Flesh and Blood. Patricia Cornwell
and an abusive father. In January Leo was sent to her office because of his behavior. He’d started sneaking alcohol. He keyed a car and was “mouthing off” to his teachers. In early May he was suspended from the tennis team after showing up at practice drunk and hitting the coach with a ball hard enough to bloody his nose.
“He started having too much spare time because he didn’t have practice anymore and now school’s out,” Joanna explains. “He was bored, lonely. He started riding his bike past our house all the time. Angie …”
“Angelina Brown,” Marino says. “Your upstairs neighbor.”
“Yes,” Joanna replies. “She would see him from her window. Her desk is in front of her window and she would see him riding back and forth in front of the house.”
“Maybe he was the one stalking your husband? Did that ever occur to you?”
“Leo doesn’t have a license yet or access to a car.”
“Was he ever inside this apartment?”
I glance down at a text message from firearms examiner Liz Wrighton as Joanna goes on to say that she always talked to Leo outside. He was never in here.
“I tried to help him.” Her tone turns to iron, and I don’t let on that what I’m reading is stunning, both extremely good and awful.
We have a high-confidence candidate. That’s Liz’s cautious way of saying we got a hit in the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, NIBIN. A comparison of digital images from New Jersey and the frag Machado dropped off at her lab shows that the measurements, the lands and grooves match. The same gun was used.
A sniper. Three victims who seem to have nothing in common.
“And there’s no reason, absolutely nothing I ever did except care about him.” Joanna’s eyes blaze. “Except to treat him nice, to be helpful and that’s what he does to thank me!”
The Charles River shines deep blue in the midafternoon sun, barely ruffled by a light breeze. Sycamores, weeping willows and Bradford pears that have lost their flowers and I remember when they fell like snow, covering sidewalks and drifting into the street. For a while I drove to and from my office in a blossomy storm that made me happy.
I look out my side window at rowers leaning their backs into long slender oars, slicing through the water in blade-like sculls. The DeWolfe Boathouse is to our right, and on our left the stair-step-shaped Hyatt Hotel, then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s spreading campus. In Marino’s SUV again, headed to the CFC, and we’re on the subject of the cell phone signals picked up when Joanna Cather claimed to be in New Hampshire this morning.
She absolutely wasn’t. Not at any time. She was telling us the truth about her lie. At shortly after seven a.m. she drove out of her cell area in Cambridge, her phone’s signal picked up by FCC-registered antenna towers along I-90 East and Massachusetts Avenue, then I-93 South. Her final destination was Gallivan Boulevard in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester where she and her husband had planned to move today.
They’d rented a two-story shingle-sided Colonial with a stone cellar, a sunporch, a garage, hardwood floors and a security system. Marino has shown me photographs of the listing on the Internet, a handsome house with character built in the 1920s. The asking price is $4,000 per month, unfurnished, utilities not included, a lot of money for the high school faculty couple. The Realtor’s name is Mary Sapp and Marino has left a message for her to call him as soon as possible.
“I got a hunch about it.” He’s switched to another topic, the timing, why the killer struck now. “I think their suddenly deciding to move triggered something so to speak. And the reason they decided to skip town is also why Nari wiped down the drawers. I think Leo Gantz’s accusation opened a can of worms in more ways than one.”
His story is ruinous no matter the outcome. Consensual sex and it’s Joanna’s word against his. As she was telling us what she called a bald-faced lie, I sensed she has feelings for him. Not just hateful ones.
“Nari was worried the police were going to show up with a search warrant any minute,” Marino says, “and while they were at it bust him for drugs.”
“His wife claims he’s clean,” I remind him. “His needle tracks are old.”
“He could be snorting or smoking.”
“Tox will tell.”
“Plain and simple there was something he didn’t want the cops to find a trace of and I’m putting my money on heroin. The cops being Cambridge, in other words yours truly,” he adds. “A complaint of sex with a minor and we were going to be called.”
But Cambridge PD hasn’t been. Leo’s unemployed father began threatening Nari and his wife but didn’t call the police.
“Wait and see. This is about money,” I reply. “Leo’s father probably figures they got a big settlement after suing the school. The irony is they haven’t gotten a dime.”
I had Lucy check. Motions are still being filed in Jamal Nari’s discrimination suit against Emerson Academy. Depositions have been scheduled, a trial date set, the usual game of chicken that only the lawyers win. The information can be found in legal databases but it hasn’t been in the press. If Leo Gantz’s father has been paying attention he could easily infer that Nari and his wife recently had come into money. The new Honda alone was enough to cause assumptions.
“If it had been me showing up to investigate whether she and Leo had sex inside the apartment I would have done everything I just did.” Marino is suddenly watching his mirrors. “You know me. No stone unturned.”
There was no cushion unturned either. Before we left the apartment he searched it again, looking under the mattress, the furniture and rugs, and inside pillows, whatever might be a hiding place. He scoured the Honda SUV and the rented Suburban. Marino processed everything that didn’t move for prints, for trace evidence.
He swabbed for DNA and when he sprayed a chemical reagent on the guitars they luminesced faintly and for a brief duration. So did the two empty guitar cases on the bed and the Bankers Box that looked rifled through plus the condoms, the Imodium under the sink. All of it glowed the whitish blue false positive for blood, a typical reaction to bleach.
He’s looking in the mirrors, an angry expression on his face. He slows down.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“I don’t believe it.” He slows even more, almost to a crawl. “The same asshole,” he says.
I look in my side mirror and recognize the pickup truck we saw earlier today when Marino confronted the young man with the leaf blower. Gray with a lot of chrome, a Super Duty truck, an older one in mint condition.
It passes us in the right lane, a hands on mechanics logo and phone number on the door, and the driver is light-skinned with short dark hair. I don’t see anybody with him or evidence of lawn care equipment.
“That’s not who we saw earlier, the kid with the leaf blower,” I puzzle. “Is it the same plate number?”
“Pretty damn sure.”
“The truck we saw on my street had Sonny’s Lawn Care on it.”
Marino holds up his BlackBerry, showing me the photograph he took this morning. The license tag is the same as the one on the gray truck that just passed us. The phone number is also the same. The truck is far ahead of us now, in the right lane with its right-turn signal on.
“A magnetic logo,” Marino decides. “The type that’s removable, has to be. What was on there this morning definitely said Sonny’s Lawn Care with the phone number under it. Maybe he’s got more than one business that share the same phone line.”
“Then