Dust ks-21

by Patricia Cornwell

  A photograph that doesn’t fit with any of them is the one I pick up and look at carefully, a big gray elephant that dwarfs the young man giving him a bath, holding a running hose and a scrub brush. I move the photo in the lamplight and study the small but strong-looking shirtless figure in baggy camouflage shorts, tightly muscled with dark hair and an empty, icy stare as he grins boldly into the camera.

  I feel the hair prickle on my scalp as I notice his shoes, black running gloves, his powerful tan legs ending in what look like black rubber feet. The photograph was taken in a grassy area with coconut palms surrounded by a chain-link fence and beyond are deep blue waters, a speedboat going by, and beyond it white cruise ships are moored at what I recognize as the Port of Miami.

  “Who is this?” I ask Benton.

  He steps close to look, and then he steps away to give me space as I continue seeing what there is to see for myself.

  “I don’t know,” he says, “but we should try to find out.”

  “The Cirque d’Orleans is based in South Florida.” I return the photograph to its mirrored shelf. “And at the first of this month it was in this area and the train was parked at Grand Junction for several days. Right in the middle of MIT.”

  “I suppose it’s possible Lombardi owns a circus, too. That would be a good venue for distributing drugs, also a way to launder money, faking ticket sales, and who knows what. Maybe he dealt with the black market selling of exotic animals. Who the hell knows?”

  I take several photographs, angling the camera to avoid reflection and glare as best I can, and I ask Benton about Dominic Lombardi’s family.

  “He has the second wife in the Virgin Islands, according to Lucy, possibly the woman in a number of these photographs,” I say. “What about children? Has Lucy mentioned anything about that?”

  “I’ll ask her.” He types a text on his phone.

  Benton waits in front of a standing cheval mirror carved with cherubs playing music and I see him front and back, facing me and reflected in the glass.

  I look at a Luca Giordano painting of blacksmiths and next to it an André Derain seated woman before an abstract background of reds and greens. Pierre Bonnard, Cézanne, and Picasso are arranged unimaginatively on one wall and I ask right off if they might be expert forgeries.

  “I’m sure that’s what he told anybody who might have seen them,” Benton says. “What do you think?”

  “I feel like I’m in an art gallery or a vulgar palace, I’m not sure which. I guess the answer is both. I don’t know if they’re real or not but they’re magical and he probably didn’t even notice them beyond what they’re worth.”

  “The Maurice de Vlaminck you’re standing in front of, stolen in Geneva in the 1960s. Valued at around twenty million.” Benton’s eyes follow me.

  “And the others?”

  “The Picasso was last in a private collection here in Boston in the 1950s. It would go at auction for around fifteen million except for the minor problem that it’s hard to sell stolen art unless the buyer doesn’t mind and there are plenty who don’t. Masterpieces like these end up in private homes. They hang in yachts and Boeing business jets. They make the rounds until they surface like these will now. Someone dies. Someone gets caught. Someone realizes what he’s looking at is genuine. In this case all of the above.”

  “You know this off the top of your head.”

  “When I was growing up we had a Miró in the living room and one day it was replaced by a Modigliani, and after that a Renoir, and at some point there was a Pissarro, a snow scene with a man on a road.”

  Benton moves away from the mirror to look at the Vlaminck, a painting of the Seine in intense colors that are mesmerizing.

  “We had the Pissarro the longest and I was very unhappy when I came home from college and it was gone. There was this space above the fireplace where the art rotated. My father bought and sold it often, never really got attached to it. To me each one was like a cat or a dog I grew to love, or not love, but I missed every one of them when they were gone the same way you miss your friend or most boring teacher or even the bully in school. It’s hard to explain.”

  I know about his father’s love of fine art and how much money he made from it but it’s the first time I’ve heard about the space above the fireplace and the Pissarro that Benton missed.

  “It took five minutes to find out about these. I e-mailed photographs to my office before Granby sent me home.” Benton holds up his phone, which has become our most trusted link to truth and justice. “The small bronze on the bedside table is a Rodin. You can see his signature at the base of the left foot, stolen from a private collection in Paris in 1942 and off the radar ever since.”

  There are scraps of paper and what look like receipts under it. Lombardi was using it as a paperweight, and the loathing I shouldn’t feel because no crime scene should be personal only gets more acute when I look inside his dressing room crammed with racks of hand-tailored suits and shirts and rows of handmade shoes and what must be hundreds of Italian silk ties. In the master bath is a countertop made of tiger’s-eye with a gold-plated sink and a shaving set made of mammoth ivory.

  The back wall beyond the shower and the tub is filled with an opulent trompe l’oeil mural of Lombardi in a suit and tie posed with a magnificent Arabian horse inside an English barn, and, behind it, a stone arch that opens to what looks more like a Tuscan landscape than the Concord countryside. His plump hand rests possessively on the horse’s sleek neck as a farrier in a leather apron and chaps bends over the hind leg he holds in his leather-gloved hands, trimming the hoof. Lombardi’s jowly face with its small cold eyes seems to stare at me as I lean closer to get a better look.

  The workbench is mounted with a vise and arranged with many picks, rasps, nippers, and sharpening files and a leather strop, but it’s what the farrier grips securely in his right hand that transports me to a place I never thought I’d be while inside the private spaces of Lombardi’s house. Suddenly I find myself inside the gambrel barn without going there, staring at a knife with a long wooden handle and a short, chisel-shaped blade, one side beveled, the other flat, with a hooked tip that curls in on itself to trim away a horse’s loose and dried-out sole.

  “When you were in the barn with Marino was this what it looked like?” I point to the workbench inside a large stall with hay on the floor and dark wooden exposed beams overhead.

  “Not quite as nice and tidy and no stone arch opening onto vineyards,” Benton says wryly. “There are a lot of tools. The horse’s name is Magnum.”

  40

  “A hoof knife.” I touch the painted one the farrier holds in the mural on the wall.

  “The sharp curled tip would explain the wider, shallow abraded cut that peeled the flesh in places and runs parallel to the deep incision made by the straight edge of the blade,” I describe to Benton. “The killer may have gone into the barn because he knew what was easy to grab and how it would function as a weapon. It’s impossible to imagine he’s not familiar with the grounds and that nobody saw him.”

  I run my finger along the brown wooden handle gripped by the farrier and along the narrow short silvery blade to where it curls in on itself at the tip. I feel the thick layers of paint on cool tumbled marble and I imagine Lombardi in his shower or bath looking at the very tool that one day would almost sever his head from his neck.

  “It’s not what you would think of unless you know about it.” I envision getting my hands on a hoof knife and trying it on ballistic gelatin to see precisely what it does. “If you saw one on a workbench, you might not realize how effective it is, sharp enough to trim a hoof but not so sharp as to cut too deeply into the sole, not straight-razor sharp, which is difficult to control if you’re frenzied or bloody. It’s quite an art how farriers sharpen their tools — not too sharp, not too dull — so you can do the job without injuring the horse or yourself.”

  “An eccentric choice that on the surface seems illogical.” Benton walks behind the long,
deep stone tub to study the mural. “But I didn’t see any regular knives in there and maybe that’s why he grabbed what he did and it could be related to the drugs he’s on. If he’s watched horses being taken care of and shod and seen farriers get tired and sweaty and the horses not stay still the same way people don’t stay still if you’re cutting their throats, he might have been present when someone cut himself or he might have watched the knives being sharpened.”

  He looks at the hoof knife clamped in a vise on the workbench in the painting.

  “And in his increasingly disordered thinking it means something to him.” Benton works his way around the edges of the killer’s mind. “He envisions himself a horse, just another one of Lombardi’s possessions he controlled and kept in a stall and treated with disrespect and indifference, and maybe this morning was reprimanded, verbally whipped. There could be symbolism like with the vapor rub, like the tools under rocks. Power. I win, you lose. It’s all about that but also at this stage a by-product of his delusions.”

  “What I can say with some degree of confidence,” I reply, “is whoever did this didn’t wander into the barn randomly and happen to see an unusual tool with a long wooden grip and stubby blade that’s hooked on the end and figure it would work just fine for killing people.”

  “He knows horses, this barn and this place,” Benton states. “And he’s become so preoccupied with his delusions they’re completely disrupting his life.”

  “Why wouldn’t the staff want to say who it is? For fear he’d find them and hurt them if he’s not caught first?”

  “Maybe the opposite. They might not fear him because he doesn’t fear them. Especially if he was in the barn with them earlier and was friendly and has been here before.”

  “Now they’re accessories to murder after the fact, participants by concealment.”

  “If it can be proven, yes.”

  “It’s probably not a new way of life for them,” I decide as I photograph Lombardi and the farrier with his knife. And then the bicycle bell rings again, another message from Lucy landing in Benton’s phone.

  “He has three children with the second wife,” he informs me. “A son who is a financial planner in Tel Aviv and two daughters who are in school in Paris and London.”

  “Sounds like a lovely family,” I reply as I decide the photograph of the young man and the elephant needs to go to Lucy because I have a feeling about him, not a good one.

  Then Benton and I leave the house as we found it and the night seems more raw and cold. The heavy pines we walk through seem more sodden than they were before and their wet branches grab at us as the wind shoves and shakes them. In the parking lot we find more unmarked cars and light fills the shades in every window on both floors of the office building where the dead are gone, by now autopsied and safely in my coolers.

  It seems later than it is and the powerful rumble of Benton’s turbo Porsche seems louder than I remember as we follow the driveway, passing the huge red barn, stopping at the barricades where a black FBI van with dark-tinted windows is parked. A surveillance vehicle, and I know where there’s one there will be others, monitoring Concord and the roads leading in and out of it and intersections along any route the target might take. I’d find it reassuring if they were looking for the right target but they’re not.

  Benton shifts the Porsche into neutral and pulls up the brake. He opens his window and waits, knowing exactly how the FBI thinks and the importance of doing nothing suddenly or nervously that might be misinterpreted. Maybe the agents inside the van are aware of his car and that it’s been parked on the property for a while but Benton is of no concern to them as they’ve held their post at the entrance of the driveway, out of sight inside their van with all of its equipment. I imagine them tracking every car, truck, or motorcycle that passes on the street, communicating with other agents in vehicles and on foot, waiting to use diversions or decoys to mobilize into what Benton calls a floating box that invisibly surrounds whoever they’re after.

  Benton touches a button in the center console and my window hums down, and I look out into the foggy night, watching an agent materialize in black tactical clothes, his carbine across his waist, his index finger ready above the trigger guard. If he didn’t know whose car this is, he will have run the tag while we’ve been sitting here. He’s not aggressive but he’s not relaxed.

  His unsmiling face is in my open window, young, with a buzz cut, nice-looking and lean like all of them, what Lucy calls Stepford Cops, automatons identically programmed and physically crafted, and she would know since she used to be one of them. Federal agents whose polish, power, and camera-ready presence make America look great, she says.

  It’s all too easy to hero-worship and emulate and my niece couldn’t have been more enamored when she started out with them as an intern while still in college. There’s nothing more impressive and sexier than the FBI, she’ll tell you now, until you run head-on into their lack of practical experience and absence of checks and balances. Until you are confronted by an Ed Granby, who answers to Washington, I think, and I’m no friendlier than the agent when I inform him who I am and that I’m clearing the scene.

  I don’t offer my credentials with its shield. I’ll make him ask and he looks past me at Benton, who says nothing and ignores him, and all of it has the intended effect. Uncertainty twitches on the agent’s face as he recognizes an impatient authority that has no fear of him and then something else is there. The agent smiles and I sense his aggression just before he puts Benton in his place.

  “How you doing tonight, Mr. Wesley?” He rests an arm along the length of the carbine strapped around his shoulder, crouching down lower. “Nobody said you were still here but I figured you wouldn’t just leave a car like this and catch a ride with someone.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Benton says with complete indifference to what the agent is implying.

  His expensive sports car was noticed and maybe it was a given that we were still on the grounds and looking around but we’re inconsequential. We aren’t part of the huge machinery and nobody cares. We aren’t a threat and maybe even Granby doesn’t think we are and then a second agent appears from around the side of the van I can’t see from where I am, a pretty woman in fatigues with her hair in a ponytail pulled through the back of her baseball cap. She moves close to her colleague and smiles at me.

  “How’s everybody doing?” she says as if it’s a fine evening.

  “The weapon you’re looking for may have come from the big barn.” I look back in the direction of it but from here it’s out of sight around a bend in the driveway. “A knife used on horse hooves, a long wooden handle with a very sharp blade that’s hooked at the end.”

  “The murder weapon might be in the barn?” The male agent doesn’t take his eyes off us.

  “One would think he didn’t run into the barn after killing three people and return the knife.” I say it blandly. “But I would expect you’d find other hoof knives and it’s quite possible he was in there earlier. That’s the important point. You might want to pass that on to your evidence response team.”

  “What are you basing this on?” the female agent asks, more curious than concerned.

  “The injuries to the victims’ necks are consistent with the knife I described and unless he brought one with him to the scene he got it from the property. I don’t know what else could have caused the incisions I saw.”

  “You’re sure it’s a certain type of knife?” she asks as if it matters to her and I can tell it doesn’t.

  “I am.”

  “So we shouldn’t be looking for a variety of knives like kitchen knives.”

  “It would be a waste of your time and unnecessarily burden the labs.”

  “I’ll make sure we take a look.” The male agent removes his hand from the window frame and backs away from the car. “You folks have a nice Christmas.”

  The two of them move sawhorses to the side and we drive through, in first gear, then second, and Benton g
uns the powerful engine before shifting into third, his way of saying fuck you. It’s as close as he can get to saying it and it occurs to me that Granby may have said it first. He may be saying it to us right now.

  As I reach Lucy on my cell phone I’m already uneasy about what Ed Granby may have put into place. I feel a spike of paranoia and my thoughts begin to race.

  It’s more than possible if not a certainty he knows we’ve been here unauthorized for the past hour and he did nothing about it because he’s secretive and calculating. He’s a consummate politician and wouldn’t want to give the appearance that he escorted the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts from the scene of a triple homicide that’s all over the news.

  He would look dirty and as if he’s hiding something. He would look exactly like what he is. And while he wouldn’t have hesitated to have Benton escorted off the grounds, Granby isn’t stupid. He’d be sneakier than that with me. He’d hold off having his evidence response team or any other agents swarm Double S until Benton and I were gone and suddenly my electronic communications don’t seem safe. Nothing does.

  “We’re just leaving and I’ll make this succinct.” It’s my way of letting Lucy know I intend to be careful about what I say.

  “Sure,” she answers.

  “I don’t know when we’ll be home and I’m worried about Sock.” She knows I’m getting to something else because Janet picked up my dog around five when our housekeeper Rosa left and Lucy’s already assured me of that.

  “He’s fine and by the way Rosa said if you’re not going to put up a tree, she will. That’s assuming Bryce doesn’t barge in and do it first.”

  “I’m going to take care of it,” I reply.

  “And Sock can’t go home tonight.”

  What she’s saying is I can’t and Benton shouldn’t either. The killer has been on our property before and we can’t predict how deranged he is but he’s deranged enough. Right now Sock is probably napping at Lucy’s house, which isn’t far from here, and I wish there were time to drop by. I wish life were settled and safe enough to have a nice late supper with my family and my dog.