Autopsy(Kay Scarpetta #25)(33)

“I’m afraid you’re right,” I say to Lucy as we walk away from the cottage. “When I was going through her townhome, I didn’t get a good feeling about her.”

I describe the water-soluble paper, the pens I noticed. I explain that what I observed made me wonder if the biomedical engineer might be involved in illegal activities. Possibly she’d shown up in Old Town to stay below the radar while living on the lam.

“And in the process, I suspect that most of all she wanted to be close to Thor Laboratories.” I turn on my phone’s flashlight, shining it on either side of the driveway in search of Merlin’s missing collar.





CHAPTER 13

LUCY STOPS WALKING, STARING at her phone in the dark, her frustrated face dimly illuminated by the display.

“Unless something’s wrong with the app,” she informs me, “no joy so far.”

She’s not picking up the missing collar’s signal, she says as my light probes the woods and shrubs. Tendrils of fog drift, water dripping like a scene out of the horror show we were talking about earlier.

“What the heck has Merlin been up to?” Lucy’s breath looks like smoke.

She moves the phone closer so I can see the message, Device Not Found.

“For some reason, I’m only pinging on the new one, which has a different serial number.” She shows me on the app. “If the missing collar is in the area, we should be able to locate it.”

“It must be out of range,” I suppose.

Her exotic-looking flat-eared cat is often sighted blocks away, usually near a neighbor’s bird feeder.

“Maybe he lost his collar on someone else’s property. It could be anywhere,” I add.

“Or something’s wrong with it, maybe it got damaged,” Lucy says.

The wind is raw and biting as we near the garage, and I turn around often, having that same feeling of being watched.

“Whatever actually happened to her, she sure acted like someone was out to get her.” Lucy continues telling me her impressions of Gwen. “When Marino and I were with her, it was maybe two weeks after she’d moved in. I assumed most of her belongings hadn’t arrived yet.”

“It would seem they still haven’t based on what I saw inside the townhome a little while ago,” I reply. “Her secrecy and paranoia certainly fit with her leading a double life, and I’m betting we’ll discover she has another place somewhere.”

“Exactly, because where’s her stuff?” Lucy shines her light around, still no sign of the missing collar. “Not in Boston, and it’s not here. There’s nothing in storage anywhere, according to Jinx Slater, her ex. At least that he knows of, and according to him, she likes to spend money.”

“You talked to him?” I ask.

“Benton did today around lunchtime.”

“How is that possible? The police weren’t called about Gwen’s disappearance until hours after that. Unless I’ve missed something important,” I add as we near the house.

“Benton will fill you in himself,” Lucy says. “But it would seem that Jinx made it pretty clear that Gwen was passing along critically sensitive information while selling proprietary technologies. Spying, and no big surprise.”

It’s suspected this started about the time she left MIT, which also is about the time she paid off everything she owed including substantial school loans. For the most part she stopped using credit cards, and soon after met Jinx, managing to fool him for years, he confided in Benton.

“It sounds like she lived beyond her means, and nothing was enough,” Lucy summarizes as we follow the walkway to the front porch. “Talented and smart, she was greedy, relentlessly ambitious and lacking in integrity, and that’s a bad combo. Accumulating a lot of debt, she made herself vulnerable to selling her soul to the devil.”

Since finishing MIT, Gwen changed her job situation on average every ten months, according to Jinx. She’d stay in a department or division long enough to learn the ropes.

“Then she’d move on to the next one, and he began suspecting she was secretly meeting with someone,” Lucy continues, passing on what Benton learned.

“As in having an affair? Or did he suspect she was involved in illegal activities?” I scan open the front door.

“He was increasingly worried about both, and when he confronted her this past July, that’s when she moved out and started spreading lies about him,” Lucy says.

“Where was she from July until moving here?”

“A short-term rental in the Boston area. Then she came to Old Town.”

The alarm is off when we walk in, Christmas music and the television still playing in the background, and I don’t see anyone. Benton likely is upstairs changing his clothes. Either that or he and Dorothy are in the kitchen.

“She has no car. How’s she been getting around? Who drove her here?” Taking Lucy’s coat, I hang it and my borrowed vest in the entryway.

“Very good questions, and I have concerns about the former boyfriend,” Lucy says as we walk through the living room. “It sounds like he’s not over her based on what Benton told me.”

“As in stalking her? Following her here to Old Town? Or driving her here himself? What has he been doing? What do we really know about how estranged they were?”