Dust Page 5

  “He’s still growing.”

  “Well, if you keep it up he will but not the way you want.”

  “Plus they clean his teeth.”

  “What about the dog toothpaste I made for you?”

  “He doesn’t like it.”

  “Her phone isn’t password-protected?” I ask as I tie my laces in double bows.

  “I’ve got my little trick for getting around that.”

  Lucy, I think. Already, Marino is bringing my niece’s old tricks to his new trade, and all of us know that her tricks aren’t necessarily legal.

  “I’d be careful about what you might not want to explain in court,” I tell him.

  “What people don’t know they can’t ask about.” It’s clear from his demeanor he doesn’t want my advice.

  “I assume you processed the phone first for prints, for DNA.” I can’t stop myself from talking to him the same way I did when he was under my supervision. Not even a month ago.

  “The phone and the case it’s in.”

  I get up from the floor and he shows me a photograph of a smartphone in a rugged black case on wet, cracked pavement near a dumpster. Not just a typical smartphone skin, I think. But a water- and shock-resistant hard-shell case with retractable screens, what Lucy refers to as military-grade. It’s what she and I both have, and the detail might tell me something important about Gail Shipton. The average person doesn’t have a smartphone skin like this.

  “I got her call history.” Marino explains how he extracted the password and other data by utilizing a handheld physical analyzer he’s not supposed to have.

  A Lucy invention. A mobile scanner she modified to do her bidding, which in her case means hacking. Leave my niece alone with your smartphone or computer for five minutes and she’ll own your life.

  “The last call Gail made yesterday afternoon was at five fifty-three.” Marino’s eyes are on the fanny pack strapped around my waist. “Carin Hegel, who’d just texted Gail to call her. When the hell did you start packing heat?”

  “Carin Hegel, as in the attorney?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Fortunately I’ve not been involved in any big lawsuits, so no. But we’ve met a number of times.” Most recently in Boston’s federal courthouse, and I try to remember when that was.

  Early this month, maybe two weeks ago. We ran into each other in the café on the second floor and she mentioned she was there for a pretrial hearing. The case involved a financial management company she described as a “gang of thugs.”

  “It’s looking pretty certain that Gail left the bar, went out to the parking lot in back, pretty much what her friend Haley Swanson told me,” Marino continues. “Gail answered a call from someone with a blocked number and must have stepped outside so she could hear. In the log it just says unknown and mobile. If you go to the corresponding info screen, it gives you the date, time, and how long the call was, which was seventeen minutes.”

  He gives Quincy another piece of biscuit.

  “Gail ended that call when the text from Carin Hegel landed,” he says. “She tried to call her and that call lasted only twenty-four seconds. Which is interesting. Either she didn’t get her and left a voice mail or she got interrupted.”

  “We need to get hold of Carin Hegel.” Uneasiness flickers.

  There was something else she told me when we were buying coffee in the courthouse café a few weeks ago. She indicated she wasn’t living at home. I gathered that she’d relocated to an undisclosed place where she planned to stay until the trial was over.

  It wasn’t safe to have her usual routines, she confided in me. How convenient it would be if she were in a car accident right now, she joked, but it was obvious she didn’t think it was a laughing matter. She was giving me fair warning in the event she showed up at my office without an appointment and horizontally, she quipped, and I didn’t think that was funny. None of it was.

  “I already left a message for her to call me ASAP,” Marino says.

  “You mentioned that her client might be missing?”

  “Yeah. Of course she doesn’t know me so I don’t know if she’ll call me back or get her damn secretary to do it. You know how big-shot lawyers are,” Marino says as I put on my coat. “The shoe was close to the phone, rained on but doesn’t look like it was out there all that long. Hours versus days,” he adds. “I’m thinking someone grabbed Gail and she struggled, dropped the phone, and a shoe came off. Why the hell are you wearing a gun?”

  “What does the shoe look like?” I ask.

  He opens another photograph on his phone to show me a green faux-crocodile leather flat upside down on dirty wet pavement.

  “It would come off easily, as opposed to boots or shoes that tie on or zip up,” I observe.

  “Right. Tells us she struggled as someone forced her into his car.”

  “I don’t know what it tells us yet. What about any other personal effects?”

  “It’s possible she had a brown shoulder bag with her. She carried one, and it’s not inside her condo. That’s what her friend Haley said.”

  “Whom you’ve not talked to since one a.m.”

  “There’s only so many minutes in an hour.” Marino offers Quincy another piece of biscuit, and now we’re up to three in fifteen minutes. “Whoever got Gail must have taken her bag.”

  “And nobody heard her scream? Someone grabs her or forces her into a car in a crowded area of Cambridge during happy hour and no one hears a thing?”

  “The bar was loud. It also depends on how much she had to drink.”

  “If she were intoxicated, it certainly would make her more vulnerable.” I’ve preached this for years.

  Rapists, muggers, and murderers tend to prefer their victims drunk or drugged. A woman staggering out of a bar alone is a sitting duck.

  “The area behind the bar was going to be pretty deserted after dark,” Marino says. “Nothing but a cut-through to Mass Ave. In other words, real easy for a bad person to get in and out of that back area behind the bar. Stupid place for her to be talking on the phone after dark and it would have been pitch-dark by five-thirty, six p.m.”

  “Let’s not start by blaming the victim.” I head down the hallway with Sock, pausing to straighten Victorian etchings on the paneled wall.

  I feel dampness and dust everywhere, my private world in disarray and neglected, or at least it seems that way, not a single holiday light and an empty unlived-in smell, nothing cooking in the kitchen, no sounds of life. Ever since I came home from Connecticut nothing has been right.

  “She shouldn’t have gone back there.” Marino’s voice follows me. “She shouldn’t have been on her phone, not paying attention,” he adds loudly.

  6

  The backyard is flooded with standing water. Trees move fitfully in gusting wind and the sound of the rain is unnaturally loud, simmering on pavers as if the back patio is hot. The air is heavy with steamy mist.

  Surrounding homes are dark, their holiday decorations on timers that black out electric candles and strands of festive lights from midnight to dusk. I know the patterns by now. Every day that I’ve been alone since I got sick, I’ve done exactly this when I take Sock out. I stand sentry in the open doorway, my left hand resting on the fanny pack. I’m aware of the weight of the pistol inside it as my shy shell-shocked greyhound trots to a favorite spot, sniffing behind boxwoods, disappearing into black holes where I can’t see him. He’s an expert at avoiding areas of the yard that have motion-sensor lights.

  I probe deep shadows and the old brick wall that separates our property from the one behind it, and maybe what Benton suggested the other day is true. I’m more vigilant than usual. He said considering everything going on it’s to be expected that I might be uneasy and raw, and I didn’t argue with him or elaborate. He’s had enough on his mind and I didn’t want him to worry, but the feeling is there as I look around at the darkness and the rain. I feel someone is watching me. I’ve felt it since I came home from Connect
icut.

  I’ve heard noises, subtle ones, a stick cracking, the whisper of dead leaves disturbed, and I’ve come to dread taking Sock out after dark and he seems to dread it too. He hates wintertime and bad weather, and I’ve rationalized that it’s probably my unsettledness he’s reacting to, and my heart sinks as he sniffs the wind just now, searching it. He stiffens, suddenly bounding back to my post at the door, his tail curled between his legs as he tries to push past me inside the house just like he’s done repeatedly of late.

  “Go potty,” I tell him firmly. “Everything’s fine. I’m right here.” I search for the source of whatever spooked him on the off chance it’s something other than me. “What is it? A raccoon, an owl, a squirrel somewhere?”

  I listen carefully, hearing nothing but the loud splashing rain as I look around from my safe base. Light seeps through the open doorway, dimly illuminating a matted carpet of soggy brown grass and leaves and the shape of the circular low stone wall around the magnolia tree in the center of the yard. Above me, the French stained-glass window is brilliant against the back of the house, the jewel-like hues drawing attention to when I’m home or headed out with my dog.

  I may as well be making an announcement to anyone with bad intentions, and it would make sense to leave the light off over the stairs. But I refuse. The vibrant colors and mythical animals give me comfort and pleasure. I won’t be ruled by irrational fear. I won’t allow evil people, even the thought of them, to rob me of more than they already have.

  “What is it? Oh for heaven’s sake, come on.” I move away from the doorway, and Sock follows me into the yard, his muzzle touching the back of my knee. “Go on.” I sound calm and unconcerned but that’s not what I feel.

  My conscious mind says all is fine but another part of my brain says something is off. I feel it strongly, what I’ve felt before. Blasts of wind-driven rain thrash the heavy branches and rubbery leaves of the magnolia tree and my pulse picks up. The storm howls around the roof and agitates the shrubbery and I physically react to something I can’t identify.

  A stone or a brick chinks on the other side of the back wall and my scalp prickles and my legs feel heavy, but those days of being too terrified to move or breathe were left behind in my childhood. I’ve been through too much and it has hardened some primal part of me that no longer panics. I peel open the fanny pack and slide out the gun as I pull up my hood and escort Sock to the stone bench around the magnolia tree. Nearby is shrubbery.

  “Go on. I’m right here,” I tell him, and he ducks behind a thick cover of boxwoods, his ears back, his eyes on me.

  Heavy cold raindrops tap the waterproof fabric covering my head as I stand perfectly still and scan. I watch the wall. I listen and wait. It occurs to me with dismay that I haven’t chambered a round and it will be difficult to pull back the slide. The pistol is wet. It was stupid not to cock it before I came outside. Sock suddenly bolts to the open door and I follow him, not turning my back to the wall that separates the yard from the property behind it.

  I feel it like a magnetic force, a malevolent presence lurking in the dark behind the wall, close enough that I can almost smell it, an acrid edge, a dirty electrical odor like something old shorting out. What people smell when they’re about to have a seizure but I’m imagining it. There’s no odor, only the muskiness of wet dead leaves and the ozone of rain. Water splashes steadily and the chilled wind blows humidly and whatever moved is silent and still. Physics displacing things, I think, like finding a coin on the rug and having no idea how it got there from the top of the dresser where you saw it last.

  I look around and see nothing out of the ordinary, and, stepping inside the house, I shut the door and lock it. I look through the peephole at the empty rain-swept yard, then I towel Sock dry and praise him for a job well done as I wipe off the pistol and zip it back inside the fanny pack. I look through the peephole again and it’s a reflex when I place my hand on the knob. I do it before I realize what I’m seeing.

  The figure standing on the other side of the wall is a young male, small, maybe a boy, I’m fairly sure. Bareheaded, light skinned, and for an instant he’s looking directly at the back door, directly at me looking at him through the peephole. I see the hint of pale flesh and the dark recesses of his eyes, and I swing the door open wide and he runs.

  “Hey!” I yell.

  He vanishes as suddenly as he appeared.

  I walk inside my kitchen of stainless-steel commercial appliances, old wood, and antique amber alabaster chandeliers.

  “What was that about?” Marino fills a glass with sparkling water, helping himself, and I can tell he assumes I was yelling at Sock, who heads to his bowls on a mat and sits expectantly.

  “We had a visitor,” I reply. “Possibly a young male, white, dark hair maybe, maybe a kid. He was behind the wall and may have been there the entire time we were in the yard. Then he ran.”

  “On your property?” Marino sets down the glass and the bottle as if he’s about to bolt to the back of the house.

  “No.” I feel surprisingly calm – validated, in fact.

  I’m not imagining things after all.

  “He was on the other side of the wall in my neighbor’s yard.” I drape the wet towel over a towel bar on a cabinet.

  “He wasn’t trespassing, then. At least not on your property.”

  “I don’t know what he was doing.”

  “Are you sure it’s not your neighbor back there?”

  “At this hour and in this weather, and why would my neighbor be ducking behind the wall and then run? The person didn’t seem familiar but I didn’t get a good look, obviously.”

  I open my pocketbook on the counter near the phone and pull out my wallet, medical examiner credentials, and keys.

  “A young male who didn’t look local. Are you sure?” Marino returns the bottle to a refrigerator, not the one he took it from.

  “I’m not sure of anything beyond what I just said.” I find my CFC badge with its embedded radio-frequency identification chip, on a lanyard and in a plastic holder. “But I’ve definitely had a weird feeling these past few days while I’ve been home, a sense that someone’s been watching the house. And Sock’s been uneasy.”

  Marino thinks for a moment, weighing his options. He could go out into the rainy dark and look around for whoever it was but no crime has been committed, at least not that we know about. I’m also fairly certain my prowler is long gone and I tell Marino that. I explain that the person I saw ran off in the direction of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is a heavily wooded property and just north of that, across Beacon Street and railroad tracks, is Somerville. Then the jurisdiction isn’t Cambridge anymore. The person could be anywhere.

  “Maybe some kid looking to do a smash-and-grab,” Marino decides as I retrieve a small powerful LED flashlight from a drawer and check to make sure the batteries are good. “Especially this time of year, there’s a lot of vandalism, car breaks, windows smashed, kids stealing laptops, iPads, iPhones. You’d be amazed how many rich people in Cambridge don’t have alarm systems,” he says as if I have no idea what goes on in the city where I live and work. “Kids case a house to figure out where the electronics are, then smash out a window, grab what they want, and run like hell.”

  “We’re a poor candidate for a smash-and-grab. It’s obvious we have an alarm system.” Inside the pantry hanging on a hook is my nylon cross-body bag, what I carry when I’m traveling light. “There are signs in the yard, and if the person looked through a window he’d see keypads on the walls with red lights indicating the house is armed.”

  “You always have it on when you’re home?”

  “Especially when I’m alone.” He knows that about me, for God’s sake.

  “And you started getting this weird feeling after Benton left for D.C.?”

  “Not as long ago as that. He’s been gone for about a month, right after the second and third murders happened. I don’t think I noticed anything unusual as long ago as that.
” He’s fishing to see if Benton’s cases have spooked me, abductions and murders Marino knows nothing about except what little has been reported in the news.

  “Okay. When exactly did you start feeling weird?”

  “Since I got back from Connecticut. Saturday night is when I first had the feeling.” My wallet, keys, credentials, badge, flashlight go inside the bag, which hugs my hip when I slip the strap over my shoulder.

  Marino watches me, and I know what he’s concluded. What I went through over the weekend was traumatic and I’m paranoid, and, more to the point, I don’t feel as safe as I did when he worked for me. He wants to believe I feel his absence deeply, that life’s not as settled as it was, and it isn’t. I open a cabinet above the sink.

  “Well, that’s understandable,” he says.

  “What I’ve sensed has nothing to do with that, I promise.” I set a can of Sock’s food and a pair of gray nitrile examination gloves on the counter.

  “Really? You want to tell me why you suddenly think it’s necessary to wear a gun to a crime scene? One you’re going to with me?” He continues to push because he wants to believe I’m scared.

  Most of all he wants to believe I need him.

  “You don’t even like guns,” he then says.

  “It’s not a matter of what I like.” I talk to the rhythm of the can opener cutting through metal. “I also don’t happen to think that guns are something one should have feelings for. Love, hate, like, or dislike should be reserved for people, pets, food. Not firearms.”

  “Since when do you wear one or even bother taking the trigger lock off?”

  “How would you know what I bother with? You’re not around me most of the time and not at all lately.” I empty the can into Sock’s bowl as he waits by his mat, his pointed face looking at me.

  “Well, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I don’t work for you anymore and all of a sudden you arm yourself everywhere.”

  “I don’t arm myself everywhere but certainly when I’m in and out of the house all hours of the night, here alone,” I reply.