“He has been since April. And it’s not his missing wife.” I stress that. “It’s someone else.”
twelve
IT’S THREE MINUTES PAST ONE WHEN WE REACH THE Longfellow Bridge connecting Boston to Cambridge.
On the other side, MIT’s playing fields and buildings have lost their charm, are squared shapes of dull grass, dark brick, and washed-out limestone beneath a thick tarp of gray clouds. Trees waiting for fall are suddenly skeletal, as if they’ve flung their parched leaves in despair, and the Charles River is roughly stirred by a blustery wind that matches my own agitation.
I read the text message again, wondering why I think it might say something different this time:
Just back in session after adjourning for lunch. Still on for 2. Sorry.—DS
I refrain from answering Dan Steward, the assistant U.S. attorney whose fault it partly or maybe mostly is that I’m being dragged into court at what couldn’t be a worse time or for a more ridiculous reason.
From now on I’ll communicate with him by phone or in person. Not in writing again ever, I promise myself, and I can’t get over it. How awful. I’m thinking in headlines, and most of all I’m worrying about the dead woman in the van behind us. She deserves my complete attention right now and won’t get it. This is wrong.
“I’ve always lived over a microscope,” I comment to Marino. “Now I live under one, every bit of minutiae open for examination and opinion. I don’t know how we’re going to do this.” I tuck my phone back inside my jacket pocket.
“You and me both. I got no idea who to call first, and I’m sure as hell not doing what the Coast Guard said and bringing in the FBI right off the bat, just hand it over to them on a silver platter because Homeland Security says so.” He is talking nonstop, and about something else. “A jurisdictional cluster fuck. Jesus Christ, could be half a dozen different departments claiming this one.”
“Or not. That’s the more likely story.”
“A cluster fuck if I ever saw one.”
Cluster fuck seems to be his favorite new expression, and I suspect it came from Lucy. But who knows where he got it.
“The FBI will want the case because it’s going to be big news. No way this won’t be high-profile, maybe a national headline. A rich old lady tied to a dog crate and dumped in the harbor. Assumed to be Mildred Lott. Then, when it turns out it’s not, it will be an even bigger story.”
“‘A rich old lady’?”
“You mind holding these?” He hands me his Ray-Bans. “Talk about the weather turning to crap. I got to go to the eye doctor, can’t see worth shit anymore. Need a perscription instead of just using over-the-counter.”
I’ve given up telling him the word is prescription.
“Now my distance vision sucks, too.” He squints as he drives. “Pisses the hell out of me, everything blurry, can’t remember what they call it. Presbyphobia.”
“Presbyopia. Old eyes.”
“Goddamn nothing focuses anymore, like Mister Magoo.”
“You know she’s rich for a fact? What makes you think that?” I place his sunglasses in my lap and adjust my vent, turning up the fan as we creep across the bridge in thick traffic. “And how do you know she’s old?”
“She’s got white hair.”
“Or platinum blond. It could be dyed. I have to look at her.”
“Nice clothes. And her jewelry. I didn’t see it up close, but it looks like gold and a fancy watch. She’s old,” he insists. “At least seventy. Like she was out having lunch or shopping or something when she was grabbed.”
“What she looks is very dehydrated and very dead. I don’t know how old or how rich, but robbery doesn’t appear to be the motive.”
“Didn’t say it was.”
“I’m saying it probably wasn’t. Assumptions are always dangerous,” I remind him. “Especially in a case like this, where all we may have to go on are physical descriptions we put out there in hopes she’s in a database. We say she’s elderly with long white hair, when in fact she’s in her forties with dyed blond hair, and we cause a big problem.”
“Someone like that’s probably been reported missing,” Marino says.
“You would think so, but we don’t know the circumstances.”
“She would be reported for sure,” he asserts. “These days people notice when your newspapers pile up or your mailbox overflows. Bills don’t get paid and services get shut off. Appointments are missed, and finally someone calls the police to check on whoever it is.”
“Often that’s true.”
“Not to