Dr. Shubert was skilled in reconstructing dino skeletons, Investigator Glenn said to me, and he was intimating that anyone who knows how to make molds and anatomically exact casts of bones in a lab might be capable of other types of fabrications, including a severed ear.
“The pipeline’s really important to global oil prices,” Marino continues, spinning his web, a web he intends to ensnare Luke Zenner in.
“I’m sure it is,” I reply.
“A multitrillion-dollar business venture.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me.”
“So how do you know for a fact there’s no link?” He glances over at me as he drives.
“Please explain how Guenter Zenner’s trading in oil among many other commodities, I can only imagine, would have something to do with Emma Shubert disappearing and my getting the e-mail?” I put it bluntly.
“Maybe she disappeared because she wanted to. Maybe she’s in collusion with people who have big money. The picture of the ear, the video are sent to you so we assume she’s dead.”
“You’re basing this on nothing.”
“No matter what, you’ll stick up for him,” Marino says. “That’s what worries Lucy and me.”
“Did the two of you stay up all night trying to force these pieces to fit into some puzzle you’ve devised? You really do want me to get rid of him that badly?”
“All I’m asking is you try to be objective, Doc,” Marino says. “As hard as that is in this situation.”
“I always do my best to be objective,” I reply calmly. “I recommend the same to you, to everyone.”
“I know how close you were to Anna, and I really liked her, too. Back in our Richmond days she was one of the few people I was glad as hell you trusted and spent time with.”
As if Marino picks my friends for me.
“But her family’s got a shady past, and I hate to remind you of that fact,” he adds.
“The Zenner family home was occupied by Nazis during the war.” I know exactly what he’s getting at. “That doesn’t make Anna or her family, including Luke, shady.”
“Well, the blond hair, the blue eyes. He sure as hell fits the part.”
“Don’t say things like that, please.”
“When you look the other way you’re just as guilty as the sons of bitches that do it,” he says. “Nazis lived in the Zenners’ ritzy castle while thousands of people were being tortured and murdered right down the road, and Anna’s family didn’t do shit.”
“What should they have done?”
“I don’t know,” Marino says.
“A mother, a father, three young daughters, and a son?”
“I don’t know. But they should have done something.”
“Should have done what? It’s a miracle they weren’t murdered, too.”
“Maybe I’d rather be murdered than go along with it.”
“Being held hostage in your own home by soldiers who are raping your daughters, and God only knows what they did to the little boy, doesn’t exactly mean you’re going along with it.” I remember Anna telling me her terrible truths, the wind gusting fiercely and flinging dead branches and brittle brown vines across her backyard as I sat in a carved rocker and felt fear pressing me from all sides.
I could barely breathe as she told me about the schloss that had been in the family for centuries, near Linz, on the Danube River. Day in and out, clouds of death from the crematorium stained the horizon above the town of Mauthausen, where there was a deep crater in the earth, a granite quarry worked by thousands of prisoners. Jews, Spanish Republicans, Russians, homosexuals.
“You don’t know where Guenter Zenner got all his money,” I hear Marino say, as I look out at a bright morning and am dark inside, reminded of nights in Richmond at Anna’s house during one of the most harrowing periods of my life. “Fact is, Guenter was already rich before he went into banking. Him and Anna inherited a shitload of money from their father, who had Nazis living in the family castle. The Zenners got rich off Jewish money and granite quarries, one of them a concentration camp so close they could see the smoke rising from the ovens.”
“These are terrible accusations,” I say to him, as I stare out my window.
“What’s terrible is what Luke reminds you of,” Marino says. “A time you don’t need to be dwelling on now that things are good. Why the hell do you want a reminder of those old days when everything was fucked up and you were blaming yourself for Benton being dead or at least thinking he was, blaming yourself for everything, including Lucy? She doesn’t want it, either. She doesn’t want you getting all hung up again about her and how it’s somehow your fault.”
“I wasn’t thinking about such things,” I reply, but now I will, since he’s managed to remind me.
Lucy’s early days at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility in Quantico have not been foremost on my mind for a very long time, but he has conjured up the Lucy from back then and the reminder isn’t a happy one. A troubled teenager whose computer skills were savant-esque, she almost single-handedly created the FBI’s Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, CAIN, while falling in love with a psychopath who nearly destroyed all of us.
I got her that FBI internship, I remember saying bitterly to Anna as we sat in her living room close to the fire with the lights out because I’ve always found it easier to talk in the dark. I did. Me, her influential, powerful aunt.
Didn’t quite lead to what you intended, did it?
Carrie used her. . . .
Made Lucy gay?
You don’t make people gay, I said, and Anna the psychiatrist abruptly got up, the firelight moving on her proud fine face, and she walked away, as if she had another appointment.
“I know you don’t want to hear it.” Marino keeps talking. “But I’m going to point out that you hired Luke in early July and this dinosaur lady disappeared barely six weeks later from the very area where they’re extracting the oil his father’s invested in.”
The entire region of northwest Canada is dependent on natural gas and oil production, he says, and if the completion of that pipeline gets blocked, Luke’s father probably stands to lose a fortune—a fortune that would be inherited by Luke.
“All of it,” Marino says. “He’s the only one left. And we know the e-mail with the cut-off ear and maybe Emma Shubert in the jetboat was sent to you from Boston, from Logan. Where the hell was Luke yesterday at six-thirty p.m.?”
“How would Emma Shubert’s disappearance relate to the pipeline being further delayed or blocked?” I ask him. “Explain how what you’re suggesting makes sense at all or is anything more than wild theorizing. Because in my mind if it turns out that she’s been murdered and it’s connected to the pipeline, that will only outrage the detractors, the environmentalists more. It certainly can’t improve public sentiment if the brutal death of a paleontologist is connected with it.”
“Maybe that’s the point,” he says. “Like those investors who bet against the housing market and made a killing because it collapsed.”
“Good God, Marino.”
He is quiet for a moment.
“Look. I realize I’ve not always made the best choices in staff.” I’ll give him that, because it’s beyond dispute, and I resist pointing out there are those who would say that my hiring him is a prime example. “I don’t always have the best judgment about people closest to me.” Including Pete Marino, but I will never say it to him.
When we first met more than two decades ago he was a homicide detective in Richmond, a recent transplant from NYPD to the former Capital of the Confederacy, where I had been installed as Virginia’s new chief medical examiner, the first woman ever appointed to that position. Marino went out of his way to be a bigoted ass at the onset of our working lives together, and there have been betrayals since. But I keep him and would choose no one over him because I’m loyal and I care and he’s just as good as he is bad. We’re an unlikely pair and probably always will be.
“I couldn’t be mo
re aware that whoever I choose impacts everyone,” I add in the same calm voice, as I do my best to be patient with his insecurities and fears and to remind myself I’m far from perfect. “But please don’t assume that if I know someone personally it somehow obviates any possibility of him being a good employee or even a civilized human being.”
“That was something when the Bruins won the Stanley Cup.” It’s Marino’s way of ending a conversation that no longer furthers his agenda. “Wonder if it will happen again in my lifetime.”
The TD Garden, or the Garden, as the locals refer to the arena, looms ahead of us on the left, and on Commercial Street, the Coast Guard base is only minutes away.
“I’ve seen a couple of them around here out with their wives, walking their dogs. Really nice guys, not snooty or nothing,” Marino says, and up ahead at the intersection a Boston cop is directing traffic.
“I think there’s a funeral.” I notice black hearses and orange traffic cones across from the ice-skating rink.
“Okay. We’ll hang a right here and cut through on Hanover.” He begins to do it as he says it. “I tweeted a couple of them, but they’re not going to answer when you’re anonymous and can’t even use your own photo for your avatar.”
“They might not do it, anyway, I’m sorry to tell you.”
“Yeah, I guess when you got fifty thousand people following you. I only got one hundred and twenty-two,” he says.
“That’s quite a lot of friends to have.”
“Hell, I don’t got a clue who they are,” he says. “They think I’m Jeff Bridges or whatever. You know, the movie. Tons of bowlers love that movie. Sort of a cult thing.”
“So you’re following strangers and they’re following you.”
“Yeah, I know how it sounds, and you’re right. No question I’d have a lot more followers and more people would tweet me back if I could be myself instead of in disguise,” he says.
“Why is it so important to you?” I look at him as he drives slowly past the Italian restaurants and bars of the North End, where the sidewalks are busy as this hour but very little is open except coffee and pastry shops.
“You know, Doc? You get to a point when you want to see where you fit in, that’s all,” he says. “Like the tree falling in the forest.”
His big face is pensive, and in the sun shining hotly through the windshield I can see the brown spots on the tops of his muscular tan hands and the fine lines in his weathered cheeks and the heavy folds around his mouth and that his close-shaven beard is white like sand. I remember when he still had hair to comb over, when he was a star detective and was always showing up at dinnertime in his pickup truck. We’ve been together since it all began.
“Explain the tree and the forest,” I say to him.
“If it fell, would there be anybody to hear it?” he ponders, as we bump over pavers along a side street as narrow as an alleyway.
At the end of it I can see Battery Wharf and the inner harbor, and on the other side of it, the distant brick buildings of East Boston.
“I believe the question is, if there were nobody to hear it, would it make a sound?” I tell him. “You always manage to make a lot of noise, Marino, and all of us hear it. I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”
seven
THE WIND GUSTS SHARPLY OUT OF THE NORTHEAST, pushing water in swells, and where the harbor is shallow it is green, and farther out a dusky blue. From my seat to the left of the pilot coxswain, who is chiseled and young, with ink-black hair, I watch seagulls lift and dive around the pier while Marino continues to be ridiculous.
He is combative and loud, as if it makes any sense to declare war on a five-point harness because its sub-strap and large rotary buckle of necessity must lodge snugly between one’s legs. The life vest he has on makes him look bigger than his more than six-foot frame, and he seems to fill half the cabin as he resists the assistance of a boatswain I know only as Kletty, having met this crew for the first time but a few moments ago.
“I can do it myself,” Marino says rudely, and it isn’t true that he can do it himself.
He’s been fussing with the straps, trying to defeat the buckle as if it is a Chinese puzzle, making a lot of impatient clicking and snapping noises as he turns the rotary and attempts to force metal links into the wrong slots, and I can’t help but wonder what Bryce said, exactly, when he called the Coast Guard a little while ago.
What persuasion of his resulted in the vessel we’re on?
Typically a 900-horsepower 33-foot Defender with shock-mitigating seats that restrain us like fighter pilots isn’t necessary for what we do. One doesn’t need maneuverability or high rates of speed when there are no arrests or rescues, and then I recall snippets of what my chief of staff was describing over the phone, painting a morbid scenario about putrid human remains and hosing off the deck and double pouching. Better to be on a bigger boat with an enclosed cabin so we can rocket back to shore with our antisocial cargo, I suppose.
“It’s tricky,” says the boatswain named Kletty, as he finishes strapping Marino into the seat behind me.
“Don’t need it.”
“You do, sir.”
“Sure as hell don’t.”
“Sorry, but we can’t go anywhere if everyone’s not strapped in.”
Then the boatswain checks my harness, which is fastened correctly, the sub-strap and rotary buckle wedged where they belong.
“Looks like you’ve done this before,” he says to me, and I sense he might be flirting, or maybe he simply is relieved that I’m not going to give him an argument about Homeland Security protocols.
“I’m all set,” I reply, and he takes a seat next to the redheaded machinist mate, whose name I think is Sullivan, the three members of the crew friendly enough and quite compelling in navy blue fatigues and caps and blaze-orange life vests.
When so many young men I come across are very nice to look at, it reminds me I’m getting old or acting as if I’m getting old or feeling like a de facto mother, and I try to resist staring at the pilot, who looks like an Armani model. He notices me looking and flashes a smile as if we are on a leisurely cruise that involves nothing awful or dead.
“Sector one-one-niner-oh-seven under way. GAR score one-two,” he radios the watch standard command center that the Green-Amber-Red risk assessment for this mission is at the moment low.
Visibility is good, the water relatively calm, the three-member team on board well qualified to transport a forensic radiologic pathologist and her grumpy lead investigator to a location amid islands and hazardous shoals in the south channel, where several hours ago a dead body and an almost extinct species of sea turtle were discovered intertwined in tangles of rope weighted down possibly by a conch pot.
“Coming up!”
A push of the throttle, and within minutes we are going thirty-six knots and climbing. The high-performance boat slices through the water, blue lights strobing, frothy white wake curling on either side of the bow, where a weapons post is lonely for its M240. Long guns and machine guns weren’t part of the checklist, as interdictions and violent confrontations aren’t anticipated. Other than the .40-caliber Sigs the crew members have strapped to their sides, there are no firearms on board that I’m aware of, unless Marino is packing a pistol in an ankle holster.
I glance at the cuffs of his khaki cargo pants, at his big booted feet, and see no hint of a weapon as he continues to complain, staring down at the hockey puck–looking buckle wedged snugly in his crotch.
“Leave it alone.” I raise my voice above the loud rumble of outboard engines, turned in my seat so I can talk to him.
“But why does this thing have to be right here?” He places his hand protectively between the buckle and his “privates,” as he calls them.
“The straps have to be routed so they restrain the body’s hard points.” I sound like a stuffy scientist making a sophomoric pun and am conscious of the handsome pilot, who was introduced as Giorgio Labella, and I can’t
forget a name when it belongs to someone who looks like that. I feel his large, dark eyes glancing at me as I talk. I feel them on the back of my neck as if a warm tongue has touched me there.
Technically, I’ve never cheated on my husband, Benton Wesley, to whom I’ve been devoted for the better part of twenty years. It doesn’t count that I cheated with him when he was married to someone else, because that’s different from cheating on him. It doesn’t count that I was briefly involved with an ATF agent assigned to Interpol in France when Benton was in a federal witness protection program and presumed dead.
Any involvements before Benton or after I believed he was no longer alive are irrelevant, and I rarely think of those individuals, including a few I will never make confessions about, as the consequences would be unnecessarily damaging to all involved. I behave myself, but it doesn’t mean I’m not interested. Being faithful to my commitments doesn’t mean thoughts don’t cross my mind or that I’m foolish enough to believe I’m not capable. As a somewhat isolated professional woman in a mostly male world, I’ve never lacked opportunities to cheat, even now that I’m not in my thirties anymore and could be someone’s de facto mother.
To the young men I encounter in the line of duty I’m ripe fruit and cheese served on a formidable platter, I suppose. A cluster of red grapes and figs with a soft Taleggio on a plate featuring a distinguished coat of arms, perhaps, or a trophy, as Benton suggested. I am a chief. I am a director. I have a special reservist rank of colonel in the Air Force and am important to the Pentagon. Power is the forbidden appetizer the Labellas want to sample, if I’m honest with myself, and Benton says I’m not. A trophy, I think. A not-so-young trophy, attractive to attractive people because of who and what I am.
It isn’t really about the way I look or my personality, although I’m diplomatic, even charming when needed, and not as shopworn as I probably deserve to be, blond and strong-featured, my Italian bones a sturdy scaffolding that continues to hold me up through decades of hard times and near misses. I don’t deserve to be slender and toned, and I often joke that a life spent exposed to formalin in windowless rooms and walk-in coolers has preserved me well.
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