screaming. I’d be encouraging everyone on the road to stay out of my way. It’s just a damn shame about the truck. I wish I were driving something inconspicuous. Even one of the CFC vans or SUVs. Anything but this. Everybody we pass is staring at the Grim Reapermobile, the double-wide, in Marino’s words. It’s about as common as a UFO in this low-crime part of the world where Lucy lives on her spectacular estate. Not that people don’t die around here. They have accidents, sudden cardiac catastrophes and take their own lives like anybody else. But those types of cases rarely require a mobile crime scene unit, and I wouldn’t be driving one if I weren’t coming directly from Chanel Gilbert’s house.
It would have made sense to swap out vehicles but there isn’t time. I don’t have the luxury of taking a shower and changing my clothes. I feel concern that’s fast becoming raw fear, and it ratchets me into a higher gear. Already I’m mobilizing, getting a determined iron-hard attitude edged in stoicism that will break bones. I’ve tried Lucy repeatedly and she doesn’t answer. I’ve tried her partner Janet. She’s not answering either, and their main home number continues to seem out of order.
“I hate to tell you but I smell it.” Marino cracks open his window and hot humid air seeps in.
“Smell what?” I pay attention to my driving.
“The stink you carried out of the house with you and trapped inside this damn truck.” He waves his hand in front of his face.
“I don’t smell anything.”
“You know what they say. A fox can’t smell its own.” Marino routinely butchers clichés and thinks an idiom is a stupid person.
“The saying is a fox smells its own hole first,” I reply.
He rolls down his window the rest of the way, and the sound of blowing air is soft because we’re moving slowly. I hear the helicopter. I’ve been hearing it ever since we left Cambridge and I’ve about decided we’re being followed, possibly by a TV news crew. Possibly the media has found out who the dead woman’s mother is, assuming the dead woman is really Chanel Gilbert.
“Can you tell if it’s a news chopper? It would make sense but sounds bigger than that,” I ask Marino.
“Can’t tell.” He’s craning his neck, looking up as best he can, and sweat is like dew on top of his shiny shaved head. “I can’t see it.” He stares out his side window at big trees, an overgrown hedge, a dented mailbox going by.
A red-tailed hawk circles in the distance, and I’ve always considered birds of prey a good sign, a positive messenger. They remind me to keep above the fray, to have a keen eye and follow my instincts. Another stab of pain knifes through my thigh, and no matter how many times I’ve dissected what happened I can’t figure out what I miscalculated, what I didn’t notice or could have done differently. I was a hawk that got hunted down like a dove. In fact I was a sitting duck.
“The thing is it’s not like her,” Marino is saying, and I realize I didn’t hear what he said right before it. “It’s not like you either, Doc. And I feel a need to point that out.”
“I’m sorry. Now what are we talking about?”
“Lucy and her so-called emergency. I keep wondering if you’ve misunderstood something. Because it doesn’t sound like her. I don’t like that we got up and walked out of a scene that may turn out not to be an accident.”
“It’s not like Lucy to have an emergency?” I glance over at him. “Anyone can have an emergency.”
“But I’m not understanding this and I swear I’m trying to. She texts you from her emergency line and that’s it? What did she say exactly? Hurry here now or something like that? Because like I said that doesn’t sound like her.”
I haven’t told him what the text said. Which was nothing. It was a video link. That’s all. Now it’s gone without a trace and he has no idea about any of it.
“Let me see the text.” He holds out a huge hand. “Let me see exactly what she said.”
“Not while I’m driving.” I dig myself deeper into what’s becoming a pit of lies, and I don’t like the feeling.
I resent the position I’ve been put in and I can’t find my way out. But I’m protecting people or at least that’s my intention.
“And she said what exactly? Tell me her exact words,” Marino badgers me.
“There was an indication of a problem.” I’m careful how I phrase it. “And now she’s not answering any of her phones. Janet isn’t either,” I repeat myself.
“Like I said it doesn’t sound like her. Lucy never acts like there’s a problem or that she needs anyone,” he says and it’s true. “Maybe someone stole her phone. Maybe it wasn’t her who sent the message. How do you know we’re not being set up so we get to her property and find out it’s an ambush?”
“Set up by whom?” I scrutinize my own voice.
I sound calm and in control. My tone doesn’t begin to belie my feelings.
“You know damn well who. It’s the kind of thing Carrie Grethen would do. So she can ambush us, lure us right where she wants us. If I see her I’m shooting on sight.” Marino isn’t making an empty threat. He means it 100 percent. “No questions asked.”
“I didn’t just hear you say that. You didn’t say it and don’t say it again,” I reply, and the diesel engine seems unnaturally loud.
I’m a white elephant on this road. I shouldn’t be on it, not driving a medical examiner’s truck, and I imagine if I saw it and didn’t know why it was headed to Lucy’s neighborhood …
Why isn’t she answering her phone? What has happened?
I won’t think about it. I can’t stand to think about it, and I’m bombarded by images I can’t shake from a video I never should have seen. At the same time I wonder what I really watched. How much footage did Carrie take out of context? How could she have had me in mind as a future audience? Or did she?
How could Carrie have known then what she would do almost two decades later? I don’t think it’s possible. Or maybe I just don’t want to believe she’s capable of executing her schemes so far in advance. That would be scary and she’s scary enough, and I obsessively sift through what’s happened today. I work my own morning like a crime scene, detail by detail, second by second. I dig, excavate and reconstruct as I drive with both hands on the wheel.
The video link landed on my phone at exactly 9:33 A.M., a little more than an hour ago. I recognized the alert from Lucy’s ICE line. It sounds like a C-sharp chord on an electric guitar, and immediately I pulled off my soiled gloves and stepped away from the body. I watched the recording and now it’s gone. Irretrievably gone. That’s what happened. That’s what I want to tell Marino. But I can’t and it’s making matters more difficult with him than they already were.
He doesn’t completely trust me. I’ve sensed it since my near miss in Florida.
Blame the victim.
Only I’m the victim this time, and in his mind it has to be my fault. That suggests I’m not who I used to be. At least not to him. He treats me differently.
