him? You don’t dump entire bags of garbage on the labs, and last I checked he wasn’t a detective. See what I mean about what I put up with?”
Marino gets on his phone as I open the door that leads outside, the same door I came in at 8:33 this morning. I know the exact time. I always make a point of knowing.
“What the hell did you do?” Marino is saying nastily, his earpiece winking blue as he holds up his phone so I can see Officer Hyde’s name in the display. “What do you mean you didn’t and you don’t know?” Marino is loud and accusatory. “You telling me it’s not with you or at the labs? That someone else made off with the kitchen trash and you got no idea? You realize what might be in that damn trash?
“Try this on for starters, asshole. It looks like she set the table for herself, meaning she was in here probably not all that long before she died and then something happened because she didn’t get around to eating.” Marino’s face is deep red. “Plus the Doc’s found an indication that someone may have tried to clean up blood in the foyer, maybe staging something. Meaning you need to get your ass back here and secure this place like a damn crime scene. I don’t give a flying fuck what the neighbors think of our tying this place up in a big yellow bow. Do it!”
“Ask him what was in the trash as best he knows,” I say as he continues to chew out Hyde over the phone.
“He doesn’t know.” Marino looks at me as he ends the call. “He says he didn’t touch the trash yet. He didn’t take it and has no idea what was in it. That’s what he says.”
“Well it appears someone took it.”
“He says he’ll find out. Either Vogel or Lapin must have it. Goddamn it!”
Vogel is the state trooper. Lapin must be the gray-haired Cambridge cop I’ve seen writing tickets around here, the one who went to a seminar and is now a bloodstain expert by his way of thinking.
“Maybe check with Lapin?” I ask. “Make sure he did something with the trash? Because this is disturbing.”
“I can’t imagine he would take it.” But Marino calls him next.
He asks him about the kitchen trash. He meets my eyes and shakes his head as he slips a pair of sunglasses out of a pocket of his cargo pants. Vintage wire-rim military aviator Ray-Bans I got him for his birthday last month. He puts them on, blacking out his eyes. He ends the call.
“Nope,” he says to me as he walks to the door that leads outside. “He says he’s not aware of anybody doing anything with the trash yet, and he didn’t touch it. Didn’t see it even. And he sure as hell didn’t take it with him. Well somebody did because it wasn’t like this when I first got here.”
We walk out into the sultry summer morning, the wind light and hot as it stirs the old trees in the side yard.
“Maybe the housekeeper took out the trash before she left.” I suggest the only other possibility that comes to mind. “Did anybody actually see her leave and notice if she had anything in her hands?”
“That’s a good question,” he says as we go down three wooden steps that end on the old brick driveway.
To one side of them flush against the house are two supercans and Marino opens the heavy dark green plastic lids.
“Empty,” he says.
“Garbage collection is weekly, probably Wednesdays here in mid-Cambridge, and today’s Friday,” I reply. “So Chanel Gilbert hasn’t put anything in the cans in several days? That’s a bit odd. Did you notice anything that might suggest she’d been out of town and just got back?”
“Not so far.” Marino wipes his hands on his shorts. “Might make sense though. She comes home and notices a light or two out and decides to change the bulbs.”
“Or that’s not what happened at all. If we consider other evidence we’re finding the story begins to change.” I remind him of what I discovered when I sprayed a reagent in the foyer. “Let’s make sure Lucy’s okay and we’ll get back here and finish up. If Hyde and others are going to secure the perimeter you might want to suggest they hold off searching the house any further until we return.”
“Good thing I have you to tell me how to do my job.”
“I’ve sent a message to my office. We’ll get the CT scan going right away and see if it tells us anything helpful,” I reply.
Parked on the brick driveway in front of my truck is the red Land Rover registered to Chanel Gilbert. I look through the driver’s window without touching anything. On the backseat is a bag of empty glass bottles, all of them the same and unlabeled, and the dash is dusty, the SUV filthy with pollen and trash from trees. Leaves and pine needles clog the space between the hood and the windshield. Cars don’t stay whistle clean around here. If people have garages they use them for storage.
“It looks like it’s been sitting outside for a while. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driven recently,” I start to say as I detect a distant thudding that is rapidly coming closer.
“Yeah.” Marino is distracted, staring at my right leg. “Just so you know you’re walking a lot worse than you were earlier. Maybe the shittiest I’ve seen you walk in weeks.”
“Good to know.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Thanks for pointing it out with your typical diplomacy.”
“Don’t get pissed at me, Doc.”
“Why would I?”
The helicopter is a beefy black twin engine at about fifteen hundred feet and several miles west, flying along the Charles River. It’s not Lucy’s Agusta with its Ferrari blue and silver paint job. I dig my keys out of my shoulder bag and try to walk without a hitch, without stiffness or a limp as Marino’s comments sting and make me self-conscious.
“Maybe I should drive.” He watches me skeptically.
“Nope.”
“You’ve been on your feet way too much today. You need to rest.”
“That’s not happening,” I say to him.
Fifteen miles northwest of Cambridge the road is barely wide enough for my big boxy truck.
White with dark tinted windows and built on a Chevy G 4500 chassis it’s basically an ambulance with the caduceus and scales of justice in blue on the doors. But there are no flashing lights. There’s no siren or PA system. I’m not in the business of offering emergency medical care. It’s a little late by the time I’m called, and I’m not expected to engage in high-risk aggressive driving. Certainly not here in the nation’s proud and proper birthplace where the shot was heard ’round the world during the Revolutionary War.
Concord, Massachusetts, is known for its famous former residents like Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson, and for hiking and horse trails and of course Walden Pond. The people here keep to themselves, often snobbishly so, and
