LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

       Doubt.

      I think that’s mostly it. Marino doubts me. He hasn’t always liked me and in the beginning of my career he might have hated me and then for the longest time he loved me too much. But throughout it all he didn’t doubt my judgment. There’s plenty he criticizes and harps on but being erratic, irrational or unreliable was never on the list. Not trusting me as a professional is new and it doesn’t feel good. It feels damn terrible.

      “The more I think about it the more I agree with you, Doc,” Marino continues to talk as I drive my big truck. “She hadn’t been dead all that long to be in such bad condition. I don’t know how we’re going to explain it to her mother. That and what lit up blue on the floor. A case that started out as no big deal and now there are questions, serious questions. And we can’t answer them. And why? Because for one thing we’re here in Concord and not in Cambridge getting to the bottom of things. How do I explain to Amanda Gilbert that you got a personal call and left her daughter’s body on the floor and just walked out?”

      “I didn’t leave the body on the floor,” I reply.

      “I meant it figuratively.”

      “Literally the body is safely at my office and I didn’t just walk out. There’s nothing figurative about it. Everything has been left as is and we’ll be back soon. And it’s also not for you to explain, Marino, and at the moment I don’t intend to discuss details with Amanda Gilbert. Not to mention we need to confirm the dead woman’s identity first.”

      “For the sake of the argument,” Marino replies, “let’s assume it’s Chanel Gilbert because who else would it be? Her mother is going to ask a shitload of questions.”

      “My answer is simple. I’ll say we need to confirm identification. We need more details and reliable witness accounts. We need undisputed facts that tell us when her daughter was last seen alive, when she last e-mailed or made a phone call. That’s the missing link. We find that out and I have a better chance of knowing when she died. The housekeeper is important. She’s the one who may have the best information.”

      I hear myself using words such as reliable, fact and undisputed. I’m being defensive because of what I sense from him. I feel his doubt. I feel it like a glowering mountain looming over me.

      “I’m suspicious of the housekeeper to tell you the truth,” he says. “What if she’s involved and is the one who turned off the air-conditioning?”

      “Was she asked about it?”

      “Hyde said it was already like that when he got to the house. She didn’t seem to know anything about why it was so hot.”

      “We need to sit down with her. What’s her name?”

      “Elsa Mulligan, thirty years old, originally from New Jersey. Apparently she moved to this area when Chanel Gilbert offered her the job.”

      “Why New Jersey?”

      “That’s where they met.”

      “When?”

      “Does it matter?”

      “Right now we have so many questions everything matters,” I reply.

      “I got the impression Elsa Mulligan hadn’t worked for Chanel all that long. A couple years? I’m not sure. That’s about as much as I know since she wasn’t still at the house when I got there. I’m passing on what Hyde said. She told him that when she let herself in through the kitchen door she could smell this horrible odor like something had died, and yep something sure had. The house was hot as shit and she got a whiff and followed it into the foyer.”

      “Did Hyde feel she was being truthful? What’s your gut tell you?”

      “I’m not sure of anything or anyone,” Marino says. “Usually we can at least count on the dead body to tell us the truth. Dead people don’t lie. Just living people do. But Chanel Gilbert’s body isn’t telling us shit because the heat escalated decomp, confusing things and I wonder if a housekeeper would know something like that.”

      “If she watches some of these crime shows she could.”

      “I guess so,” he says. “And I don’t trust her. And I’m getting an increasingly bad feeling about the case and wish to hell we hadn’t walked out on it.”

      “We didn’t walk out on it, and you’ll be the problem if you keep saying that.”

      “Really?” He looks at me. “When’s the last time you did something like this?”

      The answer is never. I don’t take personal calls in the middle of a scene and interrupt what I’m doing. But this was different. I heard an alert tone from Lucy’s emergency line, and she’s not the sort to overreact or cry wolf. I had no choice but to check on whether something terrible has happened.

      “What about the burglar alarm being on when she arrived this morning?” I ask Marino. “You told me the housekeeper turned it off. Are we sure it was armed when she unlocked the door?”

      “It was turned off at seven-forty-four, which is when she told Hyde she got there. Quarter of eight is exactly what she said.” Marino takes off his sunglasses, starts cleaning them on the hem of his shirt. “The alarm company log verifies the alarm was turned off at that time this morning.”

      “What about last night?”

      “It was set, disarmed and reset multiple times. The last time it was armed was close to ten P.M. The code was entered and after that none of the door contacts were broken. In other words it doesn’t appear someone set

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