“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 Connecticut.