texted this video to me, even if it appears to have been sent from her In Case of Emergency (ICE) cell phone number. That’s very important. It’s also problematic. Almost no one has her ICE number. I can count on one hand the people who do, and I carefully study the details in the recording. It started playing ten seconds ago. Eleven now. Fourteen. Sixteen. I scrutinize images filmed from multiple angles.
Were it not for Mister Pickle I might not have recognized Lucy’s former dorm room with its white horizontal blinds shut backward like a nappy fabric or fur rubbed the wrong way, a habit of hers that’s always driven me a little crazy. She routinely shuts blinds with the slats verso, and I gave up saying it’s like wearing your underwear inside out. She argues that when the closed slats curve up instead of down it’s impossible to see in. Anybody who thinks that way is vigilant about being watched, stalked, spied on. Lucy wouldn’t let someone get away with it.
Unless she didn’t know. Unless she trusted whoever it was.
Seconds tick by and the dorm room is the same. Empty. Silent.
The cinder block walls and tile floor are primer-white, the furniture inexpensive with a maple veneer, everything plain and practical and prodding a remote part of my brain, a pain-saturated part of my memory that I keep sealed off like human remains under poured concrete. What I’m seeing on my phone’s display could be a private psychiatric hospital room. Or a visiting officer’s quarters on a military base. Or a generically bland pied-à-terre. But I know what I’m looking at. I’d recognize that moody teddy bear anywhere.
Mister Pickle always went where Lucy did, and as I look at his poignant face I’m reminded of what was going on with me during the long lost days of the 1990s. I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia, the first woman to hold that position. I’d become Lucy’s caretaker after my selfish sister Dorothy decided to unload her on me. What was presented as a short impromptu visit turned into forever and the timing for when it all began couldn’t have been worse.
My first summer in Richmond and it was under siege as a serial killer strangled women in their own homes, in their own beds. The murders were escalating and becoming increasingly sadistic. We couldn’t catch him. We didn’t have a clue. I was new. The press and politicians thundered down on me like an avalanche. I was a misfit. I was chilly and aloof. I was peculiar. What kind of woman would dissect dead bodies in a morgue? I was ungracious and lacked southern charm. I wasn’t descended from Jamestown or the Mayflower. A backslidden Catholic, a socially liberal multicultural Miami native and I’d managed to anchor my career in the former capital of the Confederacy where the murder rate per capita was the highest in the United States.
I never got a satisfactory explanation for the reason Richmond won the prize when it came to homicide and what sense it made for the cops to brag about it. For that matter I didn’t understand the point of Civil War reenactments. Why would you celebrate the biggest thing you ever lost? I quickly learned not to give voice to such skepticisms, and when asked if I was a Yankee I said I didn’t follow baseball closely. That usually shut the person up.
The exhilaration of being one of the first female chiefs in the United States quickly lost its thrill and the brass ring I’d grabbed tarnished fast. Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia felt more like a stubborn old war zone than a bastion of civility and enlightenment, and it didn’t take long for the truth to become abundantly clear. The former chief medical examiner was a misogynistic bigoted alcoholic who died suddenly and left a disastrous legacy. No seasoned board-certified forensic pathologist with a decent reputation wanted to take his place. So a bright idea occurred to the men in charge. What about a woman?
Women are good at cleaning up messes. Why not find a female forensic expert? It doesn’t matter if she’s young and missing the requisite experience to head a statewide system. As long as she’s a qualified expert in court and minds her manners she can grow into the position. How about an overeducated detail-addicted work-obsessed perfectionistic Italian woman who grew up dirt poor, has everything to prove, is turbo-driven and divorced with no kids?
Well no kids sort of until the unexpected happened. My only sister’s only offspring Lucy Farinelli was the baby on my doorstep. Except this baby was ten years old, knew more about computers and all things mechanical than I did or ever would, and she was a tabula rasa when it came to appropriate behavior. To say Lucy was difficult is like saying that lightning is hazardous. It’s a statement of fact that will always be a given.
My niece was and is a challenge. Immutably and incurably. But as a child she was impossible and uncivilized. She was a genius aborigine, angry, beautiful, fiery, fearless, remorseless and untouchable, overly sensitive and insatiable. Nothing I might have done for her could have been enough. But I tried. I tried relentlessly against all odds. I’ve always feared I’d be a lousy mother. I have no reason to be a good one.
I thought a stuffed bear might make a neglected little girl feel better and possibly loved, and as I watch Mister Pickle on the bed of Lucy’s former dorm room in a surveillance video I didn’t know existed until one minute ago, a low voltage shock settles into a generalized calm. I go flatline. I focus. I think clearly, objectively, scientifically. I must. The video playing on my phone is authentic. It’s crucial I accept that. The footage wasn’t Photoshopped or manufactured. I know damn well what I’m seeing.
The FBI Academy. Washington Dormitory. Room 411.
I try to pinpoint precisely when Lucy was there as an intern first and later a new agent. Before she got run off the job. Basically fired by the FBI. Then ATF. Then became a mercenary special operator disappearing on missions I don’t want to know about before starting her own forensic computer company in New York City. Until she got run out of there too.
Then has become now, a Friday morning in the middle of August. Lucy is a thirty-five-year-old extremely rich technical entrepreneur who generously shares her talents with me, with my headquarters the Cambridge Forensic Center (CFC), and as I watch the surveillance video I’m in two places. Back in time and here in the present. They’re connected. A continuum.
Everything I’ve done and been has pushed forward slowly and unstoppably like a landmass, propelling me into this marble foyer spattered with putrid blood. What’s gone before has brought me exactly where I am, limping and in pain with a badly injured leg and a decomposing dead body near me on the floor. My past. But most importantly Lucy’s past, and I envision a galaxy of bright swirling shapes and secrets in a vast inky void. Darkness, scandals, deceptions, betrayals, fortunes won and lost and won again, bad shootings, good ones and near-misses.
Our lives together started with hopes and dreams and promise, and incrementally got worse and better and finally not so bad and then pretty good until it all went to hell again this past June when I almost died. I thought the horror story was over forever and no longer foremost on anybody’s mind. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. It’s as if I outran a speeding train only to be hit by it coming the other way around a bend in the tracks.
“Has anybody asked the Doc?” The voice belongs to Cambridge Police Officer Hyde. “I mean marijuana could do that, right? You smoke a lot of weed and get high and have some bullshit brainstorm like how about I change a lightbulb while I’m naked? That sounds smart. Right? Ha! Real damn smart, right? And you fall off the ladder in the middle of the night when no one’s around and crack your head open.”
Officer Hyde’s first name is Park, a terrible thing to do to a child and he gets called every insulting nickname imaginable and returns the favor. To make matters worse Officer Park Hyde is pudgy and short with freckles and kinky carrot-red hair
