“He’s clairvoyant, then,” I reply from the bed, where I’m under the covers, nothing but pajamas on. “And I’m not on the phone and wasn’t talking to anyone.”
“How’s Sock? How ya doing, boy?” he then says before I can answer. “How come he smells funny? What did you put on him, flea medicine? This time of year? You look okay. How are you feeling?”
“I cleaned his ears.”
“So how are you doing, Doc?”
Marino looms over me, and his presence seems larger than usual because he’s in a heavy parka and a baseball cap and hiking boots while I’m in nothing but flannel, modestly tucked under a blanket and a duvet. He has a small black case in his hands that I recognize as Lucy’s iPad, unless he’s managed to get one of his own, which I doubt.
“I didn’t get hurt. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve just been staying in this morning, taking care of a few things,” I say to him. “I’m assuming Dawn Kincaid is fine. Last I heard, she was stable.”
“Stable? You’re joking, right?”
“I’m talking about her physical condition. The reattachment of her finger and the damage to the rest of them, the other three that were cut so severely. It’s probably a good thing for her it was so cold in the garage. And, of course, we thought to pack her hand and her severed finger in ice. I’m hoping that helped. Do you know? I haven’t heard a word. What’s her status? I’ve not heard any reports since she was admitted last night.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Marino’s eyes look at me, and they’re just as bloodshot as they were yesterday in Salem.
“I’m not kidding. Nobody’s told me a word. Benton said earlier he would check, but I don’t think he has.”
“He’s been on the phone with us all morning.”
“Maybe you’d be so kind as to call the hospital and check.”
“Like I give a flying fuck if she loses a finger or all of her damn fingers,” Marino says. “Why would you give a fuck? You afraid she’ll sue you? That must be it, and wouldn’t that figure? She probably will. Will sue you for maybe losing the use of her hand so she can’t build nanobots or whatever anymore, a psycho like that. I guess psychopaths are stable in the mental-illness sense of the word. Can you be crazy and a psychopath? And still be put together well enough to work at a place like Otwahl? Her case is going to be one big damn problem. If she gets out, well, can you imagine?”
“Why would she get out?”
“I’m just telling you the case is going to be a problem. You won’t be safe if she’s on the loose again. None of us will be.”
He helps himself to the foot of the bed, and the bed sinks and it feels like I’m suddenly sitting uphill as he makes himself comfortable, petting Sock and informing me that the police and the FBI found the “rat hole” Dawn Kincaid had rented, a one-bedroom apartment in Revere, just outside of Boston, where she stayed when she wasn’t with Eli Goldman or with her biological father, Jack Fielding, or whoever else she had entangled in her web at any point in time. Marino slips the iPad out of its case and turns it on as he lets me know that he and Lucy and quite a number of other investigators have been searching the rat-hole apartment for hours, going through Dawn’s computer and everything she has, including everything she’s stolen.
“What about her mother?” I ask. “Has anybody talked to her?”
“Dawn’s been in contact with her for a number of years, visiting her in prison down there in Georgia now and then. Reconnected with her and with Fielding on and off over the years. Latches on when she wants something, a first-class manipulator and user.”
“But does the mother know what’s happened up here?”
“Why do you care what a fucking child molester thinks?”
“Her relationship with Jack wasn’t that simple. It’s not as easily explained as you so eloquently just put it. I’d hate for her to hear about him on the news.”
“Who gives a shit.”
“I never want anybody to find out that way,” I reply. “I don’t care who it is. Her relationship with him wasn’t simple,” I repeat. “Relationships like that never are.”
“Plain and simple to me. Black and white.”
“If she hears it on the news,” I reply, and I realize I’m perseverating. “I always hate for that to happen. Such an inhumane way for people to find out terrible things like this. That’s my concern.”
“A klepto,” Marino then says, because his only interest is the case and what the investigators have been discovering at Dawn Kincaid’s apartment.
Apparently, she is a bona fide klepto, to quote Marino. Someone who seemed to have taken souvenirs from all sorts of people, he goes on, including items stolen from people we have no idea about. But some of what investigators have found so far has been identified as jewelry and rare coins from the Donahue house, and also several rare autographed musical manuscripts that Mrs. Donahue had no idea were missing from the family library.
Recovered from a locked chest in a closet in Dawn’s apartment were guns believed to have been removed from Fielding’s collection, and his wedding band. Also in this same trunk a martial-arts carry bag, I’m told, and inside it, a black satin sash, a white uniform, sparring gear, a lunch bag filled with rusty L-shaped flooring nails, and a hammer, and a pair of boys Adidas tae kwon do shoes believed to be the ones Mark Bishop was wearing while practicing kicks in his backyard the late afternoon he was killed. Although no one is quite certain how Dawn lured the boy into lying facedown and allowing her to play some gruesome game with him that included “pretending” to hammer nails into his head, or more specifically, the first nail.
“The one that went in right here,” Marino continues speculating, pointing to the space between the back of his neck and the base of his skull. “That would have killed him instantly, right?”
“If we must use that phrase,” I reply.
“I mean, she probably helped him in some of Fielding’s Tiny Tiger classes, maybe?” he continues to spin the story. “So the kid’s familiar with her, looks up to her, and she’s hot, I mean really good-looking. If it was me, I’d tell the kid I’m going to show him a new move or something and to lie down in the yard. And of course the kid’s going to do what an expert says, what someone teaching him says, and he lies down and it’s almost dark out and then boom! It’s over.”
“Someone like that can never get out,” I reply. “She’ll do more and do it worse next time, if that’s even possible.”
“Denying everything. She’s not talking, except to say Fielding did it all and she’s innocent.”
“He didn’t.”
“I’m with you.”
“She’s going to have a hard time explaining what’s in her apartment,” I point out, as I continue going through photographs. Marino must have taken hundreds.
“She’s good-looking and charming and smart as hell. And Fielding’s dead.”
“Incriminating.” I’ve said this several times as I look through the photographs on the iPad. “Should be very helpful to the prosecution. I’m not sure why you think the case will be a problem.”
“It’s going to be. The defense will pin it all on Fielding. The psycho bitch will get a dream team of big-shot lawyers, and they’ll make the jury believe Fielding did all of it.” Marino leans closer to me, and the slope of the bed changes again, and Sock is snoring quietly, not interested in his former owner or her rat hole, which has a dog bed in it, Marino shows me.
He leans close to me, clicking through several photographs of the dog’s plaid bed and several toys, and I indicate I’d rather look at the photographs myself. He and Sock are on top of me, and I’m feeling smothered.
“I just thought I’d show you, since I’m the one who took them,” Marino says.
“Thank you. I’ll manage. You did a very good job with the photographs.”
“Point is, it’s obvious the dog stayed here.” Marino means Sock stayed in Dawn Kincaid’s rat hole. “And also with Eli and with Fielding,” he adds. “To give her credit, I guess she liked her dog.”
“She left him in Jack’s house with no heat and all alone.” I click through photographs that are overwhelmingly incriminating.
“She doesn’t give a shit unless it suits her. When it doesn’t, she gets rid of it one way or another. So she cared about him when it suited her.”
“That’s the more likely story,” I agree.
