check. But I’m pretty sure Cambridge isn’t hiring.”

“They’re not fake and they definitely were polished,” Benton says to me. “If you look at them under a lens, each has the same very subtle pitting. It may be that a tumbler was used. Gun enthusiasts who hand-load their own ammo often use tumblers to polish cartridge cases. The pennies need to go to the labs now.”

Marino holds up the Baggie. “I don’t get it.”

“They were left on top of our wall,” I explain. “It could have waited until we were sure nobody is around,” I say to Benton.

“Nobody is. That’s not how an offender like this works.”

“An offender like what?” Marino asks. “I feel like I missed the first half of the movie.”

“I’ve got to go.” Benton holds my gaze. He looks around and back at me before returning to the house where I have no doubt he’s been making plans he’s not sharing.

Marino initials the Baggie, scribbles the time and date, screwing shut one eye behind his Ray-Bans as smoke drifts into his face. Another drag on the cigarette and he bends down to wipe it against a brick, scraping it out, and he tucks the butt in a pocket. It’s an old habit that comes from working crime scenes where it’s poor form to add detritus that could be confused with evidence. I know the drill. I used to do it too. It was never pretty when I’d forget to empty my pockets before my pants or jacket ended up in the washing machine.

Marino climbs into the SUV and impatiently shoves the Baggie into the glove box.

“The pennies go to fingerprints first, then DNA and trace,” I tell him as we shut our doors. “Be gentle with them. I don’t want any additional artifact introduced such as scratches to the metal from you banging them around.”

“So I’m taking them seriously, really treating them like evidence? In what crime? You mind explaining what the hell’s going on?”

I tell him what I remember about the anonymous email I received last month.

“Did Lucy figure out who it is?”

“No.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“It wasn’t possible.”

“She couldn’t hack her way into figuring it out?” Marino backs out of the driveway. “Lucy must be slipping.”

“It appears the person was clever enough to use a publicly accessed computer in a hotel business center,” I explain. “She can tell you which one. I recall she said it was in Morristown.”

“Morristown,” he repeats. “Holy shit. The same area where the two Jersey victims were shot.”

We back out onto the street and I’m struck by how peaceful it is, almost mid-June, close to noon, the sort of day when it’s difficult to imagine someone plotting evil. Most undergraduate students are gone for the summer, many people are at work and others are home tending to projects they put off during the regular academic year.

The economics professor across from our house is mowing his grass. He looks up at us and waves as if all is fine in the world. The wife of a banker two doors down is pruning a hedge, and one yard over from her a landscaping truck is parked on the side of the street, sonny’s lawn care. Not far from it is a skinny young man wearing dark glasses, oversized jeans, a sweatshirt and a baseball cap. He’s loud with a gas engine leaf blower, clearing the sidewalk, and he doesn’t look at us or do the polite thing and pause his work as we drive past. Grass clippings and grit blast the SUV in a swarm of sharp clicks.

“Asshole!” Marino flashes his emergency lights and yelps his siren.

The young man pays no attention. He doesn’t even seem to notice.

Marino slams on the brakes, shoves the SUV into park and boils out. The blower is as loud as an airboat. Then abrupt silence as the young man stops what he’s doing. His dark glasses stare, his mouth expressionless. I try to place him. Maybe I’ve just seen him in the area doing yard work.

“You like it if I did that to your car?” Marino yells at him.

“I don’t have a car.”

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have to tell you,” he says in the same indifferent tone, and I notice his hair is long and carrot red.

“Oh yeah? We’ll see about that.”

Marino stalks around the truck, inspecting it. He pulls out a notepad and makes a big production of writing down the truck’s plate number. Next he photographs it with his BlackBerry.

“I find anything I’ll write you up for damaging city property,” he threatens, the veins standing out in his neck.

A shrug. He isn’t scared. He doesn’t give a shit. He’s even smiling a little.

Marino gets back in and resumes driving. “Fucking asshole.”

“Well you made your point,” I reply dryly.

“What the hell’s wrong with kids these days? Nobody raises them right. If he was mine, I’d kick his damn ass.”

I don’t remind him that his only child, Rocco, who is dead, was a career criminal. Marino used to kick his ass and a lot of good it did.

“You seem very agitated today,” I comment.

“You know why? Because I think we’re dealing with some type of fucking terrorist who’s now in our backyard. That’s my gut and I wish to hell it wasn’t, and me and Machado are having a real beef about it.”

“And you started thinking this when exactly?”

“After the second case in Jersey. I got a real bad feeling Jamal Nari is the third one.”

“Terrorists generally claim responsibility,” I remind him. “They don’t remain anonymous.”

“Not always.”

“What about enemies?”

I get back to the reason my vacation is being delayed and possibly ruined. More to the point, I need Marino to focus on what’s before us and not on connections he’s making to cases in New Jersey, to terrorism or to anything else.

“I would imagine that after the storm of publicity Jamal Nari must have gained a few detractors,” I add.

“Nothing to account for this that we know about so far.” Marino turns on Irving Street.

A light wind stirs hardwood trees and their shadows move on the sunny pavement. The traffic is intermittent, a couple of cars, a moped, and a boxy white construction truck that Marino tailgates and blares his horn at because it’s not going fast enough. The truck pulls over to let him pass and Marino guns the engine.

He’s in a mood all right and I doubt it’s solely related to his so-called beef with Machado. Something else is going on. Marino might be scared and going out of his way to act like he’s not.

“And the highly publicized problem with the FBI was about this time last year?” I’m asking him. “Why strike now? A lot of people have forgotten about it. Including me.”

“I don’t know how you forget after the way he treated you at the White House. Accusing you of selling body parts, saying autopsies are for profit and all that bullshit. Kind of an irony that the very thing he went after you about is now going to happen to him.”

“Did he live alone?” I ask.

“Second marriage. Joanna Cather. She was one of his students in high school and now works there as a psychologist.” Marino has gone from angry to subdued. “They started dating a couple years ago when he got divorced. Needless to say she’s much younger. She kept her name when they got married for obvious reasons.”

“What obvious reasons?”

“The name Nari. It’s Muslim.”

“Not necessarily. It could be Italian. Was he Muslim?”

“I guess the Feds thought he was which is why they went after him.”

“They went after him because of a computer error, Marino.”

“What matters is the way it looks and assumptions they make. If people thought he was Muslim, maybe that has something to do with why he’s been murdered. Especially with Obama coming here and the fact that Nari met him at the White House last year. Since the marathon bombings there’s a lot of sensitivity around here about jihadists, about loser extremists. Maybe we’re dealing with a vigilante who’s taking out people he thinks should die.”

“Jamal Nari was a Muslim and now suddenly he was a jihadist or extremist Islamist upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

He clams up, his jaw muscles clenching.

“What’s going on with you, Marino?”

“I’m not objective about it, okay?” he erupts again. “The Nari thing is pushing my wrong buttons and I can’t help it. Because of who and what he was and the fucking reward he got? A trip to the fucking White House? He gonna be on the cover of Rolling Stone next?”

“This isn’t about him, it’s about the bombings. It’s about the murder of an MIT police officer who was minding his own business, sitting in his patrol car on a night when you were on duty. It could have been you.”

“Asshole terrorists, and if the Bureau had bothered telling us they were in the Cambridge area …? I mean a detail like that and no cop is going to be sitting in his car, a damn sitting duck. I’m not back in policing even six months and something like that goes down. People killed in cold blood and their legs blown off. That’s the world we live in now. I don’t see how you get past it.”

“We don’t. But I’m asking that you put it on hold right now. Let’s talk about where Jamal Nari lived.”

“A one-bedroom apartment.” Marino’s Ray-Bans stare rigidly ahead. “They moved in after they got married.”

“This part of Cambridge is expensive,” I reply.

“The rent’s three-K. Not a problem for them for some reason. Maybe because after he was suspended from teaching he sued the school for discrimination. Figures, right? I don’t know the settlement but we’ll find out. By all appearances so far he did a little better than your average high school teacher.”

“This is from Machado?”

“I get info from a lot of places.”

“And where was Joanna Cather this morning when her husband died?”

“New Hampshire, heading to an outlet mall, according to her. She’s on her way here.” Sullen again, he refuses to look at me.

“Are you aware that by nine a.m. it was already on the Internet that a Cambridge man on Farrar Street possibly had been shot? It was retweeted before the alleged shooting had even occurred.”

“People are always screwing up the time they think something happened.”

“Regardless of how people screw up things,” I answer, “you should know exactly what time the nine-one-one call was made.”

“At ten-oh-two exactly,” he says. “The lady who noticed his body on the pavement said she’d seen him pull up and start getting groceries out of his car around nine-forty-five. Fifteen minutes later she noticed him down on the pavement at the rear of his car. She figured he had a heart attack.”

“How did anyone get the information before the police were even called?” I persist.

“Who told you?”

“Bryce.”

“Maybe he’s mixed up. It wouldn’t be a first.”

“Unfortunately, these days you have to worry about students,” I say as we slow at a four-way intersection. “If you’re a teacher or work in a school you could be targeted by a teenager, by someone even younger. The more it happens the more it will.”

“This is different from that. I already know it,” he says.

A jogger goes by in the crosswalk and starts to turn onto Farrar Street but apparently notices the emergency vehicles, the news trucks. He looks up at several helicopters hovering at about a thousand feet. Heading to Scott Street instead he nervously glances back and around as he picks up his pace.

“Obviously, we need to consider his students and any his wife had contact with,” I add. “Have you talked to her yourself?”

“Not yet. I only know what Machado’s been saying. According to him she sounded shocked and upset.” Marino finally looks at me. “Lost her shit in other words and it came across as genuine. She mentioned a kid she’s been helping, said she has no reason to think he’d hurt anyone but he has a thing for her. Or maybe Nari was shot during an attempted robbery. That was her other suggestion.”

“She said he was shot?”

“I think she got that from Machado. I didn’t get the impression that she already knew it.”

“We should make sure.”

“Thanks for helping me do my job. Obviously I couldn’t connect the dots without you.”

“Are you angry with me or just angry in general about terrorists? Why are you and Machado not getting along?”

He doesn’t say anything. I let it go for now.

“So Jamal Nari went grocery shopping.” I unlock my iPhone and execute a search on the Internet. “Was that a typical routine on a Thursday morning during the summer?”

“Joanna says no,” Marino replies. “He was stocking up because they were going to Stowe, Vermont, for a long weekend supposedly.”

Jamal Nari is on Wikipedia. There are scores of news accounts about his run-in with the FBI and trip to the White House. Fifty-three years old, born in Massachusetts, his father’s family originally from Egypt, his mother from Chicago. A gifted guitarist, he attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston and performed in musical theater and bands until he decided to settle down and teach. His high school chorus is consistently one of the top three in New England.

“Well this is a mess already,” I decide as we roll up on the scene.

I recognize the two helicopters directly overhead, Channel 12 and Channel 5. There must be at least a dozen cars, marked and unmarked, plus several news trucks in addition to other vehicles that might belong to reporters. The media has wasted no time, and that’s the way it is these days. Information is instantaneous. It’s not unusual for journalists to arrive at a scene before I do.

We park behind a CFC windowless white van rumbling on the shoulder of the road. The caduceus and scales of justice in blue on the doors are tasteful and subtle but nothing can disguise the ominous arrival of one of my scene vehicles. It’s not what anyone would ever wish to see. It can mean only one thing.

“Suddenly he gets a brand-new red Honda SUV.” Marino points out what’s parked in front of the house. “That would have set him back a few.”

“And you presume he changed cars because he thought someone was after him?” That doesn’t seem logical to me. “If someone was stalking him I wouldn’t think changing cars would make a difference. The person would figure it out soon enough.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter what I think. Maybe the Portuguese Man of War is in charge of this investigation. At least for five minutes.”

“You two need to get along. I thought you were good friends.”

“Yeah well think again.”

We climb out as my transport team, Rusty and Harold, open the back of the van. They begin pulling out a stretcher and stacks of disposable sheets.

“We got the barrier screens up,” Harold says to me.

“I can see that,” I reply. “Good job.”

The four large black nylon panels are fastened by Velcro straps to PVC frames and form an ominous boxy shelter roomy enough for me to work in while shielding the body from prying eyes. But like similar screens used roadside in motor vehicle fatalities to prevent rubbernecking, the temporary shelters also signal carnage and they won’t stop helicopters from filming. Despite our best efforts we won’t be able to keep Jamal Nari’s dead body out of the news.

“And we’ve got sandbags on the rails just to make sure somebody doesn’t accidentally knock one over,” says Harold, a former undertaker who might just sleep in a suit and tie.

“Or in case we get a chopper gets too damn close.” Rusty is clad as usual in a sweatshirt and jeans, his long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“Let’s hold here,” I say to them.

They need to stay put until I give them the signal. I don’t have to explain further. They know the routine. I need time to work and think. I count six uniformed cops sitting in their cruisers and posted at the perimeter. They’re making sure no one unauthorized enters the scene while they keep a lookout for the possible killer. I recognize two Cambridge crime scene techs who can’t do much until I’m done, and I find Sil Machado’s SUV, a dark blue Ford Explorer the same as Marino’s only not as shellacked with wax and Armor All.

Machado—the good-looking dark-haired Portuguese Man of War—is talking to a heavyset young woman, brunette, in sweats. The two of them are alone in the shade of a maple tree in front of the slate tower-roofed Victorian, a splendid three-story house turned into condominiums. Marino tells me Nari’s unit is on the first floor in back.

I lift out my scene case but hold my position at the rear of Marino’s SUV. I stand perfectly still. I get the lay of the land.

6

Tape is wrapped around big oak trees and iron lampposts, bright yellow with police line do not cross in black. It encircles the property, threaded through railings, barring the front entrance covered by a peaked roof.

I note the red Honda’s temporary tags, the open tailgate, the cartons of milk and juice, the apples, grapes, bananas, and boxes and bags of cereal, crackers and potato chips scattered on the pavement. Cans of tuna have rolled to the curb, resting not far from my feet, and honeydew melons are cracked and oozing sweet juice that I can smell. A jar of salsa is shattered, and I detect its spicy tomato odor too. Flies have gotten interested, alighting on spilled food warming in the sun.

What once was the front yard is now a paved parking area with space for several cars. A motor scooter is chained to a lamppost. Two bicycles are secured by locked heavy cables hugging columns on a wraparound front porch centered by a bay window. Probably students living here, I decide, and a fifty-three-year-old high school music teacher married to a second wife named Joanna who supposedly was shopping at a New Hampshire outlet mall when the police gave her the shocking news.

I continue to ponder that fact as I move in, ducking under the tape. If Nari and his wife were heading to Vermont for a long weekend, why was she off to an outlet mall a two-hour round-trip away? Did she need to shop this morning because of their impending trip? Or was she careful not to be home or even in Massachusetts at nine-forty-five a.m.? I reach the privacy screens. Velcro makes a ripping sound as I open the panel closest to the back of the red SUV. I make sure that the slowing cars and gathering spectators on sidewalks and in their yards can’t see what is none of their business.

I don’t enter the black boxy barricade yet as I think about what Marino said Joanna told Machado. She has no idea why anyone would have killed her husband. But she mentioned a high school student she was trying to help. She also offered the possibility of a random robbery gone as wrong as one could, and that’s not what this is.

I set down my scene case just outside the privacy screens, the sun almost directly overhead now, illuminating what’s inside. I smell the iron pungency of blood breaking down. Blowflies drone, honing in on wounds and orifices to lay their eggs.

His body is faceup on the pavement, his legs straight out, the left one only very slightly bent. His arms are loosely by his sides. He didn’t stumble. He didn’t try to catch himself when he fell or move after he did. He couldn’t.

Blood is separating from its serum at the edges, in the very early stages of coagulation, consistent with his being shot within the past two hours. Postmortem changes will have begun but not escalated because the temperature is in the upper sixties, the air dry with a cool breeze and he’s fully clothed. I estimate his body temperature will be around ninety-four degrees and he’s begun getting stiff. Then my attention is pulled back to the blood.

It flowed from the wound in his neck. Following the gentle slope of the tarmac it soaked the upper back of his white shirt, terminating some three feet from his body. The wound to his eye doesn’t appear to have bled much at all, just a trickle down the side of his face, staining his collar. A small amount flowed from the back of his head. It wasn’t much bleeding for such profound injuries to vascular areas. His heart stopped beating quickly. It may have stopped instantly.

I note the car key nearby, the two brown paper bags from Whole Foods, their contents spilled. He had the key and two bags in hand when he went down like an imploded building. Eight additional bags are still inside the SUV’s open tailgate, the interior light on, and already I’m perplexed by the extensive shopping he did for a three-day trip.

I catch glimpses of paper towels, toilet paper, boxes of aluminum foil and trash bags, and a Smirnoff vodka box with bottles of wine and liquor inside the dividers. If there are additional bags inside the apartment then Nari must have left home quite early to do this much shopping at more than one location. Whole Foods doesn’t carry liquor.

He looks familiar but he probably would even if we hadn’t briefly met. I would have seen him on the news. It’s possible I’ve seen him in passing in the neighborhood, although I have no recollection of it. I look closely at his body before touching it, getting an overview and immediate impressions. I will myself not to think about our unpleasant encounter in Washington, D.C., and the president’s raised eyebrows, his bemused smile when Nari lit into me.

He has short gray hair that’s receding, and a rugged face with a strong prominent jaw hinting at an underbite. Clean-shaven, he’s of average height and slender with little body fat but he has a swollen belly that I find curious. Possibly he’s a heavy beer drinker. I put him at about five-foot-eight, 160 pounds, someone youthful for his age.

“Anything I can help you with, Chief?” The voice with the Spanish accent belongs to CFC Investigator Jen Garate, long dark hair, blue eyes, olive skin, mid-thirties, pretty in an exotic overblown way.

She likes tight clothes that accentuate her voluptuous build, and I watch Machado watching her. He’s still talking to the young woman in sweats. She seems agitated and excited and he looks at me. He excuses himself and comes over.

“I’m all set here,” I tell Jen.

“You picked a good day to head out on vacation,” she says ironically. “I would have gotten here sooner but the little girl who drowned?”

I don’t know who she means and I’m not going to ask, not now.

“Stupid ass kids, right?” she tells me anyway. “The water was freezing and she decides it’s a good idea to jump on the pool cover. Good thing we keep dry suits in the back of the trucks. But the collar gasket leaked and I had to clean myself up.”

“Thanks for your help.” My tone doesn’t invite her chatty conversation.

“I wonder if Lucy’s still up.” She stares off at a distant helicopter, twin engine but with skids, and her observation is peculiar.

Why would she know that Lucy was flying today? They aren’t friends, not even cordial. I recognize the fuselage shape of a Eurocopter, possibly MedFlight.

“I’m just curious,” she says. “Obama’s coming here today so how does she manage permission to fly in a prohibited airspace? I guess your DOD connections don’t hurt, not to mention your husband.”

“Permission depends on who’s been vetted by the TSA and has advance clearance.” I’ve stopped what I’m doing and am meeting her gaze. “I have no influence with the FAA and I’m not sure what you’re implying.”

“I just think it’s cool to be a pilot, that’s all.”

“I’ll see you back at the office.” It’s my way of dismissing her.

She hesitates in her cargo pants and long-sleeved T-shirt that look painted on, then she smiles at Machado as his eyes wander over what she never fails to flaunt.

Male or female, Jen doesn’t care who stares. My new chief of investigations is a shallow narcissist it’s just my luck, and I hired her because I had to hire someone after Marino left. Skilled and New York trained she’s smart and competent but a mistake I’ve found out. I can’t fire her because she’s inappropriate and certain people don’t like her. I can’t tell her how to act or dress because that for sure would get me sued, and I watch her head back toward the street, swaying her hips, her round buttocks pumping.

“Doc?” Machado greets me, his eyes masked by Oakleys, a style called Half Jacket that’s popular with the cops and the military.

He is typically neat in crisp khaki slacks, a white shirt and blue striped tie, and a navy blue windbreaker with cambridge police in yellow on the back. The windbreaker is oversized, snapped up to conceal a tactical vest. He obviously was on duty when the call came in and it doesn’t escape my notice that Marino crosses his arms, his face hard, his jaw muscles clenching again.

“I hear we ruined your day,” Machado says to me.

“My day’s not as ruined as his.”

“Sorry about your vacation.”

“Right now it doesn’t seem very important, considering.” I open the sturdy plastic clasps of my scene case and retrieve white Tyvek coveralls packaged in cellophane.

“What’s been done?”

“We’ve got photographs and I’ve checked out his apartment, just a quick go-through to make sure nobody was inside who shouldn’t be. The door was unlocked and ajar. It appears he’d already carried in three bags and was getting more out of the car when somebody nailed him.”

Machado flips through a notepad as I work the coveralls over my clothes. At the bottom of my scene case I find boot covers and pull them on, standing on one foot at a time. Suiting up is an art. I’ve witnessed seasoned investigators put things on backward or lose their balance.

“That lady?” Machado glances at the one he was just talking to. “She lives in the unit on the top floor, Harvard grad student, said she was working at her desk when she saw Nari drive up. Next thing she noticed him where he is now.”

“Did she hear gunshots or anything that might have been gunshots?” I pull on gloves.

“She says she didn’t, and there were no reports of shots fired in the area. We’re already questioning the neighbors. So far coming up zero. But the grad student?” He glances back at the woman, standing rather dazed on the sidewalk now. “Angelina Brown, twenty-four, getting her doctorate in education.”

Marino is jotting down the information, his mouth set as if he just ate something that didn’t agree with him.

“She did make one interesting comment,” Machado continues, “and for sure we’ll follow up on it. Apparently her desk is in front of the window facing the street and she has a bird’s-eye view of who’s out front or entering or leaving the house. She says she’s seen a kid in the area. He rides his bike back and forth up and down the street. Not so long ago Joanna Cather was outside talking to him and then they went around back, maybe heading into her apartment. Angelina says she’s pretty sure Nari’s car wasn’t here at the time. It struck her as weird that Joanna was possibly inviting a male into the apartment when her husband wasn’t home.”

“We know the kid’s name or have a description?” Marino continues to write down the information.

“Short, thin, always has a cap on.”

“That could only be a couple of people,” Marino says snidely and Machado ignores it.

“She says the kid looks maybe sixteen,” Machado continues. “Could be a little older or a little younger, you know with pants half mast, the usual baggy bad-boy clothes.”

“Huh. Let me guess. The kid Joanna claims she’s been trying to help,” Marino says. “Yeah, well maybe she’s been giving him more than advice.”

“If your witness is right and the person she’s seen riding his bike is this same student Joanna supposedly is helping, it appears he doesn’t live too far from here,” I reply, and Tyvek makes a papery sound as I crouch on the back of my heels just inside the opening of the barrier. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be on a bike, my guess is.”

“I’m gonna talk to her,” Marino says brusquely, and I glance back at his NBA-huge black high-tops behind us.

“Help yourself,” Machado replies.

“Don’t worry, I will.” Marino walks off as I check the dead music teacher’s hands.

I bend his fingers and feel rigor mortis forming in his small muscles. He’s still warm. I begin to unbutton his shirt and discover tattoos. Trees with flying crows are on his left chest, and on his right shoulder is a logo of some sort, RainSong in stylized letters. Machado crouches next to me.

“I assume the witness, Angelina Brown, didn’t mention whether she’d noticed this same kid in the area this morning?” I insert a long thermometer under the right arm and set a second thermometer in the top drawer of my scene case.

“I asked her that. She says no.” Machado watches what I’m doing. “But it’s not like she’s looking out her window every minute, either. It’s possible he could have come around through the backyard and she wouldn’t have seen him.”

“Any chance she really wasn’t in New Hampshire when you reached her?”

“We’ll be able to determine that from cell towers that picked up her phone signal when I called her.”

I rock the body toward me and it rests heavily, limply against my knees as I check for livor mortis, the settling of noncirculating blood due to gravity. It’s just beginning to form on his back, a blush of dark pink that blanches when I press it.

“I’m wondering,” I continue, “if it might be possible she actually was inside the apartment. I wonder if she had a visitor while her husband was shopping and then she left either intentionally or unintentionally at a strategic moment right before he got home.”

“Exactly. The cell towers will tell us if she’s lying. But I’m wondering why you’re wondering it.” His attention is fixed on me.

“Because I’ve seen things like it before. And there are still a lot of people out there who don’t realize just how much information their cell phones are giving to anyone interested. They lie because they have no clue how easily they’ll be caught.”

“She shouldn’t be naïve though, not after what they went through with the FBI.” Machado makes a good point.

“I don’t guess your witness noticed if Joanna’s car was here this morning,” I add.

“Well here’s an interesting detail. It just so happens she’s driving a rental car today.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know but I’d say it’s open season on possibilities,” Machado replies. “Which is one reason we don’t want anybody inside the apartment until we get a chance to go through it with a fine-tooth comb. All we’re waiting on is the warrant.”

He’s suspicious the wife had something to do with her husband’s murder, and it’s no wonder that would enter his mind early on. But based on what the witness Angelina Brown said and also on what I’m already seeing, Jamal Nari wasn’t taken out by some jealous high school kid packing a pistol. He wasn’t picked off by a contract killer who walked up and shot him and kept on going.

Had a gun been fired on the property someone would have heard it. I strongly suspect that Nari was shot long range by someone experienced and skilled who had a point to make. I retrieve a magnifying hand lens to get a better look at the small tangential hole in the back of the neck at the hairline. I take photographs. I turn the head slightly to the right, and blood spills out of the wound, an entrance wound. I move the head some more and shine a flashlight. Fragments of copper light up like gold in a mush of coagulating blood, hair and brain tissue.

7

The wound to the eye is also an entrance, the bullet smashing through the sunglasses Nari had on. I photograph them on the pavement, the left lens gone, the tortoise frame intact.

Shards of polarized plastic are scattered over his white button-up shirt and on the pavement next to his face. He was down when he was shot through the eye, in the exact position he’s in now, and I back out of the cool shade of my privacy shelter. I look up and around at windows in other homes and town houses. I look at the apartment buildings at the end of the street a block from here, rows of them like barracks, three story, flat rooftops.

Finding a six-inch ruler and a tape measure, I duck back inside my big black box and photograph him from every angle, noting that when the bullet struck his sunglasses, the force and trajectory knocked the frames off his face. They landed exactly three feet four inches to the right of his head, and I palpate his bloody gray hair.

My gloved fingers find what I’m looking for, fractured bones in his occipital skull and lacerations where at least one bullet exited. But no bogginess. He had scarcely any vital response at all. He was dead by the time he hit the ground. I remember the anonymous poem again and its reference to a hangman.

Instant death is rare. It can be caused by the dislocation of the C2 from the vertebral body. When I see this it’s usually in hangings with long sudden drops such as from a bridge or a tall tree, and in motor vehicle and diving accidents when the victim suffers a hyperflexion injury after striking his head on a dashboard or the bottom of a pool. If the spinal cord is severed, the brain is no longer attached to the body. The heart and lungs instantly quit.

“I think you can rule out a drive-by shooting or foiled robbery or anything else that might have involved a handgun,” I tell Machado.

“You think it’s completely out of the question somebody could have come up behind him and shot him in the back of the neck? And when he dropped, shot him in the face?”

“In broad daylight with people around?”

“It’s amazing what people don’t hear or just assume is a car backfire.”

“There’s no stippling or any other evidence indicating the shot was close range.” I look carefully at the wound at the hairline. “If it was a pistol, there are no ejected cartridge cases.”

“The shooter could have picked them up.”

“That’s a lot of activity in a wide open area in the middle of the morning.”

“I’m not arguing,” Machado says. “I just want to cover every base. For example is it possible the bullet to the back of his neck exited through his eye? And we’re talking only one shot?”

“No. The wound to his eye is an entrance, and there wouldn’t be frag under and around his head if he was shot only once and while he was standing.”

“So that bullet—the first bullet—could be anywhere.”

“We’ll know more when we get him to my office. But what I’m seeing so far indicates two different flight paths. One when he was upright and another when he was down. The second shot exited the back of his skull, which is pretty much pulverized, held together by his scalp. The frag is right here.” I indicate the blood under and around the head. “The bullet disintegrated when it exited and struck the asphalt. In other words when he was shot through the eye he was in the position he’s in now.”

“Luck of the draw,” Machado says. “A bull’s-eye.”

“I don’t know if it was a lucky shot but it certainly wasn’t lucky for him except he didn’t suffer. In my opinion this was a lightning strike seemingly out of nowhere because it was made from a distance by someone who was set up for it.”

“How much of a distance?”

“It’s not possible to tell without doing detailed shooting reconstructions. And we will. And I suggest you pay close attention to any buildings around here where someone may have set up with a rifle. The frag appears to be solid copper, and if we’re talking about a handgun round such as a nine-millimeter solid copper hollowpoint, there wouldn’t have been sufficient muzzle velocity for the bullet to fragment like this. I think these were distant shots with heavy loads fired by someone with a high-power-rifle who is extremely precise and deliberate,” I reiterate.

“It’s exactly like I was telling you.” Marino is back, and I notice his shoes behind me again. “Maybe the same damn sniper that took out two people in New Jersey.”

“Jesus.” Machado’s dark glasses stare at the apartment buildings. He scans the nearby houses, pausing on the Federal-style brick multiunit dwelling directly across the street. “There we go with that again.”

“Didn’t you mention that those two victims were shot in the back of the neck?” I ask Marino.

“High up,” he says. “At the base of the skull.”

“And a second shot after they were on the ground?”

“You got it,” he replies. “Like some terrorist sending a message, making us feel nobody is safe taking the ferry or getting groceries out of the car.”

“Someone motivated by terrorism or possibly someone having fun target practicing with human beings.” I rip open a packet and remove a pair of plastic tweezers. “In either case you’re right. It sends a message that nobody’s safe.”

“Me? I’m keeping an open mind,” Machado says with an edge. “I want to find the kid on the bicycle before I start thinking murders committed by some ex-military guy gone berserk.”

“An open mind?” Marino says loudly. “That’s a joke. Your mind’s about as open as the Federal Reserve.”

“Watch it,” Machado says with the metallic ring of a warning in his tone. “You don’t ease up I’ll have you reassigned.”

“Last I checked you don’t supervise me. And the commissioner and me are tight. Threw back a few at Paddy’s the other night with him and the district attorney.”

Their squabbling and swipes are depressingly unhelpful and in poor taste. It’s as if they have forgotten the dead man who was minding his own business when someone violently stole his life and upended the worlds of everyone around him. I’m going to put a stop to the bickering the only way I can. I’ll separate them. I find a Sharpie in a drawer of my scene case.

I label a small cardboard evidence box and with the tweezers begin plucking each fleck and shred of bright copper from hair, from brain tissue and blood. The largest piece of frag is the size of a baby tooth, curved and as sharp as a razor. I place it on the tip of my index finger. I look at it with the magnifying lens and see one land, a partial one, and a groove imprinted into the copper by the rifling of the gun barrel. Then Marino is next to me, squatting, his hands gloved in black. I feel his heat. I smell the dried sweat from his workout in the gym.

“We’ll get ballistics on this right away,” I say to him. “Can you ask the investigators in New Jersey to email photographs from the two cases there?”

“Hell yes. Jack Kuster is the man.”

“Who?” Machado asks rudely.

“Only the top guy in shooting reconstructions who also happens to know more about guns than anyone you’ll ever meet.” Marino is boisterous, and I feel the anger between them.

“Get me anything as fast as you can,” I say to Marino. “The autopsy reports, lab results.”

“What if it turns out the ballistics don’t match?” Machado pushes back at me now.

“My concern at the moment,” I reply, “is that the M.O. and pattern of injuries are quite similar. A fatal shot to the back of the neck followed by a second shot that seems gratuitous and possibly symbolic. A shot to the mouth, a shot to the gut, a shot to an eye. We also have distant shots and solid copper bullets in common. Even if the ballistics don’t match, I suggest that we compare notes with Morristown. It’s in the realm of possibility that a shooter might not always use the same firearm.”

“Not likely,” Machado counters. “If you’re talking about a sniper, he’s going to use what he knows and trusts.”

“There you go with your assumptions,” Marino retorts.

“Jesus,” Machado mutters, shaking his head.

“Somebody’s got to work this intelligently before the fucker does it again.”

“Back off, buddy,” Machado snaps at him.

“I’m calling Kuster right now.” Marino pulls off his gloves and dips into a pocket of his jacket for his phone.

I place the bloody copper frag into the cardboard box. I tape the lid securely, handing the packaged evidence to Machado. I’ve just made it his responsibility to receipt it to the CFC and in the process I’m separating Marino and him. I remind Machado that the bullet fragments should be processed in the Integrated Ballistic Identification System, IBIS, immediately.

“There’s a problem with that. She’s not in …,” he starts to say, and I know what he’s alluding to and find it strange.

My top firearms examiner, Liz Wrighton, has been out sick with the flu for the past few days. I’m not sure why Machado would know about it.

“I’m calling her at home,” I reply.

I need her to use IBIS software to image the marks on the frag and run them through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, NIBIN. If the firearm in question has been used in other crimes we could get a hit in a matter of hours. I peel off my gloves.

“Hello?” she says stuffily.

“Liz? It’s Doctor Scarpetta.”

“I heard about the shooting on the news.”

“Apparently everybody has.” I look around as I talk.

Some of the neighbors are outside loitering on the sidewalks, in the street, and every car that passes slows to a crawl as people gawk. The sound of the news choppers is constant, and I notice a third one in the distance.

“The case is maybe two hours old. The media got here before I did,” I say to Liz.

“I saw it on Twitter,” she replies. “Let me see, I’m looking. Boston-dot-com says there was a shooting homicide in Cambridge, victim Jamal Nari. And another tweet reminds us who he is, you know, his pulled pork powwow with Obama. And I’m quoting. No disrespect on my part.”

“Can you come in? I’m really sorry. But this is important. How are you feeling?”

“Congested as hell but not contagious. I’m actually at CVS buying more drugs.” She coughs several times. “I can be there in forty-five.”

I look at Machado and nod that he can head to the CFC, and he walks swiftly to his SUV. Next I get my radiologic expert Anne on the phone. I tell her she has a case coming in that I want scanned immediately.

“I’m especially interested to see if he has a hangman’s fracture,” I explain.

A pause, then, “Okay. I’m confused. I thought this was a shooting.”

“Based on the position of the wound at the back of his neck and his lack of a vital response after being shot, I have a hunch we’re going to find a fracture involving both pars interarticularis of C-two. On CT we should be able to see the extent of his cervical spine injury. I’m betting his cord was severed.”

“I’ll do it as soon as the body arrives.”

“It should be there in half an hour. If I’m not back by the time you’re done, see if Luke can get started on the autopsy.”

“I guess no Florida,” Anne says.

“Not today,” I reply, and I end the call and crouch back inside the shelter of the privacy screens.

I tape small paper bags over the hands and a larger one over the head to preserve possible trace evidence. But I don’t expect anything significant beyond copper frag. I don’t think the killer came anywhere near his victim, and I stand up and look at Rusty and Harold still holding back at the CFC van. I motion to them.

They head in this direction as I pack up my scene case. Wheels rattle toward me as they roll the stretcher. Piled on top of it are white sheets and a neatly folded black body bag.

“You want to take a look inside his apartment?” Marino asks me. “Because that’s where I’m headed. I mean if you want to do your usual thing with the medicine cabinet, the fridge, the cupboards, the trash.”

He wants my company. He usually does.

“Sure. Let’s see what kind of meds he was taking,” I reply as a uniformed officer approaches him with paperwork I recognize as a warrant.

8

It’s a few minutes past one when Marino walks me around to the back of the Victorian house.

The first floor of it is clapboard, the upper stories and gables shingled. Up close I see the dark green paint is peeling and drainpipes are rusting. What’s left of the yard has been sutured by an ugly wooden fence, and the trunks of old trees crowd against it like something massive and lumbering trying to escape. I can imagine what an estate this must have been in an earlier era. What’s left of the subdivided property is no more than a sliver of land crowded by recently built bright brick town houses on three sides.

The windows of the corner first-floor apartment are small. The curtains are drawn, and the door they used to access their apartment has no patio or overhang. It must have been unpleasant hurrying inside when the weather was bad, especially if one was carrying groceries. It would have been awful in the ice and snow, treacherous in fact.

“So this is the exact way he came after he got out of his car,” Marino says as we walk through unbroken shade, chilly and still beneath leafy canopies, the earth pungent and spongy under my booted feet. “He carried three bags, walked around to the back of the house and let himself in with keys that are on the kitchen counter. There’s a knob lock and a dead bolt.”

“What about an alarm system?”

“He probably disarmed it when he went in unless it hadn’t been set, and I’ve got a call to the alarm company to find out the history for earlier today.” He glances at his phone. “Hopefully I’ll be getting that any minute.”

“Machado certainly handed off a lot of detail considering how much the two of you don’t seem to like each other at the moment.” I’m going to make him talk about it. “There’s no room in a homicide investigation for personal problems.”

“I’m a hundred percent focused.”

“If you were I wouldn’t have noticed that anything is wrong. I thought you were friends.”

His gloved hand turns a modern satin chrome knob that is an insult to the vintage oak front door.

“It’s completely closed now but when the first responding officers got here it was ajar.” He continues to ignore my questions.

I follow him in and stop just beyond the jamb, pulling the door shut. Opening my scene case I retrieve shoe covers for both of us as I glance around before stepping farther inside. The apartment is tiny, the kitchen and living area combined, the oak paneling painted chocolate brown. The wide board flooring is heavily varnished and scattered with colorful throw rugs. One bedroom, one bath, two windows across from me and two to my left, the drapes drawn, and I take my time near the door. I’m not done with him.

He and Machado are fighting and I wonder if it’s over a woman, and my thoughts dart back to Liz Wrighton. I’m rather startled but probably shouldn’t be. Single, in her late thirties, attractive, and I recall that when Marino worked for me, the two of them sometimes went shooting together or grabbed a few drinks after work. She’s been out sick since Monday and for some reason Machado knew about it.

“Did you mention to Machado that Liz has been out sick?” I ask.

“I didn’t know about it.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It isn’t.”

I look up at two rubbed bronze hanging fixtures shaped like inverted tulip bulbs. Cheap. What’s called antique inspired. Their bulbs are glaring, the dimmer switches near the door pushed up as bright as the lights will go. I doubt Jamal Nari did that when he came in with groceries and left the door ajar. I have a feeling Machado did plenty of looking around when he did his walk-through, and I suggest this to Marino. I ask him if the lights were on when the police got here or if Machado might have done it.

“I’m sure he turned them on so he could see anything in plain view before we got the warrant.” Marino is skimming through it, his mouth set angrily. “And guess what? I don’t see a sniper rifle on it. What if we find one in the closet or under the bed? It’s not like I didn’t damn tell him.”

“I don’t understand. Are you implying Joanna Cather shot her husband with a rifle they keep in the apartment?”

“I’m implying that Machado is being bullheaded and jerking me around. What he doesn’t want to hear is we’re probably looking for a special type of firearm. One that not so long ago wasn’t readily available to the public. So he’s not acknowledging anything I tell him.” Marino’s gloved hands pick up keys on the kitchen counter next to three upright brown paper Whole Foods bags. “A 5R. Like the rifle used in New Jersey.”

He’s talking about the engraving on the bullet made by the rifling of the barrel.

“Five lands and grooves with rolled leading edges,” he says. “And when do you see that in shooting cases?”

“I’m not sure I have.”

“I personally don’t know of any homicides where the shooter used a rifle with a 5R barrel except the two Jersey cases,” Marino says. “Even now there’s only a few models out there unless you custom-build, and most people don’t know crap about barrels or even think they’re important. But this shooter does because he’s damn smart. He’s a gun fanatic.”

“Or he somehow got hold of a gun like that …”

“We need to look for anything that might be related, put everything on a warrant including solid copper bullets, cartridge cases, a tumbler.” Marino talks over me. “Anything you can think of in any place we search including any vehicles like the wife’s rental car. But Machado’s fighting me. Basically he’s giving me the finger because if I’m right it’s a huge case and it’s mine not his.”

“Under ordinary circumstances it should be both of yours.”

“Well the circumstances aren’t ordinary and I should be the lead investigator. He’s already run the wrong way with the ball.”

“Your hope is that it’s Machado who gets reassigned.”

“Maybe he will and maybe he should before there’s a bigger problem.”

“What bigger problem?” There’s more to this than Marino is saying.

“Like him pinning this murder on some kid who maybe was fooling around with the dead man’s wife. A kid didn’t do this,” Marino says but that’s not his reason. There’s something else.

He opens his scene case on the floor as I survey the sitting area.

A chesterfield brown leather sofa and two side chairs. A coffee table. A flat-screen TV has been dismounted from the wall and so have framed Jimi Hendrix, Santana and Led Zeppelin posters. In a corner are three black carbon fiber guitars on stands, iridescent like a butterfly wing when the light catches just right, and I get close to inspect.

RainSong.

“He must have really loved his guitars to get a tattoo,” I comment, and I’m in the kitchen now.

Four wall-mounted cabinets, a three-burner stove, an oven, a refrigerator. On the counter are a microwave, the keys and bags of groceries Nari carried in before he returned to his car and was shot to death. I work my hands into a pair of fresh gloves before inspecting what he bought.

“Sliced cheeses, coffee, jars of marinara sauce, pasta, butter, several different spices, rye bread, detergent, dryer sheets,” I go through the inventory. “Advil, Zantac, valerian. Prescriptions for Zomig, Clarinex, Klonopin filled at the CVS at nine this morning, possibly after he bought the groceries and right before he drove home.”

I look at Marino as he slides the trash can out from under the sink.

“Who does this much shopping for a long weekend?” I open the refrigerator.

There’s nothing inside but bottles of water and an open box of baking soda.

“I’m thinking the same thing you are. Something’s wrong with this picture.” Marino lifts the trash bag out of the can. “Nothing in it but a bunch of paper towels. They’re damp. It looks like they were used to wipe something down. What do the meds tell you?”

“It would seem that one or both of them suffer from headaches, possibly migraines in addition to allergies and stomach problems,” I reply. “And valerian is a homeopathic remedy for muscle spasms and stress. Some people use it to sleep. Klonopin is a benzodiazepine used for anxiety. The name on all of the prescriptions is Nari’s. That doesn’t necessarily mean his wife wasn’t sharing.”

Marino heads toward the bedroom and I follow him. Another former jewel that is sad to see, the oak flooring original to the house and painted brown. The crown molding like the paneled walls is painted an insipid yellow. On top of the double bed are two guitar cases, hard plastic and lined with plush red fabric, and on the handles are elastic bands from baggage tickets. There are nightstands and lamps, and near the open closet door are suitcases and stacks of taped-up Bankers Boxes.

On top of the dresser are two laptop computers plugged in and charging, and Marino’s gloved fingers tap the mouse pads and the screen savers ask for passwords. He returns to the living area. Then he’s back with evidence tape and plastic bags.

“They weren’t going away for just the weekend. It’s obvious they were moving.” I step inside the bathroom.

It’s not much bigger than a closet. The vintage claw-foot tub has been outfitted with a showerhead and a yellow plastic curtain on enclosure rings. There’s a white toilet, a sink and a single frosted window.

“Didn’t you mention that they just rented this apartment a few years ago?” I ask. “And now they’re moving again?”

“It sure looks that way,” Marino says from the bedroom.

“The guitars aren’t in their cases.” I direct my voice through the open doorway so he can hear me. “And I would think that’s significant since they were important to him. Almost everything else is packed up but not his guitars.”

“I don’t see a third case anywhere. Just the two on the bed,” Marino says and I hear him opening a door, I hear coat hangers scraping on a rod.

“There should be three. One for each guitar.”

“Nope and nothing in the closet.”

I open the medicine cabinet, the mirror old and pitted. There’s nothing inside. In the cabinet under the sink are nonlubricated condoms and Imodium. Boxes and boxes of them, and it’s unusual. I wonder why these were left in here when nothing else was. They’re perfectly arranged, the boxes lined upright like a loaf of sliced bread, each label facing out. None of them are open. I detect a chlorine smell. Possibly a bathroom cleanser that was stored in here before it was packed or thrown out.

“I wonder where the building empties garbage?” I ask.

“There’s a Dumpster.”

“Someone should go through it to see what they might have tossed.” I return to the bedroom.

I notice the Bankers Box on top of the stack. The tape has been cut. Someone opened it. The lid is marked bathroom. I take a look. It’s half empty, nothing inside except a few toiletries that appear to have been rummaged through. I look at the other boxes, eleven of them and they’re taped up. They look undisturbed and I get the same weird feeling I had when I noticed the condoms and Imodium in the cabinet.

“You gotta see this.” Marino is opening dresser drawers now. “More of the same, friggin’ unbelievable. Something was definitely going on. Like they were on the damn run.”

“If so he didn’t exactly make it very far,” I reply as I hear voices outside the apartment.

“Maybe that’s why. Someone decided to stop him.” The dresser drawer he pulls open is completely empty and wiped clean.

I can see the swipe marks and lint of the wet paper towels used, perhaps the ones he found in the kitchen trash. I suggest he bag them as evidence.

“Let’s make sure it was only dust and dirt being cleaned out of drawers,” I add as the voices get closer and sound argumentative, a man and a woman. She’s extremely upset.

“No question about it.” Marino checks the drawers in the nightstands and they’re empty. They also have been wiped clean. “They were getting the hell out of Dodge. And I’m guessing someone good with a rifle wasn’t happy about it.”

We return to the living room as the voices get louder.

“Ma’am, you need to hold here,” the male voice says from the other side of the front door. “You can’t go in until I check with the investigator …”

“This is where we live! Let me in!” a woman screams.

“You need to hold here, ma’am.” And the door opens, and a uniformed officer steps halfway inside, blocking the woman behind him.

“Jamal! Jamal! No!”

Her screams pierce the quiet apartment as she tries to push past the officer, a heavyset man, gray hair, in his fifties, an impassive air I associate with cops who have been at it too long, and I try to place him. Ticketing parked cars. Picking up personal effects in the autopsy room.

“Let me in! Why won’t you tell me anything! Let me in! What’s happening? What’s happening?”

Her anguish and terror come from where no one should have to go, a wrenching hopeless place. It’s not true that we are never given more than we can bear. Only it isn’t given. It simply happens.

“It’s okay. No problem,” Marino says to the officer. “You can let her in.”

9

Joanna Cather isn’t what I expected.

I’m not sure what I imagined but not the tiny girlish woman weeping and staring glassy-eyed in grief and terror. She’s pretty in a delicate, fragile way like a porcelain doll that might break in half if you knocked her over, dressed in black leggings, boots and a pink Coldplay sweatshirt that hangs to her knees. She wears multiple rings and bracelets, her nails painted turquoise, and her long straw-blond hair is so straight it looks ironed.

“Did you see them in Boston?” I indicate her sweatshirt and she stares blankly as if she doesn’t remember what she has on. “I’m Doctor Kay Scarpetta. I’m trying to think back to when it was. Maybe two summers ago.”

My offhand reference to the British rock band and query about when it performed in the area reboots her shocked distraction, a tactic I learned early on when people are too fragmented by hysteria to give me what I need. I make a non-germane observation about the weather or what they’re wearing or anything at all we might have in common. It almost always works. I have Joanna’s attention.

“You’re a doctor?” Her eyes fasten on me, and I’m mindful of the hard stiffness of the vest underneath my shirt, of my hands still gloved in purple nitrile, of my boots cocooned in boat-shaped blue shoe covers.

“I’m handling Jamal’s case, the medical aspects of it.” I’m gentle but sure of my position, and I sense the beginning of trust.

She pauses, staring with a hint of relief and says, “July two years ago. We had VIP backstage passes. We never miss them.”

One of the band’s tour stops was Boston where they played for several nights, and Lucy got seats two rows back, center stage. We may have been at the same concert, perhaps near Joanna and her musician husband, all of us there on a rock-and-roll high.

It happens in the blink of an eye. A lightning strike. A heart attack. A wrong place. A wrong time.

“You … You saw Jamal,” she says to me. “What happened to him? He was shot?”

“Preliminarily that’s the way it looks. I’m very sorry.”

“The way it looks? You don’t know?”

“He needs to be examined. Then I’ll have answers I can be sure of.” I’m next to her now as if she’s in my care, and I tell her I regret that I don’t have more information at the moment.

I repeat how sorry I am for her terrible loss. I say all the right things as she starts crying again and this is exactly how Marino wants it to go. We’ve danced this dance since the beginning of our time. I’m the doctor who’s not here to accuse or cause further harm. The more he leans on her, the more she’ll bond with me, feeling I’m on her side. I know exactly how to insert myself without violating the boundaries of what I have a right to answer or ask. I also know how to be useful without saying a word.

“We got it from here,” Marino tells the officer hanging back in the doorway. “Make sure none of the reporters out there get any closer to the house.”

“What about the residents?” The officer whose silver name tag says t. j. hardy watches me pull off my shoe covers and gloves and drop them in a red biohazard bag on the kitchen counter.

I wear no personal protection clothing now, just my field clothes, which are official-looking with their many pockets and CFC crest. But I’m not threatening. I return to Joanna’s side as T. J. Hardy begins to explain that residents are trying to return to their apartments.

“Two of them just pulled up in their cars, are in front of the house as we speak. They’re getting upset that we won’t let them back in.” His Massachusetts accent is elastic and strong, his r’s sounding like w’s.

His voice triggers memories of him showing up in the autopsy room on several occasions for motor vehicle fatalities, and I’d had the distinct impression it was the last place he wanted to be. He’d collect personal effects and keep his distance from the steel tables. He’d avert his gaze, breathing out of his mouth because of the stench.

“Positively ID them and escort them into their apartments,” Marino says to him. “I want their names and how to reach them. Email me the info ASAP. Nobody gets near the red SUV and the immediate area around it. We’re clear on that?”

“Got it.”

“You parked out there?” Marino directs this at Joanna, and she nods, not meeting his eyes.

“What kind of vehicle?”

“A Suburban. A rental. We’re moving things … We were supposed to move things around and needed something big.” She looks past him in a fixed wide-eyed stare.

“You don’t own a car?” Marino asks.

“We traded in both of ours on his new Honda.” Her voice quavers. “The red one out there.”

“The cleanup crew wants to start picking up the spilled groceries. And …” T. J. Hardy glances at Joanna as he chooses his words. “And you know, start tidying things up.”

Marino looks at me. “We’re done, right?”

The body is at the CFC but I don’t mention it. The blood, the gore certainly need to be gone and I’m not going to say that either. I tell Marino that cleanup can get started, and Joanna quietly cries in spasms. Officer Hardy steps back outside. The solid sound of the oak door shutting startles her and her knees almost buckle. She gasps and holds a tissue over her nose and mouth, her eyes bloodshot and smeared with makeup.

“Why don’t you come sit and let’s talk,” Marino says to her, and he introduces himself, adding, “Doctor Scarpetta is the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts and also works for the Pentagon.”

“The Pentagon?” Joanna isn’t impressed and he just scared her.

“It just means I have federal jurisdiction in certain cases.” I dismiss it as nothing.

“What? You’re the fucking FBI.” The look in her eyes changes just like that.

Marino had to brag and now I have to undo it. I explain I’m an Air Force special reservist affiliated with the Armed Forces Medical Examiners. She wants to know what that means. I tell her I assist the federal government with medical intelligence and help out with military matters but I also work for the state and my office is here in Cambridge. The more detail I give the more she glazes over. Wiping her eyes. Not listening. She doesn’t care about my pedigree. She’s not threatened by it and that’s what I want.

“Point being you couldn’t be in better hands,” Marino adds. “She may have a few questions about medications, about any general health details she should know about your husband.”

He’s says it as if I’m their family doctor and it’s a tried-and-true manipulation, a familiar one I wish wasn’t needed. Nari’s prescription drugs and health history have nothing to do with what killed him. A gun did. But Marino wants me present, and if Joanna thinks what he’s saying is a ploy she makes no indication. Instead she’s suddenly deflated as if there’s no point in fighting what can’t be changed. There’s no protest or argument that will make it untrue.

“Where is he? Where’s Jamal?” Her tone is dead. “Why is that big black box set up in front of the house? I don’t understand. Was that where they put him? They wouldn’t let me look inside it. Is he in there? Where is he?”

“He’s been taken to my office for examination.” I repeat what I’ve already told her. “The black enclosure was to ensure privacy and respect. Come sit down.” I touch her elbow and lead her to the couch, and she sits stiffly on the edge of it, wiping her eyes.

“Who did this? Who would do this?” Her voice shakes and catches.

“Well that’s what this is all about, Joanna. We gotta find that out.” Marino sets a chair directly across from her and sits down. “I’m real sorry. I know how hard this is but I’ve got a lot of questions I need you to answer if you’re going to help us figure out what happened to Jamal, okay?”

She nods. I sit down off to the side.

“Starting with what time you left here this morning, where you were headed and why.” Marino has his notepad out.

“I already told the other one that. He said Jamal was shot while he was getting groceries out of the car. That someone shot him.” She looks at me. “But you said you don’t know if he was shot.”

“He needs to be examined so we can be sure of exactly what happened.” I avoid using the word autopsy.

Her eyes race around the living room and then she stares at the three guitars. “Who did that?” Her voice goes up a notch and is louder as she stares accusingly at us. “Jamal packed them in their cases. He’s so careful with his guitars. Who put them back on their stands?”

“That’s interesting,” Marino says. “There’s two cases on the bed. Where’s the third one?”

“You had no right! Touching his things, you had no right!”

“We didn’t touch his guitars,” Marino says and I think of Machado.

But he wouldn’t do that. I look across the room at the guitars, different shapes, black carbon fiber, one a matte finish, two shiny and shimmering with mother-of-pearl inlays. Upright on stands, a rubber gooseneck clamped over the strings. Facing out. Perfectly, precisely arranged, and I get out of my chair. I walk over to them and detect the vague chlorine smell of bleach, what I smelled in the bathroom. Someone was inside this apartment here who shouldn’t have been, and then I check the kitchen again.

The paper towels in the trash have no odor at all. Bleach destroys DNA. Something else was used to wipe out the drawers. Two different types of evidence, two different means of eradicating it. Possibly two different people. I sit back down. I give Marino a look that he understands. Jamal Nari’s killer may have been inside this apartment at some point, and I think of Machado again at the same instant Marino asks Joanna about him.

“I know you two talked.” He keeps the annoyance out of his voice and there’s no sign of it on his face.

But I know what he feels. Machado shouldn’t have offered details to her. He shouldn’t have said her husband was shot. If she’d said it first it would have been significant.

“You told Detective Machado you were in Tilton, New Hampshire. At the Tanger Outlets?” Marino asks her.

“He was shot in broad daylight by his car?” She’s trembling hard and maybe this time for a different reason. “Did anyone see who did it or try to help?”

When he doesn’t answer as he flips through pages in his notepad, she gets more agitated and anger glints.

“Did anyone try to get an ambulance? Didn’t anyone try to help him?” She’s asking me this.

“It was a fatal injury.” I select my words carefully.

“You mean there was nothing that could have been done. Nothing at all?”

“Your husband died very quickly.”

“I’m hoping you might know something that will help us,” Marino says.

She glares at him. “I have no idea who did this.”

“Detective Machado called your cell when you were on your way to New Hampshire.” Marino baits the trap.

“I was already there at the luggage store.”

“Was it Tanger or Merrimack?” Marino frowns, flipping pages. He looks confused. “You know the one in Tanger or the bigger outlet mall about an hour from here?”

“The bigger one. I was returning a bag with a broken zipper and he called. I asked him how he got my number and I thought maybe it was the police harassing us again.”

“As I remember it the FBI was investigating your husband not the police. In light of your bad experience it’s real important you make that distinction, Joanna.” Marino is leaning forward, his big gloved hands on his big knees. “We’re not the FBI. We’re not the ones who put you through all that.”

“It’s never been the same.” She shreds the tissue in her lap. “Is that why? Because of that someone targeted Jamal? We got a lot of hateful things from people. On the Internet. Mail. Stuff left by our cars at school and here.”

“Is that what you think?” Marino is baiting her again.

He knows what she offered to Machado when she first got the news. About the student she was helping. About a robbery gone bad.

“I don’t know what to think!” Tears flood her eyes and spill down her cheeks, streaking her makeup, the flesh around her eyes a mascara smear.

Marino slowly gets up from his chair. He walks to the kitchen, looks at the bags of groceries. He peers through the open bedroom doorway, looks at the luggage, the stacks of taped-up Bankers Boxes. His black gloved thumbs type on his BlackBerry.

“What did you say the name of the luggage store is?” he asks from the kitchen, turning his broad back to us.

“What?” She seems numb.

“The luggage store where you took the bag with the broke zipper.”

“It was just a luggage store. I … I don’t remember the name of it.”

“Tommy Bahama? Nautica?” He’s checking, seeing what stores are located in the outlet mall she claims to have visited.

“Yes,” she says.

“Yes?” Marino walks back to us, his footsteps heavy, the blue plasticized paper shoe covers making a sliding sound over hardwood. His feet look as big as Frankenstein’s.

“It could have been one of them,” she says warily.

“Ms. Cather, you don’t remember what kind of luggage you own? The suitcases in the bedroom are Rockland. A leopard pattern with pink trim, and I’m guessing those are yours. The others are American Tourister, black, and I’m guessing those are your husband’s.”

“How do you expect me to think of something like that right now?” She knows she’s been caught.

“If you find the receipt maybe it will refresh your memory.” Marino reseats himself, looking right at her as she blushes, staring down at her hands and when she talks her mouth sounds dry.

“Okay. I think I have it. I think it’s in my wallet. It should be there.” Her tongue sounds sticky as she continues evasions she knows are failing.

I go to the refrigerator and get her a bottle of water while she sits and Marino waits. Her pocketbook is on the couch and she starts digging inside it, inside her wallet, but it’s an act and not a skillful one. There’s no receipt. It’s useless to pretend.

10

“You know anything about cell towers, Ms. Cather?” Marino is scrolling through text messages, and she’s not Joanna anymore.

He’s gotten information and is distancing himself. His tone has chilled. He’s playing the role he’d already scripted and getting external validation for it, finding out things that aren’t good for her.

“Cell towers?” She takes a swallow of water, talking to him but looking at me. “I know what they are. But I don’t know anything about them.”

“That surprises me. The FBI didn’t tap your phones? They didn’t check out your locations or more specifically his? They weren’t in your email when they thought Jamal was a terrorist?” he says.

“How could I possibly know what they did? It’s not like they tell you.”

“They would have notified your lawyer.”

“Jamal would know more about it than I do. He’s who they were after. It was his lawyer not mine.” She’s crying again but there’s anger and beneath it is rage. Beneath all of it is grief that hurts so much it’s physical. And fear. Whatever she’s afraid of is prompting her to lie.

“I need you to tell the truth whatever it is,” Marino says. “But first I’m going to remind you of your rights. I always like to get that out of the way …”

“My rights?” She looks bewildered, her eyes on me as if I might save her. “You think I did this? Are you arresting me?”

“It’s just a preventive measure,” Marino replies casually. “I’m making sure you know you don’t have to talk to us. Nobody’s forcing you. If you’d rather have an attorney present that’s what we’ll do. What about the attorney your husband used? Maybe you want to call whoever that was? We’ll sit here and wait until he shows up or he can meet us at the station.”

He goes on bluffing and Mirandizing while she stares at him without blinking, her eyes turning hard and furious, thoughts flickering like static on an old TV. She’s been through this before when the FBI raided their home and hauled away her husband in handcuffs.

“I don’t want a lawyer,” she says and a calm comes over her, flat and still. “I would never do anything to physically hurt Jamal.”

I notice her use of the word physically. It seems important she make the distinction between hurting her husband physically as opposed to in some other way. I think of the boy on the bicycle she was seen chatting with.

“We don’t own a gun so I don’t know why you think … Except it’s easiest, isn’t it?” Her eyes are hot and resentful on Marino as he reads a message that landed on his phone. “All of you people are the same.”

“You weren’t in New Hampshire today,” he says as a matter of fact, typing a reply to someone who is texting him. “Let’s talk about where you really were.”

Before she can answer Marino lets her know he has proof of exactly where she’s been since seven-fifteen a.m. He knows every mile she drove and every call she made on her cell phone including three to a moving company.

“But I’d rather you tell me the details yourself,” he adds. “I’d rather give you a chance to be truthful so maybe I start feeling better about you than I do right this minute.”

“I’ve been falsely accused.” She directs this to me and she’s not talking about her husband’s homicide.

I can tell she means something else.

“When Detective Machado reached you on your cell phone,” Marino asks her, “what did he say to you exactly?”

“He identified himself. He told me what happened.” She stares down at her hands tightly clasped in her lap.

“And you told him you were in New Hampshire. Even though it wasn’t true.”

She nods yes.

“You lied.”

She nods again.

“Why?”

“I’ve been falsely accused.” Again she says this to me. “I thought that’s why he was calling, that the police were coming after me. I wanted to buy myself time so I could figure out what to do. I panicked.”

“And you didn’t change your story about where you were even after Detective Machado informed you of the real reason he was calling,” Marino says.

“It was too late. I’d already told him … I was scared. So scared I was stupid.” Her voice shakes badly, tears spilling. “And then all I could think about was Jamal. I wasn’t thinking about the lie or why I told it. I’m sorry. I’m not a bad person. I swear to God I’m not.”

She digs into her pocketbook and finds a towelette. Tearing open the packet she wipes ruined makeup off her eyes, her face and I smell the fresh scent of cucumber. She suddenly looks years younger, could pass for twenty but probably is closer to thirty. A career as a high school psychologist requires college then a master’s degree. She’s been married three years. I calculate she’s twenty-seven or twenty-eight.

“This is a nightmare. Please let me wake up from it.” She stares at me.

Then she looks at the items I took out of the bags her husband carried in, the food, the drugs. Her attention fixes on the drugs.

“Your husband had prescriptions filled at a CVS this morning,” I say to her. “Including one for Klonopin.”

“For stress,” she says.

“His stress?”

“And recently mine. Both of us.”

“Can you tell me what’s been going on with him?” I’m deliberate about what tense I use. “If he’s been anxious, stressed it’s helpful if I know why. A drug screen will tell us exactly what he has in his system. But if you have information I’d appreciate it.”

My mention of a drug screen startles her. Apparently she hadn’t thought of it.

“Klonopin,” she says. “I saw him take one this morning when we got up, and he said he was almost out. That he planned to stop at CVS while he was running errands.”

“Might he have taken anything else?” I ask.

“I … I don’t know. I wasn’t around him … I left at about seven.”

I think of the damp paper towels in the trash, the drawers wiped clean. Not a week goes by that I don’t see a heroin-related death in my morgue.

“What about street drugs?” I ask and then Marino jumps in.

“The slightest residue and a drug dog’s going to hit on it,” he says. “I got a K-nine. Maybe I should go get him.”

If the situation weren’t so tragic I would laugh. Quincy couldn’t tell the difference between heroin and baby powder. I text Anne to check Jamal Nari carefully for needle tracks, for damage to his septum, to do it right now.

“Has your husband ever been on prescription pain medications?” I ask Joanna.

“His back,” she says. “A bicycle accident when he was in his twenties, and he has ruptured disks.”

“OxyContin?”

She nods as my suspicions continue to gather. It’s not unusual for people who abuse OxyContin to switch to an opiate that’s less expensive. On the street an 80-milligram pill can cost as much as eighty dollars while a bag of heroin might go for a fraction of that price.

“He’s been clean and sober for over ten years,” Joanna says to me.

“But he’s been under stress? Do you know why?”

“He was shutting me out. He’d disappear and not tell me where he was going or where he’d been.” She continues to stare at the prescriptions on the kitchen counter.

“Was it you who cleaned the inside of all the drawers?” Marino asks and she doesn’t answer. “Did Jamal do it or you?”

“I don’t know. He might have. I told you he’s been paranoid, worried someone’s out to get him.”

“Coke? Heroin? What was he using?”

“Nothing. I’ve told you, nothing.”

“Nothing?” Marino drops his notepad, the pen on the coffee table. “Then who were you worried might find something?”

“The police,” she says. “We’ve been worried about it for days. That’s why I was so sure about the reason for the call. I thought it was about that.”

I glance at my phone as a text message lands.

“About what exactly?”

Old scars on legs were covered with tattoos. That’s as much as Anne can tell at this point but it’s enough.

Nari used to mainline drugs and attempted to disguise the needle tracks with tattoos. At a glance there’s nothing fresh that would indicate current drug abuse. But it doesn’t mean he was finished with that part of his life.

Have you scanned him yet? I write back.

Getting ready to.

“I’m not following you about the police,” Marino pushes Joanna.

“Because they’ve been after us before for no good reason! They’d like nothing better than to make it stick this time! Do you have any idea what it’s like to go through that?”

“The FBI did that.” Marino makes that point again. “It wasn’t us.”

She wipes her face and I smell cucumber again. I remember the odor of bleach and I ask her. Did she or her husband use something with chlorine in it, maybe bleach to clean out the drawers and she says no. I tell her the paper towels in the trash will be tested in my labs and she looks dejected but she doesn’t change her answer about bleach. She’s allergic to it. She breaks out in hives. They never have it in the house.

“Jamal thought someone was following him, stalking him,” she says. “Someone wearing a cap and dark glasses was riding his bumper. He thought it was the FBI again. One night he got up to use the bathroom and there was a face looking through the window. After that we frosted the glass in there and started closing all the curtains.”

“When did he start feeling this way?” Marino picks up his notepad, begins taking notes again.

“A few months ago.”

“That’s why you suddenly decided to move?”

“No.” She tells us the boy she’s been seen talking to is Leo Gantz.

He’s fifteen years old, a freshman at Emerson Academy where Nari taught music and Joanna is a psychologist. A nationally ranked tennis player, Leo Gantz has a scholarship and an abusive father. In January Leo was sent to her office because of his behavior. He’d started sneaking alcohol. He keyed a car and was “mouthing off” to his teachers. In early May he was suspended from the tennis team after showing up at practice drunk and hitting the coach with a ball hard enough to bloody his nose.

“He started having too much spare time because he didn’t have practice anymore and now school’s out,” Joanna explains. “He was bored, lonely. He started riding his bike past our house all the time. Angie …”

“Angelina Brown,” Marino says. “Your upstairs neighbor.”

“Yes,” Joanna replies. “She would see him from her window. Her desk is in front of her window and she would see him riding back and forth in front of the house.”

“Maybe he was the one stalking your husband? Did that ever occur to you?”

“Leo doesn’t have a license yet or access to a car.”

“Was he ever inside this apartment?”

I glance down at a text message from firearms examiner Liz Wrighton as Joanna goes on to say that she always talked to Leo outside. He was never in here.

“I tried to help him.” Her tone turns to iron, and I don’t let on that what I’m reading is stunning, both extremely good and awful.

We have a high-confidence candidate. That’s Liz’s cautious way of saying we got a hit in the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, NIBIN. A comparison of digital images from New Jersey and the frag Machado dropped off at her lab shows that the measurements, the lands and grooves match. The same gun was used.

A sniper. Three victims who seem to have nothing in common.

“And there’s no reason, absolutely nothing I ever did except care about him.” Joanna’s eyes blaze. “Except to treat him nice, to be helpful and that’s what he does to thank me!”

11

The Charles River shines deep blue in the midafternoon sun, barely ruffled by a light breeze. Sycamores, weeping willows and Bradford pears that have lost their flowers and I remember when they fell like snow, covering sidewalks and drifting into the street. For a while I drove to and from my office in a blossomy storm that made me happy.

I look out my side window at rowers leaning their backs into long slender oars, slicing through the water in blade-like sculls. The DeWolfe Boathouse is to our right, and on our left the stair-step-shaped Hyatt Hotel, then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s spreading campus. In Marino’s SUV again, headed to the CFC, and we’re on the subject of the cell phone signals picked up when Joanna Cather claimed to be in New Hampshire this morning.

She absolutely wasn’t. Not at any time. She was telling us the truth about her lie. At shortly after seven a.m. she drove out of her cell area in Cambridge, her phone’s signal picked up by FCC-registered antenna towers along I-90 East and Massachusetts Avenue, then I-93 South. Her final destination was Gallivan Boulevard in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester where she and her husband had planned to move today.

They’d rented a two-story shingle-sided Colonial with a stone cellar, a sunporch, a garage, hardwood floors and a security system. Marino has shown me photographs of the listing on the Internet, a handsome house with character built in the 1920s. The asking price is $4,000 per month, unfurnished, utilities not included, a lot of money for the high school faculty couple. The Realtor’s name is Mary Sapp and Marino has left a message for her to call him as soon as possible.

“I got a hunch about it.” He’s switched to another topic, the timing, why the killer struck now. “I think their suddenly deciding to move triggered something so to speak. And the reason they decided to skip town is also why Nari wiped down the drawers. I think Leo Gantz’s accusation opened a can of worms in more ways than one.”

His story is ruinous no matter the outcome. Consensual sex and it’s Joanna’s word against his. As she was telling us what she called a bald-faced lie, I sensed she has feelings for him. Not just hateful ones.

“Nari was worried the police were going to show up with a search warrant any minute,” Marino says, “and while they were at it bust him for drugs.”

“His wife claims he’s clean,” I remind him. “His needle tracks are old.”

“He could be snorting or smoking.”

“Tox will tell.”

“Plain and simple there was something he didn’t want the cops to find a trace of and I’m putting my money on heroin. The cops being Cambridge, in other words yours truly,” he adds. “A complaint of sex with a minor and we were going to be called.”

But Cambridge PD hasn’t been. Leo’s unemployed father began threatening Nari and his wife but didn’t call the police.

“Wait and see. This is about money,” I reply. “Leo’s father probably figures they got a big settlement after suing the school. The irony is they haven’t gotten a dime.”

I had Lucy check. Motions are still being filed in Jamal Nari’s discrimination suit against Emerson Academy. Depositions have been scheduled, a trial date set, the usual game of chicken that only the lawyers win. The information can be found in legal databases but it hasn’t been in the press. If Leo Gantz’s father has been paying attention he could easily infer that Nari and his wife recently had come into money. The new Honda alone was enough to cause assumptions.

“If it had been me showing up to investigate whether she and Leo had sex inside the apartment I would have done everything I just did.” Marino is suddenly watching his mirrors. “You know me. No stone unturned.”

There was no cushion unturned either. Before we left the apartment he searched it again, looking under the mattress, the furniture and rugs, and inside pillows, whatever might be a hiding place. He scoured the Honda SUV and the rented Suburban. Marino processed everything that didn’t move for prints, for trace evidence.

He swabbed for DNA and when he sprayed a chemical reagent on the guitars they luminesced faintly and for a brief duration. So did the two empty guitar cases on the bed and the Bankers Box that looked rifled through plus the condoms, the Imodium under the sink. All of it glowed the whitish blue false positive for blood, a typical reaction to bleach.

He’s looking in the mirrors, an angry expression on his face. He slows down.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“I don’t believe it.” He slows even more, almost to a crawl. “The same asshole,” he says.

I look in my side mirror and recognize the pickup truck we saw earlier today when Marino confronted the young man with the leaf blower. Gray with a lot of chrome, a Super Duty truck, an older one in mint condition.

It passes us in the right lane, a hands on mechanics logo and phone number on the door, and the driver is light-skinned with short dark hair. I don’t see anybody with him or evidence of lawn care equipment.

“That’s not who we saw earlier, the kid with the leaf blower,” I puzzle. “Is it the same plate number?”

“Pretty damn sure.”

“The truck we saw on my street had Sonny’s Lawn Care on it.”

Marino holds up his BlackBerry, showing me the photograph he took this morning. The license tag is the same as the one on the gray truck that just passed us. The phone number is also the same. The truck is far ahead of us now, in the right lane with its right-turn signal on.

“A magnetic logo,” Marino decides. “The type that’s removable, has to be. What was on there this morning definitely said Sonny’s Lawn Care with the phone number under it. Maybe he’s got more than one business that share the same phone line.”

“Then why not advertise everything on the same sign?”

“Maybe the jerk-off kid has nothing to do with it,” Marino then says. “Maybe he just happened to be clearing off a sidewalk near where the truck was parked.”

It would explain why he wasn’t concerned about Marino storming around like a maniac, taking a picture of the license plate and threatening him, I think but don’t say.

“You ever seen this same truck in your neighborhood before today?” he asks.

“Not that I recall but that doesn’t mean anything. I’m rarely home during the day.”

Marino watches the gray truck turn right onto the Harvard Bridge, and I can tell he’s deliberating whether to follow it. Instead we swing left onto Audrey Street and into an MIT apartment building parking lot where we stop.

“It’s probably nothing but I’m not taking any chances,” he says. “And I don’t want whoever’s driving it to think we’re paying attention.”

“You slowed down so he could pass us,” I remind him.

“He doesn’t know it had anything to do with him.”

I’m not convinced of that. Marino was reminded of the incident this morning and got angry all over again. Had the driver of the pickup truck been observant and able to read lips he certainly would have seen Marino glaring and cursing. But I don’t mention that either as I scan our surroundings, the MIT athletic fields and football stadium just ahead. Across the river the old buildings of Back Bay are dark red brick and gray roofed.

In the distance the skyline of Boston is dominated by the Prudential Tower with its radio mast rampant like a jousting lance, and the Hancock is slightly taller, the shapes of clouds reflected in its glass. Far off the light changes the way it does over great expanses of water, the Charles flowing northeast into the harbor, then sweeping around Logan Airport and the barrier islands before emptying into bays and finally the sea. I’m reminded of what a beautiful spring day it is, the sky bright blue, the trees and grass a vibrant green.

Right now Benton and I should be on the plane to Fort Lauderdale, and I think about a condo he rented on the ocean, my birthday surprise. Knowing his taste it will be extremely nice, and then I force such thoughts from my mind because nothing good comes from imagining what isn’t going to happen. I already know our week away will be postponed, and for us that’s the same as being canceled. Our taking time off isn’t about accumulating vacation days. It’s about bad things stopping long enough for us to have nothing to worry about.

I send him a text. You OK? Heading to my office. We need to talk.

“I got a gut feeling something isn’t right.” Marino is still on the subject of the truck. “I was only a few blocks from where Nari was shot, not to mention near your house where someone left pennies on your wall that might have been polished in a tumbler like cartridge cases.”

He calls the dispatcher on his portable and asks her to run the plate number.

“Let’s see what happens.” He rechecks the photographs on his BlackBerry. “How about dialing the number for me.” He reads the number that was on the truck.

“It’s not a good idea to have my phone involved.”

“Caller ID’s blocked on it.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want a record of my calling a number that’s unrelated to what I’m responsible for. If there’s an issue it’s hard to explain. And attorneys are always looking for issues.”

More to the point I’m not Marino’s assistant. I don’t answer to him and I’m not his partner either. But he can’t seem to remember that. I recite the number back to him and he enters it. A few seconds later a phone rings twice and someone picks up.

“Hello?” a female voice asks over speakerphone.

“Is this Sonny’s Lawn Care?”

“Excuse me? Who are you trying to reach?”

Marino repeats himself and the woman replies that he has the wrong number. He tells her who he is.

“The police? Oh my. Is something wrong?” She sounds confused and worried. “Is this about Johnny? Why is Cambridge calling me? We live in Carlisle … I do, I mean. I don’t live in Cambridge. I live in Carlisle.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m wondering if you’ve gotten other calls from people thinking they’re reaching Sonny’s Lawn Care or maybe Hands On Mechanics. Your number’s on the side of one of their trucks.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“I’m not. It’s this number.” He recites it to her.

“I don’t know what to think. We’ve had this same number for more than twenty years. It’s our home number … my home number. Well if you look in the phone book you’ll see it listed under my late husband’s name. Doctor John L. Angiers.”

It takes a moment for comprehension. Then it hits me hard.

12

Dr. Johnny Angiers’s widow says she doesn’t answer the phone anymore if she doesn’t know who’s calling.

“You just answered,” Marino reminds her but he’s kind about it. He’s not aggressive with her. “And you don’t know me, right?”

“I’m not sure why I did. I wasn’t thinking. There have been some odd messages in voice mail and maybe what you’re saying explains it. Now and then calls from people wanting trees pruned, sod put down. Earlier today it was someone who wanted his car fixed. If they get me directly I hang up on them.” She sounds upset. “I’m going to have to change my phone number and I don’t want to. I don’t want to change a number we’ve had for twenty years.”

“When did the calls start?” Marino asks.

“It’s been very recent. In the past several weeks.”

“What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Sarah Angiers.”

I check the calendar on my phone. April 28, a Monday, and I roll back my memory, pulling up the case in my thoughts. It’s one hard to forget. I found it particularly tragic and poignant, and I gave Sarah Angiers all the time she wanted when she came to my office to discuss her husband’s death. Tall and thin, she’d bothered to dress up as if she were going to church or the symphony, in a smart suit with her white hair neatly styled. I remember her as lucid and forthcoming and completely devastated.

She said she’d always been nervous about her husband going off on his own, hiking in Estabrook Woods, more than a thousand acres of undeveloped forest, hills and horse trails. She said he could be somewhat difficult when he had his mind made up and she described how much he loved to follow what she referred to as “the path” from their backyard in Carlisle all the way to Hutchins Pond in Concord.

When I examined his body in the heavily forested area where he died I was very close to Fox Castle Swamp and nowhere near Hutchins Pond. The phone signal was bad to nonexistent there, and the dozens of calls he’d made to his wife and 911 had failed. They were all right there on his outgoing log when his phone was recovered in addition to a text to his wife that wasn’t delivered. He said he was cold and exhausted so he’d found a place to sit. He was lost and it was getting dark. He would always love her. The police had nothing to go on except where he usually hiked, which was some two miles south of where he’d actually wandered.

I suspect that early into his hike he wasn’t feeling well and became disoriented, heading in the direction of Lowell Road instead of Monument Street. He realized he didn’t know where he was, and unable to reach anyone he sat on the fallen tree, getting increasingly anxious and agitated as night came. He may have panicked, suffering shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea and chest pains. Acute anxiety would have felt like a heart attack, and a heart attack would have felt like acute anxiety.

When the pain began spreading from his chest into his shoulders, neck and jaw, Johnny Angiers, a professor of medicine at Tufts, would have recognized that he was in serious trouble. He may have realized he was dying. He’d never been diagnosed with coronary artery disease but his was significant, and as I explain all this to Marino I continue to feel incredulous. I feel as if ground is moving under my feet, as if I can’t get my balance. I have no idea what is happening but it all seems too close to me like the pennies in my own backyard and the pickup truck on my street.

“One of my cases and not that long ago,” I explain. “And their phone number was on the side of a truck parked on my street this morning, not even two blocks down from my house? What the hell is going on?”

“Nothing good,” Marino says.

I Google Sonny’s Lawn Care. There’s no such company in Massachusetts. I try Hands On Mechanics and there’s no listing for that either.

“This is only getting more disturbing,” I say as the dispatcher gets back to Marino.

She tells him that the plate number belongs to a 1990 gray F-150 Ford pickup truck. It’s registered to an eighty-three-year-old white male named Clayton Phillip Schmidt with a Springfield address, some ninety miles west of here, almost across the border into Connecticut.

“Any record of the plate or vehicle being stolen?” Marino asks.

“Negative.”

He requests that all units in the area be on the alert for a 1990 gray Ford pickup truck with that plate number.

“Saw it maybe ten minutes ago on Memorial Drive, eastbound.” Marino holds the radio close to his mouth. “Took a right on the Harvard Bridge. Same vehicle was spotted around twelve hundred hours in the area of the incident on Farrar Street. Had Sonny’s Lawn Care on the door. Now has Hands On Mechanics. Possibly using different magnetic signs.”

“Thirteen to thirty-three,” another unit calls.

“Thirty-three,” Marino answers.

“Saw vehicle at approximately noon, corner of Kirkland and Irving,” unit thirteen, a female officer advises. “Had Sonny’s Lawn Care on it at that time.”

“Parked or moving?”

“Pulled off onto the shoulder.”

“You see anybody?”

“Negative.”

I open a text message Benton has just sent to me.

An unexpected development. Will tell you when I see you, I read.

I envision him in our backyard earlier today, and the pennies on our wall and the flick of light he saw. I think of Copperhead, of the odd poem tweeted to me from a hotel in Morristown. Now a mysterious truck has a phone number on it that is connected to a recent death I handled—one I really don’t want further scrutinized.

I didn’t misrepresent the medical facts in Johnny Angiers’s case but I was liberal in my interpretation and decision to sign him out as an accidental death due to hypothermia. When his insurance company questioned me, pointing out that my autopsy report indicated a finding of ruptured plaque due to coronary artery disease, I held my ground. Johnny Angiers wasn’t diabetic but his vitreous glucose was elevated and this is typical in hypothermia deaths. There were skin changes, gastric lesions and damage to his organs consistent with exposure to cold temperatures.

Hypothermia may have precipitated cardiac arrest or it could have been the other way around. It was impossible to say with certainty and if I were going to err it was on the side of compassion. The accidental life insurance policy didn’t cover death by heart attack even if it was a heart attack that caused a fatal accident such as a fall or a car crash or exposure to cold. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. The company TBP Insurers is huge. It’s notorious for finding ways to avoid payment to people who have just been traumatized by the unexpected loss of a loved one.

Had I not filled out the autopsy report and death certificate the way I did, Johnny Angiers’s widow would have been forced to sell their house and stop any financial assistance they were giving to grandchildren in college and graduate school. I had ample justification to make sure that didn’t happen, and I have a deep-seated disdain for greedy unethical insurance companies. I constantly see the lives they rob and ruin, and unfortunately my run-ins with TBP aren’t new.

“I hope what’s happening doesn’t in any way compromise her,” I remark as Marino tries a number and gets voice mail. “We should head on to my office,” I add as we continue to sit in the parking lot.

“Compromise Mrs. Angiers? Why would what’s on a pickup truck compromise her? It’s not her fault.”

“The insurance company. Anything that draws attention to her or her husband’s case may not be helpful.” I’m grateful I didn’t use my phone to call a number that turns out to be hers.

TBP would make something of it.

“She’s eligible to collect the insurance money but obviously hasn’t gotten it yet,” I add.

“How do you know what she’s gotten?”

“One of their investigators called Bryce the other day wanting to set up an appointment with me about the case. In person this time. They wouldn’t do that if they weren’t still fighting it.”

“You going to sit down with them?”

“It’s not been scheduled yet since I’m supposed to be out of town. Bryce gave them dates and we haven’t heard back, which is their typical M.O. The longer they stall, the better for them. The only person in a hurry is the one who needs the money.”

“Fuckers.” Marino tries another number on his phone.

“So now it’s in your backyard, buddy,” a man answers right off. “Unbelievable.”

“That’s how it’s looking. Your two shootings linked with the one we got here, not to mention weird shit going on,” Marino says, and I realize he’s talking to Morris County investigator Jack Kuster. “You ever hear any reports of a gray pickup truck spotted in your area, maybe one that had a company logo on the doors?”

“Not a gray one, funny you’d ask. But a white truck, you know like a Ryder or U-Haul bobtail rental truck but with no name on it. Not a huge truck, maybe a ten-footer. I thought I told you about it that night you got so shit-faced at Sona. Oh yeah. That’s why you don’t remember.” Jack Kuster has an easygoing baritone voice with a heavy New Jersey accent. “I think you must’ave been drinking Blithering Idiot.”

“Skull Splitter Ale I’m pretty sure,” Marino deadpans. “What about the white truck?”

“The day before Julie Eastman was shot while she was waiting for the Edgewater Ferry, the truck I’m talking about was spotted at a construction site that had been shut down. From there it went down the road a little ways into the ferry landing parking lot.”

“I guess there’s only one white truck in all of Jersey,” Marino says.

“The reason this particular vehicle came to anyone’s attention is it hit a car that was backing up and the truck hauled ass out of there. Two things about it caught my interest after the homicide. A recovered paint chip showed the truck had been repainted multiple times and the tag number came back to a plate belonging to someone dead. From Massachusetts as a matter of fact.”

“Jesus,” Marino says. “A commercial plate I assume.”

“No. A regular noncommercial one. Obviously stolen from a noncommercial vehicle, a thirty-something-year-old Pontiac that had been totaled back in November, thus explaining why the owner is deceased.”

“Anybody take a picture of the truck?”

“No one has come forward if they did.” Kuster’s voice is loud over speakerphone, and Marino pushes the SUV gearshift into reverse. “The person whose car was hit by it got the plate number, like I said, and described it as a white moving truck but didn’t get a look at the driver, just someone wearing a hat and glasses.”

“Doesn’t sound like the same thing here,” Marino says. “And it’s probably a wild-goose chase.”

“If it wasn’t for chasing gooses I’d have to get a job.”

“You around tomorrow if the Doc and me drop by?” As usual Marino doesn’t bother to clear it with me first. “We need to compare notes and see if we can figure out the distance this psycho is shooting from.”

“Funny you would mention that too. I got a theory and a way to test it. Especially now since you got a relatively undamaged solid bullet in your case.”

“News to me. But we haven’t been to her office yet. We haven’t had time to take a whiz for that matter.”

“Liz Wrighton sent me a photo,” Kuster says. “Right hand, one-ten twist, 5R rifling, one-ninety grain solid copper, ballistic tip. Five lands and grooves with a rolled leading edge. I’m thinking a .308 with a freaking accurate barrel like a Krieger Match. Not the sort of rifle you carry around when you’re hunting. Tough to shoot unsupported. You’d set up with a bipod or bag rests filled with sand, rice, popcorn, whatever.”

“Hunting meaning people.” Marino stops at the intersection of Audrey Street and Memorial Drive, waiting for a break in traffic.

“A typical tactical magnum rifle, only what I’m thinking about isn’t typical. I can set us up on the range, borrow what I need from SWAT. Last fall they got the latest greatest for the Super Bowl, had it all ready to go on the stadium roof just in case. Maybe you don’t remember that either, were too busy throwing back beers and tequila and telling war stories about Scarpetta and your high school days plus being pissed at Machado. Where’s he at during all this?”

“Getting in the way,” Marino says. “The Doc’s here in the car and we’re on speakerphone, headed to the morgue so maybe stop talking about her.”

“Nice to meet you, Doctor Scarpetta. What I’m referring to is a PGF. A Precision Guided Firearm that can turn a rookie shooter into a top gun sniper who can hit a target dead center at a thousand yards out or more. Unfortunately police and the military aren’t the only ones who can buy something like this. That’s what I have nightmares about. It’s just a matter of time.”

Marino ends the call and uneasily looks around us while we sit perfectly still, the traffic heavy on Memorial Drive. He’s glancing in his mirrors, out the windows, up at rooftops and suddenly accelerates across three lanes into eastbound traffic to a cacophony of blaring horns.

“How about you don’t get us killed by driving like a kamikaze pilot.” I start picking up what just spilled out of my shoulder bag.

“No point in being a damn sitting duck.” His eyes continue darting around, and his face is red. “We need to go see Kuster tomorrow. We can’t waste time on this.”

“It would be nice if you’d ask before making plans that include me.”

“He can help with shooting reconstructions.” Marino takes off his Ray-Bans. “No one better. You mind cleaning these for me?”

He drops his sunglasses in my lap.

I dig a tissue out of my jacket pocket. “What about brushes with law enforcement? Did the other victims have any reason to fear the police? What about drugs?”

“Not that I’ve heard.” He pulls down the visor and a stack of napkins flutter into his lap. “But it makes sense that Nari and his wife were scared shitless. Imagine being accused of having sex with some screwed-up juvenile? When Machado called she probably did think she was about to get arrested.”

“I’d say life couldn’t get much worse for her right now.” I continue to work on his Ray-Bans. “They need to be washed with soap and water. They’re also badly scratched. You’ve had these how long?”

“Gotta get new ones but hate to spend the dough.” He takes his glasses from me and puts them back on. “A hundred and fifty bucks a pop.”

I know what to get him for his birthday next month. He crams the napkins into the glove box and I catch a glimpse of the bagged pennies inside. I imagine a sharpshooter with a PGF and very specific ammunition that is difficult to trace because so far all that’s left is frag. I’m already puzzled by a detail I didn’t know, what Kuster said about an intact bullet. Luke Zenner must have recovered one from Nari’s body and that’s very surprising. It’s hard to believe.

Marino is chewing gum, his jaw muscles clenching. He’s chomping away because he really wants to smoke and he continues to feel for the pack of cigarettes in his jacket pocket. Pretty soon he’ll pull out a cigarette and not light it. As I’m thinking it he does it and then his cell phone rings through the speakerphone.

“Yeah,” he answers gruffly.

“This is Mary Sapp,” a woman says. “I’m returning your call from the house on Gallivan. There’s a truck parked in front and I’m not sure I should leave.”

13

He signed the lease this past Monday, agreeing to the asking price and three months’ rent in advance. Jamal Nari paid twelve thousand dollars so he and his wife could get in instantly.

Usually a renter has an attorney review a contract—especially a renter who has experience with litigation and has no reason to be trusting. But he was in too much of a hurry according to Realtor Mary Sapp, who has completely rerouted us. Across the Harvard Bridge, on Massachusetts Avenue now, and Marino is driving fast. He’s flying. Whenever a car doesn’t get out of his way, he flips on his emergency lights and whelps the siren.

It doesn’t matter that we’ve entered Boston and he’s left his jurisdiction without letting a Cambridge dispatcher know. He’s requested a backup from Boston PD and he hasn’t bothered telling Machado or anyone else what is going on. Nor is he concerned that I’m not headed to my office when I have cases to supervise, where I have a job and my own responsibilities and my own problems to worry about. He didn’t ask if my coming along for the ride is okay and I message Bryce Clark that I’ve been held up.

OMG! Do you mean robbed? he fires back, and I don’t know if he’s trying to be funny.

I’m with Marino. How is Luke doing?

Finished with post but assume you don’t want him released? I mean case from Farrar Street, not Luke.

Do not release, I reply as I overhear what Marino is asking Mary Sapp. I need to take a look at him.

Marino is reassuring the Realtor that she is safe as long as she stays inside the house. But she doesn’t sound as if she’s worried about being safe. She doesn’t sound afraid. In fact she sounds something else. Dramatic, overly charming and helpful. It occurs to me that she might be enjoying herself.

No funeral home picked out anyway. Another message from Bryce appears in a gray balloon.

Then don’t ask me if he should be released yet, I think but I’m not going to put that in writing.

I talked to the wife. She’s in a fugue state, doesn’t have a clue what to do no matter what I tell her, Bryce writes and he shouldn’t editorialize.

Will let you know when I’m headed in. I end our dialogue.

“… I probably wouldn’t have thought much about it except for what’s all over the news.” Mary Sapp’s voice fills the car, a voice that is too cheerful in light of the circumstances.

Already I don’t have a good opinion of her.

“I’m glad you’re thinking about it and are smart enough to stay put inside the house.” Marino encourages her to do as he says. “And you’re sure about the description.”

“Oh yes. Yesterday around two or three in the afternoon. I was doing another walk-through of the house, taking more photographs, making notes, making sure they didn’t damage anything when they dropped by,” she replies.

“Dropped by for what?”

“She’s been carrying in boxes of their belongings. Sometimes people scuff and bang up a place and then claim it already was like that before.”

“What you’re saying is it wasn’t the two of them. It was just Joanna dropping by.”

“That’s right. I only met him once, when I first showed them the house about a week ago. The rest of the time I’ve dealt with her.”

“And at around two or three yesterday afternoon you saw the truck.”

“When I happened to look out the window, I noticed it drive by. A big gray pickup truck with a sign of some sort on the door.”

“Any particular reason you noticed it?” Marino asks.

“It was going so slowly that I thought it was going to stop in front of the house. Some type of lawn care company and then there it was again this morning when I was meeting with Joanna.”

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