Dust ks-21

by Patricia Cornwell

  I could understand it if Benton worries he’s being targeted by this killer or any killer he pursues even if it isn’t true. How much can he subject himself to before his barriers begin to break down, before what he does gets under his skin like a parasite, like an infection? The question has lingered for as long as I’ve loved him.

  “Obviously I would look over here,” Benton says on his phone a muddy field away from me. “Maybe the police would have gotten around to it. They probably would have even though it’s remote from where her body was.”

  “Why would you look?” I ask.

  “Because of the truck.”

  “The one broken into.” I fix my attention on the black pickup he’s slowly circling as he talks.

  “It’s out of place here,” he says. “It’s not related to the construction going on. It’s someone’s personal truck improperly parked here so of course that would get my attention instantly.”

  He stands still and stares across the field at me.

  “That’s assuming the tool was used on the gate’s lock and chain.” I watch Marino and Machado give up with the shovel and decide on the hacksaw.

  “He used this tool,” Benton says. “And he wanted us to find it, and when the labs examine it you’re going to see I’m right. We’re his audience and he wants us to know everything he’s gone to the trouble to do. That’s part of the thrill —”

  “‘Gone to the trouble’?” I interrupt him, getting angry because he’s scaring me and for an instant I feel the flare of heated fury that I work so hard to bury.

  Then I will myself to feel nothing at all. It’s not helpful to react the way a normal person would. I banish what will interfere with my clinical discipline and reason, I run it off and far away from me. After all these years I’m good at emptying myself out.

  I watch Marino rummaging inside his big scene case, what’s actually a portable tool chest. I take a deep breath. Calmer now, Gail Shipton enters my mind again. It would make sense if she’s the link. If so, it would mean she had some connection with her killer even if she didn’t know him, even if they’d never met, as Benton has said.

  16

  The tool has a red fiberglass handle and a metal blade. It looks similar to a wrench and is capable of cutting through hard metals like brass, copper, and steel.

  Marino is able to tell us that at a glance. He takes photographs of the tool with the rock on top of it, a chunk of native stone about the size of a softball. Then he moves the rock out of the way. He picks up the tool.

  “Okay, so where’s the lock and chain?” The tool is overwhelmed by Marino’s big gloved hands.

  He turns it, studying it, careful not to destroy evidence like fingerprints, which I suspect aren’t there.

  “If he wanted us to find the damn tool he used, you might think he’d leave the lock and chain, too, right?”

  Marino places the tool in an evidence bag.

  “You know, if he’s going to jerk us around, the more the merrier, right?” Marino’s mood has gone from somber to sour and sarcastic.

  The first death scene he’s worked as a cop in a decade and he’s feeling lost and pushed around. Benton is making him feel small and Marino is spoiling for a fight.

  “My point is we shouldn’t assume this was used by him.” He loudly tears off a strip of evidence tape. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe you strayed off the beaten path and found something unrelated.” He directs this at Benton, staring at him with an open challenge mixed with something else. Doubt.

  Then Marino looks at me as if expecting I’ll take his side. Or maybe he’s trying to figure me out, figure Benton out, because Marino doesn’t know what to think. It’s just the three of us standing near a bulldozer on a construction site and I wonder how Benton is going to communicate what Marino needs to know. Benton can’t be forthright and Marino won’t make it easy even if he believes him. And I anticipate he won’t, not at first.

  “Maybe somebody broke into a truck, which wouldn’t be unusual,” Marino goes on in the same snide tone. “Vehicles get broken into all the time. Maybe that’s all there is to it, plain and simple.”

  “I suggest you also collect the rock,” Benton says. “He touched it. Most likely he had gloves on but he might not have, depending on his mind-set at this point.”

  “Who the hell are you talking about?”

  “The person you’re looking for. What’s not a question is he handled the rock. He picked it up and placed it where it was. We should check it for DNA, for any residue, that might have been transferred on it.”

  “Jesus friggin’ Christ. You got to be kidding me.”

  “He drove the body here,” Benton says as if there can be no question. “He parked in this lot first.” He points to the parking lot next to the dorm. “He got out of his vehicle, walked into this construction site, broke into the truck’s storage box and took the tool. After that he drove the body to the lot over there.” He points again, this time to the parking lot where I was on the phone for the past hour or so.

  The pedestrian gate is still wide open, stirred by the wind, and I remind Benton of the risk. That parking lot is across the street from the MIT police station. The killer — and I’m openly calling him that without reservation — would have had to drive over the curb and the sidewalk.

  “There was a chance the police might see him,” I conclude.

  “There was no chance of that,” Benton says flatly. “This person is calculating and he watches. He spies. He thrives on risk, on the thrill of taking a chance, and he manages to look like he belongs wherever he is, assuming you see him at all. He pulled into that lot, cut off the lock and chain from the gate. He placed the body on a sled of some sort that flattened the grass, gouging out clumps of it, as he dragged it to the infield and posed it.”

  “Why?” Marino stares hard at him, then looks at me, almost rolling his eyes.

  “Because it aroused him and is symbolic. We don’t know exactly why. We never do but what you’re seeing are the hieroglyphics on the wall of his deviant psyche.”

  “Now I’m thinking total crap.” Marino defiantly places his hands on his hips. “Whatever happened to her isn’t the fucking Da Vinci Code. She’s as dead as hamburger and I don’t give a shit about his psyche.”

  “You need to pay attention,” Benton says to him. “He spent time posing the body, walking around, looking at it from different angles. This is what gets him high, a game that gets more daring and out of control. He has his methods and everything he does has meaning to him, but he’s like a top spinning toward the edge of the table. Close to spinning off, a crash waiting to happen.”

  “How the hell can you know that based on what’s out here?”

  “I know his type and what I’m seeing tells me he’s killed before and will again.”

  As Benton describes all this I think of the Vicks-like ointment we recovered from blades of grass not far from where the body was found. I imagine the killer looking at the posed body from different angles, admiring his work, as Benton just described. The final act, a murderous triumph out on a soggy playing field in the dark, and he applies more of the vapor rub, breathing in its sharp, penetrating odor so he doesn’t forget his purpose or make mistakes, or maybe he’s already making them. Like a racehorse running powerfully, single-mindedly, but on the brink of stumbling or striking a hurdle or flying over a cliff.

  “When he was done he returned to this spot, cleaned off the tool, and left it,” Benton says. “He left it for us.”

  “It might not have been noticed over here,” Marino continues to argue. “This construction site’s not all that convenient to where the body was left.”

  “He knew we’d find it eventually.”

  “Why would he give a shit?” Marino angrily yanks off his gloves. “And how the hell could he know what was in the truck’s storage box? We’re supposed to believe the pipe cutter came from there? How does that make any sense at all? It wouldn’t be smart. Start with that. What if it hadn’t
been in there? What if he’s parked out here with a dead body in his car and then doesn’t have a tool to cut the chain off the gate?”

  “He gathers intelligence,” Benton says patiently. “This isn’t an impulse crime, Pete. It was premeditated carefully, with a motive he had in mind that’s not his real reason for killing her. He did it because he wanted to, because he’s driven by an overwhelming compulsion. That’s not the way he sees it but it’s the reality we’re dealing with.”

  “You’re talking like you know who it is.”

  “I know the type,” Benton says and that’s all he’s going to say.

  He’s not going to explain the rest of it. Not right now.

  “You know something you’re sure as hell not saying,” Marino accuses angrily and uneasily.

  “He’s the type to target his victims, to gather detailed information about them,” Benton explains. “He’s the type to access their residences, wander into their private spaces, surf the Internet for information, find whatever he can. That’s part of his arousal pattern.”

  “We’ve checked out Gail Shipton,” Marino counters. “No police reports filed. No house break, nothing at all to suggest a possible B-and-E.”

  “You should talk to people and find out if at any time, especially of late, she’s felt someone is watching her.”

  “Good thing you told me. I wouldn’t have thought of it.” A flush creeps up Marino’s neck. “And there’s nothing to say he’s not some local fruitcake and maybe this dead lady is a stand-alone case. How come you haven’t bothered considering that?” Marino stares off at Simmons Hall with its thousands of cubed windows and silvery skin. “Maybe he knows certain details because he’s operating in his own neighborhood. Maybe we’ll get lucky and this is his damn truck. Maybe he left the tool accidentally. Maybe he meant to put it back inside his truck and forgot.”

  “He watches,” Benton again says as if Marino had said nothing. “He knew this pickup truck would be here. You’ll likely find out from the owner that he’s left it here overnight on more than one occasion. Possibly he leaves it here overnight often because he likes to drink after work.”

  “That’s just pure guessing,” Marino snaps as if he’s a defense attorney objecting, “based on nothing.”

  “You’re probably going to find he’s had a DUI in the past and isn’t going to take the chance of getting another one.” Benton is relentless and unflappable. “You’ll likely discover he has some special status with MIT, maybe works here, and he can leave his truck and no one gives him a problem. He uses his own tools for whatever his job requires and anybody interested might know what he keeps locked up in his truck.”

  “What’s the point?” Marino retorts as he glances at me repeatedly.

  “What I can tell you is he has one that means something to him. His behavior is calculated and it all starts with what he sees and fantasizes about.” Benton predicts and projects, offering details that might sound ludicrous if they came from someone else.

  But Benton is right most of the time no matter how much I might wish otherwise. It’s not because he’s lucky. It’s not because he’s clairvoyant. His conclusions are drawn from an unfathomable database built over decades of every conceivable atrocity he’s seen. He’s paid a high price to be good at what he does.

  “Keep what I’ve said in mind as you work this scene and investigate this case. You’re hurting yourself if you don’t.” Benton nods at the pickup truck. “I’d check the storage box if I were you. Chances are you’re going to find something in it besides tools.”

  Marino radios Machado that they need to process a vehicle in the lot over here, that someone pried open a storage locker.

  “Have you looked inside it?” Machado’s voice is loud over the air as he and Marino face each other from opposite sides of Briggs Field.

  “Not yet.”

  “You’re thinking it’s related?”

  “We need to work it like it is,” Marino says with a bored shrug in his voice for Benton’s benefit. “I’ll radio control, see what we can track down.”

  Machado stops working on the fence post, which is dug up now and partially wrapped in heavy brown paper. He heads in our direction as Marino radios the dispatcher to run the truck’s tag for him.

  “Once the owner’s located,” Marino lets us know, “I can figure out how long the truck’s been parked in this location and get an idea of when it was broken into.”

  “I think we already have an idea.” Benton’s attention is fixed on the railroad tracks that run between the construction site and the back of Simmons Hall. “The body was discovered around three-thirty a.m.”

  “We got the call at exactly three thirty-nine.” Marino can’t resist correcting him.

  Grand Junction Corridor cuts through the MIT campus and runs in a straight line from east Cambridge, passing very close behind the CFC before crossing the Mystic River and into Boston. I’m reminded that whenever a circus comes to neighboring cities and towns, the train parks on the Grand Junction branch very close to where we’re standing.

  Beyond that conspicuous and highly publicized use of the nearly defunct rail line, only an occasional freight train clatters through, usually on the weekend. I’ve had my share of getting stuck after work, waiting for a train carrying fresh fruits and vegetables to the Chelsea Produce Market. A few weeks ago I waited for a circus train that was a mile long, red with gold lettering, the Cirque d’Orleans out of South Florida, where I’m originally from.

  “He wanted the body found quickly and likely watched it found, watched the scene being worked, possibly from right here in this construction site.” Benton continues to describe what he thinks the killer did. “Once it was daylight, he was long gone.”

  Machado has reached us now and he looks curiously at the black pickup truck. Then he looks at Benton.

  “You’re saying he was hanging around the whole time we’ve been here?” Machado asks dubiously.

  “Not the entire time but long enough to watch Kay work the scene, to watch Lucy land.”

  “And to watch you?”

  “Possibly,” Benton says. “By the time he left it was still dark and he was on foot. Most likely he followed the train tracks out of the campus, which would have enabled him to avoid car traffic, campus security, students. No one was going to see him back here where the tracks are. They’re not lighted and there’s no pedestrian path alongside them. They’re a very effective and efficient way to get in and out. Unless a train is coming,” he adds. “He had to know about the tracks back here. He had to be familiar and comfortable with them.”

  “You’re suspicious maybe he’s a student who knows the area inside out,” Machado supposes.

  “I’m not suspicious of that.”

  “Then how come you were photographing cars in the dorm parking lot?” Marino digs his big hands into a new pair of gloves, splaying his thick fingers, stretching and flexing them out.

  “Because they’re here and somebody should for exclusionary purposes, mainly. They’re not going to be helpful for any reason other than that.”

  “I get it. You drop out of the sky so you can tell us how to do our job.” Marino retrieves a dusting kit from his scene case.

  “I dropped out of the sky because Lucy gave me a ride home,” Benton says without a trace of defensiveness and again that’s all he’s going to say.

  Marino leans over the side of the black pickup truck, which I note is dirty and scuffed, a Toyota several years old that hasn’t seen a coat of wax in recent memory.

  “Just so you know,” he says, “we wrote down every tag in every lot around here. Any place someone may have stopped to dump a dead body.”

  “Great,” Benton says blandly.

  Marino inspects the damaged area of the storage locker’s diamond-steel plate lid, an area of metal sharply bent near the lock’s keyhole. He opens the lid, propping it against the back windshield of the truck.

  “Shit,” he mutters.

  17
/>   Marino reaches inside and lifts out a handbag, brown leather with a double handle, an unassuming, moderately pricey satchel. He unzips it.

  “Bingo,” he says sarcastically. “One more present to piss us off.”

  “That’s not why he left it.” Benton is matter-of-fact.

  He doesn’t look surprised or particularly interested as Marino pulls out a wallet. He opens it and produces Gail Shipton’s driver’s license.

  “If he took her someplace first, explaining why her clothes are gone, then why leave this here?” Marino studies the license, his jaw muscles clenched. “Why not throw it in a dumpster somewhere?”

  In the photograph she’s in her late teens or early twenties when her hair was much shorter and she had bangs. She’s wearing heavy framed glasses that mask her prettiness, and her expression is self-conscious, her smile frozen, her eyes askance. She doesn’t have the open, friendly face of someone who is accessible or warm, but perhaps the camera made her shy.

  “His motivation isn’t about pissing us off,” Benton says as Marino goes through the wallet’s compartments. “It’s about showing off, and what he does is deeply personal. It’s about what he feels and not about us.”

  “How is leaving her pocketbook showing off?” Marino asks.

  “It’s brazen. He’s assisting with the ID. He’s helping us because that gives him a rush.” Benton says and it tells me he’s found the victims’ IDs in the other cases.

  “I don’t see it,” Marino says.

  “It sounds like you’re talking about some sort of psychopath, like a serial killer.” Machado looks impressed and at the same time incredulous. “I’m sure as hell not passing that up the chain unless we’re sure.”