“Trust me, you don’t want anybody else taking care of this. There can’t be even one damn thing that gets screwed up,” Marino perseverates and if I’m honest with myself, I’m glad to hear his voice.
I don’t want to miss his company the way I just did. There was no one else I would take to a frenzied media carnival on a scale that was incomprehensible, the streets overwhelmed for miles by TV vans, production trucks, and pole-mounted satellites, the thudding of helicopters incessant, as if a movie were being filmed.
Were the shots close range?
The anger again and I can’t afford to rouse it, the dragon within. It was better Marino wasn’t with me. I just didn’t feel like it. I know what he can handle and he would have blown apart like glass shattered by vibrations too intense to hear.
“All I can tell you is I got a gut about it, Doc,” his familiar voice says but he sounds different, stronger and more sure of himself. “Some sick fuck out there just getting started. Maybe got the idea from what just happened.”
“From what happened in Newtown, Connecticut?” I don’t see how he can possibly leap to such a conclusion and he needs to stop bringing it up.
“That’s the way it works,” he says. “One sick fuck gets the idea from some other sick fuck who shoots up a movie theater or a school for attention.”
I imagine him driving the dark streets of Cambridge in this weather. No doubt he doesn’t have his seat belt on and it will be a waste of breath for me to tell him now that he’s a cop again. How quickly he returns to his old bad habits.
“She wasn’t shot, was she?” I ask him pointedly to derail an inappropriate and awful subject. “You’re not even sure she’s a homicide, isn’t that right?”
“It doesn’t appear she was shot,” Marino verifies.
“Let’s not confuse things by comparing it to what just happened in Connecticut.”
“I’m sick and tired of assholes getting rewarded by the media.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“It makes it worse and more likely to happen again. We shouldn’t release their names and should bury them in a damn unmarked grave.”
“Let’s stick with the case at hand. Do we know if she has obvious injuries?”
“Nothing at a glance,” he says. “But she sure as hell didn’t wrap herself up in a sheet and walk out there on her own two bare feet and lay down and die in the rain and mud.”
Marino’s bypassing my deputy chief medical examiner, Luke Zenner, or any of my forensic pathologists at the CFC isn’t about my being the most qualified even though I am. It’s about Marino stepping back into his earlier life so he can be who he was when we first met. He no longer works for me. He gets to summon me on command. That’s the way he figures things and he’ll remind me as often as he can.
“I mean, if you really don’t feel up to it…” he starts to say and it sounds like a challenge or maybe he’s goading me.
I don’t know. How can I judge anything right now? I’m worn-out and famished. I can’t stop thinking about boiled eggs with butter and coarsely ground peppercorns, and hot fresh baked bread and espresso. I would kill for a chilled glass of freshly squeezed blood orange juice.
“No, no, the worst is past.” I reach for the bottle of water on the nightstand. “Let me get myself together here.” I don’t move beyond taking a big swallow, the thirst no longer unquenchable, my lips and tongue no longer as dry as paper. “I had cough syrup before I went to bed. Codeine.”
“Lucky you.”
“I’m a little groggy but fine. It’s not a good idea for me to drive, certainly not in this weather. Who found her?”
Maybe he already told me that. I press the back of my hand to my forehead. No fever. I’m sure it really is gone, not just Advil suppressing it.
“A girl from MIT, a guy from Harvard out on a date and decided to find a little privacy in her dorm room. You know Simmons Hall? That huge building that looks like it was built out of LEGOs on the other side of the MIT baseball and rugby fields,” Marino says.
I can tell he has a police scanner with the squelch turned up loud. In his element, I’m sure. Armed and dangerous with a detective’s badge on his belt, driving an unmarked police vehicle equipped with lights and a siren and God knows what else. In the old days when he was a cop, he used to trick out his police vehicles like he does his Harleys.
“They noticed what they thought at first was a manikin in a toga lying in the mud at the far end of the field inside the fence that separates it from a parking lot,” says the Marino from my past, Marino the detective. “So they walked inside an open gate to get a closer look and when they realized it was a female wrapped in a sheet with nothing on under it and that she wasn’t breathing they called nine-one-one.”
“The body is nude?” What I’m really asking is if it’s been disturbed and by whom.
“They claim they didn’t touch it. The sheet’s soaking wet and I think it’s pretty obvious she’s naked. Machado talked to them and says he’s confident they’ve got nothing to do with whatever happened to her but we’ll swab them for DNA, do backgrounds, the whole nine yards.”
He goes on to say that Cambridge detective Sil Machado suspects the woman is a drug overdose. “Which may be related to the weird-ass suicide from the other day,” Marino adds. “As you know there’s some bad stuff on the streets and it’s causing huge problems around here.”
“Which suicide?” Unfortunately there have been a number of them while I was out of town and ill.
“The fashion-designer lady who jumped off the roof of her Cambridge apartment building and splattered the plate-glass windows of the first-floor health club while people were inside working out,” he says. “It looked like a spaghetti bomb went off. Anyway, they’re thinking it could be related.”
“I don’t know why.”
“They think it could be drugs, some bad shit she got into.”
“Who’s they?” I didn’t work the suicide of course and I reach down for the stacks of cases on the floor by the bed.
“Machado. Also his sergeant, his lieutenant,” Marino says. “It’s gone straight up the chain to the superintendents and the commissioner.”
I set files on the bed, what must be at least a dozen folders, printouts of death reports and photographs my chief of staff Bryce Clark has been leaving on the sunporch for me daily, along with provisions he’s been kind enough to pick up.
“The concern is it could be the same really bad meth or designer-type shit — in other words, some latest version of bath salts that’s been hitting the streets around here. Maybe what the suicide lady was on,” Marino tells me. “One theory is that Gail Shipton, if it’s her who’s dead, was with someone doing some really bad drugs and she ODed so he dumped her body.”
“This is your theory?”
“Hell no. If you’re dumping a body why do it in a damn university playing field like you’re displaying it to shock people? That’s my point, the biggest threat we’ve got to watch for these days. Do something sensational enough and it will be all over the news and get the attention of the president of the United States. I think whoever dumped her body at Briggs Field is a bird of that kind of feather. He’s doing it for attention, to be headline news.”
“That could be part of it but probably not all of it.”
“I’m texting you a few photos that Machado texted me.” Marino’s deep voice continues in my ear, a rough voice, a rude, pushy voice.
“You shouldn’t text while you drive.” I reach for my iPad.
“Yeah, so I’ll write myself a ticket.”
“Any drag marks or other indications of how the body ended up where it is?”
“You can see in the photos it’s real muddy and unfortunately any drag marks or footprints probably got mostly washed out by the rain. But I haven’t been there yet and looked for myself.”