e-mails or her phone?” I don’t say what I’m thinking.
How simple it would be to hoodwink Marino in cyberspace, where he doesn’t know how to navigate and his insecurity makes him vulnerable.
“She’s been paying her bills all this time,” Benton replies. “She was tweeting as recently as two weeks ago. She’s made calls from her cell phone as recently as the day before yesterday—”
“Not the person in there. She certainly didn’t.” Luke interrupts Benton while watching Ned Adams through the window.
“Someone’s been doing it.” Benton finishes what he was saying, but he doesn’t say it to Luke.
Inside the scanner room, Ned Adams opens his black leather bag. He puts his glasses on. He squints up at a video screen displaying dental x-rays.
“She’s been dead quite a lot longer than two days or two weeks,” Luke volunteers, when he really should shut up. “She certainly hasn’t been tweeting or writing checks or making phone calls for quite some time. Months, at least, I’d say. Would you agree, Dr. Scarpetta?”
“Her house is on Sixth Street,” Benton says to me. “Very close to Cambridge P.D., which just makes this all the more curious. No one’s been in it. The alarm is set, the car in the garage, police driving past it every day, and no one the wiser.”
“A time capsule,” Douglas Burke adds. “The fire department’s at the ready to breach the back door as soon as we get there.”
“I suggest you might want to go pick up those pizzas I asked you to order,” I say to Benton in a way that communicates exactly what I want him to know.
This is my office. The CFC doesn’t answer to the FBI. I will handle this case as I see fit.
“I’m posting her first. Her house can wait,” I add, in the same tone. “It’s waited half a year. It can wait two hours longer, but she can’t.”
“We were hoping Dr. Zenner could take care of the autopsy and you’d come with us and take a look,” Burke suggests.
“Whatever you need me to do.” Luke gets up from his chair as Anne walks into the scanner room and hands printouts to Ned Adams.
“What I need is for you to give us a chance to do our job here,” I reply, as the x-ray room door opens, and now Lucy is here, looking at me from the corridor. “Searching a potential crime scene is much more meaningful if we know how the victim died and what we might be looking for.”
“Could I see you for a minute?” Lucy doesn’t step inside.
“If you’ll excuse me. I think we’re done for now,” I say to the FBI.
“I noticed your car in the bay.” I walk with Lucy back toward the receiving area, stopping where no one can overhear us. “I’m wondering why.”
“And I’m wondering a lot of things.” My niece is dressed the way she was when I saw her early this morning, all in black, and it’s not like her to show up when the FBI is in the area. “I’m wondering why Marino and Machado are in the break room with the door shut. I can hear them arguing, that’s how loud Marino is. And I’m wondering why a Sikorsky S-Seventy-six belonging to Channing Lott might have filmed you recovering that body from the water today?”
“His helicopter? That’s stunning.” I hardly know what to say.
With all that’s gone on since, I haven’t given the large white helicopter another thought since I e-mailed the tail number to Lucy while I was in the car with Marino, heading to court.
“That’s really rather unbelievable,” I add, as my thoughts dart through possibilities of what I should do.
Dan Steward needs to know before closing arguments. If Channing Lott somehow is behind his helicopter filming what we just watched in court, and I don’t know how he couldn’t be, then the jury should know before it begins to deliberate. But it may be too late for that.
“The Certificate of Airworthiness is registered in Delaware to his shipping company,” Lucy informs me.
I can imagine how it would appear if I call Steward with this information and he’s forced to say in open court or even to the judge who the source is. The information would be damaging to Jill Donoghue.
Stay out of it.
“His fleet of some hundred and fifty car carriers, container ships, the M V Cipriano Lines,” my niece is telling me.
“I’m sorry.” I try to focus on what she’s saying.
“What the chopper’s registered to,” she says. “A shipping company