Depraved Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Marino?” I look for him.

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

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

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

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

“Why?” Slow heavy footsteps coming closer.

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

No answer.

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

Silence.

“Marino? Hello!”

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

The number you have reached is no longer in service …

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

Like a vault door slamming.

“Hello?” I call out. “Hello!”

No one answers.

“Marino?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank God,” I mutter.

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

“Someone may have tampered with the scene.”

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

“I thought you’d vanished.”

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

“Maybe one of the other cops did it?”

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

“Who?”

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

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

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

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

“You’ve heard nothing from her?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marino shrugs. “I don’t know.”

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

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

“Now what?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well it appears someone took it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Empty,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good to know.”

“I’m just saying.”

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

“Don’t get pissed at me, Doc.”

“Why would I?”

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

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

“Nope.”

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

“That’s not happening,” I say to him.

9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t smell anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blame the victim.

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