meeting in Iran with Ahmadinejad and something flew by vertically and landed vertically on a windowsill like a micro-Tinker Bell, I believe I’d notice it and be slightly suspicious.”
“If you were meeting with Ahmadinejad in Iran, I’d be slightly suspicious for a lot of reasons. Forgetting why my patient had the wing of one of these things on his coat, assuming this wing is part of an intact flybot—” I start to say.
“Not exactly a flybot,” she interrupts. “Not necessarily a spy-bot, either. That’s what I’m getting to. I think this is the holy grail.”
“Then whatever it is, what might it have been used for?”
“Let your imagination be the limit,” she answers. “I could make quite a list but can’t know definitively, not from one wing, although I can tell a few things that are significant. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the rest of it.”
“You mean on the body, on his coat? Find it where?”
“At the scene.”
“You went to Norton’s Woods.”
“Sure,” she says. “As soon as I realized what the wing was from. Of course I headed straight there.”
“We were together for hours.” I remind her that she could have told me before now. “Just you and me in the cockpit all the way here from Dover.”
“Funny thing about the intercom. Even when I’m sure it’s off in back, I’m still not sure. Not if it’s something I can’t afford having anyone overhear. Marino shouldn’t know about this.” She indicates the small white box with the wing in it.
“Why exactly?”
“Believe me, you don’t want him to know a damn thing about it. It’s a very small piece of something a lot bigger in more ways than one.”
She goes on to assure me that Marino knows nothing about her going to Norton’s Woods. He is unaware of the tiny mechanical wing or that it was a motivating factor in her encouraging him to bring me home from Dover early, to safely escort me in her helicopter. She didn’t mention any of this to me until now, she continues to explain, because she doesn’t trust anyone at the moment. Except Benton, she adds. And me, she adds. And she’s very careful where she has certain conversations, and all of us should be careful.
“Unless the area has been cleared,” she says, and what she means is swept, and the implication is that my office is safe or we wouldn’t be having this conversation inside it.
“You checked my office for surveillance devices?” I’m not shocked. Lucy knows how to sweep an area for hidden recorders because she knows how to spy. The best burglar is a locksmith. “Because you think who might be interested in bugging my office?”
“Not sure who’s interested in what or why.”
“Not Marino,” I then say.
“Well, that would be as obvious as a RadioShack nanny cam if he did it. Of course not. I’m not worried about him doing something like that. I just worry that he can’t keep his mouth shut,” Lucy replies. “At least not when it comes to certain people.”
“You talked about MORT in the helicopter. You weren’t worried about the intercom, about Marino, when it came to MORT.”
“Not the same thing. Not even close,” she says. “Doesn’t matter if Marino runs his mouth to certain people about a robot in the guy’s apartment. Other people already know about it, you can rest assured of that. I can’t have Marino talk about my little friend.” She looks at the small white box. “And he wouldn’t mean anything bad. But he doesn’t understand certain realities about certain people. Especially General Briggs and Captain Avallone.”
“I didn’t realize you know anything about her.” I’ve never mentioned Sophia Avallone to Lucy.
“When she was here. Jack showed her around. Marino bought her lunch, was kissing her uniformed ass. He doesn’t get it about people like that, about the fucking Pentagon, for that matter, or someone he stupidly assumes is one of us, you know, is safe.”
I’m relieved she realizes it, but I don’t want to encourage her to distrust Marino, not even slightly. She’s been through enough with him and finally they are friends again, close like they were when she was a child and he taught her to drive his truck and to shoot and she aggravated the hell out of him and it was mutual. She gets science from my genetics, but she gets her affinity for cop stuff, as she refers to it, from him. He was the big, tough detective in her life when she was a know-it-all difficult wunderkind, and he has loved and hated her as many different times as she has loved and hated him. But friends and colleagues now. Whatever it takes to keep it that way.
“From which I conclude Briggs doesn’t know about this.” I indicate the small white box on my desk. “And Captain Avallone doesn’t.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Is my office bugged right now?”
“Our conversation is completely safe,” she replies, and it isn’t an answer.
“What about Jack? Possible he knows about the flybot? Well, you didn’t tell him.”
“No damn way.”
“So unless someone’s called him looking for it. Or maybe its wing.”
“You mean if the killer called here looking for a missing flybot,” Lucy says. “And I’m just going to call it that for purposes of simplicity, although it’s not just a garden-variety flybot. That would be pretty stupid. That would imply the caller had something to do with the guy’s homicide.”
“We can’t rule out anything. Sometimes killers are stupid,” I reply. “If they’re desperate enough.”
10
Lucy gets up and goes into my private bathroom, where there is a single-cup coffeemaker on a counter. I hear her filling the tank with tap water and checking the small refrigerator. It is almost one a.m. and the snow hasn’t eased up, is falling hard and fast, and when the small flakes blow against the windows, the sound is like sand blasting the glass.
“Skim milk or cream?” Lucy calls out from what is supposed to be my private changing area, which includes a shower. “Bryce is such a good wife. He stocked your refrigerator.”
“I still drink it black.” I start opening my desk drawers, not sure what I’m looking for.
I think about my sloppy work station in the autopsy room. I think of people helping themselves to what they shouldn’t.
“Yeah, well, then why is there milk and cream?” Lucy’s loud voice. “Green Mountain or Black Tiger? There’s also hazelnut. Since when do you drink hazelnut?” The questions are rhetorical. She knows the answers.
“Since never,” I mutter, seeing pencils, pens, Post-its, paper clips, and in a bottom drawer, a pack of spearmint gum.
It is half-full, and I don’t chew gum. Who likes spearmint gum and would have reason to go into my desk? Not Bryce. He’s much too vain to chew gum, and if I caught him doing it, I would disapprove, because I consider it rude to chew gum in front of other people. Besides, Bryce wouldn’t root around inside my desk, not without permission. He wouldn’t dare.
“Jack likes hazelnut, French vanilla, shit like that, and he drinks it with skim milk unless he’s on one of his high-protein, high-fat diets,” Lucy continues from inside my bathroom. “Then he uses real cream, heavy cream, like what’s in here. I suppose if you had guests, were expecting visitors, you might have cream.”
“Nothing flavored, and please make it strong.”
“He’s a superuser just like you are,” Lucy’s voice then says. “His fingerprints are stored in every lock in this place just like yours are.”
I hear the spewing of hot water shooting through the K-Cup and use it as a welcome interruption. I refuse to engage in the poisonous speculation that Jack Fielding has been in my office during my absence, that maybe he’s been helping himself while he drinks coffee, chews gum, or who the hell knows what he’s been up to. But as I look around, it doesn’t seem possible. My office feels unlived-in. It certainly doesn’t appear as if anyone has been working in here, so what would he be doing?
“I went over to Norton’s Woods before Cambridge PD did, you know. Marino asked them to go back because of the serial number being eradicated from the Glock. But I got there first.” Lucy talks on loudly from inside the
