Flesh and Blood: A Scarpetta Novel (Scarpetta Novels Book 22)

by Patricia Cornwell

  Do not release, I reply as I overhear what Marino is asking Mary Sapp. I need to take a look at him.

  Marino is reassuring the Realtor that she is safe as long as she stays inside the house. But she doesn’t sound as if she’s worried about being safe. She doesn’t sound afraid. In fact she sounds something else. Dramatic, overly charming and helpful. It occurs to me that she might be enjoying herself.

  No funeral home picked out anyway. Another message from Bryce appears in a gray balloon.

  Then don’t ask me if he should be released yet, I think but I’m not going to put that in writing.

  I talked to the wife. She’s in a fugue state, doesn’t have a clue what to do no matter what I tell her, Bryce writes and he shouldn’t editorialize.

  Will let you know when I’m headed in. I end our dialogue.

  “ . . . I probably wouldn’t have thought much about it except for what’s all over the news.” Mary Sapp’s voice fills the car, a voice that is too cheerful in light of the circumstances.

  Already I don’t have a good opinion of her.

  “I’m glad you’re thinking about it and are smart enough to stay put inside the house.” Marino encourages her to do as he says. “And you’re sure about the description.”

  “Oh yes. Yesterday around two or three in the afternoon. I was doing another walk-through of the house, taking more photographs, making notes, making sure they didn’t damage anything when they dropped by,” she replies.

  “Dropped by for what?”

  “She’s been carrying in boxes of their belongings. Sometimes people scuff and bang up a place and then claim it already was like that before.”

  “What you’re saying is it wasn’t the two of them. It was just Joanna dropping by.”

  “That’s right. I only met him once, when I first showed them the house about a week ago. The rest of the time I’ve dealt with her.”

  “And at around two or three yesterday afternoon you saw the truck.”

  “When I happened to look out the window, I noticed it drive by. A big gray pickup truck with a sign of some sort on the door.”

  “Any particular reason you noticed it?” Marino asks.

  “It was going so slowly that I thought it was going to stop in front of the house. Some type of lawn care company and then there it was again this morning when I was meeting with Joanna.”

  “Did she drop by or were you scheduled to meet?”

  A pause, then, “It was scheduled.”

  “Maybe she was moving more boxes in,” Marino suggests, and Mary Sapp pauses again.

  “She’d moved most of them already like I said, and I suggested she hold off on moving any more or unpacking anything. That’s what I wanted to talk to her about.”

  “So you scheduled the meeting this morning. It was your idea,” Marino says, and I know what he’s thinking.

  If the Realtor scheduled the meeting it defeats the argument that Joanna contrived a reason to be out of the house at the time her husband was murdered. But that won’t stop certain parties from pushing through with their theory, and I suspect I know who will be pushing the hardest. Joanna lied to Machado and no matter her reason it was a very bad way, perhaps the worst way, to start off with him. Matters are further complicated by his relationship with Marino. They’re competing with each other, and then there’s the bleach.

  Someone may have attempted to eradicate DNA from items that appear to be part of a staged scene. Guitars taken out of their cases and displayed on their stands, items returned to a bathroom cabinet, a box of belongings rummaged through, and I have little doubt it was the killer who did all this. Machado took his time notifying Marino or my office about the homicide. He got there first and was inside the apartment, possibly turning on the lights and looking around. He shouldn’t have done this alone. He would have done it with Marino were they not at each other’s throats.

  “I asked her if she could stop by the house,” Mary Sapp is saying, “and we agreed to meet early because she said they had a very busy day ahead, running errands. And of course the move they were still planning on.”

  They were planning on it. But it doesn’t sound as if she was.

  “We agreed on eight o’clock and she did show up at that time. To give her credit, she was punctual,” she says and something has caused her to disapprove of Joanna Cather.

  “Why did you suggest that she hold off moving their belongings?” Marino asks as my suspicions about the Realtor darken.

  “Details. We had details to discuss that unfortunately were problematic. I thought it better to do so in person and not in writing,” she says. “And before I could explain, I saw the truck again.”

  “What time was this?” Marino asks and we’re on I-93 South now, on the waterfront.

  “About eight-fifteen, eight-thirty. I noticed it and even said to her, ‘I think that truck is cruising for business around here, and it won’t get him anywhere.’ My company has quite a few listings in this area and we have certain companies we recommend of course.”

  “Do you have any idea who was in the truck when you saw it yesterday and again this morning? Did the driver look familiar?”

  “No one I’ve ever seen before. An unattractive man wearing dark glasses. I don’t know who it is.”

  “What about Joanna? Did she say anything about it?” Marino flicks his lights again, riding the bumper of the car in front of us and it changes lanes to let him pass. “Did she mention if she’d ever noticed the truck before?”

  “She didn’t seem happy about it,” she says. “Then she stepped away from me for a minute and made a phone call. I got the impression she was talking to the husband.”

  THE HUSBAND, I THINK about what she just said. She has distanced herself from Jamal Nari and depersonalized him. Mary Sapp has information she wants to keep from Marino and I don’t trust her in the least.

  “What was Joanna’s demeanor this morning?” Marino asks as we drive past acres of solar panels and the National Grid gas storage tank with its rainbow design, a landmark in Dorchester and a waypoint on the Quarry Route that Lucy often follows when flying her helicopter in and out of Logan.

  “Somewhat frantic and irritable but that’s not unusual when people are moving. And eventually she sensed there was an issue, a problem and she became difficult.” Another pause. “Are you thinking the gray truck out front has something to do with what happened to the husband? That maybe it’s someone he was involved with?” she asks, and I think about drugs again.

  Heroin-related crimes are epidemic in this area of Boston.

  Marino says, “Ms. Sapp, did Joanna seem afraid of anything when you were with her this morning?”

  She hesitates before she answers. “I’m not sure. Well, I don’t think so.”

  “I’m just wondering if she or maybe her husband might have mentioned they were having some sort of trouble,” Marino says.

  “Privacy. I know that came up several times. They didn’t want people bothering them anymore.”

  “Anymore?”

  “Yes.”

  She goes on to claim that she doesn’t know for a fact why the couple’s need to move was urgent. She knows only what Nari mentioned last week, which was that they wanted something bigger and preferred not living in the same city where he worked.

  “I know privacy was a big concern,” Mary Sapp repeats, and she describes Nari as a popular musician and teacher who had been in the news last year and was “pestered by his students” because he lived too close to the school. If she’d had any inkling they were in any kind of trouble, she wouldn’t have leased the house to them “to begin with and this entire ordeal would never have happened.”

  She makes the point that she was under the impression Joanna recently had quit her job as a school psychologist so she could “stay at home and start a family.” She says the couple never let
on that maybe “their circumstances” had changed and weren’t at all what was represented when she first showed them the house on Gallivan Boulevard. After Joanna made the phone call, possibly to her husband, she and the Realtor got “into a discussion.” It wasn’t pleasant.

  “I tried in the nicest way to convey to her that I no longer thought the property was well suited for them,” she explains, “and she said it was a done deal. Her exact words. She began unpacking things over my objections, threatening to sue me for breach of contract.”

  “Were you still at the house with her when she got the call about her husband’s death?” Marino asks.

  “I wasn’t. I finally left. That man is just sitting,” she says. “I think he’s waiting for me but I can’t imagine why.”

  I recall that Joanna told us the moving truck was scheduled to pick up their furniture today at three P.M. and bring it to the house in Dorchester. If she’s still planning to go ahead with the move she should be arriving at any moment but I have a strong feeling she won’t. She hasn’t even picked a funeral home yet and Bryce described her as being in a fugue state. If she can’t make a decision about what to do with her husband’s body then it’s unlikely that she’s made any other important decisions either. She’s in shock. I hope she has family. I hope she has friends.

  “I’m two minutes from you,” Marino says to the Realtor. “Just stay where you are, okay?”

  “He’s sitting in the same place, right behind my car. He’s just sitting inside the truck. It says ‘Hands On Mechanics’ on the door and I don’t know why someone like a mechanic would be waiting here if that’s what he’s doing. It’s odd though. When I saw the truck yesterday I thought it was a lawn care person, like I said. He might be eating something. I can’t really tell from where I am.”

  “I’m going to get off the phone now.” Marino is very calm. “You just stay put. You’ve got the doors locked and the alarm on?” He’s asked her this before, and she says yes, she’s made sure of it, and Marino ends the call. “There’s got to be an explanation,” he says to me. “If he just killed Jamal Nari he sure as hell wouldn’t drive over here and sit in front of their house.”

  “The fact is we don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I answer. “Including with Mary Sapp. I don’t trust her.”

  ON GRANITE AVENUE WEdrive over water. For a moment we’re surrounded by it and I feel airborne. On our right is the Dorchester Bay with its sliver of tawny beach, on our left the Neponset River where small boats are moored.

  Marino blasts through an intersection of bright-white-painted crosswalks, no pedestrians in sight, and he hangs a sharp left on Gallivan Boulevard and floors it. I recognize the small shingle-sided house from photographs on the Internet, a white Mercedes parked directly in front and behind it the gray Ford pickup truck.

  If the truck’s driver seems concerned that an unmarked police vehicle has pulled up behind him, he makes no sign of it. If the strobing blue and red grille lights are disconcerting or even a surprise there is no indication. He appears to be drinking a large coffee, his sunglasses watching us in the rearview mirror. But he makes no move to get out of the truck even as a Boston Police Department cruiser speeds around the corner and stops in the middle of the street next to us.

  “You sit tight and let’s see what the hell this is.” Marino opens his door at the same time the uniformed officer in the cruiser opens his.

  At least Marino left the engine running. I unlock the windows and roll mine down so I don’t get any more surprises or feel trapped. I watch him approach the old gray truck, his Harley windbreaker moved out of the way of the .40 caliber Sig on his right hip. He raps the driver’s window with his knuckle as the uniformed officer lowers his hand to his gun and steps around Marino to get a different perspective of the person inside.

  “What can I help you with?” I hear a rude male voice say as the window goes down.

  “License and registration and step outside,” Marino says.

  “Have I done something wrong?”

  “Maybe I should be asking you that.”

  “I’ll assume you just did and the answer is no. I’ve done nothing wrong,” he says and I have the unsettling sensation that I’ve heard the voice before, aggressive and unpleasant.

  “Sir, you need to step out of your truck,” the uniformed officer says rather fiercely, young, dark skinned with a V-shaped build and biceps bulging from the short sleeves of his blue shirt.

  The driver’s door opens as the man says, “Don’t get excited and do something stupid. I need to get my wallet and the registration out of the glove box, that’s what I’m reaching for.”

  “Sir, do you have a gun in your vehicle?” the uniformed officer almost shouts.

  “I do not. For God’s sake don’t shoot me.”

  CHAPTER 14

  MARINO AND THE UNIFORMED officer have their hands by their guns, their attention riveted to the driver’s every move.

  I can see him leaning to the right, his right arm reaching, and the same thought replays itself in my mind, caught in a loop, I keep thinking it. If the worst happens, there’s nothing I can do except call 911. Not all police vehicles have built-in radios anymore. Marino’s SUV doesn’t. He uses his portable instead and has it in hand, leaving me alone with an iPhone, the vest beneath my shirt and my wits.

  I didn’t bother with my .380 today, and I wish I had as I watch the driver step out of the truck, the same light-complexioned man who passed us on Memorial Drive. He has short curly black hair, is coarse featured, slender, medium height, dressed in jeans and a baggy denim shirt that isn’t tucked in. In the lobe of his left ear is a small diamond stud, and his watch is military-looking, a black dial with a rotating bezel on a black silicone band. He hasn’t shaved for days. He’s not afraid. His demeanor is mocking and defiant.

  “Move your glasses out of the way,” Marino says loudly.

  “Do what . . . ?”

  “Take them off.”

  The man parks the sunglasses on top of his head and blinks in the brightness. There’s something wrong with his eyes. They aren’t symmetrical, are different sizes, one slightly lower than the other. I try Benton’s cell phone and he answers.

  “Arms out!” Marino steps closer to the truck and looks through the open window. “Nice scanner. Handheld. You make it your practice to monitor the police around here? What you got it set on? Let me guess. One-thirty-one-point-eight.”

  I tell Benton where I am and then I tell him about Machado. I mention the bleach as I watch Marino reach inside the truck and pick up the scanner. Benton recalls that Machado was at the scene about an hour before Marino was called, before I was.

  “Yes,” I confirm. “That’s right.”

  “Poor judgment if nothing else,” he says.

  “At the very least.”

  “I’m glad you told me.”

  “Marino’s not in a position to be objective about it. I’m not saying it’s anything . . .”

  “I understand what you’re saying and it’s a problem no matter what,” Benton replies. “Something gets compromised and it can’t always be fixed.”

  We end the call as I watch Marino toss the handheld scanner back on the seat.

  “BAPERN,” he says to the man. “So you can monitor what we say to each other and our pursuits and descriptions of assholes like you.”

  The Boston Area Police Emergency Radio Network is intercity. Its 131.8 frequency covers most police departments in the greater Boston area, and I wonder who he is. Maybe a journalist, maybe a cop, but neither makes sense unless he’s on some oddball assignment that includes displaying magnetic signs and wrong phone numbers on a truck that’s registered to an eighty-three-year-old man in Springfield.

  “I’m not wanted,” he says.

  “Right now you are.”

  “And you don’t have a warrant to search my truc
k.” He points a finger at Marino.

  “Arms out!”

  “I don’t have a weapon.” He holds out his arms, waving his vehicle registration and a wallet.

  “Take your license out of your wallet.”

  He does it.

  “Arms out! Don’t make me tell you again!”

  “Don’t shoot me! Don’t tase me!” he exclaims as if either is imminent.

  “Turn around and place your hands on the truck,” Marino orders him.

  “You don’t need to be so nasty.”

  The voice is familiar. I try to place it and I can’t. I watch Marino frisk him, and satisfied he’s unarmed he takes the license and registration. He looks them over and calls them in to the dispatcher. Rand Bloom, thirty-two years old, a South Boston address. I can hear every word of it over the radio Marino holds and the scanner inside the pickup truck.

  “This your truck?” Marino asks.

  “My grandfather’s.” Rand Bloom leans against it, crossing his arms. “Clay Schmidt. He lives in a retirement community in Springfield but I’m guessing you already know that. What’s your interest in me?”

  “I’m the one asking the questions here.”

  “Ever heard of the First Amendment, freedom of speech? Maybe not since you don’t seem to know about illegal searches.”

  “You want to tell me what you were doing in Cambridge this morning and why you had a different sign on this truck?”

  “No. I don’t want to tell you.” He doesn’t sound remotely intimidated.

  In fact he seems amused as if the joke is on the police and he knows they’re about to find that out.

  “Thirty-three,” the Cambridge dispatcher sounds.

  Marino answers without taking his eyes off Bloom, who has no outstanding warrants. Arrested this past March for trespassing, he currently has a restraining order against him and lists his occupation as Specialized Investigations. I realize why his bitchy, condescending voice is familiar. I open my door and step out of the SUV.