Autopsy, p.29
Autopsy, page 29
Turning onto West Braddock at the Cadillac dealership, he ends the call, reminding me that my sister can’t tolerate being ignored. What he doesn’t yet know is that he’s seeing the first sign of her getting discontented. Next, her attention is prone to wander in a way that won’t make him happy.
“That’s the way she’s wired,” I remind him. “Which is also why she likes you retired.”
“I didn’t retire,” he fires back defensively.
“From some things you did,” I reply, and he’s not naïve.
Dorothy isn’t thrilled about him working with me. I’ve played peacemaker with them before and no doubt will again.
“Well, it gets old, Doc,” he says. “At times like this it wears me thin, having to pay so much attention when there’s big stuff going on. Murders, for example.”
“Take her out to dinner,” I suggest. “It’s early. Go back to my place, clean up and the two of you do something fun. The Oak Steakhouse, you know how much you two like that place.”
“With you getting freakin’ fired, how is anything supposed to feel like fun right now? Judas Priest! First our neighbor gets whacked. Now you lose your job. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to move here.”
“I’m sorry,” I reply with surprising composure. “I never asked you to come along for the ride, and this is why. And you’re going to have to explain to my sister what’s going on.”
“Okay, you’re right,” he says, and I’m glad Dorothy can’t hear his reluctance.
That’s part of the problem. I don’t want him preferring my company to hers, and it’s already happening now that we’re working together again.
“It’s not helpful if she resents me more than usual,” I remind him.
“I’ll drop you off, and take her out, but I really don’t like you driving home alone,” he says.
“I have to at some point,” I reply, texting Rex Bonetta that I’m pulling into the parking lot.
I’m hoping he’s still around, and he is. I ask if we can meet in the trace evidence lab, and he replies that he’s there now. Marino stops in his usual spot, and it’s not lost on me that Maggie’s Volvo is nowhere to be seen.
“She picked a good day to leave early,” I comment. “Not that I’d really want to run into her. You and Dorothy have a nice dinner.”
Shutting the door abruptly, I turn away from him, feeling shaky inside as if I might cry. I’m hoping he didn’t see the look on my face, everything catching up with me. Taking a deep breath, steadying myself, I unlock the pedestrian door. I pass through the empty bay, stepping inside the lower level where there’s a better phone signal, and I call Lucy.
“I’m here at the office, safe and sound,” I tell her as I walk past the empty autopsy suite. “And Marino and your mother are going out to dinner.”
“The helicopter is on its way back to the hangar, and I’m headed home,” Lucy says in my wireless earpiece. “How long will you be?”
“Not terribly long, and it’s going to be just you and me for dinner if you don’t mind waiting a bit.” I walk past the anthropology lab, the bones in their big pot softly clattering.
“We’ve got everything for tacos,” Lucy volunteers, and she’s not offered to help with a meal in a while.
“That sounds wonderful.” I open the fire-exit door, heading upstairs to an isolated wing that houses the scanning electron microscope.
Momentarily, I’m following the second-floor corridor, wondering who knows I’m about to be a thing of the past. Through observation windows, I glance at preoccupied scientists in the DNA clean rooms and labs with their airlocks and special ventilation, everybody covered in PPE. A few look up at me as I walk past, and it’s possible they don’t know the news.
Most assuredly they will by morning when I return to clear out my office. Ahead is the latent fingerprints lab, and I may as well check on one of my cases while I’m in the area. Veteran examiner Andy Patient is working under a chemical hood, gloved up and masked, trying to rehydrate the shriveled tips of fingers removed from mummified remains.
They were discovered in an abandoned barn not long after I started here, and I’ve yet to find evidence of violence. But the victim, an older white male, was naked when he died, his clothing strewn about as if he disrobed in a hurry. While that might look suspicious, it’s not necessarily.
As irrational as it seems, often that’s what people do when they’re freezing to death. They have the false sense of being too warm and begin to undress. I’m suspicious he may have sought shelter in the barn during cold weather and died from exposure. But who was he, and what was he doing on a deserted farm?
“Hi, Andy.” I stop in the doorway. “How are things going?”
“I’m optimistic.” He turns around, a wizened fingertip gripped in the forceps he holds in one hand, a syringe in the other.
If he knows I’ve been fired, he doesn’t let on.
“I think we’ll have prints with enough characteristics to run through IAFIS.” He refers to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
“Let’s hope we get lucky since we weren’t with DNA,” I reply as he injects a sodium carbonate solution into what might be the tip of a thumb as best I can tell from where I’m standing.
I examined the remains days ago, noting that muscles and ligaments had decomposed but there was cutaneous tissue and visible friction ridges. Recommending we try restoring the fingertips, I cut them off at the middle phalanges. Since then Andy has been working on the desiccated digits, trying to get prints, still to no avail.
“We do have an update, a possibility of who this might be.” He places the fingertip in a petri dish. “The police say an eighty-three-year-old man wandered away from a nursing home in Winchester almost two years ago.”
A widower suffering from dementia, he has kids who don’t live here or care, it seems. Delusional and paranoid, he believed the government was after him, and had tried to escape multiple times in the past.
“Well, I think you may have figured it out,” I say to Andy. “And that would explain why his DNA’s not in CODIS.”
“What’s really bad is the barn where he was found isn’t even two miles from the nursing home.” Taking off his gloves and mask, he walks over to me, his blue eyes tired behind his glasses, the stubble on his chin salty white. “I’m getting the impression nobody looked all that hard. What it sounds like is he wandered off in his confused state and sought shelter.”
“What time of year was it?”
“February during a cold snap,” he says, and how terribly sad. “Do you think you’ll sign him out as an accident?” he asks, and I don’t answer.
I won’t be around to do that. The next chief will have to but I act as if business will go on as usual.
“We’ll see what else we find out,” I reply.
“I have a feeling this is going to end up in a lawsuit.” He takes off his lab coat.
“Yes, I’m sure the kids who had no use for him will go after the nursing home,” I reply, walking off.
Chapter 38
Where I’m headed is in a wing of its own for good reason.
The lab is windowless, its walls, floor and ceiling thick concrete reinforced with steel to minimize vibrations or anything else that might interfere with highly sensitive instruments. When I walk in, Rex is seated at the scanning electron microscope (SEM) with trace evidence examiner Lee Fishburne.
“She’s never been known for her modesty,” Rex says instantly, and I don’t know what he’s talking about. “Greta Fruge,” he explains. “I was on the phone with her a little while ago.”
“She can be a showboat but is one hell of a toxicologist,” Lee volunteers, and I remember him from my early years when I was in Richmond.
His thick black hair is now a white crescent around the back of his head, and he’s thinner, a little stooped.
“She’s going to work with us, supplying assays,” Rex says, his attention lingering on me, and he knows.
I can see it in his eyes.
“Hopefully, we can find better ways to identify what’s hitting the streets, bad stuff like iso,” he says. “And that might be what was used to poison the wine you carried home from France.”
“What we’re looking at right now is microscopic evidence that was in samples we took from the bottle.” Lee indicates the images on flat screens above a console as complicated as any cockpit.
At a magnification of 2000X, he’s identified trace evidence that includes multicolored paint pigments, copper, lead, silica, bat hair and periwinkle pollen grains that look like pinkish-yellow coral.
“Periwinkle?” I inquire, and while it’s not indigenous to Virginia, the creeper vines had overtaken the garden when we moved into our new home.
The perennial is native to Europe, and was brought to America in the 1700s, the very time our house was built. Without a doubt there’s an abundance of periwinkle pollen on the property inside and out. There would be paint pigments and everything else I’m seeing. Even bat hair, I suppose.
How distressing if it turns out the wine was tampered with inside our own basement. Could I get more things wrong? I’m plagued by doubts that are growing by leaps and bounds.
“What can you tell me about the paint pigments?” I look at them on the video displays.
“They’re old, real old,” Lee lets me know. “The green pigment has arsenic in it, and that’s not been used for centuries. The white paint you’re seeing is made of lead. The blue is lapis lazuli, one of the most expensive pigments long ago, usually reserved for important works of art like painting the Madonna, for example.”
“I’m wondering if what we’re finding means anything to you,” Rex says to me.
I think of the trace evidence that we’d discover if we started analyzing microscopic samples from my own place. The house was hung with valuable old art while the former ambassador to the U.K. lived there. From what I gather, he collected rare paintings, sculptures and tapestries during his travels, and had them throughout the house.
I don’t let on that what Lee is finding on SEM and X-ray diffraction might have anything to do with me personally. Even Rex doesn’t know the whole truth about the poisoned wine, only that it was given to me overseas, and I made the mistake of tasting it. At least I can be grateful that Elvin is none the wiser about that, not yet at any rate, and it’s time to go home. I’ve done enough damage for one day.
“Carry on no matter what.” I figure Rex knows what I mean, and he walks me into the corridor. “I’ll be around in the morning,” I say to him. “Let me know when you get a confirmation with the drug screen.”
“I know you didn’t really resign,” he says. “Screw Elvin Reddy. Don’t let him run you off. The way people are acting is because of his influence, Kay. You’re the most hopeful thing that’s happened around here, the only chance of getting rid of that influence.”
“For now, it seems he’s gotten his way,” I reply. “But thanks, Rex.” I can feel him watch as I head back to the stairwell.
Maybe Lucy hasn’t lost her touch but I’m worried I may have lost mine. Second thoughts and misgivings are seizing my thoughts, and it plagues me that Cammie’s death will be left unsolved. Once I’m out of the picture, the labs will stop the analysis I told them to restart. Her case will be ignored again, and her family will never get the satisfaction they deserve.
Wyatt is opening the bay door as I walk through, letting in a hearse, and I tell him good night.
“I heard about you quitting,” he says. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Thank you, Wyatt,” I reply. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Climbing into my Subaru, I start it up. I listen to music on the radio all the way home, in no mood to chat with anyone else, dreading what my sister will have to say when she hears the news. Probably she already has, and I imagine Marino getting her lubricated with cosmopolitans, maybe the apple martinis she’s fond of, and lowering the boom.
He’ll let her know I didn’t resign, if he hasn’t already. I was fired, and they aren’t staying here if Benton, Lucy and I don’t. If we return to Massachusetts, so will Dorothy and Marino, and from there it’s simple to script what will happen. She’ll feign shock and upset, and I’ll hear about it forever.
How terrible for me. How unfair, and she’ll hound me with endless advice and questions, all the while secretly pleased by my failure. It’s time to clear out the negativity, I tell myself as I reach the house. I don’t need Lucy worrying about me, and she must have seen me on her many cameras.
In a sweat suit, sneakers and her bomber jacket, she’s waiting by the carriage house when I pull up. She lifts one of the wooden rolling doors, her flat-eared cat pacing nearby, his tail twitching. I wait until she picks him up, making sure he’s safely out of the way as I tuck my take-home car inside. Climbing out, we pull down the door together, and I give her the hug I wanted to give her earlier.
“Lucy, you were amazing today,” I say as we walk to the house. “And it seems your aunt can’t stay out of trouble.”
The news is playing as I unlock the front door, and Merlin follows us to the kitchen where spicy ground beef is simmering on the stove, a cookie sheet lined with taco shells, and my stomach growls. An aged añejo tequila is on the countertop next to a shaker filled with ice, and two glasses.
Lucy pulls her pistol from the back of her sweatpants, placing it on a countertop. Her pump action shotgun is parked in a corner, and I ask her about it.
“I don’t walk back and forth to my place without protection,” she explains. “Not anymore with all that’s going on. Plus, Mom’s nervous, and nothing better for home protection than a shotgun.”
“That’s a scary thought.” I’m not eager to think what might happen if Dorothy decided to defend the fort. “I guess she’s planning on staying here for a while.” Opening a drawer, I get out napkins and silverware.
“Things are tough at Colonial Landing.” Lucy takes off her jacket, hanging it on the back of a chair. “The media’s all over the place, and people are showing up, gawking. Dana Diletti is still at it if you can believe that. I guess being a suspect in her own attempted home break-in doesn’t matter. If anything, she’s more popular, trending all over the Internet.”
“I’m sure she’ll say the police planted the evidence or something to that effect.”
“She’s already saying it. You ready for a drink?”
I couldn’t be readier, I tell her. But there’s one order of business I need to take care of first.
“The wine downstairs,” I explain as I think about what I just saw in the trace evidence lab. “I want to check just in case there’s any chance that bottle wasn’t the only one tampered with.”
“I think you’re worrying too much,” she says, wearing the bracelet I gave her.
“It looks nice on you.” I touch it while walking past to a cabinet, getting out plates. “And it’s not about my worrying. It’s about the evidence.”
Setting the breakfast table by the curtained window, I pass on what I discovered before coming home. It’s possible the microscopic debris inside the bottle of Bordeaux could have come from here.
“What if the wine was injected with poison inside our own basement?” I say to her. “There have been people in and out since I got back from France.”
“That’s true,” Lucy says. “But I found nothing on the security videos that would indicate someone was on the property who shouldn’t be.”
“I’m going to check, no way I wouldn’t after what happened.” Opening my briefcase, I pull out my magnifier glasses and a pair of nitrile gloves. “It shouldn’t be hard to tell if the other bottles have been tampered with now that I know we’re looking for an injection site.”
“You want some help?” She stirs the ground beef on the stove.
“No. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Maybe bring up another bottle of tequila while you’re at it.”
“You got it.” I head for the basement, and Merlin is on my heels, keeping me company.
Down the wooden stairs, I flip on lights as I go from one room to the next, feeling the same strange icy draft. Then I hear a faint noise from outside the door with its locked acrylic flap that clicks open when Merlin slinks past. The wind is starting up again, branches tap-tapping a window.
Lucy’s cat follows me like a shadow as I reach the refrigerator, putting on the exam gloves and magnifier glasses. I count fourteen bottles, beautiful Burgundies and Bordeaux. Robust Italian reds, and delicate whites, and I begin examining them one at a time. The foil-wrapped corks I’m looking at haven’t been perforated by a syringe or anything else.
“So far, so good,” I let Merlin know as he rubs my legs. “Maybe I won’t have to lose all these wonderful wines I’ve carried home for years,” I add as the cat door lock clicks free again, and he’s not close enough for that to happen.
Taking off the magnifier glasses, I freeze in shocked disbelief. A muscular male hand covered with angry red scratches pushes through the flap, followed by a black sleeve–covered arm as Merlin hisses, arching his back. The man reaches up toward the inside door handle, and my response is automatic.
I kick his elbow with all my might in the opposite direction that it’s supposed to bend. The sound of the joint breaking is as loud as a stick snapping, and he howls and shrieks in furious pain. Hurrying through the basement, I’m yelling for Lucy as I thunder up the stairs, and there’s no sign of her anywhere.
I grab her pistol off the countertop, flying through the house, and out the front door, my heart hammering through my chest. Running through the near dark, I can hear the thudding before I see the source of it. My niece is caving in the man’s head with the butt of her shotgun. Lifting it and slamming it down again and again.
While our intruder lies motionless, his right arm bent at an unnatural angle. Nearby is a can of spray paint. Also, Merlin’s missing collar, and I get the impression of someone stocky dressed in dark clothing and boots.
“Lucy, it’s okay.” I’m careful not to startle her as she continues maniacally, and each time the sound is sickening. “Lucy, you can stop. It’s okay.”
“That’s the way she’s wired,” I remind him. “Which is also why she likes you retired.”
“I didn’t retire,” he fires back defensively.
“From some things you did,” I reply, and he’s not naïve.
Dorothy isn’t thrilled about him working with me. I’ve played peacemaker with them before and no doubt will again.
“Well, it gets old, Doc,” he says. “At times like this it wears me thin, having to pay so much attention when there’s big stuff going on. Murders, for example.”
“Take her out to dinner,” I suggest. “It’s early. Go back to my place, clean up and the two of you do something fun. The Oak Steakhouse, you know how much you two like that place.”
“With you getting freakin’ fired, how is anything supposed to feel like fun right now? Judas Priest! First our neighbor gets whacked. Now you lose your job. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to move here.”
“I’m sorry,” I reply with surprising composure. “I never asked you to come along for the ride, and this is why. And you’re going to have to explain to my sister what’s going on.”
“Okay, you’re right,” he says, and I’m glad Dorothy can’t hear his reluctance.
That’s part of the problem. I don’t want him preferring my company to hers, and it’s already happening now that we’re working together again.
“It’s not helpful if she resents me more than usual,” I remind him.
“I’ll drop you off, and take her out, but I really don’t like you driving home alone,” he says.
“I have to at some point,” I reply, texting Rex Bonetta that I’m pulling into the parking lot.
I’m hoping he’s still around, and he is. I ask if we can meet in the trace evidence lab, and he replies that he’s there now. Marino stops in his usual spot, and it’s not lost on me that Maggie’s Volvo is nowhere to be seen.
“She picked a good day to leave early,” I comment. “Not that I’d really want to run into her. You and Dorothy have a nice dinner.”
Shutting the door abruptly, I turn away from him, feeling shaky inside as if I might cry. I’m hoping he didn’t see the look on my face, everything catching up with me. Taking a deep breath, steadying myself, I unlock the pedestrian door. I pass through the empty bay, stepping inside the lower level where there’s a better phone signal, and I call Lucy.
“I’m here at the office, safe and sound,” I tell her as I walk past the empty autopsy suite. “And Marino and your mother are going out to dinner.”
“The helicopter is on its way back to the hangar, and I’m headed home,” Lucy says in my wireless earpiece. “How long will you be?”
“Not terribly long, and it’s going to be just you and me for dinner if you don’t mind waiting a bit.” I walk past the anthropology lab, the bones in their big pot softly clattering.
“We’ve got everything for tacos,” Lucy volunteers, and she’s not offered to help with a meal in a while.
“That sounds wonderful.” I open the fire-exit door, heading upstairs to an isolated wing that houses the scanning electron microscope.
Momentarily, I’m following the second-floor corridor, wondering who knows I’m about to be a thing of the past. Through observation windows, I glance at preoccupied scientists in the DNA clean rooms and labs with their airlocks and special ventilation, everybody covered in PPE. A few look up at me as I walk past, and it’s possible they don’t know the news.
Most assuredly they will by morning when I return to clear out my office. Ahead is the latent fingerprints lab, and I may as well check on one of my cases while I’m in the area. Veteran examiner Andy Patient is working under a chemical hood, gloved up and masked, trying to rehydrate the shriveled tips of fingers removed from mummified remains.
They were discovered in an abandoned barn not long after I started here, and I’ve yet to find evidence of violence. But the victim, an older white male, was naked when he died, his clothing strewn about as if he disrobed in a hurry. While that might look suspicious, it’s not necessarily.
As irrational as it seems, often that’s what people do when they’re freezing to death. They have the false sense of being too warm and begin to undress. I’m suspicious he may have sought shelter in the barn during cold weather and died from exposure. But who was he, and what was he doing on a deserted farm?
“Hi, Andy.” I stop in the doorway. “How are things going?”
“I’m optimistic.” He turns around, a wizened fingertip gripped in the forceps he holds in one hand, a syringe in the other.
If he knows I’ve been fired, he doesn’t let on.
“I think we’ll have prints with enough characteristics to run through IAFIS.” He refers to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
“Let’s hope we get lucky since we weren’t with DNA,” I reply as he injects a sodium carbonate solution into what might be the tip of a thumb as best I can tell from where I’m standing.
I examined the remains days ago, noting that muscles and ligaments had decomposed but there was cutaneous tissue and visible friction ridges. Recommending we try restoring the fingertips, I cut them off at the middle phalanges. Since then Andy has been working on the desiccated digits, trying to get prints, still to no avail.
“We do have an update, a possibility of who this might be.” He places the fingertip in a petri dish. “The police say an eighty-three-year-old man wandered away from a nursing home in Winchester almost two years ago.”
A widower suffering from dementia, he has kids who don’t live here or care, it seems. Delusional and paranoid, he believed the government was after him, and had tried to escape multiple times in the past.
“Well, I think you may have figured it out,” I say to Andy. “And that would explain why his DNA’s not in CODIS.”
“What’s really bad is the barn where he was found isn’t even two miles from the nursing home.” Taking off his gloves and mask, he walks over to me, his blue eyes tired behind his glasses, the stubble on his chin salty white. “I’m getting the impression nobody looked all that hard. What it sounds like is he wandered off in his confused state and sought shelter.”
“What time of year was it?”
“February during a cold snap,” he says, and how terribly sad. “Do you think you’ll sign him out as an accident?” he asks, and I don’t answer.
I won’t be around to do that. The next chief will have to but I act as if business will go on as usual.
“We’ll see what else we find out,” I reply.
“I have a feeling this is going to end up in a lawsuit.” He takes off his lab coat.
“Yes, I’m sure the kids who had no use for him will go after the nursing home,” I reply, walking off.
Chapter 38
Where I’m headed is in a wing of its own for good reason.
The lab is windowless, its walls, floor and ceiling thick concrete reinforced with steel to minimize vibrations or anything else that might interfere with highly sensitive instruments. When I walk in, Rex is seated at the scanning electron microscope (SEM) with trace evidence examiner Lee Fishburne.
“She’s never been known for her modesty,” Rex says instantly, and I don’t know what he’s talking about. “Greta Fruge,” he explains. “I was on the phone with her a little while ago.”
“She can be a showboat but is one hell of a toxicologist,” Lee volunteers, and I remember him from my early years when I was in Richmond.
His thick black hair is now a white crescent around the back of his head, and he’s thinner, a little stooped.
“She’s going to work with us, supplying assays,” Rex says, his attention lingering on me, and he knows.
I can see it in his eyes.
“Hopefully, we can find better ways to identify what’s hitting the streets, bad stuff like iso,” he says. “And that might be what was used to poison the wine you carried home from France.”
“What we’re looking at right now is microscopic evidence that was in samples we took from the bottle.” Lee indicates the images on flat screens above a console as complicated as any cockpit.
At a magnification of 2000X, he’s identified trace evidence that includes multicolored paint pigments, copper, lead, silica, bat hair and periwinkle pollen grains that look like pinkish-yellow coral.
“Periwinkle?” I inquire, and while it’s not indigenous to Virginia, the creeper vines had overtaken the garden when we moved into our new home.
The perennial is native to Europe, and was brought to America in the 1700s, the very time our house was built. Without a doubt there’s an abundance of periwinkle pollen on the property inside and out. There would be paint pigments and everything else I’m seeing. Even bat hair, I suppose.
How distressing if it turns out the wine was tampered with inside our own basement. Could I get more things wrong? I’m plagued by doubts that are growing by leaps and bounds.
“What can you tell me about the paint pigments?” I look at them on the video displays.
“They’re old, real old,” Lee lets me know. “The green pigment has arsenic in it, and that’s not been used for centuries. The white paint you’re seeing is made of lead. The blue is lapis lazuli, one of the most expensive pigments long ago, usually reserved for important works of art like painting the Madonna, for example.”
“I’m wondering if what we’re finding means anything to you,” Rex says to me.
I think of the trace evidence that we’d discover if we started analyzing microscopic samples from my own place. The house was hung with valuable old art while the former ambassador to the U.K. lived there. From what I gather, he collected rare paintings, sculptures and tapestries during his travels, and had them throughout the house.
I don’t let on that what Lee is finding on SEM and X-ray diffraction might have anything to do with me personally. Even Rex doesn’t know the whole truth about the poisoned wine, only that it was given to me overseas, and I made the mistake of tasting it. At least I can be grateful that Elvin is none the wiser about that, not yet at any rate, and it’s time to go home. I’ve done enough damage for one day.
“Carry on no matter what.” I figure Rex knows what I mean, and he walks me into the corridor. “I’ll be around in the morning,” I say to him. “Let me know when you get a confirmation with the drug screen.”
“I know you didn’t really resign,” he says. “Screw Elvin Reddy. Don’t let him run you off. The way people are acting is because of his influence, Kay. You’re the most hopeful thing that’s happened around here, the only chance of getting rid of that influence.”
“For now, it seems he’s gotten his way,” I reply. “But thanks, Rex.” I can feel him watch as I head back to the stairwell.
Maybe Lucy hasn’t lost her touch but I’m worried I may have lost mine. Second thoughts and misgivings are seizing my thoughts, and it plagues me that Cammie’s death will be left unsolved. Once I’m out of the picture, the labs will stop the analysis I told them to restart. Her case will be ignored again, and her family will never get the satisfaction they deserve.
Wyatt is opening the bay door as I walk through, letting in a hearse, and I tell him good night.
“I heard about you quitting,” he says. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Thank you, Wyatt,” I reply. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Climbing into my Subaru, I start it up. I listen to music on the radio all the way home, in no mood to chat with anyone else, dreading what my sister will have to say when she hears the news. Probably she already has, and I imagine Marino getting her lubricated with cosmopolitans, maybe the apple martinis she’s fond of, and lowering the boom.
He’ll let her know I didn’t resign, if he hasn’t already. I was fired, and they aren’t staying here if Benton, Lucy and I don’t. If we return to Massachusetts, so will Dorothy and Marino, and from there it’s simple to script what will happen. She’ll feign shock and upset, and I’ll hear about it forever.
How terrible for me. How unfair, and she’ll hound me with endless advice and questions, all the while secretly pleased by my failure. It’s time to clear out the negativity, I tell myself as I reach the house. I don’t need Lucy worrying about me, and she must have seen me on her many cameras.
In a sweat suit, sneakers and her bomber jacket, she’s waiting by the carriage house when I pull up. She lifts one of the wooden rolling doors, her flat-eared cat pacing nearby, his tail twitching. I wait until she picks him up, making sure he’s safely out of the way as I tuck my take-home car inside. Climbing out, we pull down the door together, and I give her the hug I wanted to give her earlier.
“Lucy, you were amazing today,” I say as we walk to the house. “And it seems your aunt can’t stay out of trouble.”
The news is playing as I unlock the front door, and Merlin follows us to the kitchen where spicy ground beef is simmering on the stove, a cookie sheet lined with taco shells, and my stomach growls. An aged añejo tequila is on the countertop next to a shaker filled with ice, and two glasses.
Lucy pulls her pistol from the back of her sweatpants, placing it on a countertop. Her pump action shotgun is parked in a corner, and I ask her about it.
“I don’t walk back and forth to my place without protection,” she explains. “Not anymore with all that’s going on. Plus, Mom’s nervous, and nothing better for home protection than a shotgun.”
“That’s a scary thought.” I’m not eager to think what might happen if Dorothy decided to defend the fort. “I guess she’s planning on staying here for a while.” Opening a drawer, I get out napkins and silverware.
“Things are tough at Colonial Landing.” Lucy takes off her jacket, hanging it on the back of a chair. “The media’s all over the place, and people are showing up, gawking. Dana Diletti is still at it if you can believe that. I guess being a suspect in her own attempted home break-in doesn’t matter. If anything, she’s more popular, trending all over the Internet.”
“I’m sure she’ll say the police planted the evidence or something to that effect.”
“She’s already saying it. You ready for a drink?”
I couldn’t be readier, I tell her. But there’s one order of business I need to take care of first.
“The wine downstairs,” I explain as I think about what I just saw in the trace evidence lab. “I want to check just in case there’s any chance that bottle wasn’t the only one tampered with.”
“I think you’re worrying too much,” she says, wearing the bracelet I gave her.
“It looks nice on you.” I touch it while walking past to a cabinet, getting out plates. “And it’s not about my worrying. It’s about the evidence.”
Setting the breakfast table by the curtained window, I pass on what I discovered before coming home. It’s possible the microscopic debris inside the bottle of Bordeaux could have come from here.
“What if the wine was injected with poison inside our own basement?” I say to her. “There have been people in and out since I got back from France.”
“That’s true,” Lucy says. “But I found nothing on the security videos that would indicate someone was on the property who shouldn’t be.”
“I’m going to check, no way I wouldn’t after what happened.” Opening my briefcase, I pull out my magnifier glasses and a pair of nitrile gloves. “It shouldn’t be hard to tell if the other bottles have been tampered with now that I know we’re looking for an injection site.”
“You want some help?” She stirs the ground beef on the stove.
“No. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Maybe bring up another bottle of tequila while you’re at it.”
“You got it.” I head for the basement, and Merlin is on my heels, keeping me company.
Down the wooden stairs, I flip on lights as I go from one room to the next, feeling the same strange icy draft. Then I hear a faint noise from outside the door with its locked acrylic flap that clicks open when Merlin slinks past. The wind is starting up again, branches tap-tapping a window.
Lucy’s cat follows me like a shadow as I reach the refrigerator, putting on the exam gloves and magnifier glasses. I count fourteen bottles, beautiful Burgundies and Bordeaux. Robust Italian reds, and delicate whites, and I begin examining them one at a time. The foil-wrapped corks I’m looking at haven’t been perforated by a syringe or anything else.
“So far, so good,” I let Merlin know as he rubs my legs. “Maybe I won’t have to lose all these wonderful wines I’ve carried home for years,” I add as the cat door lock clicks free again, and he’s not close enough for that to happen.
Taking off the magnifier glasses, I freeze in shocked disbelief. A muscular male hand covered with angry red scratches pushes through the flap, followed by a black sleeve–covered arm as Merlin hisses, arching his back. The man reaches up toward the inside door handle, and my response is automatic.
I kick his elbow with all my might in the opposite direction that it’s supposed to bend. The sound of the joint breaking is as loud as a stick snapping, and he howls and shrieks in furious pain. Hurrying through the basement, I’m yelling for Lucy as I thunder up the stairs, and there’s no sign of her anywhere.
I grab her pistol off the countertop, flying through the house, and out the front door, my heart hammering through my chest. Running through the near dark, I can hear the thudding before I see the source of it. My niece is caving in the man’s head with the butt of her shotgun. Lifting it and slamming it down again and again.
While our intruder lies motionless, his right arm bent at an unnatural angle. Nearby is a can of spray paint. Also, Merlin’s missing collar, and I get the impression of someone stocky dressed in dark clothing and boots.
“Lucy, it’s okay.” I’m careful not to startle her as she continues maniacally, and each time the sound is sickening. “Lucy, you can stop. It’s okay.”
