Wonderland Greyhound Park

Wonderland Greyhound Park shifts from a coveted parcel in Rick Weinberg’s casino plans to a derelict crime scene. Its history as a working racetrack and off-track betting venue gives way to buckled asphalt, abandoned equipment, and damaged buildings; by the time Spenser and Henry Cimoli search it, the empty site has become part of the investigation into the violence surrounding Weinberg’s development project.

The Racetrack in the Land Deal

Weinberg’s acquisition of land for his proposed casino was the culmination of years of work. Lewis Blanchard explains that buyers acting anonymously had assembled most of the parcels, while the last Ocean View condominium remained a sticking point because residents still lived there. Other properties, including the dog track, were empty. Blanchard says the deal had been in progress for five years, a span that makes the racetrack more than incidental scenery: it was one piece of a planned transformation pursued through a broad, carefully arranged land purchase.

The casino plan gives the site a second significance. Soon after Weinberg secured a particularly elusive piece of real estate, he was murdered. The precise connection between the killing and the acquisition is not established in the discussion, and the investigators do not yet know who killed him or why. They suspect organized crime, either in Boston or Las Vegas. The racetrack therefore sits within a project whose commercial ambition and unsettled criminal context are already intertwined, even before the abandoned grounds become the setting for new discoveries.

A Venue Left Behind

When Spenser and Henry return to Wonderland after midnight, the parking lot has been cleared of most of its cars. The exposed asphalt buckles and breaks into potholes. Fragments of the old amusement park stand beyond it, while crime-scene tape still marks the grandstand entrance and a new length of chain-link fencing blocks the racetrack frontage. Ragged construction trailers sit nearby. These details place the site between uses: evidence of a closed attraction remains, but the property is also fenced, watched, and associated with development work.

Inside, the former public spaces retain the debris of their ordinary purpose. Spenser and Henry pass abandoned ticket booths and turnstiles, then reach the concession stands and the large space once devoted to off-track betting. Loose wires and cables hang from the walls. Old losing tickets remain scattered across the floor, their paper litter recalling the crowds and transactions that have disappeared. The scene does not present the building as an empty abstraction; its leftover equipment and waste make the shutdown visible in the very places designed to manage customers, wagers, and movement through the venue.

The Search Through the Buildings

The search proceeds from the public betting area toward the Club House and the announcer’s booth once used by Sammy Cain. Puddles and a long stream of backed-up sewage mark the route upstairs. Overturned chairs, hamburger wrappers, and empty Budweiser cups remain in the booth, whose broad windows look out over the dirt track. At night, the track is barely visible, except for lights from warehouses nearby. The building’s former functions survive in fragments, but neither the track nor the booth offers a working center to the place.

Spenser and Henry continue through one room and then another. In a room lit only weakly from outside, they find a woman lying at an impossible angle on red-and-black linoleum. The discovery changes the search from exploration of a derelict property into an encounter with apparent lethal violence. The surrounding decay is concrete and accumulated, but the body makes the site’s danger immediate: the buildings have not merely been abandoned; someone has used them as a place where a person can be left unseen.

The Kennel and the Site’s New Meaning

Beyond the dirt track, now overgrown with weeds, lie old metal starting boxes and a cinder-block kennel. A light comes from its open entrance. Inside, cages line both sides of a central passage, and a mechanic’s lamp has been run through pipes and connected to a generator. Thick chains hang from the same pipes, holding the body of a man. The generator makes the walls and cages shake. Beneath the man are an old car battery, a bucket of water, sponges, and metal brushes attached to wires—a crude arrangement that suggests torture.

The kennel’s contents turn the racetrack’s abandonment into part of the investigation’s present-tense threat. Spenser and Henry approach armed, and both keep their guns ready even though the man is dead. The venue’s old sporting and betting infrastructure persists around them as machinery of another kind: cages, chains, wires, and a generator now frame evidence of violence rather than entertainment. Wonderland thus marks a sharp reversal in the land’s meaning. Once a parcel in a casino development plan and a public betting venue, it is now a fenced ruin where the search for answers leads to two bodies and an improvised torture setup.