Free Dust by Patricia Cornwell Page A

missing posted it on their website around midnight,” Machado says. “Haley Swanson.”
    “That’s kind of weird.”
    “Not necessarily. Everybody’s a journalist these days. She called nine-one-one and then posted the photo and that Gail was missing. Guess she was trying to help us do our job, right? The person in the photo looks like the dead lady. Exactly like her.”
    “Gail Shipton,” Marino confirms as I find a story on the Internet that grabs my attention.
    “Unless she’s got an identical twin.”
    Gail Shipton is involved in high-stakes litigation that is about to go to trial, and I remember Carin Hegel and what she told me in the federal courthouse several weeks ago. She referenced a gang of thugs and living away from home. I scroll through the story about a lawsuit Gail filed, the details surprisingly scant for a case this big. I search some more.
    “Has Haley Swanson come to the station to do a report yet?” Marino asks.
    “Not that I know of.”
    “That bothers me.”
    “Maybe she figures there’s no point, that Gail’s not missing anymore, that it’s a lot worse than that. How far out are you?” Machado’s voice fills the car.
    “ETA about five.”
    “The Doc with you?”
    “Ten-four.” Marino ends the call.
    “Gail Shipton was in the middle of a legal battle with her former financial manager, Dominic Lombardi.” I skip through the story displayed on my phone. “His international company, Double S, is locally based, just west of here in Concord.”
    “Never heard of it.” Marino irritably flicks his lights at an oncoming car that has its high beams on. “Not that I give a shit about financial companies since I’ve never exactly needed one and think most Wall Street types are crooks.”
    I search for “Double S,” and there are plenty of stories about it, most of them puff pieces probably placed by their PR machine.
    “It appears to specialize in extremely high-net-worth clients.” I dig down several pages and click on another news story, this one indicating not all has been rosy for Double S. “They’ve had problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, investments that allegedly violated the
Know your client
rule. Plus some problems with the IRS. And this is rather interesting. They’ve been sued at least six different times over the past eight years. For some reason no case has ever made it to court.”
    “Probably settled. Everybody settles. Litigation is the new national industry. The only thing made in America anymore,” Marino says acidly. “Legalized extortion. I falsely accuse you of something and you give me money to shut up. And if you can’t afford a hotshot lawyer you’re screwed. Like what just happened to me, a class-action suit handled by a shitty little law firm and I’m out two thousand bucks in truck repairs because the dealership had the biggest law firm in Boston and a PR firm and everything. A damn design problem with the bed being out of alignment and they said it was the little guy’s fault for driving it too hard over ruts.”
    Marino, who is anything but little, rants on about a truck he bought in the fall, his angry story one I’ve heard so often I practically have it memorized. After he’d driven the brand-new pickup for less than a week he noticed the rear was
squatting
, as he put it. When he gets to the part about the bump stop being impacted by the rear axle and the frame being too weak, I cut him off.
    “I can’t tell if the cases were settled.” I return his attention to Gail Shipton’s lawsuit against Double S and the suspicious fact that it appears she’s conveniently dead less than two weeks before the trial is to start. “But so far I don’t see any mention of settlements, just that the cases were dropped. That’s the word used in a story that ran in the
Financial Times
several years ago. ‘Double S is a big international business run by a small company in the horse country of Massachusetts.’”
    I skip