that sucks at our feet, headed toward Machado and the two officers, one with Cambridge, the other with MIT.
Having stood sentry over the body for more than an hour, they look wet and chilled, their boots chunked with red clay. Machado’s boyish face is tired and tense, with a shadow of stubble, and I can sense his worries. He has legitimate ones.
Cambridge is a powerhouse, with Harvard and MIT and multibillion-dollar technology companies, not to mention a constant stream of visitors that includes celebrities, royalty, and sitting heads of state. The DA and the mayor will be breathing fire down the investigative unit’s neck if this case isn’t solved quickly and quietly.
“I don’t see anybody guarding the gate,” Marino says right off. “There’s a news crew hovering like vultures. Barbara
Un
fairbanks, it just so happens. Where’s the backup I asked for?”
“We’ve got another car coming.” Machado turns his attention to the parking lot where the news van is waiting with headlights on, engine rumbling.
For an instant I hold Barbara Fairbanks’s stare. A tall lithe woman with bottomless dark eyes and short raven-black hair, she’s remarkably pretty in a hard way, like a gemstone, like a perfectly shaped figure carved of Thai spinel or tourmaline. She turns away and climbs back inside the van, and she’s not the sort to give up on a scoop.
“The body may have been placed on top of something and dragged,” Marino says to Machado. “The grass just inside the gate looks disturbed and pressed down in places with divots where it got dug up in spots.”
“There are a lot of divots and churned-up areas,” Machado replies, and it doesn’t seem to bother him that Marino has a way of acting as if he’s in charge. “The problem is knowing for sure when any of them happened. It’s hard to tell because of the conditions.”
After setting scene cases in the mud, Harold and Rusty place the spine board and sheets on top of them, awaiting my instruction as Marino digs a pair of examination gloves out of a pocket and asks for a camera. I silently make plans, calculating how to handle what I expect will happen next as I watch the news van drive out of the parking lot. I have no doubt that Barbara Fairbanks hasn’t given up. I expect she’ll circle around to the other side of the field, the one nearest us, and try to film through the fence. I’m not going to examine the body until I know exactly what she intends to do.
“I’ll walk around, get some photos.” Marino turns on his flashlight and is careful stepping in the muck, sweeping the beam of light over puddles and red mud.
The MIT officer says to me, “I’m pretty sure he didn’t do anything to her out here, just left her so she’d be found really fast.”
I set down my scene case as he continues to offer his opinions, and with his strong jaw and perfect build he’s probably used to commanding attention. I remember him well from a case several weeks ago. An MIT freshman died suddenly and unexpectedly during wrestling practice.
“Drugs,” he adds. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
I don’t recall his name but I won’t forget Bryce following him and gawking when the officer appeared inside the large-scale x-ray room while I was using an embalming machine to inject contrast dye into the dead wrestler’s femoral artery, a procedure that would seem bizarre to someone unfamiliar with postmortem angiography. Three-dimensional computed tomography images revealed the cause of death before I touched the body with a blade.
“We’ve met before,” I say to him as I crouch down by my field case. “Earlier this month.”
“Yeah, that was pretty crazy. I thought for a minute you were a mad scientist pumping in fluids like you were trying to raise him from the dead. Andy Hunter,” he reintroduces himself, his gray eyes penetrating. “It turns out the kid’s father is a Nobel Prize winner. You’d think people that smart could have prevented
Having stood sentry over the body for more than an hour, they look wet and chilled, their boots chunked with red clay. Machado’s boyish face is tired and tense, with a shadow of stubble, and I can sense his worries. He has legitimate ones.
Cambridge is a powerhouse, with Harvard and MIT and multibillion-dollar technology companies, not to mention a constant stream of visitors that includes celebrities, royalty, and sitting heads of state. The DA and the mayor will be breathing fire down the investigative unit’s neck if this case isn’t solved quickly and quietly.
“I don’t see anybody guarding the gate,” Marino says right off. “There’s a news crew hovering like vultures. Barbara
Un
fairbanks, it just so happens. Where’s the backup I asked for?”
“We’ve got another car coming.” Machado turns his attention to the parking lot where the news van is waiting with headlights on, engine rumbling.
For an instant I hold Barbara Fairbanks’s stare. A tall lithe woman with bottomless dark eyes and short raven-black hair, she’s remarkably pretty in a hard way, like a gemstone, like a perfectly shaped figure carved of Thai spinel or tourmaline. She turns away and climbs back inside the van, and she’s not the sort to give up on a scoop.
“The body may have been placed on top of something and dragged,” Marino says to Machado. “The grass just inside the gate looks disturbed and pressed down in places with divots where it got dug up in spots.”
“There are a lot of divots and churned-up areas,” Machado replies, and it doesn’t seem to bother him that Marino has a way of acting as if he’s in charge. “The problem is knowing for sure when any of them happened. It’s hard to tell because of the conditions.”
After setting scene cases in the mud, Harold and Rusty place the spine board and sheets on top of them, awaiting my instruction as Marino digs a pair of examination gloves out of a pocket and asks for a camera. I silently make plans, calculating how to handle what I expect will happen next as I watch the news van drive out of the parking lot. I have no doubt that Barbara Fairbanks hasn’t given up. I expect she’ll circle around to the other side of the field, the one nearest us, and try to film through the fence. I’m not going to examine the body until I know exactly what she intends to do.
“I’ll walk around, get some photos.” Marino turns on his flashlight and is careful stepping in the muck, sweeping the beam of light over puddles and red mud.
The MIT officer says to me, “I’m pretty sure he didn’t do anything to her out here, just left her so she’d be found really fast.”
I set down my scene case as he continues to offer his opinions, and with his strong jaw and perfect build he’s probably used to commanding attention. I remember him well from a case several weeks ago. An MIT freshman died suddenly and unexpectedly during wrestling practice.
“Drugs,” he adds. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
I don’t recall his name but I won’t forget Bryce following him and gawking when the officer appeared inside the large-scale x-ray room while I was using an embalming machine to inject contrast dye into the dead wrestler’s femoral artery, a procedure that would seem bizarre to someone unfamiliar with postmortem angiography. Three-dimensional computed tomography images revealed the cause of death before I touched the body with a blade.
“We’ve met before,” I say to him as I crouch down by my field case. “Earlier this month.”
“Yeah, that was pretty crazy. I thought for a minute you were a mad scientist pumping in fluids like you were trying to raise him from the dead. Andy Hunter,” he reintroduces himself, his gray eyes penetrating. “It turns out the kid’s father is a Nobel Prize winner. You’d think people that smart could have prevented
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