“It’s not my job to take sides or have an opinion unless it’s about why someone has died.”
“That’s not my wife,” he says, and Peggy Stanton’s identity hasn’t yet been released. “When they played the TV footage in court, I knew it wasn’t her. I knew it instantly, and I wanted to tell you myself in the event there’s been a question.”
I wonder if Toby leaked the identity to Jill Donoghue and if she knows her client is here.
“As grim as the condition of the body seemed to be, I could tell without hesitation it’s not Millie.” Lott removes the cap from a bottle of water. “She couldn’t possibly look like that, and if you’ve been through her medical records or been given details of her physical description, you’ll realize what I’m saying is correct.”
I have little doubt he knows I’ve been through those records and am aware that Mildred Lott is or was almost six feet tall. Peggy Stanton, whose murder Channing Lott shouldn’t know about unless he had something to do with it or his lawyer’s been told, was barely five-foot-three. When she was visible on TV as I was getting her body into the Stokes basket, it was obvious she wasn’t tall. I know from examining her that her hair was white, not dyed blond, and that she had no scars from recent cosmetic surgeries, an abdominoplasty, a rhytidectomy.
“It was the first thing all of us thought when it hit the news.” Al Galbraith reaches for his coffee, and he seems disquieted, as if the subject is a distasteful one. “No matter the condition, someone doesn’t get shorter,” he says awkwardly, as if he feels compelled to say something about his boss’s missing wife.
“Postmortem changes, changes after death, don’t make someone shorter,” I agree.
“An imposing woman,” Galbraith says, and it flickers in my mind he didn’t like her. “I think anybody who met Mrs. Lott was struck by how statuesque she was.”
“Exactly,” Shelly Duke agrees, and it occurs to me that they don’t want to be here. “A stunning, overwhelming woman. She filled a room, just dominated it when she walked in, and I mean it in the best way,” she adds, with sadness that is unconvincing.
Lott has made them come. They are as unsettled as one might expect them to be inside a forensic facility, sitting down with me and discussing someone I sense they had ambivalence about. I wonder if Jill Donoghue has masterminded this unscheduled meeting, but I can’t imagine a motive. She has boldly stated that there will be no double jeopardy in this case, that her client won’t be tried again for the same charge or anything similar.
This nightmare is over but not the worst one, Donoghue has been telling the media since the acquittal was announced this morning. Now Channing Lott gets to deal with his own victimization, because he’s the real victim here, she’s been saying, jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, as if the tragic loss of his wife wasn’t horrific enough.
“Dr. Scarpetta, might I ask you a question?” He is completely focused on me, sitting very straight and turned in a way that tells me why his two chief executive officers are with him.
He gives them his back and doesn’t look to either one for anything. They are witnesses, not trusted friends. Lott didn’t achieve what he has in life by being naïve or stupid. Even as I worry about his intentions, he’s ensuring I won’t be the one causing trouble.
“I can’t promise I’ll be able to answer, but go ahead.” I recall what the Gloucester detectives Lorey and Kefe said when they met with me after Mildred Lott vanished.
“You know the details, I assume. Millie was home alone in our Gloucester place on March eleventh, a Sunday,” Lott says, as if he’s making an opening statement.
A vain woman who courted the rich and famous and had visited the White House more than once and had even met the Queen, the detectives described to me, and when I asked if they knew of anyone who might have wanted something bad to happen to Mildred Lott, they said to get out the phone book and point.
Point to any page, they said. Could be anyone she’d ever stepped on, overworked, or underpaid, or had treated like the help, they claimed, and I remember thinking at the time how common it is that victims aren’t likable. No one deserves to be abducted, raped, murdered, robbed, or maimed, but that doesn’t mean the person didn’t deserve something.
“She’d just relocated us back to Gloucester. We keep the house closed during the bleakest months of winter,” Lott repeats what he obviously has said many times before. “And I’d spoken to her at what was morning for me and about nine p.m. for her, and of course she was very upset. I was away on business in Asia and in fact had decided to cut short my trip because of the dog. Millie was a wreck.”
“She may not know about Jasmine,” Shelly Duke prompts him. “Their dog,” she says to me.
“Our shar-pei vanished on March eighth,” Lott explains. “The landscapers left the gate open again. It had happened before and Jasmine got out. Last time she was found frantic and lost, the police spotted her. The local police know her and an officer picked her up and brought her back to us. Then we weren’t so fortunate, it seemed at first. Police suspected someone stole her, a rare purebred, a miniature and not inexpensive, and Millie was beside herself. There aren’t words to describe how upset she was.” Channing Lott blinks back tears.
“Your dog vanished three days before your wife did,” I say to him.
“Yes.” He clears his throat.
“Did Jasmine ever show up?”
“Two days after Millie disappeared, Jasmine was found wandering several miles north of our house, close to the Annisquam River,” he says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s cat. “In an off-leash walking area with a lot of brush and boulders above Wheeler Street. Some people out with their dog found her.”
“Do you think she’d been loose the entire time she was missing?” I ask.
“Couldn’t have been, not for the better part of a week in the rainy raw weather, down in the low forties at night, without food or water. She was in too good of shape to have been out that entire time. I think whoever took her changed his mind. Jasmine can be aggressive, unpredictable, isn’t fond of strangers.”
Someone who has no regard for human life but wouldn’t harm an animal.
“The Ransom of Red Chief.” Channing Lott’s laughter is hollow, and what is significant to me is the chronology.
Most likely Peggy Stanton’s cat got out or was put out after her owner had disappeared and possibly already was dead, yet Mildred Lott’s dog vanished before any crime had occurred.
“It’s been suggested that my wife might have drowned accidentally.” He gets around to asking my opinion about that, and I can’t possibly have an answer. “Or maybe took her own life.”
He goes on to describe the theories, which have been endless and far-fetched, some of them recited by Donoghue in court. Mildred Lott was drunk or on drugs and wandered outside and fell into the ocean or deliberately went into the frigid water to drown herself. She was having an affair and ran off with whoever it was because she feared her husband’s wrath. She’d been stashing millions of dollars in offshore accounts and is now living under an assumed identity in the Caribbean, on the Mediterranean, in the South of France, in Marrakech. Alleged sightings of her have been all over the Internet.
“I’m interested in your opinion.” He presses me for one. “A person drowns either accidentally or is murdered or commits suicide? Wouldn’t the body turn up eventually?”
“Bodies in water aren’t always found,” I reply. “People lost at sea, people who go overboard from ships or get pulled under or swept away by strong currents, for example. Depending on whether the body gets hung up on something—”
“Eventually there would be absolutely nothing left?”
“Whatever is left has to be found, and it isn’t always.”
“But if my wife fell into the ocean, perhaps stumbled over rocks or fell off our dock, wouldn’t you expect her to show up?” He persists bravely and not easily.
His eyes are bright with sorrow that seems real.
&nbs
p; “In a case like that, generally, yes,” I answer.
“Al, if you would?” Lott says, without looking at him.
Al Galbraith opens his briefcase and withdraws a manila envelope he pushes across the table to me, and I don’t open it. I don’t touch it. I won’t until I know exactly what it is and whether it is something I should see.
“A copy of the security camera recording,” Lott explains. “The same thing the Gloucester detectives, the FBI, the lawyers have. What the jury saw. Twenty-six seconds. Not much but it’s the last images of her, the last thing Millie did before she vanished in thin air. She’s opening a back door of our house at exactly thirteen minutes before midnight on that Sunday, March eleventh. She’s dressed for bed, and there’s no damn reason for her to go out into the backyard at that hour. Certainly she wasn’t letting Jasmine out. Jasmine was still missing. It was cold, quite overcast and windy, and Millie walked out of the house not at all dressed for the weather and seemed to be a bit panicked.”
At this point, he turns to look at his colleagues.
“It’s still not the right choice of words. A word I’ve struggled with, trying to precisely describe the look on her face, her body language.” He seems sincerely at a loss and genuinely pained. “How would you describe it?” he asks his chief executives. “Urgent, distressed, alarmed?”
“I don’t get that when I watch it,” Galbraith says, as if he’s said it before.
It sounds flat. It sounds rehearsed.
“Only that she appears to have a purpose,” Lott’s chief of operations says. “She emerges from the house as if she has a reason, is directed. I wouldn’t think of the word panic when I look at the video, but it’s very quick and not all that clear, except she’s saying something to someone.”
“I’d describe the look as urgent, yes.” Shelly Duke nods. “But not upset and definitely not panicked.” She directs this to Lott. “I don’t think she looks frightened the way someone might if they’re worried a bad person is lurking around or trying to break in.”
“If she’d been frightened and worried someone was trying to break in,” Lott replies, and I detect annoyance and impatience beneath his charm, “she wouldn’t have turned off the alarm and gone out into the dark at that hour. Not when she was there alone.”
He’s the type to get frustrated with people not as smart and determined as he, and that would be almost everyone.
“Millie was very security-conscious,” Lott says to me. “She absolutely didn’t go out of the house that night because she heard a noise, was scared of someone or something. Most assuredly not. That was the last thing she would have done. When she was scared, she called the police. She certainly didn’t hesitate to call nine-one-one. I’m sure you’ve talked to the Gloucester police and are aware they were quite familiar with her and our property. In fact, several officers had been to the house just days before when Jasmine disappeared.”
I tell Channing Lott I’m very sorry but I have people waiting for me. I’ll be happy to review the security footage, although it’s unlikely I’ll have anything to add that hasn’t already been observed by others who have viewed it. I push back my chair because I feel he’s making a case for his innocence and I don’t intend to be manipulated.
“It just nags at me.” He makes no move to leave. “Who was it? Who could she have been talking to? You see the prevailing theory, and one that the prosecution continued to beat like a drum, is she was talking to me. She’s come out into the yard and is saying something to me.”
“A theory based on what?” I ask him, and I probably shouldn’t be asking him anything further. “Is there audio on the security video?”
“There isn’t, and you can see her only from the side. You can’t really make out how her lips are moving, not clearly. So to more precisely answer you, Dr. Scarpetta, the theory, like all of the theories about me, is based on nothing but the prosecution’s, the government’s, determination to win their case.”
He looks angry. He looks wronged, and it’s not lost on me he won’t refer to Dan Steward by name.
“I’m sure you saw all over the news that the prosecution suggested I wasn’t really traveling,” he says. “That my being in Tokyo the night Millie disappeared was a ruse somehow, that I actually was back here and in collusion with whoever I supposedly hired to murder her. The point the prosecution made relentlessly is my wife would never have left the house late at night unless the person she heard was someone she completely trusted.”
“Exactly right, she wouldn’t if she didn’t know who it was,” Shelly Duke agrees.
“Yes, that we all knew about Mrs. Lott,” Al Galbraith says. “Considering the position she had in life, she was keenly aware of the risks. I don’t want to use the word paranoid.”
“Kidnapping for ransom,” Lott says to me. “Which was her first thought about what happened to our dog.”
“That someone grabbed Jasmine and soon enough would demand ransom,” Shelly Duke, his chief financial officer, says. “Kidnapping is a billion-dollar industry, and it’s a depressing reality that certain individuals, particularly those who travel internationally, should have appropriate insurance coverage. Millie asked me on a number of occasions if one could get the same insurance for Jasmine.”
“She worried someone might pull a boat up to our dock in the middle of the night.” Lott has a way of talking over people without interrupting them. “After those Somali pirates abducted that British couple from their yacht? Well, that was upsetting enough to Millie, and then when bandits murdered a tourist and kidnapped his wife from that luxury resort in Kenya, she became quite concerned. Obsessively concerned. Our property is fenced in and gated, but she worried about vulnerability from the deep-water dock, was sufficiently worried to ask me to get rid of it, which I certainly didn’t want to do, as on occasion I moor the Cipriano there.”
“Your yacht?” I ask, because I can’t help it.
If he in fact is charged with some other crime, I’ve just ensured I will be a witness, possibly for the defense again.
“Was your yacht docked there the night she vanished?” I then ask, because I don’t care about Jill Donoghue.
I care about the truth.
“It wasn’t,” he answers. “It was spending the winter in Saint-Tropez. I usually don’t have it brought back to this area until May.”
I open the door adjoining my office to Bryce’s and give him the envelope, telling him to e-mail copies of the security video to Lucy and me. I let him know that he can show our guests out, and Channing Lott gives me a card, engraved on creamy paper of heavy stock. He’s written his private telephone numbers on it.
“Millie wouldn’t go with anyone, even if a gun was pointed at her head.” He pauses in the corridor, his eyes intensely locked on mine. “If someone tried to grab her in our backyard, she would have fought like hell. He’d have to shoot her on the spot right then and there.”
thirty-five
TOXICOLOGY IN PEGGY STANTON’S CASE IS LIKE SEARCHING for a needle in a haystack when the needle may not be a needle and the hay may not be hay. I can’t grab at straws and wildly guess. I can’t demand every special drug screen imaginable without running out of samples and Phillis Jobe running out of patience.
“An ordeal, I admit,” I say to my chief toxicologist over the phone. “I’m asking a lot and offering very little, I know.”
Frozen sections of liver, kidney, and brain are in poor condition that will only worsen and be consumed with each test we run. I don’t have urine or vitreous fluid. I don’t have a single tube of blood.
“It’s like pulling a sword from a stone, but I believe it can be done.” I’m at my desk inside my office, where the doors are shut as I explore possibilities with confidence I didn’t feel before. “I believe we’ve got a chance if we try a very practical approach.”
New insights about Mildred Lott combined with what I know about Peggy Stanton lead in a more obvious direction, which I suspect strongly is the same directio
n for each victim, whether it is two or three or, God forbid, more. If what Benton has projected is true and the killer is murdering the same woman every time, perhaps his mother or some other powerful female figure, then he likely picks the same type of woman, at least symbolically, and chooses the same way of overpowering her.
“No possible injection sites you found when you posted her?” Phillis gets to that.
“None we could see,” I reply. “Her skin wasn’t in great condition, but we went over her very carefully with injection sites in mind, with any injury in mind. What seems probable if not evident at this point is she was last home on the early Friday evening of April twenty-seventh, fed her cat, unset and reset her alarm system at about six p.m., when she headed out with her pocketbook and keys. Most likely she drove off in her Mercedes and had an encounter that ended in a place where she was held hostage and killed. Possibly the same place where her body was frozen or kept in cold storage until she was weighted down and dumped in the bay as recently as yesterday or the night before.”
“If the same person killed Mildred Lott, I wonder why her body’s not been found,” Phillis says.
“Not found yet.” I know what Benton’s opinion is, that the killer keeps the bodies because he doesn’t want to give them up. “Part of the fantasy may be the aftermath, not letting them go, continuing some bizarre relationship he has with them,” I explain.
“Necrophilia?”
“No evidence with Peggy Stanton, but I can’t absolutely rule it out. Although I doubt it, to be honest. But if Mildred Lott was his first victim, his attachment to whatever she symbolized, his fantasy, in her case likely is stronger. She may be more personal to him, but that doesn’t mean his interest is overtly sexual. Benton thinks it’s about degrading, about power, about destruction.”
“She disappeared about six weeks before this one did.” Before Peggy Stanton did, Phillis means. “Any other missing women we know of who might be even earlier?”
“There are always missing people. But no similar case comes to mind. If Mildred Lott was his first, he likely has stronger feelings and fantasies about her,” I repeat emphatically, because I believe she is the key. “She might represent something different to him, a bigger prize.”
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