Port Mortuary

ALSO BY PATRICIA CORNWELL

THE SCARPETTA NOVELS

Postmortem

Body of Evidence

All That Remains

Cruel and Unusual

The Body Farm

From Potter’s Field

Cause of Death

Unnatural Exposure

Point of Origin

Black Notice

The Last Precinct

Blow Fly

Trace

Predator

Book of the Dead

Scarpetta

The Scarpetta Factor

ANDY BRAZIL SERIES

Hornet’s Nest

Southern Cross

Isle of Dogs

WIN GARANO SERIES

At Risk

The Front

NON-FICTION

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed

BIOGRAPHY

Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

OTHER WORKS

Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen

Life’s Little Fable

Scarpetta’s Winter Table

A NOTE TO MY READERS

While this is a work of fiction, it is not science fiction. The medical and forensic procedures, and technologies and weapons, you are about to see exist now, even as you read this work. Some of what you are about to encounter is extremely disturbing. All of it is possible.

Also real and fully operational at this writing are various entities, including the following:

Port Mortuary at Dover Air Force Base

Armed Forces Medical Examiner (AFME)

Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL)

Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP)

Department of Defense (DoD)

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)

Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System (SWORDS)

Although completely within the realm of possibility, the Cambridge Forensic Center (CFC), the Chatham Correctional Institute, Otwahl Technologies, and the Mortuary Operational Removal Transport (MORT) are creations of the author’s imagination, as are all of the characters in this story and the plot itself.

My Thanks -

To all the fine men and women of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who have been kind enough during my career to share their insights and highly advanced knowledge, and to impress me with their discipline, their integrity, and their friendship.

As always, I’m deeply indebted to Dr. Staci Gruber, director of the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Core, McLean Hospital, and assistant professor, Harvard Medical School, Department of Psychiatry.

And, of course, my gratitude to Dr. Marcella Fierro, former chief medical examiner of Virginia, and Dr. Jamie Downs, medical examiner, Savannah, Georgia, for their expertise in all things pathological.

TO STACI

You have to live with me

while I live it—

1

Inside the changing room for female staff, I toss soiled scrubs into a biohazard hamper and strip off the rest of my clothes and medical clogs. I wonder if Col. Scarpetta stenciled in black on my locker will be removed the minute I return to New England in the morning. The thought hadn’t entered my mind before now, and it bothers me. A part of me doesn’t want to leave this place.

Life at Dover Air Force Base has its comforts, despite six months of hard training and the bleakness of handling death daily on behalf of the US government. My stay here has been surprisingly uncomplicated. I can even say it’s been pleasant. I’m going to miss getting up before dawn in my modest room, dressing in cargo pants, a polo shirt, and boots, and walking in the cold dark across the parking lot to the golf course clubhouse for coffee and something to eat before driving to Port Mortuary, where I’m not in charge. When I’m on duty for the armed forces medical examiner, the AFME, I’m no longer a chief. In fact, I’m outranked by quite a number of people, and critical decisions aren’t mine to make, assuming I’m even asked. Not so when I return to Massachusetts, where I’m depended on by everyone.

It’s Monday, February 8. The wall clock above the shiny white sinks reads 16:33 hours, lit up red like a warning. In less than ninety minutes I’m supposed to appear on CNN and explain what a forensic radiologic pathologist, or RadPath, is and why I’ve become one, and what Dover and the Department of Defense and the White House have to do with it. In other words, I’m not just a medical examiner anymore, I suppose I’ll say, and not just a habeas reservist with the AFME, either. Since 9/11, since the United States invaded Iraq, and now the surge of troops in Afghanistan —I rehearse points I should make—the line between the military and civilian worlds has forever faded. An example I might give: This past November during a forty-eight-hour period, thirteen fallen warriors were flown here from the Middle East, and just as many casualties arrived from Fort Hood, Texas. Mass casualty isn’t restricted to the battlefield, although I’m no longer sure what constitutes a battlefield. Maybe every place is one, I will say on TV. Our homes, our schools, our churches, commercial aircraft, and where we work, shop, and go on vacation.

I sort through toiletries as I sort through comments I need to make about 3-D imaging radiology, the use of computerized tomography, or CT, scans in the morgue, and I remind myself to emphasize that although my new headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the first civilian facility in the United States to do virtual autopsies, Baltimore will be next, and eventually the trend will spread. The traditional postmortem examination of dissect as you go and take photographs after the fact and hope you don’t miss something or introduce an artifact can be dramatically improved by technology and made more precise, and it should be.

I’m sorry I’m not doing World News tonight, because now that I think of it, I’d rather have this dialogue with Diane Sawyer. The problem with my being a regular on CNN is that familiarity often breeds contempt, and I should have thought about this before now. The interview could get personal, it occurs to me, and I should have mentioned the possibility to General Briggs. I should have told him what happened this morning when the irate mother of a dead soldier ripped into me over the phone, accusing me of hate crimes and threatening to take her complaints to the media.

Metal bangs like a gunshot as I shut my locker door. I pad over tan tile that always feels cool and smooth beneath my bare feet, carrying my plastic basket of olive-oil shampoo and conditioner, and an exfoliant scrub made of fossilized marine algae, a safety razor, a can of shaving gel for sensitive skin, liquid detergent, a washcloth, mouthwash, a toothbrush, a nail brush, and fragrant Neutrogena oil I’ll use when I’m done. Inside an open stall, I neatly arrange my personal effects on the tile ledge and turn on the water as hot as I can stand it, hard spray blasting as I move around to get all of me, then lifting my face up, then looking down at the floor, at my own pale feet. I let water pound the back of my neck and head in hopes that stiff muscles will relax a little as I mentally enter the closet inside my base lodging and explore what to wear.

General Briggs—John, as I refer to him when we’re alone— wants me in an Airman Battle Uniform, or better yet, Air Force blues, and I disagree. I should wear civilian clothes, what people see me in most of the time when I do television interviews, probably a simple dark suit and ivory blouse with a collar, and the understated Breguet watch on a leather strap that my niece, Lucy, gave me. Not the Blancpain with its oversized black face and ceramic bezel, which also is from her, because she’s obsessed with timepieces, with anything technically complicated and expensive. Not pants but a skirt and heels, so I come across as nonthreatening and accessible, a trick I learned long ago in court. For some reason, jurors like to see my legs while I describe in graphic anatomical detail fatal wounds and the agonal last moments of a victim’s life. Briggs will be displeased with my choice in attire, but I reminded him during the Super Bowl last night when we were having drinks that a man shouldn’t tell a woman what to wear unless he’s Ralph Lauren.

The steam in my shower stall shifts, disturbed by a draft, and I think I hear someone. Instantly, I’m annoyed. It could be anyone, any military personnel, doctor or otherwise, whoever is authorized to be inside this highly classified facility and in need of a toilet or a disinfecting or a change of clothes. I think about colleagues I was just with in the main autopsy room and have a feeling it’s Captain Avallone again. She was an unavoidable presence much of the morning during the CT scan, as if I don’t know how to do one after all this, and she drifted like ground fog around my work station the rest of the day. It’s probably she who’s just come in. Then I’m sure, because it’s always her, and I feel a clenching of resentment. Go away.

“Dr. Scarpetta?” her familiar voice calls out, a voice that is bland and lacking in passion and seems to follow me everywhere. “You have a phone call.”

“I just got in,” I shout over the loud spatter of water.

It’s my way of telling her to leave me be. A little privacy, please. I don’t want to see Captain Avallone or anyone right now, and it has nothing to do with being naked.

“Sorry, ma’am. But Pete Marino needs to talk to you.” Her unemphatic voice moves closer.

“He’ll have to wait,” I yell.

“He says it’s important.”

“Can you ask him what he wants?”

“He just says it’s important, ma’am.”

I promise to get back to him shortly, and I probably sound rude but despite my best intentions, I can’t always be charming. Pete Marino is an investigator I’ve worked with half my life. I hope nothing terrible has happened back home. No, he would make sure I knew if there was a real emergency, if something was wrong with my husband, Benton; with Lucy; or if there was a major problem at the Cambridge Forensic Center, which I’ve been appointed to head. Marino would do more than simply ask someone to let me know he’s on the phone and it’s important. This is nothing more than his usual poor impulse control, I decide. When he thinks a thought, he feels he must share it with me instantly.

I open my mouth wide, rinsing out the taste of decomposing charred human flesh that is trapped in the back of my throat. The stench of what I worked on today rises on swells of steam deep into my sinuses, the molecules of putrid biology in the shower with me. I scrub under my nails with antibacterial soap I squirt from a bottle, the same stuff I use on dishes or to decon my boots at a scene, and brush my teeth, gums, and tongue with Listerine. I wash inside my nostrils as far up as I can reach, scouring every inch of my flesh, then I wash my hair, not once but twice, and the stench is still there. I can’t seem to get clean.

The name of the dead soldier I just took care of is Peter Gabriel, like the legendary rock star, only this Peter Gabriel was a private first class in the army and had been in the Badghis Province of Afghanistan not even a month when a roadside bomb improvised from plastic sewer pipe packed with PE-4 and capped with a copper plate punched through the armor of his Humvee, creating a molten firestorm inside it. PFC Gabriel took up most of my last day here at this huge high-tech place where the armed forces pathologists and scientists routinely get involved in cases most members of the public don’t associate with us: the assassination of JFK; the recent DNA identifications of the Romanov family and the crew members of the H.L. Hunley submarine that sank during the Civil War. We’re a noble but little-known organization with roots reaching back to 1862, to the Army Medical Museum, whose surgeons attended to the mortally wounded Abraham Lincoln and performed his autopsy, and I should say all this on CNN. Focus on the positive. Forget what Mrs. Gabriel said. I’m not a monster or a bigot. You can’t blame the poor woman for being upset, I tell myself. She just lost her only child. The Gabriels are black. How would you feel, for God’s sake? Of course you’re not a racist.

I sense a presence again. Someone has entered the changing room, which I’ve managed to fog up like a steam shower. My heart is beating hard because of the heat.

“Dr. Scarpetta?” Captain Avallone sounds less tentative, as if she has news.

I turn off the water and step out of my stall, grabbing a towel to wrap up in. Captain Avallone is an indistinct presence hovering in haze near the sinks and motion-sensitive hand dryers. All I can make out is her dark hair and her khaki cargo pants and black polo shirt with its embroidered AFME gold-and-blue shield.

“Pete Marino…” she starts to say.

“I’ll call him in a minute.” I snatch another towel off a shelf.

“He’s here, ma’am.”

“What do you mean ‘here’?” I almost expect him to materialize in the changing room like some prehistoric creature emerging from the mist.

“He’s waiting for you out back by the bays, ma’am,” she informs me. “He’ll take you to the Eagle’s Rest so you can get your things.” She says it as if I’m being picked up by the FBI, as if I’ve been arrested or fired. “My instructions are to take you to him and assist in any way needed.”

Captain Avallone’s first name is Sophia. She’s army, just out of her radiology residency, and is always so damn military-correct and obsequiously polite as she lingers and loiters. Right now is not the time. I carry my toiletry basket, padding over tile, and she’s right behind me.

“I’m not supposed to leave until tomorrow, and going anywhere with Marino wasn’t part of my travel plans,” I tell her.

“I can take care of your vehicle, ma’am. I understand you’re not driving….”

“Did you ask him what the hell this is about?” I grab my hairbrush and my deodorant out of my locker.

“I tried, ma’am,” she says. “But he wasn’t helpful.”

A C-5 Galaxy roars overhead, on final for 19. The wind as usual is out of the south.

One of many aeronautical principles I’ve learned from Lucy, who is a helicopter pilot among other things, is that runway numbers correspond to directions on a compass. Nineteen, for example, is 190 degrees, meaning the opposite end will be 01, oriented that way because of the Bernoulli effect and Newton’s laws of motion. It’s all about the speed air needs to flow over a wing, about taking off and landing into the wind, which in this part of Delaware blows in from the sea, from high pressure to low, from south to north. Day in and day out, transport planes bring the dead and take them away along a blacktop strip that runs like the River Styx behind Port Mortuary.

The shark-gray Galaxy is the length of a football field, so huge and heavy it seems scarcely to move in a pale sky of feathery clouds that pilots call mare’s tails. I would know what type of airlifter it is without looking, can recognize the high pitch of its scream and whistle. By now I know the sound of turbine engines producing a hundred and sixty thousand pounds of thrust, can identify a C-5 or a C-17 when it’s miles out, and I know helicopters and tilt rotors, too, can tell a Chinook from a Black Hawk or an Osprey. During nice weather when I have a few moments to spare, I sit on a bench outside my lodging and watch the flying machines of Dover as if they’re exotic creatures, such as manatees or elephants or prehistoric birds. I never tire of their lumbering drama and thundering noise, and the shadows they cast as they pass over.

Wheels touch down in puffs of smoke so close by I feel the rumble in my hollow organs as I walk across the receiving area with its four enormous bays, high privacy wall, and backup generators. I approach a blue van I’ve never seen before, and Pete Marino makes no move to greet me or open my door, and this bodes nothing one way or another. He doesn’t waste his energy on manners, not that being gracious or particularly nice has ever been a priority of his for as long as I can remember. It’s been more than twenty years since the time when we first met in Richmond, Virginia, at the morgue. Or maybe it was a homicide scene where I first was confronted with him. I really can’t recall.

I climb in and shut the door, stuffing a duffel bag between my boots, my hair still damp from the shower. He thinks I look like hell and is silently judging. I can always tell by his sidelong glances that survey me from head to toe, lingering in certain places that are none of his business. He doesn’t like it when I wear my AFME investigative garb, my khaki cargo pants, black polo shirt, and tactical jacket, and the few times he’s seen me in uniform I think I scared him.

“Where’d you steal the van?” I ask as he backs up.

“A loaner from Civil Air.” His answer at least tells me nothing has happened to Lucy.

The private terminal on the north end of the runway is used by nonmilitary personnel who are authorized to land on the air force base. My niece has flown Marino here, and it crosses my mind they’ve come as a surprise. They showed up unannounced to spare me from flying commercial in the morning, to escort me home at last. Wishful thinking. That can’t be it, and I look for answers in Marino’s rough-featured face, taking in his overall appearance rather much the way I do a patient at first glance. Running shoes, jeans, a fleece-lined Harley-Davidson leather coat he’s had forever, a Yankees baseball cap he wears at his own peril, considering he now lives in the Republic of the Red Sox, and his unfashionable wire-rim glasses.

I can’t tell if his head is shaved smooth of what little gray hair he has left, but he is clean and relatively neat, and he doesn’t have a whisky flush or a bloated beer gut. His eyes aren’t bloodshot. His hands are steady. I don’t smell cigarettes. He’s still on the wagon, more than one. Marino has many wagons he is wise to stay on, a train of them working their way through the unsettled territories of his aboriginal inclinations. Sex, booze, drugs, tobacco, food, profanity, bigotry, slothfulness. I probably should add mendacity. When it suits him, he’s evasive or outright lies.

“I assume Lucy’s with the helicopter…?” I start to say.

“You know how it is around this joint when you’re doing a case, worse than the damn CIA,” he talks over me as we turn onto Purple Heart Drive. “Your house could be on fire and nobody says shit, and I must have called five times. So I made an executive decision, and Lucy and me headed out.”

“It would be helpful if you’d tell me why you’re here.”

“Nobody would interrupt you while you were doing the soldier from Worcester,” he says to my amazement.

PFC Gabriel was from Worcester, Massachusetts, and I can’t fathom why Marino would know what case I had here at Dover. No one should have told him. Everything we do at Port Mortuary is extremely discreet, if not strictly classified. I wonder if the slain soldier’s mother did what she threatened and called the media. I wonder if she told the press that her son’s white female military medical examiner is a racist.

Before I can ask, Marino adds, “Apparently, he’s the first war casualty from Worcester, and the local media’s all over it. We’ve gotten some calls, I guess people getting confused and thinking any dead body with a Massachusetts connection ends up with us.”

“Reporters assumed we’d done the autopsy in Cambridge?”

“Well, the CFC’s a port mortuary, too. Maybe that’s why.”

“One would think the media certainly knows by now that all casualties in theater come straight here to Dover,” I reply. “You’re certain about the reason for the media’s interest?”

“Why?” He looks at me. “You know some other reason I don’t?”

“I’m just asking.”

“All I know is there were a few calls and we referred them to Dover. So you were in the middle of taking care of the kid from Worcester and nobody would get you on the phone, and finally I called General Briggs when we were about twenty minutes out, refueling in Wilmington. He made Captain Do-Bee go find you in the shower. She single, or does she sing in Lucy’s choir? Because she’s not bad-looking.”

“How would you know what she looks like?” I reply, baffled.

“You weren’t around when she stopped by the CFC on her way to visit her mother in Maine.”

I try to remember if I was ever told this, and at the same time I’m reminded I have no idea what has gone on in the office I’m supposed to run.

“Fielding gave her the royal tour, the host with the most.” Marino doesn’t like my deputy chief, Jack Fielding. “Point being, I did try to get hold of you. I didn’t mean to just show up like this.”

Marino is being evasive, and what he’s described is a ploy. It’s made up. For some reason he felt it necessary to simply appear here without warning. Probably because he wanted to make sure I would go with him without delay. I sense real trouble.

“The Gabriel case can’t be why you just showed up, as you put it,” I say.

“Afraid not.”

“What’s happened?”

“We’ve got a situation.” He stares straight ahead. “And I told Fielding and everybody else that no way in hell the body was being examined until you get there.”

Jack Fielding is an experienced forensic pathologist who doesn’t take orders from Marino. If my deputy chief opted to be hands-off and defer to me, it likely means we’ve got a case that could have political implications or get us sued. It bothers me considerably that Fielding hasn’t tried to call or e-mail me. I check my iPhone again. Nothing from him.

“About three-thirty yesterday afternoon in Cambridge,” Marino is saying, and we’re on Atlantic Street now, driving slowly through the middle of the base in the near dark. “Norton’s Woods on Irving, not even a block from your house. Too damn bad you weren’t home. You could have gone to the scene, could have walked there, and maybe things would have turned out different.”

“What things?”

“A light-skinned male, possibly in his twenties. Appears he was out walking his dog and dropped dead from a heart attack, right? Wrong,” he continues as we pass rows of concrete and metal maintenance facilities, hangars and other buildings that have numbers instead of names. “It’s broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon, plenty of people around because there was an event at whatever that building is, the one with the big green metal roof.”

Norton’s Woods is the home of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a wooded estate with a stunning building of timber and glass that is rented out for special functions. It is several houses down from the one Benton and I moved into last spring so I could be near the CFC and he could enjoy the close proximity of Harvard, where he is on the faculty of the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry.

“In other words, eyes and ears,” Marino goes on. “A hell of a time and a place to whack somebody.”

“I thought you said he was a heart attack. Except if he’s that young, you probably mean a cardiac arrhythmia.”

“Yeah, that was the assumption. A couple of witnesses saw him suddenly grab his chest and collapse. He was DOA at the scene—supposedly. Was transported directly to our office and spent the night in the cooler.”

“What do you mean ‘supposedly’?”

“Early this morning Fielding went into the fridge and noticed blood drips on the floor and a lot of blood in the tray, so he goes and gets Anne and Ollie. The dead guy’s got blood coming out of his nose and mouth that wasn’t there the afternoon before, when he was pronounced. No blood at the scene, not one drop, and now he’s bleeding, and it’s not purge fluid, obviously, because he sure as hell isn’t decomposing. The sheet he’s covered with is bloody, and there’s about a liter of blood in the body pouch, and that’s fucked up. I’ve never seen a dead person start bleeding like that. So I said we got a fucking problem and everybody keep your mouth shut.”

“What did Jack say? What did he do?”

“You’re kidding, right? Some deputy you got. Don’t get me started.”

“Do we have an identification, and why Norton’s Woods? Does he live nearby? Is he a student at Harvard, maybe at the Divinity School?” It’s right around the corner from Norton’s Woods. “I doubt he was attending whatever this event was. Not if he had his dog with him.” I sound much calmer than I feel as we have this conversation in the parking lot of the Eagle’s Rest inn.

“We don’t have many details yet, but it appears it was a wedding,” Marino says.

“On Super Bowl Sunday? Who plans a wedding on the same day as the Super Bowl?”

“Maybe if you don’t want anybody to show up. Maybe if you’re not American or are un-American. Hell if I know, but I don’t think the dead guy was a wedding guest, and not just because of the dog. He had a Glock nine-mil under his jacket. No ID and was listening to a portable satellite radio, so you probably can guess where I’m going with this.”

“I probably can’t.”

“Lucy will tell you more about the satellite-radio part of it, but it appears he was doing surveillance, spying, and maybe whoever he was fucking with decided to return the favor. Bottom line, I’m thinking somebody did something to him, causing an injury that was somehow missed by the EMTs, and the removal service didn’t notice anything, either. So he’s zipped up in the pouch and starts bleeding during transport. Well, that wouldn’t happen unless he had a blood pressure, meaning he was still alive when he was delivered to the morgue and shut inside our damn cooler. Forty-something degrees in there and he would have died from exposure by this morning. Assuming he didn’t bleed to death first.”

“If he has an injury that would cause him to bleed externally,” I reply, “why didn’t he bleed at the scene?”

“You tell me.”

“How long did they work on him?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Possible during resuscitation efforts a blood vessel was somehow punctured?” I ask. “Antemortem and postmortem injuries, if severe enough, can cause significant bleeding. For example, maybe during CPR a rib was fractured and caused a puncture wound or severed an artery? Any reason a chest tube might have been placed presumptively and that caused an injury and bleeding you’ve described?”

But I know the answers even as I ask the questions. Marino is a veteran homicide detective and death investigator. He wouldn’t have commandeered my niece and her helicopter and come to Dover unannounced if there was a logical explanation or even a plausible one, and certainly Jack Fielding would know a legitimate injury from an accidental artifact. Why haven’t I heard from him?

“The Cambridge Fire Department’s HQ is maybe a mile from Norton’s Woods, and the squad got to him within minutes,” Marino says.

We are sitting in the van with the engine off. It is almost completely dark, the horizon and the sky melting into each other with only the faintest hint of light to the west. When has Fielding ever handled a disaster without me? Never. He absents himself. Leaves his messes for others to clean up. That’s why he’s not tried to get hold of me. Maybe he’s walked off the job again. How many times does he need to do that before I stop hiring him back?

“According to them, he died instantly,” Marino adds.

“Unless an IED blows someone into hundreds of pieces, there’s really no such thing as dying instantly,” I reply, and I hate it when Marino makes glib statements. Dying instantly. Dropping dead. Dead before he hit the ground. Twenty years of these generalities, no matter how many times I’ve told him that cardiac and respiratory arrests aren’t causes of death but symptoms of dying, and clinical death takes minutes at least. It isn’t instant. It isn’t a simple process. I remind him again of this medical fact because I can’t think of anything else to say.

“Well, I’m just reporting what I’ve been told, and according to them, he couldn’t be resuscitated,” Marino answers, as if the EMTs know more about death than I do. “Was unresponsive. That’s what’s on their run sheet.”

“You interviewed them?”

“One of them. On the phone this morning. No pulse, no nothing. The guy was dead. Or that’s what the paramedic said. But what do you think he’s going to say—that they weren’t sure but sent him to the morgue anyway?”

“Then you told him why you were asking.”

“Hell, no, I’m not retarded. You don’t need this on the front page of the Globe. This hits the news, I may as well go back to NYPD or maybe get a job with Wackenhut, except no one’s hiring.”

“What procedure did you follow?”

“I didn’t follow shit. It was Fielding. Of course, he says he did everything by the book, says Cambridge PD told him there was nothing suspicious about the scene, an apparent natural death that was witnessed. Fielding gave permission for the body to be transferred to the CFC as long as the cops took custody of the gun and got it to the labs right away so we could find out who it’s registered to. A routine case, and not our fault if the EMTs fucked up, or so Fielding says, and you know what I say? It won’t matter. We’ll get blamed. The media will go after us like nothing you’ve ever seen and will say everything should move back to Boston. Imagine that?”

Before the CFC began doing its first cases this past summer, the state medical examiner’s office was located in Boston and was besieged by political and economic problems and scandals that were constantly in the news. Bodies were lost or sent to the wrong funeral homes or cremated without a thorough examination, and in at least one suspected child-abuse death the wrong eyeballs were tested. New chiefs came and went, and district offices had to be shut down due to a lack of funding. But nothing negative ever said about that office could compare to what Marino is suggesting about us.

“I’d rather not imagine anything.” I open my door. “I’d rather focus on the facts.”

“That’s a problem, since we don’t seem to have any that make much sense.”

“And you told Briggs what you just told me?”

“I told him what he needed to know,” Marino says.

“The same thing you just told me?” I repeat my question.

“Pretty much.”

“You shouldn’t have. It was for me to tell. It was for me to decide what he needs to know.” I’m sitting with the passenger’s door open wide and the wind blowing in. I’m damp from the shower and chilled. “You don’t raise things up the chain just because I’m busy.”

“Well, you were busy as hell, and I told him.”

I climb out of the van and reassure myself that what Marino has just described can’t be accurate. Cambridge EMTs would never make such a disastrous mistake, and I try to conjure up an explanation for why a fatal wound didn’t bleed at the scene and then bled profusely, and I contemplate computing time of death or even the cause of it for someone who died inside a morgue refrigerator. I’m confounded. I haven’t a clue, and most of all I worry about him, this young man delivered to my door, presumed dead. I envision him wrapped in a sheet and zipped inside a pouch, and it’s the stuff of old horrors. Someone coming to inside a casket. Someone buried alive. I’ve never had such a ghastly thing happen, not even close, not once in my career. I’ve never known anyone who has.

“At least there’s no sign he tried to get out of the body bag.” Marino tries to make both of us feel better. “Nothing to indicate he might have been awake at some point and started panicking. You know, like clawing at the zipper or kicking or something. I guess if he struggled he would have been in a weird position on the tray when we found him this morning, or maybe rolled off it. Except I wonder if you would suffocate in one of those bags, now that I think of it. I guess so, since they’re supposed to be water-tight. Even though they leak. You show me a body bag that doesn’t leak. And that’s the other thing. Blood drips on the floor leading from the bay to the fridge.”

“Why don’t we continue this later.” It’s check-in time. There are plenty of people in the parking lot as we walk toward the inn’s modern but plain stucco entrance, and Marino has a big voice that projects as if he’s perpetually talking inside an amphitheater.

“I doubt Fielding has bothered to watch the recording,” Marino adds anyway. “I doubt he’s done a damn thing. I haven’t seen or heard from the son of a bitch since first thing this morning. MIA once again, just like he’s done before.” He opens the glass front door. “I sure as hell hope he doesn’t shut us down. Wouldn’t that be something? You do him a fucking favor and give him a job after he walked off the last one, and he destroys the CFC before it’s even off the ground.”

Inside the lobby with its showcases of awards and air force memorabilia, its comfortable chairs and big-screen TV, a sign welcomes guests to the home of the C-5 Galaxy and C-17 Globe-master III. At the front desk I silently wait behind a man in the muted pixilated tiger stripes of army combat uniforms, or ACUs, as he buys shaving cream, water, and several mini bottles of Johnnie Walker Scotch. I tell the clerk that I’m checking out earlier than planned, and yes, I’ll remember to turn in my keys, and of course I understand I’ll be charged the usual government rate of thirty-eight dollars for the day even though I’m not staying the night.

“What is it they say?” Marino goes on. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

“Let’s try not to be quite so negative.”

“You and me both gave up good positions in New York, and we shut down the office in Watertown, and this is what we’re left with.”

I don’t say anything.

“I hope like hell we didn’t ruin our careers,” he says.

I don’t answer him because I’ve heard enough. Past the business center and vending machines, we take the stairs to the second floor, and it is now that he informs me that Lucy isn’t waiting with the helicopter at the Civil Air Terminal. She’s in my room. She’s packing my belongings, touching them, making decisions about them, emptying my closet, my drawers, disconnecting my laptop, printer, and wireless router. He’s waited to tell me because he knows damn well that under ordinary circumstances, this would annoy me beyond measure—doesn’t matter if it’s my computer-genius, former-federal-law-enforcement niece, whom I’ve raised like a daughter.

Circumstances are anything but ordinary, and I’m relieved that Marino is here and Lucy is in my room, that they have come for me. I need to get home and fix everything. We follow the long hallway carpeted in deep red, past the balcony arranged with colonial reproductions and an electronic massage chair thoughtfully placed there for weary pilots. I insert my magnetic key card into the lock of my room, and I wonder who let Lucy in, and then I think of Briggs again and I think of CNN. I can’t imagine appearing on TV. What if the media has gotten word of what’s happened in Cambridge? I would know that by now. Marino would know it. My administrator Bryce would know it, and he would tell me right away. Everything is going to be fine.

Lucy is sitting on my neatly made bed, zipping up my cosmetic case, and I detect the clean citrus scent of her shampoo as I hug her and feel how much I’ve missed her. A black flight suit accentuates her bold green eyes and short rose-gold hair, her sharp features and leanness, and I’m reminded of how stunning she is in an unusual way, boyish but feminine, athletically chiseled but with breasts, and so intense she looks fierce. Doesn’t matter if she’s being playful or polite, my niece tends to intimidate and has few friends, maybe none except Marino, and her lovers never last. Not even Jaime, although I haven’t voiced my suspicions. I haven’t asked. But I don’t buy Lucy’s story that she moved from New York to Boston for financial reasons. Even if her forensic computer investigative company was in a decline, and I don’t believe that, either, she was making more in Manhattan than she’s now paid by the CFC, which is nothing. My niece works for me pro bono. She doesn’t need money.

“What’s this about the satellite radio?” I watch her carefully, trying to interpret her signals, which are always subtle and perplexing.

Caplets rattle as she checks how many Advil are in a bottle, deciding not enough to bother with, and she clunks it in the trash. “We’ve got weather, so I’d like to get out of here.” She takes the cap off a bottle of Zantac, tossing that next. “We’ll talk as we fly, and I’ll need your help copiloting, because it’s going to be tricky dodging snow showers and freezing rain en route. We’re supposed to get up to a foot at home, starting around ten.”

My first thought is Norton’s Woods. I need to pay a retrospective visit, but by the time I get there, it will be covered in snow. “That’s unfortunate,” I comment. “We may have a crime scene that was never worked as one.”

“I told Cambridge PD to go back over there this morning.” Marino’s eyes probe and wander as if it is my quarters that need to be searched. “They didn’t find anything.”

“Did they ask you why you wanted them to look?” That concern again.

“I said we had questions. I blamed it on the Glock. The serial number’s been ground off. Guess I didn’t tell you that,” he adds as he looks around, looking at everything but me.

“Firearms can try acid on it, see if we can restore the serial number that way. If all else fails, we’ll try the large-chamber SEM,” I decide. “If there’s anything left, we’ll find it. And I’ll ask Jack to go to Norton’s Woods and do a retrospective.”

“Right. I’m sure he’ll get right on it,” Marino says sarcastically. “He can take photographs before the snow starts,” I add. “Or someone can. Whoever’s on call—”

“Waste of time,” Marino says, cutting me off. “None of us was there yesterday. We don’t know the exact damn spot—only that it was near a tree and a green bench. Well, that’s a lot of help when you’re talking about six acres of trees and green benches.”

“What about photographs?” I ask as Lucy continues going through my small pharmacy of ointments, analgesics, antacids, vitamins, eyedrops, and hand sanitizers spread over the bed. “The police must have taken pictures of the body in situ.”

“I’m still waiting for the detective to get those to me. The guy who responded to the scene, he brought in the pistol this morning. Lester Law, goes by Les Law, but on the street he’s known as Lawless, just like his father and grandfather before him. Cambridge cops going back to the fucking Mayflower. I’ve never met him.”

“I think that about does it.” Lucy gets up from the bed. “You might want to make sure I didn’t miss anything,” she says to me.

Wastebaskets are overflowing, and my bags are packed and lined up by a wall, the closet door open wide, nothing inside but empty hangers. Computer equipment, printed files, journal articles, and books are gone from my desk, and there is nothing in the dirty-clothes hamper or bathroom or in the dresser drawers I check. I open the small refrigerator, and it is empty and has been wiped clean. While she and Marino begin carrying my belongings out, I enter Briggs’s number into my iPhone. I look out at the three-story stucco building on the other side of the parking lot, at the large plate-glass window in the middle of the third floor. Last night I was in that suite with him and other colleagues, watching the game, and life was good. We cheered for the New Orleans Saints and ourselves, and we toasted the Pentagon and its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, which had made CT-assisted virtual autopsies possible at Dover and now at the CFC. We celebrated mission accomplished, a job well done, and now this, as if last night wasn’t real, as if I dreamed it.

I take a deep breath and press send on my iPhone, going hollow inside. Briggs can’t be happy with me. Images flash on the wall-mounted flat-screen TV in his living room, and then he walks past the glass, dressed in the combat uniform of the army, green and sandy brown with a mandarin collar, what he typically wears when he’s not in the morgue or at a scene. I watch him answer his phone and return to his big window, where he stands, looking directly at me. From a distance we are face-to-face, an expanse of tarmac and parked cars between the armed forces chief medical examiner and me, as if we’re about to have a standoff.

“Colonel.” His voice greets me somberly.

“I just heard. And I assure you I’m taking care of this, will be on the helicopter within the hour.”

“You know what I always say,” his deep, authoritative voice sounds in my earpiece, and I try to detect the degree of his bad mood and what he’s going to do. “There’s an answer to everything. The problem is finding it and figuring out the best way to do that. The proper and appropriate way to do that.” He’s cool. He’s cautious. He’s very serious. “We’ll do this another time,” he adds.

He means the final briefing we were scheduled to have. I’m sure he also means CNN, and I wonder what Marino told him. What exactly did he say?

“I agree, John. Everything should be canceled.”

“It has been.”

“Which is smart.” I’m matter-of-fact. I won’t let him sense my insecurities, and I know he sniffs for them. I know damn well he does. “My first priority is to determine if the information reported to me is correct. Because I don’t see how it can be.”

“Not a good time for you to go on the air. I don’t need Rockman to tell us that.”

Rockman is the press secretary. Briggs doesn’t need to talk to him because he already has. I’m sure of it.

“I understand,” I reply.

“Remarkable timing. If I was paranoid, I might just think someone has orchestrated some sort of bizarre sabotage.”

“Based on what I’ve been told, I don’t see how that would be possible.”

“I said if I was paranoid,” Briggs replies, and from where I stand, I can make out his formidable sturdy shape but can’t see the expression on his face. I don’t need to see it. He’s not smiling. His gray eyes are galvanized steel.

“The timing is either a coincidence or it’s not,” I say. “The basic tenet in criminal investigations, John. It’s always one or the other.”

“Let’s not trivialize this.”

“I’m doing anything but.”

“If a living person was put in your damn cooler, I can’t think of much worse,” he says flatly.

“We don’t know—”

“It’s just a damn shame after all this.” As if everything we’ve built over the past few years is on the precipice of ruin.

“We don’t know that what’s been reported is accurate—” I start to say.

“I think it would be best if we bring the body here,” he interrupts again. “AFDIL can work on the identification. Rockman will make sure the situation is well contained. We’ve got everything we need right here.”

I’m stunned. Briggs wants to send a plane to Hanscom Field, the air force base affiliated with the CFC. He wants the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab and probably other military labs and someone other than me to handle whatever has happened, because he doesn’t think I’m competent. He doesn’t trust me.

“We don’t know if we’re talking about federal jurisdiction,” I remind him. “Unless you know something I don’t.”

“Look. I’m trying to do what’s best for all involved.” Briggs has his hands behind his back, his legs slightly spread, staring across the parking lot at me. “I’m suggesting we can dispatch a C-Seventeen to Hanscom. We can have the body here by midnight. The CFC is a port mortuary, too, and that’s what port mortuaries do.”

“That’s not what port mortuaries do. The point isn’t for bodies to be received, then transferred elsewhere for autopsies and lab analysis. The CFC was never intended to be a first screening for Dover, a preliminary check before the experts step in. That was never my mandate, and it wasn’t the agreement when thirty million dollars was spent on the facility in Cambridge.”

“You should just stay at Dover, Kay, and we’ll bring the body here.”

“I’m requesting you refrain from intervening, John. Right now this case is the jurisdiction of the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts. Please don’t challenge me or my authority.”

A long pause, then he states rather than asks, “You really want that responsibility.”

“It’s mine whether I want it or not.”

“I’m trying to protect you. I’ve been trying.”

“Don’t.” That’s not what he’s trying. He doesn’t have confidence in me.

“I can deploy Captain Avallone to help. It’s not a bad idea.”

I can’t believe he would suggest that, either. “That won’t be necessary,” I reply firmly. “The CFC is perfectly capable of handling this.”

“I’m on the record as having offered.”

On the record with whom? It occurs to me uncannily that someone else is on the line or within earshot. Briggs is still standing in front of his window. I can’t tell if anyone else might be in the suite with him.

“Whatever you decide,” he then says. “I’m not going to step on you. Call me as soon as you know something. Wake me up if you have to.” He doesn’t say good-bye or good luck or it was nice having me here for half a year.

2

Lucy and Marino have left my room. My suitcases, rucksacks, and Bankers Boxes are gone, and there is nothing left. It is as if I was never here, and I feel alone in a way I haven’t for years, maybe decades.

I look around one last time, making sure nothing has been forgotten, my attention wandering past the microwave, the small refrigerator-freezer and coffeemaker, the windows with their view of the parking lot and Briggs’s lighted suite, and beyond, the black sky over the void of the empty golf course. Thick clouds pass over the oblong moon, and it glows on and off like a signal lantern, as if telling me what is coming down the tracks and if I should stop or go, and I can’t see the stars at all. I worry that the bad weather is moving fast, carried on the same strong south wind that brings in the big planes and their sad cargo. I should hurry, but I’m distracted by the bathroom mirror, by the person in it, and I pause to look at myself in the glare of fluorescent lights. Who are you now? Who really?

My blue eyes and short blond hair, the strong shape of my face and figure, aren’t so different, I decide, are remarkably the same, considering my age. I have held up well in my windowless places of concrete and stainless steel, and much of it is genetic, an inherited will to thrive in a family as tragic as a Verdi opera. The Scarpettas are from hearty Northern Italian stock, with prominent features, fair skin and hair, and well-defined muscle and bone that stubbornly weather hardship and the abuses of self-indulgence most people wouldn’t associate with me. But the inclinations are there, a passion for food, for drink, for all things desired by the flesh, no matter how destructive. I crave beauty and feel deeply, but I’m an aberration, too. I can be unflinching and impervious. I can be immutable and unrelenting, and these behaviors are learned. I believe they are necessary. They aren’t natural to me, not to anyone in my volatile, dramatic family, and that much I know is true about what I come from. The rest I’m not so sure about.

My ancestors were farmers and worked for the railroads, but in recent years my mother has added artists, philosophers, martyrs, and God knows what to the mix as she has set about to research our genealogy. According to her, I’m descended from artisans who built the high altar and choir stalls and made the mosaics at Saint Mark’s Basilica and created the fresco ceiling of the Chiesa dell’Angelo San Raffaele. Somehow I have a number of friars and monks in my past, and most recently—based on what I don’t know—I share blood with the painter Caravaggio, who was a murderer, and have some tenuous link to the mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy during the Roman Inquisition.

My mother still lives in her small house in Miami and is pre-possessed with her efforts to explain me. I’m the only physician in the family tree that she knows of, and she doesn’t understand why I’ve chosen patients who are dead. Neither my mother nor my only sibling, Dorothy, could possibly fathom that I might be partly defined by the terrors of a childhood consumed by tending to my terminally ill father before I became the head of the household at the age of twelve. By intuition and training, I’m an expert in violence and death. I’m at war with suffering and pain. Somehow I always end up in charge or to blame. It never fails.

I shut the door on what has been my home not just for six months but more than that, really. Briggs has managed to remind me where I’m from and headed. It’s a course that was set long before this past July, as long ago as 1987, when I knew my destiny was public service and didn’t know how I could repay my medical-school debt. I allowed something as mundane as money, something as shameful as ambition, to change everything irrevocably and not in a good way—indeed, in the worst way. But I was young and idealistic. I was proud and wanted more, not understanding then that more is always less if you can’t be sated.

Having gotten full rides through parochial school and Cornell and Georgetown Law, I could have begun my professional life unburdened by the obligations of debt. But I’d turned down Bowman Gray Medical School because I wanted Johns Hopkins badly. I wanted it as badly as I’d ever wanted anything, and I went there without benefit of financial aid, and what I ended up owing was impossible. My only recourse was to accept a military scholarship as some of my peers had done, including Briggs, who I was acquainted with in the earliest stage of my profession, when I was assigned to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the AFIP, the parent organization of the AFME. A quiet stint of reviewing military autopsy reports at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Briggs led me to believe, and once my debt was paid, I’d move on to a solid position in civilian legal medicine.

What I didn’t plan on was South Africa in December of ‘87, what was summertime on that distant continent. Noonie Pieste and Joanne Rule were filming a documentary and about my same age when they were tied up in chairs, beaten, and hacked, broken bottle glass shoved up their vaginas, their windpipes torn out. Racially motivated crimes against two young Americans. “You’re going to Cape Town,” Briggs said to me. “To investigate and bring them home.” Apartheid propaganda. Lies and more lies. Why them and why me?

As I take the stairs down to the lobby, I tell myself not to think about this right now. Why am I thinking about it at all? But I know why. I was yelled at over the phone this morning. I was called names, and what happened more than two decades ago is now before me again. I remember autopsy reports that vanished and my luggage gone through. I remember being certain I would turn up dead, a convenient accident or suicide, or staged murder, like those two women I still see in my head. I see them as clearly as I did then, pale and stiff on steel tables, their blood washing through drains in the floor of a morgue so primitive we used handsaws to open their skulls, and there was no x-ray machine, and I had to bring my own camera.

I drop off my key at the front desk and replay the conversation I just had with Briggs, and I have clarity. I don’t know why I didn’t see the truth instantly, and I think of his remote tone, his chilly deliberateness, as I watched him through glass. I’ve heard him talk this way before, but usually it is directed at others when there is a problem of a magnitude that places it out of his hands. This is about more than his personal opinion of me. This is about something beyond his typical calculations and our conflicted past.

Someone has gotten to him, and it wasn’t the press secretary, not anyone at Dover but higher up than that. I feel certain Briggs conferred with Washington after Marino divulged information, running his mouth and spinning his wild speculations before I’d had the chance to say a word. Marino shouldn’t have discussed the Cambridge case or me. He’s set something into motion he doesn’t understand, because there’s a lot he doesn’t understand. He’s never been military. He’s never worked for the federal government and is clueless about international affairs. His idea of bureaucracy and intrigue is local police department policies, what he rubber-stamps as bullshit. He has no concept of power, the kind of power that can tilt a presidential election or start a war.

Briggs would not have suggested sending a military plane to Massachusetts for the transfer of a body to Dover unless he’s gotten clearance from the Department of Defense, the DoD—in other words, the Pentagon. A decision has been made and I’m not part of it. Outside, in the parking lot, I climb into the van and won’t look at Marino, I’m so angry.

“Tell me more about the satellite radio,” I say to Lucy, because I intend to get to the bottom of this. I intend to find out what Briggs knows or has been led to believe.

“A Sirius Stiletto,” Lucy says from the dark backseat as I turn up the heat because Marino is always hot while the rest of us freeze. “It’s basically nothing more than storage for files, plus a power source. Of course, it also works as a portable XM radio, just as it’s designed to, but it’s the headphones that are creative. Not ingenious but technically clever.”

“They’ve got a pinhole camera and a microphone built in,” Marino offers as he drives. “Which is why I think the dead guy was the one doing the spying. How could he not know he had an audiovisual recording system built into his headphones?”

“He might not have known. It’s possible someone was spying on him and he had no idea,” Lucy says to me, and I sense she and Marino have been arguing about it. “The pinhole is on top of the headband but in the edge of it and hard to see. Even if you noticed, it wouldn’t necessarily cross your mind that built inside is a wireless camera smaller than a grain of rice, an audio transmitter that’s no bigger, and a motion sensor that goes to sleep after ninety seconds if nothing’s moving. This guy was walking around with a micro-webcam that was recording onto the radio’s hard drive and an additional eight-gig SD card. It’s too soon for me to tell you if he knew it—in other words, if he rigged this up himself. I know that’s what Marino thinks, but I’m not at all sure.”

“Does the SD card come with the radio, or was it added after-market?” I inquire.

“Added. A lot of storage space, in other words. What I’m curious about is if the files were periodically downloaded elsewhere, like onto his home computers. If we can get hold of them, we might know what this is about.”

Lucy is saying that the video files she has looked at so far don’t tell us much. She has reason to suspect the dead man has a home computer, possibly more than one of them, but she hasn’t found anything that might tell us where he lived or who he is.

“What’s stored on the hard drive and SD card go back only as far as February fifth, this past Friday,” she continues. “I don’t know if that means the surveillance just started, or more likely, these video files are large and take up a lot of space on the hard drive. They probably get downloaded somewhere, and what’s on the hard drive and SD card gets recorded over. So what’s here may be just the most recent recordings, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others.”

“Then these video clips were probably downloaded remotely.”

“That’s what I would do if it were me doing the spying,” Lucy says. “I’d log in to the webcam remotely and download what I wanted.”

“What about watching in real time?” I then ask.

“Of course. If he was being spied on, whoever’s doing it could log on to the webcam and watch him as it’s happening.”

“To stalk him, to follow him?”

“That would be a logical reason. Or to gather intelligence, to spy. Like some people do when they suspect their person is cheating on them. Whatever you can imagine, it’s possible.”

“Then it’s possible he inadvertently recorded his own death.” I feel a glint of hope and at the same time am deeply disturbed by the thought. “I say ‘inadvertently’ because we don’t know what we’re dealing with. For example, we don’t know if he intentionally recorded his own death, if he’s therefore a suicide, and I’m not ready to rule out anything.”

“No way he’s a suicide,” Marino says.

“At this point, we shouldn’t rule out anything,” I repeat.

“Like a suicide bomber,” Lucy says. “Like Columbine and Fort Hood. Maybe he was going to take out as many people as he could in Norton’s Woods and then kill himself, but something happened and he never got the chance.”

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I say again.

“The Glock had seventeen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber,” Lucy tells me. “A lot of firepower. You could certainly ruin someone’s wedding. We need to know who got married and who attended.”

“Most of these people have extra magazines,” I reply, and I know all about the shootings at Fort Hood, at Virginia Tech, at far too many places, where assailants open fire without necessarily caring who they kill. “Usually these people have an abundance of ammunition and extra guns if they’re planning on mass murder. But I agree with you. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a high-profile place, and we should find out who got married there yesterday and who the guests were.”

“I figure you’re a member,” Marino says to me. “Maybe you got a contact for getting a list of members and a schedule of events.”

“I’m not a member.”

“You’re kidding.”

I don’t offer that I haven’t won a Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer and don’t have a Ph.D., just an M.D. and a J.D., and they don’t count. I could remind him that the Academy may not be relevant anyway, because nonmembers can rent the building. All it takes is connections and money. But I don’t feel like giving Marino detailed explanations. He shouldn’t have called Briggs.

“Good news and not so good about the recordings.” Lucy reaches over the back of the seat and hands me her iPad. “Good news, as I’ve pointed out, is it doesn’t appear anything’s been deleted, at least not recently. Which could be an argument in favor of him being the one doing the spying. You might speculate that if someone had him under surveillance and has something to do with his death, that person likely would have logged on to the web address and scrubbed the hard drive and SD before people like us could look.”

“Or how about remove the damn radio and headphones from the damn scene?” Marino says. “If he was being stalked, hunted down, and whoever’s doing it whacked him? Well, if it was me, I’d grab the headset and radio and keep walking. So I’m betting he was the one doing the recording. I don’t believe for a minute someone else was. And I’m betting this guy was involved in something, and whatever the reason for the spy equipment, he was the only one who knew about it. What sucks is there’s no recording of the perp, of whoever whacked him, which is significant. If he was confronted by someone while he was walking his dog, why didn’t the headphones record it?”

“The headphones didn’t record it because he didn’t see the person,” Lucy replies. “He wasn’t looking at whoever it was.”

“Assuming there was a person who somehow caused his death,” I remind both of them.

“Right,” she says. “The headphones pretty much pick up whatever the wearer is looking at, the camera on the crown of his head, pointing straight out like a third eye.”

“Then whoever whacked him came up from behind,” Marino states conclusively. “And it happened so fast the victim never even turned around. Either that or it was some kind of sniper attack. Maybe he was shot with something from a distance. Like a dart with poison. Aren’t there some poisons that cause hemorrhaging? May sound far-fetched, but shit like this happens. Remember the KGB spy poked with an umbrella that had ricin in the tip? He was waiting at a bus stop, and no one saw a thing.”

“It was a Bulgarian dissident who worked for the BBC, and it’s not a certainty it was an umbrella, and you’re getting deeper into the woods without a map,” I tell him.

“Ricin wouldn’t drop you in your tracks, anyway,” Lucy says. “Most poisons won’t. Not even cyanide gas. I don’t think he was poisoned.”

“This isn’t helpful,” I answer.

“My map is my experience as a cop,” Marino says to me. “I’m using my deductive skills. They don’t call me Sherlock for nothing.” He taps his baseball cap with a thick index finger.

“They don’t call you Sherlock at all.” Lucy’s voice from the back.

“It’s not helpful,” I repeat, looking at his big shape as he drives, at his huge hands on the wheel, which rubs against his gut even when he’s in what he considers his fighting shape.

“Aren’t you the one always telling me to think outside the box?” Defensiveness hardens his tone.

“Guessing isn’t helpful. Connecting dots that might be the wrong dots is reckless, and you know it,” I say to him.

Marino has always been inclined to jump to conclusions, but it’s gotten worse since he took the job in Cambridge, since he went to work for me again. I blame it on a military presence in our lives that is as constant as the massive airlifters flying low over Dover. More directly, I blame it on Briggs. Marino is ridiculously enamored of this powerful male forensic pathologist who is also a general in the army. My connection to the military has never mattered to him or even been acknowledged, not when it was part of my past, not when I was recalled to a special status after 9/11. Marino has always ignored my government affiliations as if they don’t exist.

He stares straight ahead, and headlights of an approaching car illuminate his face, touched by disgruntledness and a certain lack of comprehension that is part of who he is. I might feel sorry for him because of the affection I can’t deny, but not now. Not under the circumstances. I won’t let on that I’m upset.

“What else did you share with Briggs—in addition to your opinions?” I ask Marino.

When he doesn’t answer, Lucy does. “Briggs saw the same thing you’re about to see,” she says. “It wasn’t my idea, and I didn’t e-mail them, just so we’re clear.”

“Didn’t e-mail what exactly?” But I know what exactly, and my incredulity grows. Marino sent evidence to Briggs. It’s my case, and Briggs has been given information first.

“He wanted to know,” Marino says, as if that’s a good enough reason. “What was I supposed to tell him?”

“You shouldn’t have told him anything. You went over my head. It’s not his case,” I reply.

“Yeah, well, it is,” Marino says. “He was appointed by the surgeon general, meaning he basically was hired by the president, so I’d say that means he outranks everyone in this van.”

“General Briggs isn’t the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts, and you don’t work for him. You work for me.” I’m careful how I say it. I try to sound reasonable and calm, the way I do when a hostile attorney is trying to dismantle me on the witness stand, the way I do when Marino is about to erupt into an unseemly display of loud profanities and slammed doors. “The CFC has a mixed jurisdiction and can take federal cases in certain situations, and I realize it’s confusing. Ours is a joint initiative between the state and federal governments and MIT, Harvard. And I realize that’s an unprecedented concept and tricky, which is why you should have let me handle it instead of bypassing me.” I try to sound easygoing and matter-of-fact. “The problem about involving General Briggs prematurely, about involving him precipitously, is things can take on a life of their own. But what’s done is done.”

“What do you mean? ‘What’s done‘?” Marino sounds less sure of himself. I detect an anxious note, and I’m not going to help him out. He needs to think about what has been done, because he’s the one who did it.

“What’s the not-so-good news?” I turn around and ask Lucy.

“Take a look,” she says. “It’s the last three recordings made, including a minute here and there when the headset was jostled by the EMTs, the cops, and this morning by me when I started looking at it in my lab.”

The iPad’s display glows brightly, colorfully, in the dark, and I tap on the icon for the first video file she has selected, and it begins to play. I see what the dead man was seeing yesterday at three-oh-four p.m., a black-and-white greyhound curled up on a blue couch in a living room that has a heart-of-pine floor and a blue-and-red rug.

The camera moves as the man moves because he has the headphones on and they are recording: a coffee table covered with books and papers neatly stacked, and what looks like architectural or engineering drafting vellum with a pencil on top; a window with wooden blinds that are closed; a desk with two large flat-screen monitors and two silver MacBooks, and a phone plugged into a charger, possibly an iPhone, and an amber glass smoking pipe in an ashtray; a floor lamp with a green shade; a fleece dog bed and scattered toys. I get a glimpse of a door that has a deadbolt and a sliding lock, and on a wall are framed photographs and posters that go by too abruptly for me to see the details. I will wait to study them later.

So far I observe nothing that tells me who the man is or where he lives, but I get the impression of the small apartment or maybe the house of someone who likes animals, is financially comfortable, and is mindful of security and privacy. The man, assuming this is his place and his dog, is highly evolved intellectually and technically, is creative and organized, possibly smokes marijuana, and has chosen a pet that is a needy companion, not a trophy but a creature that has suffered cruelty in a former life and can’t possibly fend for itself. I feel upset for the dog and worry about what has happened to it.

Certainly the EMTs, the police, didn’t leave a helpless greyhound in Norton’s Woods yesterday, lost and alone in the New England weather. Benton told me it was eleven degrees this morning in Cambridge, and before the night is out, it will snow. Maybe the dog is at the fire department’s headquarters, well fed and attended to around the clock. Maybe Investigator Law took it home or some other police person did. It’s also possible no one realized the dog belonged to the man who died. Dear God, that would be awful.

“What happened to the greyhound?” I have to ask.

“Got no idea,” Marino says, to my dismay. “Nobody knew until this morning when Lucy and me saw what you’re looking at. The EMTs don’t remember seeing a greyhound running loose, not that they were looking, but the gate leading into Norton’s Woods was open when they got there. As you probably know, the gate’s never locked and is wide open a lot of the time.”

“He can’t survive in freezing conditions. How could people not notice the poor thing unleashed and running loose? Because I can’t imagine he wasn’t running around in the park for at least a few minutes before he ran out of the open gate. Common sense would tell you that when his master collapsed, the dog didn’t suddenly flee from the woods and onto the street.”

“A lot of people take their dogs off the leashes and let them run loose in the parks like Norton’s Woods,” Lucy says. “I know I do with Jet Ranger.”

Jet Ranger is her ancient bulldog, and he doesn’t exactly run.

“So maybe nobody noticed because it didn’t look out of the ordinary,” she adds.

“Plus, I think everybody was a little preoccupied with some guy dropping dead,” Marino states the obvious.

I look out at military housing on a poorly lit road, at aircraft that are bright and big like planets in the overcast dark. I can’t make sense of what I’m being told. I’m surprised the greyhound didn’t stay close to his master. Maybe the dog panicked or there’s some other reason no one noticed him.

“The dog’s bound to show up,” Marino goes on. “No way people in an area like that are going to ignore a greyhound wandering around by itself. My guess is one of the neighbors or a student has it. Unless it’s possible the guy was whacked and the killer took the dog.”

“Why?” I puzzle.

“Like you’ve been saying, we need to keep an open mind,” he answers. “How do we know that whoever did it wasn’t watching nearby? And then at an opportune moment, took off with the dog, acting like it belonged to him?”

“But why?”

“It could be evidence that would lead to the killer for some reason,” he suggests. “Maybe lead to an identification. A game. A thrill. A souvenir. Who the hell knows? But you’ll notice from the video clips at one point the leash was taken off him, and guess what? It hasn’t showed up. It didn’t come in with the headphones or the body.”

The dog’s name is Sock. On the iPad’s display, the man is walking and clucking his tongue, telling Sock it’s time to go. “Let’s go, Sock,” he coaxes in a pleasant baritone voice. “Come on, you lazy doggie, it’s time for a walk and a shit.” I detect a slight accent, possibly British or Australian. It could be South African, which would be weird, a weird coincidence, and I need to get South Africa off my mind. Focus on what’s before you, I tell myself as Sock jumps off the couch, and I notice he has no collar. Sock— a male, I assume, based on the name—is thin, and his ribs show slightly, which is typical for greyhounds, and he is mature, possibly old, and one of his ears is ragged as if once torn. A rescue retired from the racetrack, I feel sure, and I wonder if he has a microchip. If so and if we can find him, we can trace where he’s from and possibly who adopted him.

A pair of hands enters the frame as the man bends over to loop a red slip lead around Sock’s long, tapered neck, and I notice a silver metal watch with a tachymeter on the bezel and catch the flash of yellow gold, a signet ring, possibly a college ring. If the ring came in with the body, it might be helpful, because it might be engraved. The hands are delicate, with tapered fingers and light-brown skin, and I get a glimpse of a dark-green jacket and baggy black cargo pants and the toe of a scuffed brown hiking boot.

The camera fixes on the wall over the couch, on wormy chestnut paneling and the bottom of a metal picture frame, and then a poster or a print rises into view as the man stands up, and I get a close look at the reproduction of a drawing that is familiar. I recognize da Vinci’s sixteenth-century sketch of a winged flapping device, a flying machine, and I think back a number of years— when was it exactly? The summer before 9/11. I took Lucy to an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, “Leonardo the Inventor,” and we spent many entranced hours listening to lectures by some of the most eminent scientists in the world while studying da Vinci’s conceptual drawings of water, land, and war machines: his aerial screw, scuba gear, and parachute, his giant crossbow, self-propelled cart, and robotic knight.

The great Renaissance genius believed that art is science and science is art, and the solutions to all problems can be found in nature if one is meticulous and observant, if one faithfully seeks truth. I have tried to teach my niece these lessons most of her life. I have repeatedly told her we are instructed by what is around us if we are humble and quiet and have courage. The man I am watching on the small device I hold in my hands has the answers I need. Talk to me. Tell me. Who are you, and what happened?

He is walking toward the door that is deadbolted with the slide lock pulled across, and the perspective abruptly shifts, the camera angle changes, and I wonder if he has adjusted the position of the headphones. Maybe he didn’t have them completely over his ears and now he’s about to turn on music as he heads out. He walks past something mechanical and crude-looking, like a grotesque sculpture made of metal scrap. I pause on the image but can’t get a good look at whatever it is, and I decide that when I have the luxury of time I’ll replay the clips as often as I want and study every detail carefully, or if need be, get Lucy to forensically enhance the images. But right now I must accompany the man and his dog to the wooded estate not even a block from Benton’s and my house. I must witness what happened. In several minutes he will die. Show me and I’ll figure it out. I’ll learn the truth. Let me take care of you.

The man and the dog go down four flights of stairs in a poorly lit stairwell, and footsteps sound light and quick against uncarpeted wood, and the two of them emerge on a loud, busy street. The sun is low, and patches of snow are crusty on top with black dirt, reminding me of crushed Oreo cookies, and whenever the man glances down, I see wet pavers and asphalt, and the sand and salt from snow removal. Cars and people move jerkily and lurch as he turns his head, scanning as he walks, and music plays in the background, Annie Lennox on satellite radio, and I hear only what is audible outside the headphones, what is being picked up by the mike inside the top of the headband. The man must have the volume turned up high, and that’s not good, because he might not hear someone come up behind him. If he’s worried about his security, so worried that he double-locks his apartment door and carries a gun, why isn’t he worried about not hearing what is going on around him?

But people are foolish these days. Even reasonably cautious people multitask ridiculously. They text-message and check e-mail while driving or operating other dangerous machinery or while crossing a busy street. They talk on their cell phones while riding bicycles and while Rollerblading, and even while flying. How often do I tell Lucy not to answer the helicopter phone; doesn’t matter that it’s Bluetooth-enabled and hands-free. I see what the man sees and recognize where he’s walking, on Concord Avenue, moving at a good clip with Sock, past redbrick apartment buildings and the Harvard Police Department, and the dark-red awning of the Sheraton Commander Hotel across the street from the Cambridge Common. He lives very near the Common, in an older apartment building that has at least four floors.

I wonder why he doesn’t take Sock into the Common. It’s a popular park for dogs, but he and his greyhound continue past statues and cannons, lampposts, bare oak trees, benches, and cars parked at meters lining the street. A yellow Lab chases a fat squirrel, and Annie Lennox sings “No more I-love-yous… I used to have demons in my room at night… “ I am the man’s eyes and ears at the time the headphones are recording, and I have no reason to suspect he knows about the hidden camera and mike or that any such thing is on his mind at all.

I don’t get the sense he has a dark plan or is spying as he walks his dog. Except that he has a Glock semiautomatic pistol and eighteen rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition under his green jacket. Why? Is he on his way to shoot someone, or is the gun for self-protection, and if so, what did he fear? Maybe it was a habit of his, a normal routine to walk around armed. There are people like that, too. People who don’t think twice about it. Why did he grind the serial number off the Glock, or did someone else do it? It enters my mind that the hidden recording devices built into his headphones might be an experiment of his or a research project. Certainly Cambridge and its surrounds are the mecca of technical innovations, which is one of the reasons the DoD, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Harvard, and MIT agreed to establish the CFC on the north bank of the Charles River in a biotech building on Memorial Drive. Maybe the man was a graduate student. Maybe he was a computer scientist or an engineer. I watch what is on the iPad’s display, abrupt, shaky images of Mather Court apartments, a playground, Garden Street, and the tilted, worn headstones of the Old Burying Ground.

In Harvard Square, his attention fixes on the Crimson Corner newsstand, and he seems to think of walking in that direction, perhaps to buy a paper from the overstocked selection that Benton and I love. This is our neighborhood, where we prowl for coffee and ethnic food, and papers and books, ending up with take-out and armloads of wonderful things to read that we pile on the bed on weekends and holidays when I’m home. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal, and if one doesn’t mind news a day or two old, there are fat papers from London, Berlin, and Paris. Sometimes we find La Nazione and L’espresso, and I read to us about Florence and Rome, and we look at ads for villas to rent and fantasize about living like the locals, about exploring ruins and museums, the Italian countryside and the Amalfi Coast.

The man pauses on the crowded sidewalk and seems to change his mind about something. He and Sock trot across the street, on Massachusetts Avenue now, and I know where they are headed, or I think I do. A left on Quincy Street, and they are walking more briskly, and the man has a plastic bag in his hand, as if Sock isn’t going to hold out much longer. Past the modern Lamont Library and the Georgian Revival brick Harvard Faculty Club and Fogg Museum, and the Gothic stone Church of the New Jerusalem, and they turn right on Kirkland Avenue. It is the three of us. I am with them, cutting over to Irving, turning left on it, minutes from Norton’s Woods, minutes from Benton’s and my house, listening to Five for Fighting on the satellite radio… “even heroes have the right to bleed… “

I feel a growing sense of urgency with each step as we move closer to the man dying and the dog being lost in the bitter cold, and I desperately don’t want it. I’m walking with them as if leading them into it because I know what’s ahead and they don’t, and I want to stop them and turn them back. Then the house is on our left, three-story, white with black shutters and a slate roof, Federal style, built in 1824 by a transcendentalist who knew Emerson, Thoreau, and the Norton of Norton’s Anthology and Norton’s Woods. Inside the house, Benton’s and my house, are original woodwork and molding, and plaster ceilings with exposed beams, and over the landings of the main staircase are magnificent French stained-glass windows with wildlife scenes that light up like jewels in the sun. A Porsche 911 is in the narrow brick driveway, exhaust fogging out of the chrome tailpipes.

Benton is backing up his sports car, the taillights glowing like fiery eyes as he brakes for a man and his dog walking past, and the man has his headphones turned toward Benton, maybe admiring the Porsche, a black all-wheel-drive Turbo Cabriolet that he keeps as shiny as patent leather. I wonder if he will remember the young man in the bulky green coat and his black-and-white greyhound or if they really registered at the time, but I know Benton. He’ll become obsessed, maybe as obsessed with the man and his dog as I am, and I search my memory for what Benton did yesterday. Late afternoon he dropped by his office at McLean because he’d forgotten to bring home the case file of the patient he was to evaluate today. A few degrees of separation, a young man and his old dog, who are about to be parted forever, and my husband alone in his car heading to the hospital to pick up something he forgot. I’m watching it all unfold as if I’m God, and if this is what it’s like to be God, how awful that must be. I know what’s going to happen and can’t do a thing to stop it.

3

I realize the van has stopped and Marino and Lucy are getting out. We are parked in front of the John B. Wallace Civil Air Terminal, and I stay put. I continue to watch what is playing on the iPad as Lucy and Marino begin unloading my belongings.

Cold air rushes in through the open tailgate while I puzzle over the man’s decision to walk Sock in Norton’s Woods, in what’s called Mid-Cambridge, almost in Somerville. Why here? Why not closer to where he lived? Was he meeting someone? A black iron gate fills the display, and it is partially opened and his hand opens it wide, and I realize he has put on thick black gloves, what look like motorcycle gloves. Are his hands cold, or is there another reason? Maybe he does have a sinister plan. Maybe he intends to use the gun. I imagine pulling back the slide of a nine-millimeter pistol and pressing the trigger while wearing bulky gloves, and it seems illogical.

I hear him shake open the plastic bag, and then I see it as he looks down and I catch a glimpse of something else, what looks like a tiny wooden box. A stash box, I think. Some of them are made of cedar and even have a tiny hygrometer in them like a humidor, and I recall the amber glass smoking pipe on the desk inside the apartment. Maybe he likes to walk his dog in Norton’s Woods because it is remote and usually quite private, and of little interest to the police unless there is a VIP or high-level event that requires security. Maybe he enjoys coming here and smoking weed. He whistles at Sock, bends over, and slips the lead off him, and I can hear him say, “Hey, boy, do you remember our spot? Show me our spot.” Then he says something that’s muffled. I can’t quite make it out. “And for you,” it sounds like he says, followed by, “Do you want to send one…?” Or “Do you send one…?” After playing it twice I still can’t understand what he is saying, and it may be that he is bent over and talking into his coat collar.

Who is he talking to? I don’t see anyone nearby, just the dog and the gloved hands, and then the camera angle shifts up as the man straightens up and I see the park again, a vista of trees and benches, and off to one side a stone walkway near the building with the green metal roof. I catch glimpses of people and conclude by the way they are bundled up for the cold that they aren’t wedding guests but most likely are walking in the park just like the man is. Sock trots toward shrubs to leave his deposit, and his master moves deeper into the gracious wooded estate of ancient elms and green benches.

He whistles and says, “Hey, boy, follow me.”

In shaded areas around thick clumps of rhododendrons the snow is deep and churned up with dead leaves and stones and broken sticks that make me think morbidly of clandestine graves, of sloughed off skin and weathered bones that have been gnawed on and scattered. He is scanning, looking around, and the hidden camera pauses on the three-tier green metal roof of the glass-and-timber building I can see from the sunporch at Benton’s and my house. As the man turns his head, I see a door on the first floor that leads outside, and the camera pauses again on a woman with gray hair standing outside the door. She is dressed in a suit and a long brown leather coat and is talking on her phone.

The man whistles and makes a gritty sound as he walks on the granite gravel path toward Sock, to pick up what the dog has left… “and this emptiness fills my heart… “ Peter Gabriel sings. I think of the young soldier with the same name who burned up in his Humvee, and I smell him as though his foul odors are still trapped deep inside my nose. I think of his mother and her grief and anger on the phone when she called me this morning. Forensic pathologists aren’t always thanked, and there are times when those left behind act as if I am the reason their loved one is dead, and I try to remember that. Don’t take it personally.

The gloved hands shake out the rumpled plastic bag again, the type one gets at the market, and then something happens. The man’s gloved hand flies up at his head, and I hear the jostle of his hand hitting the headphones as if he’s swatting at something, and he exclaims, “What the…? Hey… !” in a breathy, startled way. Or maybe it is a cry of pain. But I don’t see anything or anyone, just the woods and distant figures in it. I don’t see his dog, and I don’t see him. I back up the recording and play it again. His black gloved hand suddenly enters the frame, and he blurts out, “What the…?” then, “Hey… !” I decide he sounds stunned and upset, as if something has knocked the wind out of him.

I play it again, listening for anything else, and what I detect in his tone is protest and maybe fear, and, yes, pain, as if someone has elbowed him or bumped him hard on a busy sidewalk. Then the tops of bare trees rush up and around. Chipped bits of slate zoom in and get large as he thuds down on the path, and either he is on his back or the headphones have come off. The screen is fixed on an image of bare branches and gray sky, and then the hem of a long black coat swishes past, flapping as someone walks swiftly, and another loud jostling noise and the picture changes again. Bare branches and a gray sky but different branches showing through the slats of a green bench. It happens so fast, so unbelievably fast, and then the voices and the sounds of people get loud.

“Someone call nine-one-one!”

“I don’t think he’s breathing.”

“I don’t have my phone. Call nine-one-one!”

“Hello? There’s… uh, yeah, in Cambridge. Yes, Massachusetts. Je-sus! Hurry, hurry; they fucking have me on hold. Je-sus, hurry! I can’t believe this. Yes, yes, a man, he’s collapsed and doesn’t seem to be breathing… Norton’s Woods at the corner of Irving and Bryant… Yes, someone is trying CPR. I’ll stay on… I’m staying on. Yes, I mean, I don’t… She wants to know if he’s still not breathing. No, no, he’s not breathing! He’s not moving. He’s not breathing!… I didn’t really see it, just looked over and noticed he was on the ground, suddenly he was on the ground…”

I press pause and get out of the van, and it is cold and very windy as I walk quickly into the terminal. It is small, with restrooms and a sitting area, and an old television is turned on. For a moment I watch Fox News and fast-forward the video on the iPad while Lucy leans against the front desk and pays the landing fee with a credit card. I continue to stare at images of bare branches showing between the slats of green-painted wood, certain now that the headphones ended up under a bench, the camera fixed straight up as the XM radio plays…. “Dark lady laughed and danced… ” The music is louder because the headphones aren’t pressed against the man’s head, and it seems absurdly incongruous to be listening to Cher.

Voices off camera are urgent and excited, and I hear the sounds of feet and the distant wail of a siren as my niece chats with an older man, a retired fighter pilot now working at Dover part-time as a fixed base operator, he is happy to tell her.

“… In ‘Nam. So that would have been, what, an F-Four?” Lucy chats with him.

“Oh, yeah, and the Tomcat. That was the last one I flew. But Phantoms were still around, you know, as late as the eighties. You build them right and they last like you wouldn’t believe. Look how long the C-Five’s been around. And still some Phantoms in Israel, I think. Maybe Iran. Nowadays those left in the US, we use them for unmanned targets, as drones. One hell of an aircraft. You ever seen one?”

“In Belle Chasse, Louisiana, at the Naval Air Station. Took my helicopter down there to help with Katrina.”

“They’ve been experimenting with hurricane-busting, using Phantoms to fly into the eye.” He nods.

The screen on the iPad goes black. The headphones weren’t recording anymore, and I’m convinced that when the man fell to the ground they must have ended up some distance away under a bench. The motion sensor wasn’t detecting enough activity to prevent it from dozing, and that’s curious to me. How exactly did his headphones get knocked off and end up where they did? Maybe someone kicked them out of the way. It could have been accidental if that’s what happened, perhaps by a person trying to help him, or it could have been deliberate by a person who was covertly recording him, stalking him. I think of the hem of the black coat flapping by, and I fast-forward intermittently, looking for the next images, listening for sounds, but nothing until four-thirty-seven p.m., when the woods and the darkening sky swing wildly, and bare hands loom large and paper crackles as the headphones are placed inside a brown bag, and I hear a voice say, “… Colts all the way.” And another voice says, “Saints are gonna take it. They got…” Then murky darkness and muffled voices, and nothing.

Finding the TV remote on the arm of a couch inside the terminal, I switch the channel to CNN and listen to the news and watch the crawl, but not a word about the man on the video clips. I need to ask about Sock again. Where is the dog? It’s not acceptable that no one seems to know. I fix on Marino as he enters the sitting area, pretending not to see me because he is sulking, or maybe he regrets what he’s done and is embarrassed. I refuse to ask him anything, and it feels as if the missing dog is somehow his fault, as if everything is Marino’s fault. I don’t want to forgive him for e-mailing the video clips to Briggs, for talking to him first. If I don’t forgive Marino for once, maybe he’ll learn a lesson for once, but the problem is I’m never quite able to convince myself of any case I make against him, against anyone I care about. Catholic guilt. I don’t know what it is, but already I am softening toward him, my resolve getting weaker. I feel it happening as I search channels on the television, looking for news that might damage the CFC, and he walks over to Lucy, keeping his back to me. I don’t want to fight with him. I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

I walk away from the TV, convinced at least for the moment that the media doesn’t know about the body waiting for me in my Cambridge morgue. Something as sensational as that would be a headline, I reason. Messages would be landing nonstop on my iPhone. Briggs would have heard about it and said something. Even Fielding would have alerted me. Except I’ve heard nothing from Fielding about anything at all, and I try to call him again. He doesn’t answer his cell phone, and he’s not in his office. Of course not. He never works this late, for God’s sake. I try him at his home in Concord and get voicemail again.

“Jack? It’s Kay,” I leave another message. “We’re about to take off from Dover. Maybe you can text or e-mail me an update. Investigator Law hasn’t called back, I assume? We’re still waiting for photographs, and have you heard anything about a missing dog, a greyhound? The victim’s dog, named Sock, last seen in Norton’s Woods.” My voice has an edge. Fielding is ducking me, and it’s not the first time. He’s a master at disappearing acts, and he should be. He’s staged enough of them. “Well, I’ll try you again when we land. I assume you’ll meet us at the office, probably sometime between nine-thirty and ten. I’ve sent messages to Anne and Ollie, and maybe you can make sure they are there. We need to take care of this tonight. Maybe you could check with Cambridge PD about the dog? He might have a microchip….”

It sounds silly to belabor my point about Sock. What the hell would Fielding know about it? He couldn’t be bothered to go to the scene, and Marino’s right. Someone should have gone.

Lucy’s Bell 407 is black with dark tinted glass in back, and she unlocks the doors and baggage compartment as wind buffets the ramp.

A wind sock is stiffly pointed north like a horizontal traffic cone, and that’s good and bad. The wind will still be on our tail but so will the storm front, heavy rains mixed with sleet and snow. Marino begins to load my luggage while Lucy walks around the helicopter, checking antennas, static ports, rotor blades, the emergency pop-out floats and the bottles of nitrogen that inflate them, then the aluminum alloy tail boom and its gear box, the hydraulic pump and reservoir.

“If someone was spying on him, covertly recording him, and realized he was dead, then the person had something to do with it,” I say to her, apropos of nothing. “So wouldn’t you expect that person to have remotely deleted the video files recorded by the headphones, at least gotten rid of them on the hard drive and SD card? Wouldn’t such a person want to make sure we didn’t find any recordings or have a clue?”

“Depends.” She grabs hold of a handle on the fuselage and inserts the toe of her boot into a built-in step, climbing up.

“If it were you doing it,” I ask.

“If it were me?” She opens fasteners and props open a panel of the lightweight aluminum skin. “If I didn’t think anything significant or incriminating had been recorded, I wouldn’t have deleted them.” Using a small but powerful SureFire flashlight, she inspects the engine and its mounts.

“Why not?”

Before she can answer, Marino walks over to me and says to no one in particular, “I got to make a visit. Anybody else needs to, now’s the time.” As if he’s the chief steward and reminding us that there is no restroom on the helicopter. He’s trying to make up to me.

“Thanks, I’m fine,” I tell him, and he walks off across the dark ramp, back to the terminal.

“If it were me, this is what I’d do after he’s dead,” Lucy continues as the strong light moves over hoses and tubing, as she makes sure nothing is loose or damaged. “I’d download the video files immediately by logging on to the webcam, and if I didn’t see anything that worried me, I’d leave them be.”

She climbs up higher to check the main rotor, its mast, its swash plate, and I wait until she is back on the tarmac before I ask, “Why would you leave them be?”

“Think about it.”

I follow her around the helicopter so she can climb up and check the other side. She almost seems amused by my questions, as if what I’m asking should be obvious.

“If they’re deleted after he’s dead, then someone else did it, right?” she says, checking under cowling, the light probing carefully.

Then she drops back down to the ramp.

“Of course he couldn’t do it after he was dead.” I wait to answer her, because she could get hurt climbing all over her helicopter, especially when she’s up around the rotor mast. I don’t want her distracted. “So that’s why you would leave them if you were the one spying on him and knew he was dead or were the one responsible for his death.”

“If I were spying on him, if I followed him so I could kill him, hell, yes, I’d leave the last video recordings made, and I wouldn’t grab the headphones from the scene, either.” She shines the brilliant light along the fuselage again. “Because if people saw him wearing them out there in the park or on his way to the park, why are they now missing? The headphones are rather beefy and noticeable.”

We walk around to the nose of the helicopter.

“And if I take the headphones, I’d have to take his satellite radio, too, dig in his coat pocket and get that out, have to take time to go to all this trouble after he’s on the ground, and hope nobody saw me. And what about earlier files downloaded somewhere, assuming the spying has gone on for a while? How is that explained if there’s no recording device that shows up and we find recordings on a home computer or server somewhere? You know what they say.” She opens an access panel above the pitot tube and shines the light in there. “For every crime, there are two—the act itself and then what you do to cover it up. Be smarter to leave the headphones, the video files, alone, to let cops or someone like you or me assume he was recording himself, which is what Marino believes, but I doubt it.”

She reconnects the battery. Her rationale for disconnecting it whenever she leaves the helicopter for any period of time is that if someone manages to get inside the cockpit and is lucky while fiddling with the throttle and switches, they could accidentally start the engine. But not if the battery is disconnected. Doesn’t matter her hurry, Lucy always does a thorough preflight, especially if she’s left her aircraft unattended, even if it’s on a military base. But it doesn’t escape my attention that she is checking everything more thoroughly than usual, as if she suspects something or is uneasy.

“Everything A-okay?” I ask her. “Everything in good shape?”

“Making sure of it,” she says, and I feel her distance more strongly. I sense her secrets.

She trusts no one. She shouldn’t. I never should have trusted some people, either, going back to day one. People who manipulate and lie and claim it is for a cause. The right cause, a godly or just cause. Noonie Pieste and Joanne Rule were smothered to death in bed, probably with a pillow. That’s why there was no tissue response to their injuries. The sexual assaults, the hacks with machetes and slashes with broken glass, and even the ligatures binding them when they were tied up in the chairs, all of it postmortem. A godly cause, a just cause, in the minds of those responsible. An unthinkable outrage, and they got away with it. To this day they did. Don’t think about it. Focus on what is before you, not on the past.

I open the left-front door and climb up on a skid, the wind gusting hard. Maneuvering myself around the collective and cyclic and into the left seat, I fasten my four-point harness as I hear Marino opening the door behind me. He is loud and big, and I feel the helicopter settle from his weight as he climbs into the back, where he always sits. Even when Lucy flies with only him as a passenger, he isn’t allowed up front where there are dual controls that he can nudge or bump or use as an armrest because he doesn’t think. He just doesn’t think.

Lucy gets in and begins another preflight, and I help her by holding the checklist, and together we go through it. I’ve never had a desire to fly the various aircraft my niece has owned over the years, or to ride her motorcycles or drive her fast Italian cars, but I’m fine to copilot, am handy with maps and avionics. I know how to switch the radios to the necessary frequencies or enter squawks and other information into the transponder or Chelton Flight System. If there was an emergency, I probably could get the helicopter safely to the ground, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

“… Overhead switches in the off position,” I continue going down the list.

“Yes.”

“Circuit breakers in.”

“They are.” Lucy’s agile fingers touch everything she checks as we go down the plastic-laminated list.

Momentarily, she flips on the boost pumps and rolls the throttle to flight idle.

“Clear to the right.” As she looks out her side window.

“Clear to the left.” As I look out at the dark ramp, at the small building with its lighted windows and a Piper Cub tied down a safe distance away in the shadows, its tarp shaking in the wind.

Lucy pushes the start switch, and the main rotor blade begins to turn slowly, heavily, thudding faster like a heartbeat, and I think of the man. I think of his fear, of what I detected in those three words he exclaimed.

“What the…? Hey… !”

What did he feel? What did he see? The lower part of a black coat, the loose skirt of a black coat swishing past. Whose coat? A wool dress coat or a trench coat? It wasn’t fur. Who was wearing the long, black coat? Someone who didn’t stop to help him.

“What the…? Hey… !” A startled cry of pain.

I replay it in my mind again and again. The camera angle dropping suddenly, then fixing straight up at bare branches and gray sky, then the hem of the long, black coat moving past in the frame for an instant, maybe a second. Who would step around someone in distress as if he was an inanimate object, such as a rock or a log? What kind of human being would ignore someone who grabbed his chest and collapsed? The person who caused it, perhaps. Or someone who didn’t want to be involved for some reason. Like witnessing an accident or assault and speeding off so you don’t become part of the investigation. A man or a woman? Did I see shoes? No, just the hem or skirt of the coat flapping, and then another jostling sound and the picture was replaced by different bare trees showing through the underside of a green-painted bench. Did the person in the long, black coat kick the headphones under the bench there so they didn’t record something else that was done?

I need to look at the video clips more closely, but I can’t do it now. The iPad is in back, and there isn’t time. The blades rapidly beat the air, and the generator is online. Lucy and I put our headsets on. She flips more overhead switches, the avionics master, the flight and navigation instruments. I turn the intercom switch to “crew only” so Marino can’t hear us and we can’t hear him while Lucy talks to the air traffic controller. The strobes, the pulse and night scanner landing lights, blaze on the tarmac, painting it white as we wait for the tower to clear us for takeoff. Entering destinations in the touch-screen GPS and in the moving map display and the Chelton, I correct the altimeters. I make sure the digital fuel indicator matches the fuel gauge, doing most things at least twice, because Lucy believes in redundancy.

The tower releases us, and we hover-taxi to the runway and climb on course to the northeast, crossing the Delaware River at eleven hundred feet. The water is dark and ruffled by the wind, like molten metal flowing thickly. The lights of land flicker through trees like small fires.

4

We change our heading, veering toward Philadelphia, because the visibility deteriorates closer to the coast. I flip the intercom switch so we can check on Marino.

“You all right back there?” I’m calmer now, too preoccupied with the long, black coat and the man’s startled exclamation to be angry with Marino.

“Be quicker to cut through New Jersey,” his voice sounds, and he knows where we are, because there is an in-flight map on a video screen inside the rear passenger compartment.

“Fog and freezing rain, IFR conditions in Atlantic City. And it isn’t quicker,” Lucy replies. “We’ll be on ‘crew only’ most of the time so I can deal with flight following.”

Marino is cut out of our conversation again as we are handed off from one tower to the next. The Washington sectional map is open in my lap, and I enter a new GPS destination of Oxford, Connecticut, for an eventual fuel stop, and we monitor weather on the radar, watching blocks of solid green and yellow encroach upon us from the Atlantic. We can outrun, duck, and dodge the storms, Lucy says, as long as we stay inland and the wind continues to favor us, increasing our ground speed to what at this moment is an impressive one hundred and fifty-two knots.

“How are you doing?” I keep up my scan for cell towers and other aircraft.

“Better when we get where we’re going. I’m sure we’ll be fine and can outrun this mess.” She points at what’s on the weather radar display. “But if there’s a shadow of a doubt, we’ll set down.”

She wouldn’t have come to pick me up if she thought we might have to spend the night in a field somewhere. I’m not worried. Maybe I don’t have enough left in me to worry about yet one more thing.

“How about in general? How are you doing?” I say into the mike, touching my lip. “You’ve been on my mind a lot these past few weeks.” I try to draw her out.

“I know how hard it is to keep up with people under the circumstances,” she says. “Every time we think you’re coming back, something changes, so we’ve all quit thinking it.”

Three times now the completion of my fellowship was delayed by one urgent matter or another. Two helicopters shot down in one day in Iraq with twenty-three killed. The mass murder at Fort Hood, and most recently, the earthquake in Haiti. Armed forces MEs got deployed or none could be spared, and Briggs wouldn’t release me from my training program. A few hours ago, he attempted to delay my departure again, suggesting I stay in Dover. As if he doesn’t want me to go home.

“I figured we’d get to Dover and find out you had another week, two weeks, a month,” Lucy adds. “But you’re done.”

“Apparently, they’re sick of me.”

“Let’s hope you don’t get home only to turn around and go back.”

“I passed my boards. I’m done. I’ve got an office to run.”

“Someone needs to run it. That’s for sure.”

I don’t want to hear more damning comments about Jack Fielding.

“And things are fine elsewhere?” I ask.

“They’ve almost finished the garage, big enough for three cars even with the washing bay. Assuming you tandem park.” She starts on a construction update, reminding me how disengaged I’ve been from what’s going on at my own home. “The rubberized flooring is in, but the alarm system isn’t ready. They weren’t going to bother with glass breakers, and I said they had to. Unfortunately, one of the old wavy-glass windows original to the building didn’t survive the upgrade. So you’ve got a bit of a breeze in the garage at the moment. Did you know all this?”

“Benton’s been in charge.”

“Well, he’s been busy. You got the freq for Millville? I think one-two-three-point-six-five.”

I check the sectional and affirm the frequency and enter it into Comm 1. “How are you?” I try again.

I want to know what I’m coming home to in addition to a dead man awaiting me in the morgue cooler. Lucy won’t tell me how she is, and now she’s accusing Benton of being busy. When she says something like that, she doesn’t mean it literally. She’s very tense. She’s obsessively watching the instruments, the radar screens, and what’s outside the cockpit, as if she’s expecting to get into a dogfight or to be struck by lightning or to have a mechanical failure. I’m sensing something is off about her, or maybe I’m the one in a mood.

“He has a big case,” I add. “An especially bad one.”

We both know which one I mean. It’s been all over the news about Johnny Donahue, the patient at McLean, a Harvard student who last week confessed to murdering a six-year-old boy with a nail gun. Benton believes the confession is false, and the cops, the DA, are unhappy with him. People want the confession to be genuine, because they don’t want to think someone like that might still be loose. I wonder how the evaluation went today, as I envision Benton’s black Porsche backing out of our driveway on the video clips I just watched. He was on his way to McLean to pick up Johnny Donahue’s case file when a young man and a greyhound walked past our house. Several degrees of separation. The human web connecting all of us, connecting everyone on earth.

“Let’s keep one-two-seven-point-three-five on Comm Two so we can monitor Philly,” Lucy is saying, “but I’m going to try to stay out of their Class B. I think we can, unless this stuff pushes in any tighter from the coast.”

She indicates the green and yellow shapes on the satellite weather radar display that show precipitation moving closer, as if trying to bully us northwest into the bright skyline of downtown Philadelphia, fly us into the high-rises.

“I’m fine,” she then says. “Sorry about him, because I can tell you’re pissed.” She points her thumb toward the back, meaning Marino. “What’d he do besides be his usual self?”

“Were you listening when he talked to Briggs?”

“That was in Wilmington. I was busy paying for fuel.”

“He shouldn’t have called him.”

“Like telling Jet Ranger not to drool when I get out the bag of treats. It’s Pavlovian for Marino to shoot off his mouth to Briggs, to show off. Why are you more surprised than usual?” Lucy asks as if she already knows the answer, as if she’s probing, looking for something.

“Maybe because it’s caused a worse problem than usual.” I tell her about Briggs wanting the body transported to Dover.

I tell her that the chief of the armed forces medical examiners has information he’s not sharing, or at least I suspect that he is withholding something important from me. Probably because of Marino, I say. Because of what he’s managed to stir up by going over my head.

“I don’t think that’s all of it by a long shot,” Lucy says as her tail number is called out over the air.

She presses the radio switch on her cyclic and answers, and as she talks to flight following, I enter the next frequency. We hop-scotch from air space to air space, the shapes on the weather radar mostly yellow now and bird-dogging us from the southeast, indicating heavy rains that at this altitude will create hazardous conditions as supercooled water particles hit the leading edges of the rotor blades and freeze. I watch for moisture on the Plexiglas windscreen and don’t see anything, not one drop, while I wonder what Lucy is referring to. What’s not it by a long shot?

“Did you notice what was in his apartment?” Lucy’s voice in my headset, and I assume she means the dead man and what I watched on the video clips recorded by his headphones.

“You said that’s not all of it.” I go back to that first. “Tell me what you’re referring to.”

“I’m about to and didn’t want to bring it up in front of Marino. He didn’t notice, wouldn’t know what it was, anyway, and I didn’t point it out because I wanted to talk to you and I’m not sure he should know about it, period.”

“Didn’t point out what?”

“My guess is Briggs didn’t need it pointed out,” Lucy goes on. “He had a lot more time to look at the video clips than you did, and he or whoever else he’s showed them to would have recognized the metal contraption near the door, sort of looks like a six-legged creepy crawler welded together with wires and composite pieces and parts, about the size of a stackable washer and dryer. Picked up by the camera for a second when the man and Sock were on their way out to Norton’s Woods. I’m sure it wasn’t lost on you, of all people.”

“I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a crude metal sculpture.” Obviously, I missed a connection she’s made. A big one.

“A robot, and not just any robot,” Lucy informs me. “A prototype developed for the military, what was supposed to be a tactical packbot for the troops in Iraq, and then another creative purpose was suggested that went over like the proverbial lead balloon.”

A glint of recognition, and an ominous feeling begins working its way up from my gut, tightening my chest, creating awareness, then a memory.

“This particular model didn’t last long,” she continues, and I think I know what she’s talking about.

MORT. Mortuary Operational Removal Transport. Good God.

“Never made it into service and is obsolete if not silly now, replaced by biologically inspired legged robots that can carry heavy loads over rough or slippery terrain,” she says. “Like the quadruped called Big Dog that’s all over YouTube. Damn thing can carry hundreds of pounds all day long in the worst conditions imaginable, jumps like a deer and regains its balance if it trips or slips or you kick it.”

“MORT,” I go ahead and say it. “Why would he have a packbot like MORT in his apartment? I think I’m misunderstanding something.”

“You ever see it in person back then, when you got into a debate about it on Capitol Hill? And you’re not misunderstanding anything. I’m talking about MORT.”

“I never saw MORT in person.” I saw it on videotaped demonstrations only, and I got into more than one debate, especially with Briggs. “Why would he have something like that?” I ask again about what Lucy claims is in the dead man’s apartment.

“Creepy as hell. Like a giant mechanical ant, gas-powered,” she says. “Sounds like a chain saw when it’s ambulating slowly on its short, clunky legs with two sets of grippers in front like Edward Scissorhands. If you saw it coming at you, you’d run like hell or maybe lob a grenade at it.”

“But in his apartment? Why?” I remember demonstrations that I found horrifying, and heated discussions that became nasty skirmishes with colleagues including Briggs at the AFME, at Walter Reed, and in the Russell Senate Office Building.

MORT. The epitome of wrongheaded automation that became the source of a controversy in military and medical intelligence. It wasn’t the technology that was such a terrible idea, it was the suggestion of how it should be used. I remember a hot summer morning in Washington, the heat rising off a sidewalk crowded with Boy Scouts touring the capital as Briggs and I argued. We were hot in our uniforms, frustrated and stressed, and I remember walking past the White House, people everywhere, and wondering what would be next. What other inhumanities would be offered by technology? And that was almost a decade ago, almost the Stone Age compared to now.

“I’m pretty sure—in fact, more than pretty sure—that’s what’s parked inside the guy’s apartment,” Lucy is saying. “And you don’t buy something like that on eBay.”

“Maybe it’s a model,” I suggest. “A facsimile.”

“No way. When I zoomed in on it, I could see the composite parts in detail, some wear and tear on it from usage, probably from R-and-D on hard terrain and it got scraped up a little. I could even see the fiber-optic connectors. MORT wasn’t wireless, which was just one of a number of things wrong with it. Not like what they’re doing today with autonomous robots that have onboard computers and receive information through sensors controlled by man-wearable units instead of lugging around a cumbersome Pelican case-based one. Like the military guys are doing so their field-embedded operators are hands-free when they’re out with their robotic squads. This whole new thing with lightweight ruggedized processors that you can wear in your vest, saying you’re operating an unmanned ground vehicle or the armed robots, the SWORDS unit, the Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System. A robotic infantry armed with M-two-forty-nine light machine guns. Not something I’m comfortable with, and I know how you feel about that.”

“I’m not sure that there are words for how I feel about it,” I reply.

“Three SWORDS units so far in Iraq, but they haven’t fired their weapons yet. Nobody’s sure how to get a robot to have that kind of judgment. Artificial EQ. A rather daunting prospect but I’m sure not impossible.”

“Robots should be used for peacekeeping, surveillance, as pack mules.”

“That’s you but not everyone.”

“They should not make decisions about life and death,” I go on. “It would be like autopilot deciding whether we should fly through these clouds rolling toward us.”

“Autopilot could if my helicopter had moisture and temperature sensors. Throw in force transducers and it will land all by itself as light as a feather. Enough sensors and you don’t need me anymore. Climb in and push a button like the Jetsons. Sounds crazy, but the crazier, the better. Just ask DARPA. You got any idea how much money DARPA invests in the Cambridge area?”

Lucy lowers the collective, losing altitude and bleeding off speed as another ghostly patch of clouds rolls toward us in the dark.

“Besides what it’s invested in the CFC?” she then says.

Her demeanor is different, even her face is different, and she’s no longer trying to hide what has come over her. I know this mood. I know it all too well. It is an old mood I haven’t seen in a while, but I know it like I know the symptoms of a disease that has been in remission.

“Computers, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, the more off the wall, the better,” she continues. “Because there’s no such thing as mad scientists anymore. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as science fiction. Come up with the most extreme invention you can imagine, and it’s probably being implemented somewhere. It’s probably old news.”

“You’re suggesting this man who died in Norton’s Woods is connected to DARPA.”

“Somehow he is, in some capacity. Don’t know how directly or indirectly,” Lucy answers. “MORT isn’t being used anymore, not by the military, not for any purpose, but was Star Wars stuff about eight or nine years ago when DARPA stepped up funding for military and intelligence-gathering applications of robotics, bio and computer engineering. And forensics and other applications germane to our war dead, to what happens in combat, in theater.”

It was DARPA that funded the research and development of the RadPath technology we use in virtual autopsies at Dover and now at the CFC. DARPA funded my four-month fellowship that turned into six.

“A substantial percentage of research grants are going to Cambridge area labs, to Harvard and MIT,” Lucy says. “Remember when everything became about the war?”

It’s getting harder to remember a time when that wasn’t true. War has become our national industry, like automotives and steel and the railroads once were. That’s the dangerous world we live in. I don’t believe it can change.

“The brilliant idea that robots like MORT could be utilized in theater to recover casualties so troops didn’t risk their lives for a fallen comrade?” Lucy reminds me.

Not a brilliant idea but an unfortunate one. A supremely stupid one, I thought at the time and still do. Briggs and I weren’t on the same side about it. He’ll never give me credit for saving him from a PR misstep that could have injured him badly.

“The idea was aggressively researched for a while and then got tabled,” Lucy adds.

It got tabled because using robots for such a purpose supposes they can decide a fallen soldier, a human being, is fatally injured or dead.

“DoD got a lot of shit for it, at least internally, because it seemed cold-blooded and inhumane,” she says.

Deservedly. No one should die in the grippers of something mechanical dragging them off the battlefield or out of a crashed vehicle or from the rubble of a building that has collapsed.

“What I’m getting at is the early generations of this technology have been buried by DoD, relegated to a classified scrap yard or salvaged for pieces and parts,” Lucy says. “Yet your guy in the cooler has one in his apartment. Where’d he get it? He’s got a connection. He has drafting paper on the coffee table. He’s an inventor, an engineer, something like that, and somehow involved in classified projects that require a high level of security clearance, but he’s a civilian.”

“How can you be so sure he’s a civilian?”

“Believe me, I’m sure. He’s not experienced or trained, and he sure as hell isn’t military intel or a government agent or he wouldn’t walk around listening to music turned up loud and armed with an expensive pistol that has the serial number ground off—in other words, he probably bought it on the street. He’d have something that would never be traced to him or anyone, something you use once and toss….”

“We don’t know who the gun is traced to?” I want to make sure.

“Not that I know of, not yet, which is ridiculous. This guy isn’t undercover. Hell, no. I think what he is is scared,” Lucy says as if she knows it for a fact. “Was,” she adds. “He was. And someone had him under surveillance—my belief, anyway—and now he’s dead. In my opinion, it’s not a coincidence. I suggest you exercise extreme caution when talking to Marino.”

“Sometimes he has terrible judgment, but he’s not trying to do me in.”

“He’s also not medical intel like you are, and his understanding only goes so far as not discussing cases with his buddies at the bowling alley and not talking to reporters. He thinks it’s perfectly fine to confide in people like Briggs, because he’s got no sense when it comes to military brass.” Lucy’s demeanor is as uneasy and somber as I’ve seen her since I can’t remember when. “In a case like this one, you talk to me, you talk to Benton.”

“Have you told Benton what you just told me?”

“I’ll let you explain about MORT, because he’s not likely to understand what it is. He wasn’t around when you went through all that with the Pentagon. You tell him, and then all of us can talk. You, him, me, and that’s it, at least for now, because you don’t know who is what, and you damn well better have your facts straight and know who’s us and who’s them.”

“If I can’t trust Marino with a case like this, or any case, for that matter, why do I have him?” Defensiveness sharpens my tone, because Marino was her idea, too.

She encouraged me to hire him as CFC’s chief of operational investigations, and she talked him into it, too, although it wasn’t exactly a hard sell. He’d never admit it, but he doesn’t want to be anywhere I’m not, and when he realized I was going to be in Cambridge, he suddenly got disenchanted with the NYPD. He lost interest in Assistant DA Jaime Berger, whose office he was assigned to. He got into a feud with his landlord in the Bronx. He started complaining about New York taxes, even though he’d been paying them for several years. He said it was intolerable having no place to ride a motorcycle and no place to park a truck, even though he owned neither at the time. He said he had to move.

“It’s not about trust. It’s about acknowledging limitations.” It’s an uncharacteristically charitable thing for Lucy to say. Usually, people are simply bad or useless and deserve whatever punishment she decides.

She eases up on the collective and makes subtle adjustments with the cyclic, increasing our speed and making sure we don’t climb into the clouds. The night around us is impenetrably dark, and there are stretches where I can’t see lights on the ground, suggesting we are flying over trees. I enter the frequency for McGuire so we can monitor its airspace while keeping an eye on the Traffic Collision Avoidance System, the TCAS. It is showing no other aircraft anywhere. We might be the only ones flying tonight.

“I don’t have the luxury to allow for limitations,” I tell my niece. “Meaning I probably made a mistake hiring Marino. I probably made a bigger one hiring Fielding.”

“Not probably, and not the first time. Jack walked out on you in Watertown and went to Chicago, and you should have left him there.”

“In all fairness, we lost our funding in Watertown. He knew the office was probably going to close, and it did.”

“That’s not why he left.”

I don’t respond, because she’s right. It isn’t why. Fielding wanted to move to Chicago because his wife had been offered a job there. Two years later, he asked if he could come back. He said he missed working for me. He said he missed his family. Lucy, Marino, Benton, and me. One big, happy family.

“It isn’t just them. You have a problem with everybody there,” Lucy then says.

“So nobody should have been hired. Including you, I suppose.”

“Probably not me, either. I’m not exactly a team player.” She was fired by the FBI, by ATF. I don’t think Lucy can be supervised by anybody, including me.

“Well, this is a nice thing to come home to,” I reply.

“That’s the danger with a prototype installation that no matter what anyone says is in fact both civilian and military, has both local and federal jurisdiction and also academic ties,” Lucy says. “You’re neither-nor. Staff members don’t exactly know how to act or aren’t capable of staying within boundaries, assuming anyone even understands the boundaries. I warned you about that a long time ago.”

“I don’t remember you warning me. I just remember you pointing it out.”

“Let’s enter the freq for Lakehurst and squawk VFR, because I’m ditching flight following,” she decides. “We get pushed any farther west and we’re going to have a crosswind that will slow us down more than twenty knots and we’ll be grounded for the night in Harrisburg or Allentown.”

5

Snowflakes are crazed like moths in landing lights and the wind of our blades as we set down on the wooden dolly. The skids tentatively touch, then spread heavily as the weight settles, and four sets of headlights begin to move toward us from the security gate near the FBO.

The headlights move slowly across the ramp, illuminating snow that is falling fast, and I recognize the silhouette of Benton’s green Porsche SUV. I recognize the Suburban and the Range Rover, both of them black. I don’t know the fourth car, a sleek, dark sedan with a chrome mesh grille. Lucy and Marino must have driven here separately today and left their SUVs with the line crew, which makes sense. My niece always arrives at the airport well in advance of everyone else so she can get the helicopter ready, so she can check it from the pitot tube on its nose to the stinger on its tail boom. I haven’t seen her like this in a while, and as we wait the two minutes in flight idle before she finishes the shutdown, I try to remember the last time, pinpoint it exactly, in hopes of figuring out what’s happening. Because she isn’t telling me.

She won’t unless it fits into her overall plan, and there is no getting information out of her when she’s not ready to offer it, which can be never in extreme situations. Lucy thrives on covert behavior, is far more comfortable being who she’s not than who she is, and that’s always been the case, going back to her earliest years. She feeds on the power of secrecy and is energized by the drama of risk, of real danger. The more threatening, the better. All she’s revealed to me so far is that an obsolete robot in the dead man’s apartment is a DARPA-funded packbot called MORT that at one time was intended for mortuary operations in theater, in other words, body removal in war, a mechanical Grim Reaper. MORT was insensitive and inappropriate, and I fought it aggressively years ago, but the peculiarity of the dead man having such a thing in his apartment doesn’t explain Lucy’s behavior.

When was it that she scared me so badly, not that it’s been only once, but the time I thought she might end up in prison? Seven or eight years ago, I decide, when she came back from Poland, where she was involved in a mission that had to do with Interpol, with special ops that to this day I’m unclear about. I’ll never know just how much she would tell me if I pushed hard enough, but I won’t. I’ve chosen to remain foggy about what she did over there. What I know is enough. It’s more than enough. I would never say that about Lucy’s feelings, health, or general well-being, because I care intensely about every molecule of her, but I can say it about some complex and clandestine aspects of the way she has lived. For her own good and mine, there are details I will not ask about. There are stories I don’t want to be told.

During the last hour of our flight here to Hanscom Field, she got increasingly preoccupied, impatient, and impossibly vigilant, and it is her vigilance that has a special caliber. That’s what I recognize. Vigilance is the weapon she draws when she feels threatened and goes into a certain mode I used to dread. In Oxford, Connecticut, where we stopped for fuel, she wouldn’t leave the helicopter unattended, not for a second. She supervised the fuel truck and made me stand guard in the cold while she trotted inside the FBO to pay because she didn’t trust Marino with guard duty, as she put it. She told me that when they had refueled in Wilmington, Delaware, earlier today en route to Dover, he was too busy on the phone to care about security or notice what was going on around them.

She said she watched him through the window as he paced on the tarmac, talking and gesturing, no doubt swept up in telling Briggs about the man who allegedly was still alive when he was locked inside my cooler. Not once did Marino look at the helicopter, Lucy reported to me. He was oblivious when another pilot strolled over to check it out, squatting so he could inspect the FLIR, the Nightsun, and peering through Plexiglas into the cabins. It didn’t enter Marino’s mind that the doors were unlocked, as was the fuel cap, and of course there is no such thing as securing the cowling. One can get to the transmission, the engine, the gear boxes, the vital organs of a helicopter, by the simple release of latches.

All it takes is water in the fuel tank for a flameout in flight, and the engine quits. Or sprinkle a small amount of contaminant into the hydraulic fluid, maybe dirt, oil, or water into the reservoir, and the controls will fail like power steering in a car, but a little more serious when you’re two thousand feet in the air. If you really want to create havoc, contaminate both the fuel and the hydraulic fluid so you have a flameout and a hydraulic failure simultaneously, Lucy described in gory detail as we flew with the intercom on “crew only” so Marino couldn’t hear. That would be especially unfortunate after dark, she said, when emergency landings, which are difficult enough, are far worse, because you can’t see what’s under you and had better hope it isn’t trees, power lines, or some other obstruction.

Of course, the sabotage she fears most is an explosive device, and she’s obsessed in general with explosives and what they’re really used for and who is using them against us, including the US government using them against us if it suits certain agendas. So I had to listen to that for a while before she went on to depress me further by explaining how simple it would be to plant such a thing, preferably under luggage or a floor mat in back so that when it detonates it takes out the main fuel tank beneath the rear seats. Then the helicopter turns into a crematorium, she told me, and this made me think of the soldier in the Humvee again and his devastated mother lashing out at me over the phone. I was making unfortunate associations most of the time we were flying, because for better or worse, any disaster described evokes vivid examples from my own cases. I know how people die. I know exactly what will happen to me if I do.

Lucy cuts the throttle and pulls the rotor brake down, and the instant the blades stop turning, the driver’s door of Benton’s SUV opens. The interior light doesn’t go on. It won’t in any one of the three SUVs on the ramp, because cops and federal agents, including former ones, have their quirks. They don’t sit with their backs to the door. They hate to fasten their seat belts, and they don’t like interior lights in their vehicles. They are imprinted to avoid ambushes and restraints that might impede their escape. They resist turning themselves into illuminated targets. They are vigilant but not as vigilant as Lucy has been these past few hours.

Benton walks toward the helicopter and waits near the dolly with his hands in the pockets of an old black shearling coat I gave him many Christmases ago, his silver hair mussed by the wind. He is tall and lean against the snowy night, and his features are keen in the uneven shadow and light. Whenever I see him after a long separation, it is with the eyes of a stranger, and I’m drawn to him all over again, just like the first time long ago in Virginia when I was the new chief, the first woman in America to run such a large medical examiner system, and he was a legend in the FBI, the star profiler and head of what was then the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. He walked into my conference room, and I was suddenly unnerved and unsure of myself, and it had nothing to do with the serial murders we were there to discuss.

“You know this guy?” he says into my ear as we hug. He kisses me lightly on the lips, and I smell the woodsy fragrance of his aftershave and feel the soft leather of his coat against my cheek.

I look past him to a man climbing out of the sedan, what I now can see is a dark-blue or black Bentley that has the throaty purr of a V12 engine. He is big and overweight, with a jowly face and a fringe of thinning hair that flails in the wind. Dressed in a long overcoat, the collar up around his ears, and with gloves on, he stands a polite distance away with the detached demeanor of a limo driver. But I sense his awareness of us. He seems most interested in Benton.

“He must be waiting for someone else,” I decide as the man looks at the helicopter, then looks at Benton again. “Or he’s mixed up.”

“Can I help you?” Benton steps closer to him.

“I’m looking for Dr. Scarpetta?”

“And why might you be looking for Dr. Scarpetta?” Benton is friendly but firm, and he gives nothing away.

“I was sent here with a delivery, and the instructions I got is the party would be on Dr. Scarpetta’s helicopter or meeting it. What branch of service you with, or maybe you’re Homeland Security? I see it’s got a FLIR, a searchlight, a lot of special equipment. Pretty high-tech; how fast does it go?”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m supposed to give something directly to Dr. Scarpetta. Is that you? I was told to ask for identification.” The driver watches Lucy and Marino carry my belongings out of the passenger and baggage compartments. The driver isn’t interested in me, not so much as a glance. I’m the wife of the tall, handsome man with silver hair. The driver thinks Benton is Dr. Scarpetta and that the helicopter is his.

“Let’s get you out of here before this turns into a blizzard,” Benton says, walking toward the Bentley in a way that gives the driver no choice but to follow. “I hear we’re getting six to eight inches, but I think we’re in for more, like we need it, right? What a winter. Where are you from? Not here. The south somewhere. I’m guessing Tennessee.”

“You can tell after twenty-seven years? Guess I need to work on talking Yankee. Nashville. Was stationed here with the Sixty-Sixth Air Base Wing and never got around to leaving. I’m not a pilot, but I drive pretty good.” He opens the passenger door and leans inside. “You fly that thing yourself? I’ve never been in one. I knew right away your chopper wasn’t air force. I guess if you’re CIA, you’re not going to tell me….”

Their voices drift back to me as I wait on the ramp where Benton left me. I know better than to follow him to the Bentley but am unwilling to sit inside our car when I have no idea who the man is or what delivery he’s talking about or how he knew someone named Scarpetta would be at Hanscom, either on a helicopter or meeting it, and what time it would land. The first person who comes to mind is Jack Fielding. It’s likely he knows my itinerary, and I check my iPhone. Anne and Ollie have answered my text messages and are already at the CFC, waiting for us. But nothing from Fielding. What is going on with him? Something is, something serious. This can’t be nothing more than his usual irresponsibility or indifference or erratic behavior. I hope he’s all right, that he’s not sick or injured or fighting with his wife, and I watch Benton tuck something into a coat pocket. He heads straight to the SUV, and that’s his message to me. Get in and don’t ask questions on the ramp. Something just transpired that he doesn’t like, despite his relaxed friendly act with the driver.

“What is it?” I ask him as we shut our doors at the same time Marino opens the back and starts shoving in my boxes and bags.

Benton turns up the heat and doesn’t answer as more of my belongings are loaded, and then Marino comes around to my door. He raps a knuckle on the glass.

“Who the hell was that?” He stares off in the direction of the Bentley, and snow is falling thick and hard, frosting the bill of his baseball cap and melting on his glasses.

“Did many people know you and Lucy were heading out to Dover today?” Benton leans his shoulder against me as he talks to him.

“The general. And Captain What’s-her-name Avallone when I called trying to get a message to the Doc. And certain people at our office knew. Why?”

“Nobody else? Maybe a mention in passing to the EMTs, to Cambridge police?”

Marino pauses, thinking, and a look passes over his face. He’s not sure whom he told. He’s trying to remember, and he’s calculating. If he did something foolish, he won’t want to admit it, has heard quite enough about how indiscreet he is. He doesn’t intend to be chastised yet again, although, to be fair, he wouldn’t have had a reason to behave as if it was classified information that he and Lucy were flying to Delaware to pick me up. It’s not a state secret where I’ve been, only why I’ve been there, and I was supposed to come home tomorrow, anyway.

“No big deal if you did.” Benton seems to be thinking the same thing I am. “I’m just trying to figure out how a messenger knew to meet the helicopter here, that’s all.”

“What kind of messenger drives a Bentley?” Marino says to him.

“Apparently, the kind who’s been told your itinerary, including the helicopter’s tail number,” Benton replies.

“Goddamn Fielding. What the hell’s he doing? He’s fucking lost it, that’s what.” Marino takes off his glasses and then has nothing to wipe them with, and his face looks naked and strange without his old wire-rims. “I mentioned to a few people that you were probably coming back today instead of tomorrow. I mean, obviously certain people knew because of the problem we have with the dead guy bleeding and everything else.” He directs this at me. “But Fielding’s the one who knew exactly what you were doing, and he sure as hell knows Lucy’s helicopter, since he’s been in it before. Shit, you don’t know the half of it,” he adds darkly.

“We’ll talk at the office.” Benton wants him to shut up.

“What the hell do we really know about him? What the fuck’s he up to? It’s damn time to quit protecting him. He’s sure as hell not protecting you,” he says to me.

“Let’s talk about this later,” Benton replies with a warning in his tone.

“Setting you up somehow,” Marino says to me.

“Now’s not the time to get into it.” Benton’s voice flattens out.

“He wants your job. Or maybe he just doesn’t want you to have it.” Marino looks at me as he digs his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and steps away from my window. “Welcome home, Doc.” Flakes of snow blowing into the car are cold and wet on my face and neck. “Good to be reminded who you can really trust, right?” He stares at me as I roll up the glass.

Anticollision beacons flash red and white on the wingtips of parked jets as we drive slowly across the ramp toward the security gate, which has just swung open.

The Bentley drives through, and we are right behind it, and I notice its Massachusetts plate doesn’t have livery stamped on it, suggesting the car isn’t owned by a limousine company. I’m not surprised. Bentleys are unusual, especially around here, where people are understated and conservation-minded, even those who fly private. I seldom see Bentleys or Rolls-Royces, mostly Toyotas or Saabs. We pass the FBO for Signature, one of several flight services on the civilian side of the airfield, and I place my hand on the soft suede of Benton’s coat pocket without touching the creamy white envelope barely protruding from it.

“Would you like to tell me what just happened?” It appears he was given a letter.

“Nobody should know you just flew here or that you might be here, shouldn’t know anything about you personally or your whereabouts, period,” Benton says, and his face and voice are hard. “Obviously, she called the CFC and Jack told her. She’s certainly called there before, and who else but Jack?”

He says it as if it’s really not a question, and I have no idea what he is referring to.

“I can’t understand why he or anyone would talk to her, for Christ’s sake,” Benton goes on, but I don’t believe he doesn’t understand whatever it is he’s talking about. His tone says something else entirely. I don’t sense that he’s even surprised.

“Who?” Because I have no idea. “Who’s called the CFC?”

“Johnny Donahue’s mother. Apparently, that’s her driver.” Indicating the car up ahead.

The windshield wipers make a loud rubbery sound as they drag across the glass, pushing away snow that is turning to slush as it hits. I look at the taillights of the Bentley in front of us and try to make sense of what Benton is telling me.

“We should look at whatever it is.” I mean the envelope in his pocket.

“It’s evidence. It should be looked at in the labs,” he says.

“I should know what it is.”

“I finished evaluating Johnny this morning,” Benton then reminds me. “I know his mother has called the CFC several times.”

“How do you know?”

“Johnny told me.”

“A psychiatric patient told you. And that’s reliable information.”

“I’ve spent a total of almost seven hours with him since he was admitted. I don’t believe he killed anyone. There are a lot of things I don’t believe. But I do believe his mother would call the CFC, based on what I know,” Benton says.

“She can’t really think we would discuss the Mark Bishop case with her.”

“These days people think everything is public information, that they’re entitled,” he says, and it’s not like him to make assumptions and to indulge in generalities. His statement strikes me as glib and evasive. “And Mrs. Donahue has a problem with Jack,” Benton adds, and that comment strikes me as genuine.

“Johnny’s told you his mother has a problem with Jack. And why would she have an opinion about him?”

“Some of this I can’t get into.” He stares straight ahead as he drives on the snowy road, and the snow is falling faster and slashes through the headlights and clicks against glass.

I know when Benton is keeping things from me. Usually, I’m fine with it. Right now I’m not. I’m tempted to slide the envelope out of his pocket and look at what someone, presumably Mrs. Donahue, wants me to see.

“Have you met her, talked to her?” I ask him.

“I’ve managed to avoid that so far, although she’s called the hospital, trying to track me down, called several times since he was admitted. But it’s not appropriate for me to talk to her. It’s not appropriate for me to talk about a lot of things, and I know you understand.”

“If Jack or anyone has divulged details about Mark Bishop to her, that’s about as serious as it gets,” I reply. “And I do understand your reticence, or I think I do, but I have a right to know if he’s done that.”

“I didn’t know what you know. If Jack’s said anything to you,” he says.

“About what specifically?”

I don’t want to admit to Benton and most of all to myself that I can’t remember precisely when I talked to Fielding last. Our conversations, when we’ve had them, have been perfunctory and brief, and I didn’t see him at all when I was home for several days over the holidays. He had gone somewhere, presumably taken his family somewhere, but I’m not sure. Long months ago, Fielding quit sharing the details of his personal life with me.

“Specifically, this case, the Mark Bishop case,” Benton says. “When it happened, for example, did Jack discuss it with you?”

Saturday, January 30, six-year-old Mark Bishop was playing in his backyard, about an hour from here in Salem, when someone hammered nails into his head.

“No,” I answer. “Jack hasn’t talked about it with me.”

I was in Dover when the boy was murdered, and Fielding took the case, which was extraordinarily out of character, and I thought so then. He’s never been able to deal with children but for some reason decided to deal with this one, and it shocked me. In the past, if the body of a child was en route to the morgue, Fielding absented himself. It made no sense at all that Fielding would take the Mark Bishop case, and I’m sorry I didn’t return home, because that was my first impulse. I should have acted on it, but I didn’t want to do to my second in command what Briggs just did to me. I didn’t want to show a lack of faith.

“I’ve reviewed it thoroughly, but Jack and I haven’t discussed it, although I certainly indicated I would make myself available if there was a need.” I feel myself getting defensive and hate it when I get that way. “Technically, it’s his case. Technically, I wasn’t here.” I can’t stop myself, and I know it sounds weak, like I’m making excuses, and I feel annoyed with myself.

“In other words, Jack hasn’t tried to share the details. I should say he’s not shared his details,” Benton says.

“Consider where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing,” I remind him.

“I’m not saying it’s your fault, Kay.”

“What’s my fault? And what do you mean ‘his’ details?”

“I’m asking if you’ve asked Jack about it. If maybe he’s avoided discussing it with you.”

“You know how he is when it’s kids. At the time, I left him a message that one of the other medical examiners could handle it, but Jack took care of it. I was surprised he did, but that’s how it went. As I’ve said, I’ve reviewed all of the records. His, the police, the lab reports, et cetera.”

“So you really don’t know what’s going on with it.”

“It seems you’re saying I don’t.”

Benton is silent.

“Know what’s going on in addition to the latest? The confession made by the Donahue boy?” I try again. “Certainly I know what’s been in the news, and a Harvard student confessing to such a thing has been all over it. Obviously, what you’re getting at is there are details I’ve not been told.”

Again Benton doesn’t answer. I imagine Fielding talking to Johnny Donahue’s mother. It’s possible Fielding gave her details about where I would be tonight, and she sent her driver to deliver an envelope to me, although the driver didn’t seem to know Dr. Scarpetta was a woman. I look at Benton’s black shearling coat. In the dark, I can make out the vague white edge of the envelope in his pocket.

“Why would anyone from your office talk to the mother of the person who’s confessed to the crime?” Benton’s question sounds more like a statement. It sounds rhetorical. “We absolutely sure nothing was leaked to the media about your leaving Dover today, maybe because of this case?” He means the man who collapsed in Norton’s Woods. “Maybe there’s a logical explanation for how she knew. A logical explanation other than Jack. I’m trying to be open-minded.”

It doesn’t sound like he’s trying to be open-minded at all. It sounds like he believes Fielding told Mrs. Donahue for a reason, one I can’t begin to fathom. Unless it’s what Marino said minutes ago, that Fielding wants me to lose my job.

“You and I both know the answer.” I hear the conviction in my tone and realize how certain I am of what Jack Fielding could be capable of. “Nothing’s been in the news that I’m aware of. And even if Mrs. Donahue found out that way, it doesn’t explain her knowing the tail number of Lucy’s helicopter. It doesn’t explain how she knew I was arriving by helicopter or would land at Hanscom or at what time.”

Benton drives toward Cambridge, and the snow is a blizzard of flakes that are getting smaller. The wind is beating the SUV, gusting and shoving, the night volatile and treacherous.

“Except the driver thought you were me,” I add. “I could tell by the way he was dealing with you. He thinks you’re Dr. Scarpetta, and Johnny Donahue’s mother certainly must know I’m not a man.”

“Hard to say what she knows,” Benton answers. “Fielding’s the medical examiner in this case, not you. As you said, technically, you have nothing to do with it. Technically, you’re not responsible.”

“I’m the chief and ultimately responsible. At the end of the day, all ME cases in Massachusetts are mine. I do have something to do with it.”

“It’s not what I meant, but I’m glad to hear you say it.”

Of course it’s not what he meant. I don’t want to think about what he meant. I’ve been gone. Somehow I was supposed to be at Dover and at the same time get the CFC up and running without me. Maybe it was too much to ask. Maybe I’ve been deliberately set up for failure.

“I’m saying that since the CFC opened, you’ve been invisible,” Benton says. “Lost in a news blackout.”

“By design,” I reply. “The AFME doesn’t court publicity.”

“Of course it’s by design. I’m not blaming you.”

“Briggs’s design.” I give voice to what I suspect Benton is getting at.

He doesn’t trust Briggs. He never has. I’ve always chalked it up to jealousy. Briggs is a very powerful and threatening man, and Benton hasn’t felt powerful or threatening since he left the FBI, and then there is a past Briggs and I share. He is one of very few people still in my life who predates Benton. It feels as if I was barely grown up when I first met John Briggs.

“The AFME didn’t want you giving interviews about the CFC or publicly talking about anything relating to Dover until the CFC was set up and you were finished with your training,” Benton goes on. “That’s kept you out of the limelight for quite a while. I’m trying to remember the last time you were on CNN. At least a year ago.”

“And coincidentally, I was supposed to step back into the lime-light tonight. And coincidentally, CNN was canceled. The third time it’s been canceled, as my return here was delayed and delayed.”

“Yes. Coincidentally. A lot of coincidences,” Benton says.

Maybe Briggs has compromised me and done so intentionally. How brilliant it would be to groom me for a bigger job, the biggest job so far, while systematically making me less visible. To silence me. Ultimately, to get rid of me. The idea of it is shocking. I don’t believe it.

“Whose coincidences, that’s what you would need to know,” Benton then says. “And I’m not stating as fact that Briggs did anything Machiavellian. He’s not the entire Pentagon. He’s just one gear in a very big machine.”

“I know how much you dislike him.”

“It’s the machine I don’t like. It’s always going to be there. Just make sure you understand it so you don’t get chewed up by it.”

Snow clicks and bounces against glass as we pass stretches of open fields and dense woods, and a creek runs hard against the guardrail to our right as we pass over a bridge. The air must be colder here, the snow small and icy as we drive in and out of pockets of changing weather that I find unsettling.

“Mrs. Donahue knows that the chief medical examiner and director of the CFC, someone named Dr. Scarpetta, is Jack’s boss,” Benton then says. “She had to know that if she went to the trouble to have something delivered to you. But maybe that’s all she knows,” he summarizes, offering an explanation for what just happened at the airport.

“Let’s look at whatever it is.” I want the envelope.

“It should go to the labs.”

“She knows I’m Jack’s boss but doesn’t know I’m a woman.” It seems preposterous, but it’s possible. “Even though all she had to do was Google me.”

“Not everybody Googles.”

I’m reminded of how easy it is for me to forget that there are still technically unsophisticated people in the world, including someone who might have a chauffeur and a Bentley. Its taillights are far ahead of us now on the narrow two-lane road, getting smaller and more distant as the car drives too fast for the conditions.

“Did you show the driver your identification?” I ask.

“What do you think?”

Of course Benton wouldn’t. “So he didn’t realize you’re not me.”

“Not from anything I did or said.”

“I guess Mrs. Donahue will continue to think Jack works for a man. Strange that Jack would tell her how to find me and not indicate how her driver might recognize me, at least indicate I’m not a man. Not even use pronouns that might indicate it. Strange. I don’t know.” I’m not convinced of what we’re conjecturing. It doesn’t feel right.

“I wasn’t aware you were having so many doubts about Jack. Not that they aren’t warranted.” Benton is trying to draw me out. The FBI agent in him. I’ve not seen it in a while.

“Just don’t say I’m twice bitten or thrice bitten or whatever. Please,” I say with feeling. “I’ve heard it enough today.”

“I’m saying I wasn’t aware.”

“And all I’ve been aware of is my usual misgivings and denials about him,” I reply. “I’ve not had sufficient information to be more concerned than usual.” My way of asking Benton to give me sufficient information if he has it, to not act like a cop or a mental-health practitioner. Don’t hold back, I’m telling him.

But he does hold back. He doesn’t say a word. His attention is fixed straight ahead, his profile sharp in the low illumination of the dashboard lights. This is the way it’s always been with us. We step around confidential and privileged information. We dance around secrets. At times we lie. In the beginning, we cheated, because Benton was married to someone else. Both of us know how to deceive. It isn’t something I’m proud of, and I wish it didn’t continue to be necessary professionally. Especially right this minute. Benton is dancing around secrets, and I want the truth. I need it.

“Look, we both know what he’s like, and yes, I’ve been invisible since the CFC opened,” I continue. “I’ve been in a vacuum, doing the best I can to handle things long distance while working eighteen-hour days, not even time to talk to my staff by phone. Everything’s been electronic, mostly e-mails and PDFs. I’ve hardly seen anyone. I should never have placed Jack in charge under the circumstances. When I hired him yet again and rode out of town, I set everyone up for exactly what’s happened. And you did tell me so, and you aren’t the only one.”

“You’ve never wanted to believe you’ve got a serious problem with him,” Benton says in a way that unsteadies me further. “Even if you’ve had plenty of them. Sometimes there’s simply no sufficient evidence that will make us accept a truth we can’t bear to believe. You can’t be objective when it comes to him, Kay. I’m not sure I’ve ever understood the reason.”

“You’re right, and I hate it.” I clear my throat and calm my voice. “And I’m sorry.”

“I just don’t know if I’ll ever figure it out.” He glances over at me, both hands on the wheel, and we’re alone on a snow-blown road that is poorly lit, driving through a snowy darkness. The Bentley is no longer visible up ahead. “I’m not judging you.”

“He wrecks his life and needs me again.”

“It’s not your fault he wrecks his life unless you haven’t told me something. Actually, no matter what, it wouldn’t be your fault. People wreck their own lives. They don’t need others to do it.”

“That’s not entirely true. He didn’t choose what happened to him as a child.”

“And that’s not your fault, either,” Benton says, as if he knows more about Fielding’s past than I’ve ever told him, what few details I have. I’ve always been careful not to probe my staff, especially not to probe Fielding. I know enough about his early tragedies to be mindful of what he might not want to talk about.

“Of course it sounds stupid,” I add.

“Not stupid. Just a drama that will always end the same way. I’ve never completely understood why you feel the need to act it out with him. I feel like something happened. Something you’ve not told me.”

“I tell you everything.”

“We both know that’s not true about either of us.”

“Maybe I should just stick with dead people.” I hear the bitterness in my tone, the resentment seeping through barriers I’ve carefully constructed most of my life. Maybe I don’t know how to live without them anymore. “I know how to handle dead people just fine.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Benton says quietly.

It’s because I’m tired, I tell myself. It’s because of what happened this morning when the black mother of a dead black soldier disparaged me over the phone and called me names, referred to my following not the Golden Rule but the White Rule. Then Briggs tried to override my authority. It’s possible I’ve been set up by him. It’s possible he wants me to fail.

“It’s such a goddamn stereotype,” Benton then says.

“Funny thing about stereotypes. They’re usually based on something.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

“There won’t be any more problems with Jack. The drama will end, I promise. Assuming he hasn’t already ended it, hasn’t walked off the job. He’s certainly done that before. He has to be fired.”

“He’s not you, never was or could be, and he’s not your damn child.” Benton thinks it is as simple as that, but it isn’t.

“He has to be let go,” I answer.

“He’s a forty-six-year-old forensic pathologist who’s never earned the trust you show him or anything the hell you do for him.”

“I’m done with him.”

“You are done with him. I’m afraid that’s true and you’re going to have to let him go,” Benton says, as if a decision was made already, as if it isn’t up to me. “What is it you feel so guilty about?” There’s something in his tone, something about his demeanor. I can’t put my finger on what it is. “Way back in your Richmond days when you were just getting started with him. Why the guilt?”

“I’m sorry I’ve caused so many problems.” I evade his question. “I feel I’m the one who’s let everybody down. I’m sorry I’ve not been here. I can’t begin to express how sorry I am. I take responsibility for Jack, but I won’t allow it anymore.”

“Some things you can’t take responsibility for. Some things aren’t your fault, and I’m going to keep reminding you of that, and you’ll probably keep believing it’s your fault, anyway,” my husband the psychologist says.

I’m not going to discuss what is my fault and what isn’t, because I can’t talk about why I’ve always been irrationally loyal to Jack Fielding. I came back from South Africa, and my penance was Fielding. He was my public service, what I sentenced myself to as punishment. I was desperate to do right by him because I was convinced I’d wronged everyone else.

“I’m taking a look.” I mean at what is in Benton’s coat pocket. “I know how to look at a letter without compromising it, and I need to see what Mrs. Donahue wrote to me.”

I slide the envelope out, holding it lightly by its edges, and discover the flap is sealed with gray duct tape that partially covers an address engraved in an old-style serif typeface. I recognize the street as one in Boston’s Beacon Hill, near the Public Garden, very close to where Benton used to own a brownstone that was in his family for generations. On the front of the envelope is Dr. Kay Scarpetta: Confidential written elaborately with a fountain pen, and I’m careful about touching anything else with bare hands, especially the tape. It is a good source for fingerprints, for DNA and microscopic materials. Latent prints can be developed on porous surfaces such as paper by using a reagent such as ninhydrin, I calculate.

“Maybe you’ve got a knife handy.” I place the envelope in my lap. “And I need to borrow your gloves.”

Benton reaches across me and opens the glove box, and inside is a Leatherman multi-tool knife, a flashlight, a stack of napkins. He pulls a pair of deerskin gloves out of his coat pockets, and my hands are lost in them, but I don’t want to leave my fingerprints or eradicate those of someone else. I don’t turn on the map reading light, because the visibility is bad and getting worse. Illuminating what I’m doing with the flashlight, I slip a small blade into a corner of the envelope.

I slit it along the top and slide out two folded sheets of creamy stationery that are of heavy stock with a watermark I can’t make out clearly, what looks like some type of emblazonment or family crest. The letterhead is the same Beacon Hill address, and the two pages are typed with a typewriter that has a cursive typeface, which is something I haven’t seen in many years, maybe a decade at least. I read out loud:

Dear Dr. Scarpetta,

I hope you will excuse what I’m sure must seem an inappropriate and presumptuous gesture on my part. But I am a mother as desperate as a mother could possibly be.

My son Johnny has confessed to a crime I know he did not commit and could not have committed. Certainly he’s had difficulties of late that resulted in our seeking treatment for him, but even so, he’s never demonstrated any serious behavior problems, not even when he began Harvard as a withdrawn and bullied fifteen-year-old. If he was going to have a breakdown, I should think it would have been then, having left home for the first time and not possessing the normal skills for interacting with others and making friends. He did remarkably well until this past fall semester of his senior year, when his personality became alarmingly altered. But he did not kill anyone!

Dr. Benton Wesley, a consultant for the FBI and a member of the McLean Hospital staff, knows quite a lot about my son’s background and developmental obstacles, and perhaps he is at liberty to discuss these details with you, since he hasn’t seemed inclined to discuss them with your assistant, Dr. Fielding. Johnny’s is a long, complex story, and I need you to hear it. Suffice it to say that when he was admitted at McLean last Monday, it was because he was deemed to be a danger to himself. He had not harmed anybody else or so much as intimated that he might. Then suddenly out of the blue he confessed to such a vicious and horrible crime, and in short order was transferred to a locked ward for the criminally insane. I ask you, how is it possible the authorities have been so quick to believe his ludicrous and deluded tales?

I must talk to you, Dr. Scarpetta. I know your office performed the autopsy on the little boy who died in Salem, and I believe it is reasonable to request a second opinion. Of course you know Dr. Fielding’s conclusion—that the murder was premeditated, carefully planned, a cold-blooded execution that was an initiation for a satanic cult. Something as monstrous as that is absolutely inconsistent with anything my son could do to anyone, and he has never had anything to do with cults of any description. It is outrageous to assume that his fondness of books and films with a horror or supernatural or violent theme might have influenced him to “act out.”

Johnny suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. He is spectacularly gifted in some areas and completely incompetent in others. He has very rigid habits and routines that he is obsessive about, and on January 30, he was eating brunch at The Biscuit with the person he is closest to, a supremely gifted graduate student named Dawn Kincaid, just as they do every Saturday morning from ten a.m. until one p.m. He could not, therefore, have been in Salem when the little boy was killed mid-afternoon.

Johnny has the remarkable ability to remember and parrot the most obscure details, and it is clear to me that what he has said to the authorities has come straight from what he’s been told about the case and what’s been in the news. He truly does seem to believe he is guilty (for reasons I can’t begin to comprehend), and even claims that a “puncture wound” to his left hand was from the nail gun misfiring when he used it on the boy, which is fabricated. The wound is self-inflicted, a stab wound from a steak knife, and one of the many reasons we took him to McLean to begin with. My son seems determined to be severely punished for a crime he didn’t commit, and the way things are going, he will get his wish.

Below are numbers to contact me. I hope you will have compassion and that I hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

Erica

Erica Donahue

6

I return the sheets of heavy, stiff stationery to their envelope, then wrap the letter in napkins from the glove box to protect it as much as possible inside the zip-up compartment of my shoulder bag. If I have learned nothing else, it is that you can’t go back. Once potential evidence has been cut through, contaminated, or lost, it’s like an archaeologist’s trowel shattering an ancient treasure.

“She doesn’t seem to know you and I are married,” I comment as trees thrash in the wind along the roadside, snow swirling whitely.

“She might not,” Benton replies.

“Does her son know?”

“I don’t discuss you or my personal life with patients.”

“Then she may not know much about me.”

I try to work out how it might be possible that Erica Donahue wouldn’t tell her driver that the person he was to deliver the letter to is a small blonde woman, not a tall man with silver hair.

“She uses a typewriter, assuming she typed this herself,” I continue to deduce. “And anyone who would go to so much trouble taping up the envelope to ensure confidentiality probably isn’t going to let someone else type the letter. If she still uses a typewriter, it’s unlikely she goes on the Internet and Googles. The watermarked engraved stationery, the fountain pen, the cursive typeface, possibly a purist, someone very precise, who has a very certain and set way of doing things.”

“She’s an artist,” Benton says. “A classical pianist who doesn’t share the same high-tech interests as the rest of her family. Husband’s a nuclear physicist. Older son’s an engineer at Langley. And Johnny, as she pointed out, is incredibly gifted. In math, science. Writing that letter won’t help him. I wish she hadn’t.”

“You seem very invested in him.”

“I hate it when people who are vulnerable are an easy out. Because someone is different and doesn’t act like the rest of us, he must be guilty of something.”

“I’m sure the Essex County prosecutor wouldn’t be happy to hear you say that.” I’ve assumed that’s who hired Benton to evaluate Johnny Donahue, but Benton isn’t acting like a consultant, certainly not like one for the DA’s office. He’s acting like something else.

“Misleading statements, lack of eye contact, false confessions. A kid with Asperger’s and his never-ending isolation and search for friends,” Benton says. “It’s not uncommon for such a person to be overly influenced.”

“Why would someone want to influence Johnny to take the blame for a violent crime?”

“All it takes is the suggestion of something suspicious, such as what a weird coincidence that you were talking crazy about going to Salem, and then that little boy was murdered there. Are you sure you hurt your hand when you stuck it in a drawer and got stabbed by a steak knife, or did it happen some other way and you don’t remember? People see guilt, and then Johnny sees it. He’s led to say what he thinks people want to hear and to believe what he thinks people want to believe. He has no understanding of the consequences of his behavior. People with Asperger’s syndrome, especially teenagers, are statistically overrepresented among innocent people who are arrested and convicted of crimes.”

Snowflakes are suddenly large and blowing wildly like white dogwood petals in a violent wind. Benton downshifts the Tiptronic transmission and lightly touches the brakes.

“Maybe we should pull over.” I can’t see the road as the headlights bounce off whiteness swarming all around us.

“Some freakish storm cell, like a microburst.” He leans close to the steering wheel, peering straight ahead, as angry gusts of wind buffet us. “I think the best thing is to drive out of it.”

“Maybe we should stop.”

“We’re on pavement. I can see which lane we’re in. Nothing’s coming.” He looks in the mirrors. “Nothing’s behind us.”

“I hope you’re right.” I’m not just talking about the snow. Everything seems ominous, as if sinister forces surround us, as if we’re being warned.

“It wasn’t a smart thing for her to do. An emotional thing, maybe even a well-intended thing, but not smart.” Benton drives very slowly through chaotic whiteness. “It’s hearsay, but it won’t be helpful. It’s best you don’t call her.”

“I’ll need to show the letter to the police,” I reply. “Or at least tell them about it, so they can decide what they want to do.”

“She’s just made things worse.” He says it as if he’s the one deciding things. “Don’t get mixed up in this by calling her.”

“Other than her trying to influence the medical examiner’s office, how has she made things worse?” I ask.

“Several key points she incorrectly makes. Johnny doesn’t read horror or supernatural or violent fiction or go to movies like that, at least not that I’m aware of, and that detail won’t help him. Also, Mark Bishop wasn’t murdered mid-afternoon. It was closer to four. Mrs. Donahue may not realize what she just implied about her son,” Benton says as the white squall ends as suddenly as it began.

Flakes are small and icy again, swirling like sand over pavement and accumulating in shallow drifts on the roadsides.

“Johnny was at The Biscuit with his friend, that’s true,” Benton continues, “but according to him, he was there until two, not one. Apparently, he and his friend had been there numerous times, but I’m not aware of him having some rigid regimen of being there every Saturday with her from ten to one.”

The Biscuit is on Washington Street, barely a fifteen-minute walk from our house in Cambridge, and I think of Saturdays when I’ve been home, when Benton and I have wandered into the small cafe with its chalkboard menu and wooden benches. I wonder if Johnny and his friend were ever in there when we were.

“What does his friend say about what time they left the cafe?” I ask.

“She claims she got up from the table around one p.m. and left him sitting there because he was acting strange and refused to leave with her. According to her statement to the police, Johnny was talking about going to Salem to get his fortune read, was talking wildly about that, and was still at the table when she walked out the door.”

I find it interesting that Benton would have looked at a police statement or know the details of what a witness said. His role isn’t to determine guilt or innocence or even to care but to evaluate if the patient is telling the truth or malingering and is competent to stand trial.

“Someone with Asperger’s would have a hard time with the concept of a fortune being read or cards being read or anything of that nature,” Benton is saying, and the more he tells me, the more perplexed I am.

He’s talking to me as if he’s a detective and we’re working the case together, yet he’s cryptic when it comes to Jack Fielding. There’s nothing accidental about it. My husband rarely lets information slip, even if he gives the appearance otherwise. When he thinks I should know information he can’t tell me, he finds a way for me to figure it out. If he decides it’s best I don’t know, he won’t help me. It’s the frustrating way we live, and at least I can say I’m never bored with him.

“Johnny can’t think abstractly, can’t comprehend metaphors. He’s very concrete,” Benton is saying.

“What about other people inside the cafe?” I ask. “Could anybody in the cafe verify what the friend said or what Johnny claims?”

“Nothing more definitive than he and Dawn Kincaid were in there that Saturday morning,” Benton says, and I don’t remember when I’ve seen him so disturbed by someone he has evaluated. “Don’t know about it being a weekly routine, and by the time Johnny confessed, several days had passed. Amazing what shitty memories people have, and then they start guessing.”

“Then all you have is what Johnny says and now what his mother says in this letter,” I reiterate what I’m hearing. “He says he left The Biscuit at two, which might not have given him enough time to get to Salem and commit the murder at around four. And his mother is saying he left at one, which could have given him enough time to do it.”

“As I said, it’s not helpful. What’s in his mother’s letter is quite bad for him. So far the only real alibi anyone can offer that might show his confession is bullshit is a problematic timeline. But an hour makes all the difference, or it could.”

I imagine Johnny getting up from his table at The Biscuit at around one p.m. and heading to Salem. Depending on traffic and when he was actually out of Cambridge or Somerville and heading north on I-95, he could have been at the Bishops’ house in the historic district by two or two-thirty.

“Does he have a car?” I ask.

“He doesn’t drive.”

“A taxi, the train? Not a ferry this time of year. They don’t start running again until spring, and he would have had to board it in Boston. But you’re right. Without a car, it would have taken him longer to get there. An hour would make a difference for someone who had to find transportation.”

“I just don’t understand where she got that detail,” Benton says. “Well, maybe from him. Maybe he’s changed his story yet again. Johnny said he left The Biscuit at two, not one, but maybe he’s changed that rather critical detail because he thinks it’s what someone wants to hear. However, it would be unusual, very unusual.”

“You were just with him this morning.”

“I’m not the one who would influence him to change a detail.”

Benton is saying that the detail is new and he doesn’t believe that Johnny has changed his story about what time he left the cafe. It would seem Mrs. Donahue simply made a mistake, but when I try to imagine that, something feels wrong.

“How would he have gotten to Salem at all?” I ask.

“He could have taken a taxi or a train, but there’s no evidence he did either. No sightings of him, no receipts found, nothing to prove he was ever in Salem or had any connection with the Bishop family. Nothing except his confession,” Benton says as his eyes cut to the rearview mirror. “And what’s important about that is his story is exactly what’s been in the news, and he changes the details as news accounts and theories change. That part of his mother’s letter is accurate. He parrots details word for word. Including if somebody suggests a scenario or information—leads him, in other words. Suggestibility, vulnerable to manipulation, acting in a way that generates suspicion, hallmark signs in Asperger’s.” He glances in the mirror again. “And attention to detail, to minutiae that can seem bizarre to others. Like what time it is. He’s always maintained he left The Biscuit at two p.m. Three minutes past two, to be exact. You ask Johnny what time it is or what time he did something, and he’ll tell you practically to the second.”

“So why would he change that detail?”

“In my opinion, he wouldn’t.”

“Seems like he’d be better off saying he left earlier if he really wants people to believe he murdered Mark Bishop.”

“It’s not that he wants people to believe it. It’s that he believes it. Not because of what he remembers but because of what he doesn’t remember and because of what’s been suggested to him.”

“By whom? Sounds like he confessed before he was ever a suspect and interrogated. So he wasn’t enticed into a false confession by the police, for example.”

“He doesn’t remember. He’s convinced he suffered a dissociative episode after he left The Biscuit at two p.m., somehow got to Salem and killed a boy with a nail gun—”

“He didn’t,” I interrupt. “That much I can tell you with certainty. He didn’t kill Mark Bishop with a nail gun. Nobody did.”

Benton doesn’t say anything as he speeds up, the snowflakes small again and sounding like grit hitting the car.

“Mrs. Donahue’s also clearly misunderstood Jack’s medical opinion.” I talk with conviction as another part of me won’t stop worrying about how I should handle her. I consider doing what Benton said and not calling her. I’ll have my administrative assistant, Bryce, contact her instead, first thing in the morning, and say I’m sorry but I’m not able to discuss the Mark Bishop case or any case. It’s important Bryce not give the impression that I’m too busy, that I’m unmoved by Mrs. Donahue’s distress, and that makes me think of PFC Gabriel’s mother again, of the painful things she said to me this morning at Dover. “I assume you’ve reviewed the autopsy report,” I say to Benton.

“Yes.”

“Then you know there is nothing in Jack’s report that mentions a nail gun, only that injuries caused by nails penetrating the brain were the cause of death.” I decide I can’t possibly let Bryce make such a call on my behalf. I’ll do it myself and ask Mrs. Donahue not to contact me again. I’ll emphasize it’s for her own protection. Then I’m filled with doubt, going back and forth on what to do with her, no longer so sure of myself. I’ve always had confidence in my ability to handle devastated people, bereft and enraged people, but I don’t understand what happened this morning. Mrs. Gabriel called me a bigot. No one has ever called me a bigot before.

“A nail gun hasn’t been ruled out by the people who count,” Benton informs me. “Including Jack.”

“I find that almost impossible to believe.”

“He’s been saying it.”

“First I’ve heard of it.”

“He’s been saying it to whoever will listen. I don’t care what’s in his written report, the paperwork you’ve seen,” Benton repeats as he looks in the rearview mirror.

“Why would he say something contrary to lab reports?”

“I’m simply relaying to you what I know for a fact that he’s been saying about a nail gun being the weapon.”

“Saying a nail gun was used is absolutely contrary to scientific and medical fact.” In my sideview mirror I see headlights far behind us. “A nail gun leaves tool marks consistent with a single mechanized blow, similar to a firing-pin impression on a cartridge case. Instead, what we have in this instance are tool marks on nails that are consistent with a handheld hammer, and there were hammer marks on the boy’s scalp and skull and underlying pattern contusions. Nail guns often leave a primer residue similar to gunshot residue, but Mark Bishop’s wounds were negative for lead, for barium. A nail gun wasn’t used, and I’m frankly amazed if what you’re implying is that the police, the prosecutor, believe otherwise.”

“Not hard to understand a number of things people choose to believe in this case,” Benton says, and he’s sped up, driving the speed limit.

I look in my sideview mirror again, and the headlights are much closer. Bright bluish-white lights blaze in my sideview mirror. A large SUV with xenon headlights and fog lamps. Marino, I think. And behind him, I hope, is Lucy.

“Wanting to believe that Johnny’s confession is true, as I’ve said,” Benton continues. “Wanting to think that it had to be a blitz attack, that Mark Bishop couldn’t have seen it coming or he would have struggled like hell. No one wants to think a child was held down and knew what was about to happen to him as someone drove nails into his skull with a hammer, for Christ’s sake.”

“He had no defense injuries, no evidence of a struggle, no evidence of being held down. It’s in Jack’s report. I’m sure you’ve seen it, and I’m sure he explained all this to the prosecutor, to the police.”

“I wish you’d done the damn autopsy.” Benton cuts his eyes to his mirrors.

“What exactly has Jack been saying beyond what I’ve read in his paperwork? Besides the possibility of a nail gun.”

Benton doesn’t answer me.

“Maybe you don’t know,” I then say, but I believe he does.

“He said he couldn’t rule out a nail gun,” Benton replies. “He said it isn’t possible to tell definitively. He said this after he was asked because of what Johnny claimed in his confession. Jack was specifically and directly asked if a nail gun could have been used.”

“The answer’s definitively no.”

“He would debate that with you. He said it isn’t possible to tell definitively in this case. He said it’s possible it was a nail gun.”

“I’m telling you it’s not possible, and it is possible to tell definitively,” I reply. “And this is the first I’ve heard about a nail gun except for what’s been on the Internet, which I have dismissed, since I dismiss most things in the news unless I am certain of the sources.”

“He suggested if you pressed a nail gun against someone’s head, you’d get what’s similar to the muzzle mark made by a contact gunshot wound. And it’s possible that’s what we’re seeing on the scalp and underlying tissue. And that’s why there’s no evidence of a struggle or that the boy knew what was happening.”

“You wouldn’t get a muzzle mark similar to a contact gunshot wound, and it’s not possible,” I reply. “The injuries I saw in photographs are hammer marks, and just because there was no evidence of a struggle doesn’t mean the boy wasn’t somehow coerced or coaxed or manipulated into cooperating. It sounds to me as if certain parties are choosing to ignore the facts of the case because of what they want to believe. That’s extremely dangerous.”

“I think Fielding is the one who might be ignoring the facts of the case. Maybe intentionally.”

“Good God, Benton. He might be a lot of things…”

“Or it’s negligence. It’s one or the other,” Benton says, and he has something in mind, I believe he does. “Listen. You did the best you could these past six months.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I know what it means. It means exactly what I’ve feared every single day that I’ve been gone.

“Remember when he was your fellow in the dark ages, in Richmond?” Benton is getting close to an area that is off-limits, even though he couldn’t possibly know it. “From day one, he couldn’t stand doing kids, that’s absolutely true, as you’ve pointed out. If a kid was coming in, he’d run like hell, sometimes disappearing days at a time. And you’d drive around, trying to find him, going to his house, his favorite bar, the damn gym or tae kwon do, drinking himself into a stupor or kicking the shit out of someone. Not that any of us like dealing with dead children, for Christ’s sake, but he’s got a real problem.”

I should have encouraged Fielding to go into surgical pathology, to work in a hospital lab, looking at biopsies. Instead, I mentored and encouraged him.

“But he took the Mark Bishop case,” Benton says. “He could have passed him off to one of your other docs. I just hope he didn’t lie; I sure as hell hope he didn’t do that on top of everything else.” But Benton thinks Fielding is lying. I can tell.

“On top of what else?” I ask as I look into my sideview mirror, wondering why Marino is on our bumper.

“I hope someone didn’t encourage him to suggest the possibility of a nail gun even if he knows better.” Benton has a way of looking in his mirrors without moving his head. All his years of undercover work, of watching his back because he really had to. Some habits never die.

“Who?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“You sound like you do know. You’re not going to tell me.” It is useless to push him. If he’s not telling me, it’s because he can’t. Twenty years of the dance and it never gets easier.

“The cops want this case solved, that’s for damn sure,” Benton says. “They want a nail gun to be the weapon, because it’s what Johnny has confessed to and because the thought is easier to deal with than a hammer. It concerns me that someone has influenced Jack.”

“Someone has? Or you’re just guessing that someone has.”

“It concerns me that it might be Jack who is influencing people,” Benton says next, and that’s what he really thinks.

“I wish Marino would get off our bumper. He’s blinding me with his damn lights. What’s he doing?”

“It’s not Marino,” Benton says. “His Suburban doesn’t have lights like that, and he has a front plate. This one doesn’t. It’s from out of state, a state that doesn’t require a front plate, or it’s been removed or is covered with something.”

I turn around to look and the lights hurt my eyes. The SUV is only a few car lengths behind us.

“Maybe someone trying to pass us,” I wonder aloud.

“Well, let’s see, but I don’t think so.” Benton slows down, and so does the SUV. “I’ll make you pass us, how about that,” and he’s talking to the driver behind us. “Grab the number from the rear plate as he goes by,” Benton says to me.

We are almost stopped in the road, and the SUV stops, too. It backs up quickly and makes a U-turn, going the other way, fish-tailing as it speeds off in the snowy night on the snowy road. I can’t make out the plate on its rear bumper or any detail about the SUV except that it is dark and large.

“Why would someone be following us?” I say to Benton as if he might know.

“I have no idea what that was,” Benton says.

“Someone was following us. That’s what that was. Staying too close because of the weather, because visibility is so bad you would have to stay close or you could easily lose the person if they turned off.”

“Some jerk,” Benton says. “Nobody sophisticated. Unless he deliberately wanted us to know he was back there or thought we wouldn’t notice.”

“How’s it even possible? We just drove through a blizzard. Where the hell did it come from? Out of nowhere?”

Benton picks up his phone and enters a number.

“Where are you?” he says to whoever answers, and after a pause he adds, “A large SUV with fog lights, xenons, no front plate, on our ass. That’s right. Made a U-turn and sped off the other way. Yes, on Route Two. Anything like that just pass you? Well, that’s weird. Must have turned off. Well, if… Yes. Thanks.”

Benton places his phone back on the console and explains, “Marino’s a few minutes behind us, and Lucy’s right behind him. The SUV’s vanished. If someone’s stupid enough to follow us, he’ll try again and we’ll figure it out. If the point was to intimidate, then whoever it is doesn’t know his target.”

“Now we’re a target.”

“Anyone who knows wouldn’t try it.”

“Because of you.”

Benton doesn’t answer. But what I said is true. Anyone who knows anything about Benton would be aware of how foolhardy it is to think he can be intimidated. I feel his hard edge, his steely aura. I know what he can do if threatened. He and Lucy are similar if confronted. They welcome it. Benton’s simply cooler, more calculating and restrained than my niece will ever be.

“Erica Donahue.” That’s the first thought to come to mind. “She’s already sent one person to intercept us, and I doubt she realizes how dangerous her son’s charming, handsome Harvard psychologist is.”

Benton doesn’t smile. “Wouldn’t make sense.”

“How many people know our whereabouts?” There is no point in trying to lighten the mood, which is unrelentingly intense. Benton has his own caliber of vigilance. It is different from Lucy’s, and he is far better at concealing it. “Or my whereabouts. How many people know?” I go on. “Not just the mother or the driver. What did Jack do?”

Benton speeds up again and doesn’t answer me.

“You’re not thinking Jack has some reason to intimidate us. Or try,” I then say.

Benton doesn’t reply, and we drive in silence and there is no sign of the SUV with the fog lamps and xenon headlights.

“Lucy suspects he’s drinking a lot.” Benton finally starts talking again. “But you should get that from her. And from Marino.” His tone is flat, and I hear the unforgiveness in it. He has nothing but disdain for Fielding, even if he is silent about it most of the time.

“Why would Jack lie? Why would he try to influence anyone?” I’m back to that.

“Apparently, he’s been coming in late and disappearing, and he’s having his skin problems again.” Benton doesn’t answer my question. “I hope to hell he’s not doing steroids on top of everything else, especially at his age.”

I resist the usual defense that when Fielding is acutely stressed, he has problems with eczema, with alopecia, and that he can’t help it. He’s always been obsessed with his body, is a classic case of megarexia or muscle dysmorphia, and most likely this can be attributed to the sexual abuse he suffered as a young boy. It would sound absurd to go down the list, and I’m not going to do it this time. For once, I won’t. I continue checking my sideview mirror. But the xenon headlights and fog lamps are gone.

“Why would he lie about this case?” I ask again. “Why would he want to influence anybody about it?”

“I can’t imagine how you could make a kid stay still for that,” Benton says, and he’s thinking about Mark Bishop’s death. “The family was inside the house and claim they didn’t hear screams, didn’t hear anything. They claim that Mark was playing one minute and the next he was facedown in the yard. I’m trying to envision what happened and can’t.”

“All right. We’ll talk about that, since you’re not going to answer my question.”

“I’ve tried to picture it, to reconstruct it, and draw a blank. The family was home. It’s not a big yard. How is it possible no one saw someone or heard anything?”