Port Mortuary

7

The storm has settled in, the wind much calmer now, and the snow is already several inches deep. Traffic is steady on Memorial Drive, the weather of little consequence to people used to New England winters.

The rooftops of MIT fraternity houses and playing fields are solid white on the left side of the road, and on the other side the snow drifts like smoke over the bike path and the boathouse and vanishes into the icy blackness of the Charles. Farther east, where the river empties into the harbor, the Boston skyline is ghostly rectangular shapes and smudges of light in the milky night, and there is no air traffic over Logan, not a single plane in sight.

“We should meet with Renaud as soon as possible—the sooner, the better.” Benton thinks Essex County District Attorney Paul Renaud should know that there may be something more to Johnny Donahue’s confession, that somehow the Harvard senior and a dead man in my cooler could be connected. “But if this involves DARPA?” Benton adds.

“Otwahl gets DARPA funding. But it isn’t DARPA, isn’t DoD. It’s civilian, an international private industry,” I reply. “But certainly it’s closely tied to government through substantial grants, tens of millions, maybe a lot more than that, since their rather clumsy invention of MORT.”

“The question is what else they’re focused on. What are they focused on now that could have significance in all this?”

“I honestly can’t say, not for a fact. But you know the obvious just by looking at the place.” Were we to drive back toward Hanscom, we would pass within a mile of Otwahl Technologies and its adjoining superconducting test facility, a massive self-contained complex with its own private police force. “Neutron science, most likely, because of materials science and how it applies to new technologies.”

“Robotics,” Benton says.

“Robots, nanotechnology, software engineering, synthetic biology. Lucy knows something about it.”

“Probably more than something.”

“Knowing her, yes. A lot more than something.”

“They’re probably making damn humanoids so we never run out of soldiers.”

“They might be.” I’m not joking.

“And Briggs would know about the robot in this guy’s apartment.” Benton means the dead man’s apartment. “Because of video clips? What else about that? I wonder if he said something to Jack about it, called and alerted him by asking questions.”

I explain it further, giving a more detailed account of the man and the recordings Lucy discovered—recordings that Marino inappropriately e-mailed to Briggs before I had a chance to review them first, and when I did get a chance to see them, it was only superficially, en route to the Civil Air Terminal in Dover. I tell Benton all about the ill-fated six-legged robot, the Mortuary Operational Removal Transport, known as MORT, that is parked inside the apartment near the door, and I remind him of the controversies, of the disagreements I had with certain politicians and especially with Briggs over using a machine to recover casualties in theater or anywhere.

I describe the heartlessness, the horror, of a gas-powered metal construction that sounded like a chain saw lurching across the earth to recover wounded or dead human beings by grasping them in grippers that looked like the mandibles of a bull ant. “Think of the message it sends if you’re dying on the battlefield and this is what your comrades send for you,” I say to Benton. “What kind of message does it send to the victim’s loved ones if they see it on the news?”

“You used inflammatory language like that when you testified before a defense appropriations Senate subcommittee,” Benton assumes.

“I don’t remember what I said verbatim.”

“I’m sure you didn’t make any friends at Otwahl. You probably made enemies you have no idea about.”

“It wasn’t about Otwahl or any other technology company. All Otwahl did was create an unmanned robotic vehicle. It was people at the Pentagon that came up with its so-called useful purpose. I think originally MORT was supposed to be a packbot, nothing more. I didn’t even remember Otwahl was the company until tonight. They were never a preoccupation of mine. My disagreement was with the Pentagon, and I was going to stand my ground.” I almost say this time. But I catch myself. Benton doesn’t know about the time I didn’t stand my ground.

“Enemies who haven’t forgotten. Those kinds of enemies never forget. I’m sorry I wasn’t privy to all this when it was going on,” Benton says, because he wasn’t around when I was making enemies on Capitol Hill. He was in a protective witness program and not exactly in a position to give me advice or counsel or even assure me that he wasn’t dead. “You must have files on it, records from back then.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to take a look, get up to speed. It might explain a few things.”

“What things?”

“I’d like to look at what you have from back then,” Benton says. Transcripts from my testimony, video recordings of the segments aired on C-SPAN: What I have would be in my safe in our Cambridge basement—along with certain items I don’t want him to see. A thick gray accordion file and photographs I took with my own camera. Bloodstained squares of white cardboard improvised before the day of FTA DNA collection kits, because if blood is air-dried it can last forever, and I knew where technology was headed. Plain white envelopes with fingernail cuttings and pubic combings and head hair. Oral, anal, and vaginal swabs, and cut and torn bloody underpants. An empty Chablis bottle, a beer can. Materials I smuggled from a dark continent half a world away more than two decades ago, evidence I shouldn’t have had, items I shouldn’t have had privately tested, but I did. I seriously consider that if Benton was aware of the Cape Town cases, he might not feel the same about me.

“You know the old saying, revenge is best served cold,” he goes on. “You fucked a huge multimillion-dollar project, a joint venture between DoD and Otwahl Technologies, and stepped on toes, and although a number of years have passed, I suspect there are people out there who haven’t forgotten, even if you have. And now here you are, working with DoD in Otwahl’s backyard. A perfect opportunity to calculate revenge, to pay you back.”

“Pay me back? A man dropping dead in Norton’s Woods is payback?”

“I just think we should know the cast of characters.”

Then we stop talking about it, because we have reached the girder bridge that connects Cambridge to Boston, the Mass Ave Bridge, or what the locals refer to as the Harvard Bridge or MIT Bridge, depending on their loyalties. Just ahead, my headquarters rises like a lighthouse, silo-shaped with a glass dome on top, seven stories sided in titanium and reinforced with steel. The first time Marino saw the CFC he decided it looked like a dum-dum bullet, and in the snowy dark, I suppose it does.

Turning off Memorial Drive, away from the river, we take the first left into the parking area, illuminated by solar security lights and surrounded by a black PVC-coated fence that can’t be climbed or cut. I dig a remote control out of my bag and push a button to open the tall gate, and we drive over tire tracks that are almost completely covered in fresh white powder. Anne and Ollie’s cars are here, parked near the CFC’s all-wheel-drive cargo vans and SUVs, and I notice one is missing, one of the SUVs. There should be four, but one of them is gone and has been since before it began to snow, probably the on-call medicolegal investigator.

I wonder who is on duty tonight and why that person is out in one of our vehicles. At a scene, or is the person at home, and I look around as if I’ve never been here before. Above the fence on two sides are lab buildings that belong to MIT, glass and brick, with antennas and radar dishes on the roofs, the windows dark except for a random few glowing dimly, as if someone left a desk light or a lamp on. Snow streaks the night and is loud like a brittle rain as Benton pulls close to my building, into the space designated for the director, next to Fielding’s spot, which is empty and smooth with snow.

“We could put it in the bay,” Benton says hopefully.

“That would be a little spoiled, since no one else can,” I reply. “And it’s unauthorized, anyway. For pickups and deliveries only.”

“Dover’s worn off on you. Am I going to have to salute?”

“Only at home.”

We climb out, and the snow is up to the ankles of my boots and doesn’t pack under them because it is too cold, the flakes tiny and icy. I enter a code in a keypad next to a shut bay door that begins to retract loudly as Marino and Lucy drive into the lot. The receiving bay looks like a small hangar sealed with white epoxy paint, and mounted in the ceiling is a monorail crane, a motorized lifter for moving bodies too large for manual handling. There is a ramp inside leading to a metal door, and parked off to the side is our white van-body truck, what at Dover we refer to as a bread truck, designed to transport up to six bodies on stretchers or in transfer cases and to serve as a mobile crime scene lab when needed.

As I wait for Marino and Lucy, I’m reminded I’m not dressed for New England. My tactical jacket was perfectly adequate in Delaware, but now I’m thoroughly chilled. I try not to think about how good it would be to sit in front of the fire with a single-malt Scotch or small-batch bourbon, to catch up with Benton about things other than tragedy and betrayal and enemies with long memories, to get away from everyone. I want to drink and talk honestly with my husband, to put aside games and subterfuge and not wonder what he knows. I crave a normal time with him, but we don’t know what that is. Even when we make love we have our secrets and nothing is normal.

“No updates except Lawless.” Marino answers a question no one asked as the bay door clanks down behind us. “He e-mailed scene photographs—finally. But says no luck with the dog. No one’s called to report a lost greyhound.”

“What greyhound?” Benton asks.

I was too busy describing MORT and didn’t mention much else I saw on the video clips. I feel foolish. “Norton’s Woods,” I reply. “A black-and-white greyhound named Sock that apparently ran off while the EMTs were busy with our case.”

“How do you know his name is Sock?”

I explain it to him as I hold my thumb over the glass sensor of the biometric lock so it can scan my fingerprint. Opening the door that leads into the lower level of the building, I mention that the dog might have a microchip that could supply useful information about the owner’s identification. Some rescue groups automatically microchip former racing greyhounds before putting them up for adoption, I add.

“That’s interesting,” Benton says. “I think I saw them.”

“He stared right at you as you were pulling out of the driveway in your sports car about three-fifteen yesterday afternoon,” Lucy tells him as we enter the processing area, an open space with a security office, a digital floor scale, and a wall of massive stainless-steel doors that open into cooler rooms and a walk-in freezer.

“What are you talking about?” Benton asks my niece.

“All that time in the car driving through a blizzard and you didn’t catch him up on things?” Lucy says to me, and she’s not easy to be around when she gets like this.

I feel a prick of annoyance even though she’s right. She knows you, too, enters my mind. She knows you just as well as you know her. She knows damn well when something is bothering me that I stubbornly keep to myself, and I’ve been bothered and feeling stubborn since I left Dover. It was stupid of me not to go into the sort of detail that Benton can do something with. I don’t know of anyone more psychologically astute, and he would have plenty to say about the minutiae picked up by the recorders concealed inside the dead man’s headphones.

Instead, I obsessed about DARPA because I was really obsessing about Briggs. I can’t get past what happened earlier today, about what happened decades ago, about how what he caused never seems to end. He knows about that dark place in my past, a place I take no one, and a part of me will never forgive him for creating that place. It was his idea for me to go to Cape Town. It was his goddamn brilliant plan.

“He and the greyhound walked right past your driveway just minutes before he died,” Lucy is telling Benton, but her gaze is steady on me. “If you hadn’t left, you would have heard the sirens. You probably would have headed over there to see what was going on and maybe would have some useful information for us.”

She looks at me as if she is looking at the dark place. It’s not possible she could know about it, I reassure myself. I’ve never told her, never told Benton or Marino or anyone. The documents were destroyed except for what I have. Briggs promised that decades ago when I left the AFIP and moved to Virginia, and I already knew reports were missing without being told. Lucy doesn’t have the combination to my safe, I remind myself. Benton doesn’t. No one does.

“If you drop by my lab,” Lucy is saying to Benton, “I’ll show the video clips to you.”

“You haven’t seen them,” I say to Benton, because I’m not sure. He’s acting as if he hasn’t seen them, but I don’t know if it’s just more of the same, more secrets.

“I haven’t,” he answers, and it sounds like the truth. “But I want to, and I will.”

“Weird you’re in them,” Lucy says to him. “Your house is in them. Really weird. Sort of freaked me out when I saw it.”

The night security guard sits behind his glass window, and he nods at us but doesn’t get up from his desk. His name is Ron, a big, muscular dark-skinned man with closely shorn hair and unfriendly eyes. He seems afraid of me or skeptical, and it’s obvious he’s been instructed to maintain his post, not to be sociable, no matter who it is. I can only imagine the stories he’s heard, and Fielding enters my thoughts again. What has happened to him? What trouble has he caused? How much has he hurt this place?

I walk over to the security guard’s window and check the sign-in log. Since three p.m., three bodies have come in: a motor-vehicle fatality, a gunshot homicide, and an asphyxiation by plastic bag that is undetermined.

“Is Dr. Fielding here?” I ask Ron.

Retired marine corps military police, he is always neat and proud in his midnight-blue uniform with American flag and AFME patches on the shoulders and a brass CFC security shield pinned to his shirt. His face is wary and not the least bit warm behind his glass partition as he answers that he hasn’t seen Fielding. He tells me that Anne and Ollie are here but no one else. Not even the on-call death investigator is in. Janelle, he informs me in a monotone, and every other word is ma’am, and I’m reminded of how cold and condescending ma’am this and ma’am that can sound and how tired I got of hearing it at Dover. Janelle is working from home because of the weather, Ron reports. Apparently, Fielding told her that was okay, even though it’s not. That is against the rules I established. On-call investigators don’t work from home.

“We’ll be in the x-ray room,” I inform Ron. “If anybody else shows up, you can find us in there. But unless it’s Dr. Fielding, I need to know who it is and give clearance. Actually, I probably should know if Dr. Fielding shows up, too. You know what, no matter who it is, I need to know.”

“If Dr. Fielding comes in you want me to call, ma’am. To alert you,” Ron repeats, as if he’s not sure that’s what I meant, or maybe he’s arguing.

“Affirmative,” I make myself clear. “No one should just walk in, doesn’t matter if they work here. Until I tell you otherwise. I want everything airtight right now.”

“I understand, ma’am.”

“Any calls from the media? Any sign of them?”

“I keep looking, ma’am.” Mounted on three walls are monitors, each split into quadrants that are constantly rotating images picked up by security cameras outside the building and in strategic areas such as the bays, corridors, elevators, lobby, and all doors leading into the building. “I know there’s some concern about the man found in the park.” Ron looks past me at Marino, as if the two of them have an understanding.

“Well, you know where we’ll be for now.” I open another door. “Thank you.”

A long white hallway with a gray tile floor leads to a series of rooms located in a logical order that facilitates the flow of our work. The first stop is ID, where bodies are photographed and fingerprinted and personal effects not taken by the police are removed and secured in lockers. Next is large-scale x-ray, which includes the CT scanner, and beyond that are the autopsy room, the soiled room, the anteroom, the changing rooms, the locker rooms, the anthropology lab, the Bio4 containment lab reserved for suspected infectious or contaminated cases. The corridor wraps around in a circle that ends where it began, at the receiving bay.

“What does security know about our patient from Norton’s Woods?” I ask Marino. “Why does Ron think there’s a concern?”

“I didn’t tell him anything.”

“I’m asking what he knows.”

“He wasn’t on duty when we left earlier. I haven’t seen him today.”

“I’m wondering what he’s been told,” I repeat patiently, because I don’t want to squabble with Marino in front of the others. “Obviously, this is a very sensitive situation.”

“I gave an order before I left that everyone needed to be on the lookout for the media,” Marino says, taking off his leather jacket as we reach the x-ray room, where the red light above the door indicates that the scanner is in use. Anne and Ollie won’t have started without me, but it’s their habit to deter people from walking into an area where there are levels of radiation much higher than are safe for living patients. “Wasn’t my idea for Janelle or the others to work from home, either,” Marino adds.

I don’t ask how long that’s been going on or who the “others” are. Who else has been working from home? This is a state government facility, a paramilitary installation, not a cottage industry, I feel like saying.

“Damn Fielding,” Marino then mutters. “He’s fucking up everything.”

I don’t answer. Now is not the time to discuss how fucked up everything is.

“You know where I’ll be.” Lucy walks off toward the elevator, and with an elbow pushes a hands-free oversized button. She disappears behind sliding steel doors as I pass my thumb over another biometric sensor and the lock clicks free.

Inside the control room, forensic radiologist Dr. Oliver Hess is seated at a work station behind lead-lined glass, his gray hair unruly, his face sleepy, as if I got him out of bed. Past him, through an open door, I can see the eggshell-white Siemens Somatom Sensation and hear the fan of its water-cooled system. The scanner is a modified version of the one used at Dover, equipped with a custom head holder and safety straps, its wiring subsurface, its parameter sealed, its table covered by a heavy vinyl slicker to protect the multimillion-dollar system from contaminants such as body fluids. Slightly angled down toward the door to facilitate sliding bodies on and off, the scanner is in the ready status, and technologist Anne Mahoney is placing radio-opaque CT skin markers on the dead man from Norton’s Woods. I get a strange feeling as I walk in. He is familiar, although I’ve never seen him before, only parts of him on recordings I watched on an iPad.

I recognize the tint of his light-brown skin and his tapered hands, which are by his sides on top of a disposable blue sheet, his long, slender fingers slightly curled and stiff with rigor.

In the video clips I heard his voice and saw glimpses of his hands, his boots, his clothing, but I did not see his face. I’m not sure what I imagined but am vaguely disturbed by his delicate features and long, curly brown hair, by the spray of light freckles across his smooth cheeks. I pull the sheet back, and he is very thin, about five-foot-eight and at most one hundred and thirty pounds, I deduce, with very little body hair. He could easily pass for sixteen, and I’m reminded of Johnny Donahue, who isn’t much older. Kids. Could that be a common denominator? Or is it Otwahl Technologies?

“Anything?” I ask Anne, a plain-looking woman in her thirties with shaggy brown hair and sensitive hazel eyes. She’s probably the best person on my staff, can do anything, whether it is different types of radiographic imaging or helping in the morgue or at crime scenes. She is always willing.

“This. Which I noticed when I undressed him.” Her latex-sheathed hands grip the body at the waist and hip, pulling it over so I can see a tiny defect on the left side of the back at the level of the kidneys. “Obviously missed at the scene because it didn’t bleed out, at least not much. You know about his bleeding, which I witnessed with my own two eyes when I was going to scan him early this morning? That he bled profusely from his nose and mouth after he was bagged and transported?”

“That’s why I’m here.” I open a drawer to retrieve a hand lens, and then Benton is by my side in a surgical mask and gown and gloves. “He’s got some sort of injury,” I say to him as I lean close to the body and magnify an irregular wound that looks like a small buttonhole. “Definitely not a gunshot entrance. A stab wound made by a very narrow blade, like a boning knife but with two edges. Something like a stiletto.”

“A stiletto in his back would drop him in his tracks?” Benton’s eyes are skeptical above his mask.

“No. Not unless he was stabbed at the base of his skull and it severed his spinal cord.” I think of Mark Bishop and the nails that killed him.

“Like I said at Dover, maybe something was injected,” Marino offers as he walks in covered from head to foot with personal protective clothing, including a face shield and hair cover, as if he’s worried about airborne pathogens or deadly spores, such as anthrax. “Maybe some kind of anesthesia. A lethal injection, in other words. That could sure as hell drop you in your tracks.”

“In the first place, an anesthesia like sodium thiopental is injected into a vein, as are pancuronium bromide or potassium chloride.” I pull on a pair of examination gloves. “They aren’t injected into the person’s back. Same thing with mivacurium, with succinylcholine. You want to kill somebody decisively and quickly with a neuromuscular blocker, you’d better inject it intravenously.”

“But if they were injected into a muscle, it would still kill you, right?” Marino opens a cabinet and gets out a camera. He rummages in a drawer and finds a plastic six-inch ruler for size reference. “During executions, sometimes the injection misses the vein and goes into the muscle, and the inmate still dies.”

“A slow and very painful death,” I reply. “By all accounts, this man’s death wasn’t slow, and this injury wasn’t made by a needle.”

“I won’t say the prison techs do it on purpose, but it happens. Well, it’s probably on purpose. Just like some of them chill the cocktail, making sure the dirtbag feels it hit, the ice-cold hand of death,” Marino says for Anne’s benefit, because she is passionately anti-capital punishment. His way of flirting is to offend her whenever he can.

“That’s disgusting,” she says.

“Hey. It’s not like they cared about the people they whacked, right? Like they cared if they suffered, right? What goes around comes around. Who hid the damn label maker?”

“I did. I lie awake at night figuring out ways to get you back.”

“Oh, yeah? For what?”

“For just being you.”

Marino digs in another drawer, finds the label maker. “He looks a hell of a lot younger than what the EMTs said. Anybody notice that besides me? Don’t you think he looks younger than his twenties?” Marino asks Anne. “Looks like a damn kid.”

“Barely pubescent,” she agrees. “But then, all college kids are starting to look like that to me. They look like babies.”

“We don’t know if he was a college student,” I remind everyone.

Marino peels the backing off a label printed with the date and case number, and sticks it on the plastic ruler. “I’ll canvas the area over there by the common, see if any supers in apartment buildings recognize him, just do it my damn self to keep the rumor mill quiet. If he lives around there, and it sure seems like it, based on what’s on the videos, someone’s got to remember him and his greyhound. Sock. What kind of name is that for a dog?”

“Probably not his full name,” Anne says. “Race dogs have these rather elaborate registered kennel names, like Sock It to Me or Darned Sock or Sock Hop.”

“I keep telling her she should go on Jeopardy,” Marino says.

“It’s possible his name might be in a registry,” I comment. “Something with Sock in it, assuming we have no luck with a microchip.”

“Assuming you find the damn dog,” Marino says.

“We’re running his prints, his DNA. Right away, I hope?” Benton stares intently at the body, as if he’s talking to it.

“I printed him this morning and no luck, nothing in IAFIS. Nothing in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. We’ll have his DNA tomorrow and run it through CODIS.” Marino’s big gloved hands place the ruler under the man’s chin. “It’s kind of strange about the dog, though. Someone’s got to have him. I’m thinking we should put out info for the media about a lost greyhound and a number people can call.”

“Nothing from us,” I reply. “Right now we’re staying away from the media.”

“Exactly,” Benton says. “We don’t want the bad guys knowing we’re even aware of the dog, much less looking for it.”

“‘Bad guys’?” Anne says.

“What else?” I walk around the table, doing what Lucy calls a “high recon,” looking carefully at the body from head to toe.

Marino is taking photographs, and he says, “Before we put him back in the fridge this morning, I checked his hands for trace, collected anything preliminarily, including personal effects.”

“You didn’t tell me about personal effects. Just that he didn’t seem to have any,” I reply.

“A ring with a crest on it, a steel Casio watch. A couple keys on a keychain. Let’s see what else. A twenty-dollar bill. A little wooden stash box, empty, but I swabbed it for drugs. The stash box on the video clip. For a second you could see him holding it right after he got to Norton’s Woods.”

“Where was it recovered?” I ask.

“In his pocket. That’s where I found it.”

“So he took it out of his pocket at the park and then put it back in his pocket before his terminal event.” I remember what I watched on the iPad, the small box held in the black glove.

“I’d say we should be looking for the snorting or smoking variety,” Marino says. “I’m betting weed. Don’t know if you noticed,” he says to me, “but he had a glass pipe in an ashtray on his desk.”

“We’ll see what shows up on tox,” I reply. “We’ll do a STAT alcohol and expedite a drug screen. How backed up are they up there?”

“I’ll tell Joe to move it to the head of the line,” Anne refers to the chief toxicologist, who I brought with me from New York, rather shamelessly stole him from the NYPD crime labs. “You’re the boss. All you’ve got to do is ask.” She meets my eyes. “Welcome back.”

“What kind of crest, and what does the keychain look like?” Benton asks Marino.

“A coat of arms, an open book with three crowns,” he says, and I can tell when he enjoys having Benton at a disadvantage. The CFC is Marino’s turf. “No writing on it, no phrase in Latin, nothing like that. I don’t know what the crests for MIT and Harvard are.”

“Not what you described,” Benton answers. “Okay if I use this?” He indicates a computer on the counter.

“The keychain is one of those steel rings attached to a leather loop, like you’d snap around your belt,” Marino goes on. “And as we all know, no wallet, not even a cell phone, and I think that’s unusual. Who walks around with no cell phone?”

“He was taking his dog out and listening to music. Maybe he wasn’t planning to be out very long and didn’t want to talk on the phone,” Benton says as he types in search words.

I pull the body over on its right side and look at Marino. “You want to help me with this?”

“Three crowns and an open book,” Benton says. “City University of San Francisco.” He types some more. “An online university specializing in health sciences. Would an online university have class rings?”

“And his personal effects are in which locker?” I ask Marino.

“Numero uno. I got the key if you want it.”

“I would. Anything the labs need to check?”

“Can’t see why.”

“Then we’ll keep his personal effects until they go to a funeral home or to his family, when we figure out who he is,” I reply.

“And then there’s Oxford,” Benton says next, still searching the Internet. “But if the ring he had on was Oxford, it would have Oxford University on it, and you said it didn’t have any writing or motto.”

“It didn’t,” Marino replies. “But it looks like someone had it made, you know, plain gold and engraved with the crest, so maybe it wouldn’t be as official as what you order from a school and wouldn’t have a motto or writing.”

“Maybe,” Benton says. “But if the ring was made, I have a hard time imagining it’s for Oxford University, would be more inclined to think if someone went to an online college he might have a ring made because maybe there’s no other way to get one, assuming you want to tell the world you’re an alum of an online college. This is the City University of San Francisco coat of arms.” Benton moves to one side so Marino can see what’s on the computer screen, an elaborate crest with blue-and-gold mantling, and a gold owl on top with three gold fleur-de-lis, then below three gold crowns, and in the middle an open book.

Marino is holding the body on its side, and he squints at the computer screen from where he’s standing and shrugs. “Maybe. If it was engraved, you know, if the person had it made for him, maybe it wouldn’t be that detailed. That could be it.”

“I’ll look at the ring,” I promise as I examine the body externally and make notes on a clipboard.

“No reason to think he was in a struggle, and we might get a perp’s DNA or something off the watch or whatever. But you know me.” Marino resumes what he was saying to me about processing the dead man’s personal effects. “I swabbed everything anyway. Nothing struck me as unusual except that his watch had quit, one of those self-winding kind that Lucy likes, a chronograph.”

“What time did it stop?”

“I got it written down. Sometime after four a.m. About twelve hours after he died. So he’s got a nine-mil with eighteen rounds but no phone,” he then says. “Okay. I guess so unless he didn’t leave it at home and in fact somebody took it. Maybe took the dog, too. That’s what I keep wondering.”

“There was a phone on a desk in the video clips I saw,” I remind him. “Plugged into a charger near one of the laptops, I believe. Near the glass smoking pipe you mentioned.”

“We couldn’t see everything he did in there before he left. I figured he might have grabbed his phone on his way out,” Marino supposes. “Or he might have more than one. Who the hell knows?”

“We’ll know when we find his apartment,” Benton says as he prints what he’s found on the Internet. “I’d like to see the scene photos.”

“You mean when I find the apartment.” Marino puts the camera down on a countertop. “Because it’s going to be me poking around. Cops gossip worse than old women. I find where the guy lives, then I’ll ask for help.”

8

On a body diagram, I note that at eleven-fifteen p.m. the dead man is fully rigorous and refrigerated cold. He has a pattern of dark-red discoloration and positional blanching that indicates he was flat on his back with his arms straight by his sides, palms down, fully clothed, and wearing a watch on his left wrist and a ring on his left little finger for at least twelve hours after he died.

Postmortem hypostasis, better known as lividity or livor mortis, is one of my pet tattletales, although it is often misinterpreted even by those who should know better. It can look like bruising due to trauma when in fact it is caused by the mundane physiological phenomenon of noncirculating blood pooling into small vessels due to gravity. Lividity is a dusky red or can be purplish with lighter areas of blanching where areas of the body rested against a firm surface, and no matter what I’m told about the circumstances of a death, the body itself doesn’t lie.

“No secondary livor pattern that might indicate the body moved while livor was still forming,” I observe. “Everything I’m seeing is consistent with him being zipped up inside a pouch and placed on a body tray and not moving.” I attach a body diagram to a clipboard and sketch impressions made by a waistband, a belt, jewelry, shoes and socks, pale areas on the skin that show the shape of elastic or a buckle or fabric or a weave pattern.

“Certainly suggests he didn’t even move his arms, didn’t thrash around, so that’s good,” Anne decides.

“Exactly. If he’d come to, he would have at least moved his arms. So that’s real good,” Marino agrees, keys clicking as an image fills the screen of the computer terminal on a countertop.

I make a note that the man has no body piercings or tattoos, and is clean, with neatly trimmed nails and the smooth skin of one who doesn’t do manual labor or engage in any physical activity that might cause calluses on his hands or feet. I palpate his head, feeling for defects, such as fractures or other injuries, and find nothing.

“Question is whether he was facedown when he fell.” Marino is looking at what Investigator Lester Law e-mailed to him. “Or is he on his back in these pictures because the EMTs turned him over?”

“To do CPR they would have had to turn him faceup.” I move closer to look.

Marino clicks through several photos, all of them the same but from different perspectives: the man on his back, his dark-green jacket and denim shirt open, his head turned to one side, eyes partly closed; a close-up of his face, debris clinging to his lips, what looks like particles of dead leaves and grass and grit.

“Zoom in on that,” I tell Marino, and with a click of the mouse, the image is larger, the man’s boyish face filling the screen.

I return to the body behind me and check for injuries of his face and head, noting an abrasion on the underside of the chin. I pull down the lower lip and find a small laceration, likely made by his lower teeth when he fell and hit his face on the gravel path.

“Couldn’t possibly account for all the blood I saw,” Anne says.

“No, it couldn’t,” I agree. “But it suggests he hit the ground face-first, which also suggests he dropped like a shot, didn’t even stumble or try to break his fall. Where’s the pouch he came in?”

“I spread it out on a table in the autopsy room, figured you’d want to have a look,” Anne tells me. “And his clothes are air-drying in there. When I undressed him, I put everything in the cabinet by your station. Station one.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“Maybe somebody punched him,” Marino offers. “Maybe distracted him by punching or elbowing him in the face, then stabbed him in the back. Except that probably would have been recorded, would be on the video clips.”

“He would have more than just this laceration if someone punched him in the mouth. If you look at the debris on his face and the location of the headphones”—I’m back at the computer, clicking on images to show them—”it appears he fell facedown. The headphones are way over here, what looks like at least six feet away under a bench, indicating to me that he fell with sufficient force to knock them a fair distance and disconnect them from the satellite radio, which I believe was in a pocket.”

“Unless someone moved the phones, perhaps kicked them out of the way,” Benton says.

“That was my other thought,” I reply.

“You mean like somebody who tried to help him,” Marino says. “People crowding around him and the headphones ended up under a bench.”

“Or someone did it deliberately.” There is something else I notice.

Clicking through the slideshow, I stop on a photograph of his left wrist. I zoom in on the steel tachymeter watch, move in close on its carbon-fiber face. The time stamp on the photograph is five-seventeen p.m., which is when the police officer took it, yet the time on the watch is ten-fourteen, five hours later than that.

“When you collected the watch this morning”—I direct this to Marino—”you said it appeared to have stopped. You sure it wasn’t simply that the time was different than our local time?”

“Nope, it was stopped,” he says. “Like I said, one of those self-winding watches, and it quit at some point early in the morning, like around four a.m.”

“Seems it might have been set five hours later than Eastern Standard Time.” I point out what I’m seeing in the photograph.

“Okay. Then it must have stopped around eleven p.m. our time,” Marino says. “So it was set wrong to begin with and then it quit.”

“Maybe he was on another time zone because he’d just flown in from overseas,” Benton suggests.

“Soon as we finish up here, I got to find his apartment,” Marino says.

I check the quality-control numbers in the quality-control log, making sure standard deviation is zero and the noise level of the system or variation is within normal limits.

“We ready?” I say to everyone.

I’m eager to do the scan. I want to see what is inside this man.

“We’ll do a topogram, then collect the data set before going to three-D recon with at least fifty percent overlapping,” I tell Anne as she presses a button to slide the table into the scanner. “But we’ll change the protocol and start with the thorax, not the head, except, of course, for using the glabella as our reference.”

I refer to the space between the eyebrows above the nose that we use for spatial orientation.

“A cross-sectional of the chest exactly correlating with the region of interest you’ve marked.” I go down the list as we return to the control room. “An in situ localization of the wound; we’ll isolate that area and any associated injury, any clues in the wound track.”

I seat myself between Ollie and Anne, and then Marino and Benton pull up chairs behind us. Through the glass window I can see the man’s bare feet in the opening of the scanner’s bore.

“Auto and smart MT, noise index eighteen. Point-five segment rotation, point-six-two-five detector configuration,” I instruct. “Very thin slice ultra-high resolution. Ten-millimeter collimation.”

I can hear the electronic pulsing sounds as detectors begin rotating inside the x-ray tube. The first scan lasts sixty seconds. I watch in real time on a computer screen, not sure what I’m seeing, but it shouldn’t be this. It occurs to me the scanner is malfunctioning or that some other patient’s scan is displayed, the wrong file accessed. What am I looking at?

“Jesus,” Ollie says under his breath, frowning at images in a grid, strange images that must be a mistake.

“Orient in time and space, and let’s line up the wound back to front, left to right, and upward,” I direct. “Connect points to get the penetration of wound track, well, such as it is. There is a wound track and then it disappears? I don’t know what this is.”

“What the hell am I looking at?” Marino asks, baffled.

“Nothing I’ve ever seen before, certainly not in a stabbing,” I reply.

“Well, for one thing, air,” Ollie announces. “We’re seeing a hell of a lot of air.”

“These dark areas here and here and here.” I show Marino and Benton. “On CT, air looks dark. As opposed to the brighter white areas, which show higher density. Bone and calcification are bright. You can get a pretty good idea of what something is by the density of the pixels.”

I reach for the mouse and move the cursor over a rib so they can see what I mean.

“CT number is one thousand one hundred and fifty-one. Whereas this not-so-bright area here”—I move the cursor over an area of lung—”is forty. That’s going to be blood. These dullish dark areas you’re seeing are hemorrhage.”

I’m reminded of high-velocity gunshots that cause tremendous crushing and tearing of tissue, similar to injury caused by the blast wave from an explosion. But this isn’t a gunshot case. This isn’t from a detonated explosive device. I don’t see how either could be true.

“Some kind of wound that travels through the left kidney, superiorly through the diaphragm and into the heart, causing profound devastation along the way. And all this.” I point to murky areas around internal organs that are displaced and sheared. “More subcutaneous air. Air in the paraspinal musculature. Retroperitoneal air. How did all this air get inside of him? And here and here. Injury to bone. Rib fracture. Fracture of a transverse process. Hemopneumothorax, lung contusion, hemopericardium. And more air. Here and here and here.” I touch the screen. “Air surrounding the heart and in the cardiac chambers, as well as in the pulmonary arteries and veins.”

“And you’ve never seen anything like this?” Benton asks me.

“Yes and no. Similar devastation caused by military rifles, anti tank cannons, some semiautomatics using extreme shock fragmenting high-velocity ammunition, for example. The higher the velocity, the greater the kinetic energy dissipates at impact and the greater the damage, especially to hollow organs, such as bowel and lungs, and nonelastic tissue, such as the liver, the kidneys. But in a case like that, you expect a clear wound track and a missile or fragments of one. Which we aren’t seeing.”

“What about air?” Benton asks. “Do you see these pockets of air in cases like that?”

“Not exactly,” I reply. “A blast wave can create air emboli by forcing air across the air-blood barrier, such as out of the lungs. In other words, air ends up where it doesn’t belong, but this is a lot of air.”

“A hell of a lot,” Ollie concurs. “And how do you get a blast wave from a stabbing?”

“Do a slice right through those coordinates,” I say to him, indicating the region of interest marked by a bright white bead— the radio-opaque CT skin marker that was placed next to the wound on the left side of the man’s back. “Start here and keep moving down five millimeters above and below the region of interest specified by the markers. That cut. Yes, that’s the one. And let’s reformat into virtual three-D volume rendering from inside out. Thin, thin cuts, one millimeter, and the increment between them? What do you think?”

“Point-seventy-five by point-five will do it.”

“Okay, fine. Let’s see what it looks like if we virtually follow the track, what track there is.”

Bones are as vivid as if they are laid bare before us, and organs and other internal structures are well defined in shades of gray as the dead man’s upper body, his thorax, begins to rotate slowly in three-dimension on the video display. Using modified software originally developed for virtual colonoscopies, we enter the body through the tiny buttonhole wound, traveling with a virtual camera as if we are in a microscopic spaceship slowly flying through murky grayish clouds of tissue, past a left kidney blown apart like an asteroid.

A ragged opening yawns before us, and we pass through a large hole in the diaphragm. Beyond is shattering, shearing, and contusion. What happened to you? What did this? I don’t have a clue. It’s a helpless feeling to find physical damage that seems to defy physics, an effect without a cause. There’s no projectile. There’s no frag, nothing metal I can see. There’s no exit wound, only the buttonhole entrance on the left side of his back. I’m thinking out loud, repeating important points, making sure everyone understands what is incomprehensible.

“I keep forgetting nothing works down here,” Benton comments distractedly as he looks at his iPhone.

“Nothing exited, and nothing is lighting up.” I calculate what must be done next. “No sign of anything ferrous, but we need to be sure.”

“Absolutely no idea what could have done this,” Benton states rather than asks as he gets up from his chair, making rustling sounds as he unties his disposable gown. “You know the old saying, nothing new under the sun. I guess, like a lot of old sayings, it’s not true.”

“This is new. At least to me,” I reply.

He bends over and pulls off his shoe covers. “No question he’s a homicide.”

“Unless he ate some really bad Mexican food,” Marino says.

It vaguely drifts through my thoughts that Benton is acting suspiciously.

“Like a high-velocity projectile, but there’s no projectile, and if it exited the body, where’s the exit wound?” I keep saying the same thing. “Where the hell’s the metal? What the hell could he have been shot with? An ice bullet?”

“I saw a thing about that on MythBusters. They proved it’s impossible because of heat,” Marino says, as if I’m serious. “I don’t know, though. Wonder what would happen if you loaded the gun and kept it in the freezer until you were ready to fire it.”

“Maybe if you’re a sniper in the interior of Antarctica,” Ollie says. “Where’d that idea come from, anyway? Dick Tracy? I’m asking for real.”

“I thought it was James Bond. I forget which movie.”

“Maybe the exit wound isn’t obvious,” Anne says to me. “Remember that time the guy was shot in the jaw and it exited through his nostril?”

“Then where’s the wound track?” I reply. “We need better contrast between tissues, need to be damn sure there’s nothing we’re missing before I open him up.”

“If you need my help with that, I can call the hospital,” Benton says as he opens the door. I can tell he’s in a hurry, but I’m not sure why.

It’s not his case.

“Otherwise, I’ll check on what Lucy’s found,” Benton says. “Take a look at the video clips. Check on a couple other things. You don’t mind if I use a phone up there.”

“I’ll make the call,” Anne says to him as he leaves. “I’ll get it arranged with McLean and take care of the scan.”

It’s been a theoretical possibility this day would come, and we are cleared with the Board of Health, and with Harvard and its affiliate McLean Hospital, which has four magnets ranging in strength from 1.5 to 9 Tesla. Long ago I made sure the protocols were in place to do MRIs on dead bodies in McLean’s neuroimaging lab, where Anne works as a part-time MR tech for psychiatric research studies. That’s how I got her. Benton knew her first and recommended her. He picks well, is a fine judge of character. I should let him hire my damn staff. I wonder whom he is going to call. I’m not sure why he is here at all.

“If that’s what you want, we can do it right now,” Anne is saying to me. “There shouldn’t be a problem, won’t be anyone around. We’ll just go right up to the front door and get him in and out.”

At this hour, psychiatric patients at McLean won’t be wandering around the campus. There’s little risk of them happening upon a dead body being carried in or out of a lab.

“What if someone shot him with a water cannon?” Marino stares as if transfixed at the rotating torso on the video screen, the ribs curving and gleaming whitely in 3-D. “Seriously. I’ve always heard that’s the perfect crime. You fill a shotgun shell with water, and it’s like a bullet when it goes through the body. But it doesn’t leave a trace.”

“I’ve not had a case like that,” I reply.

“But it could happen,” Marino says.

“Theoretically, however, the entrance wound wouldn’t be like this one,” I reply. “Let’s get going. I want him posted and safely out of sight before everyone starts arriving for work.” It’s almost midnight.

Anne clicks on the icon for tools to take measurements and informs me the width of the wound track before it blows through the diaphragm is .77 to 1.59 millimeters at a depth of 4.2 millimeters.

“So what that tells me…” I start to say.

“How about inches,” Marino complains.

“Some type of double-edged object or blade that doesn’t get much wider than half an inch,” I explain. “And once it penetrated the body up to an approximate depth of two inches, something else happened that caused profound internal damage.”

“What I’m wondering is how much of this abnormality we’re seeing is iatrogenic,” Ollie says. “Caused by the EMTs working on him for twenty minutes. That’s probably the first question we’ll get asked. We have to keep an open mind.”

“No way. Not unless King Kong did CPR,” I reply. “It appears this man was stabbed with something that caused tremendous pressure in his chest and a large air embolus. He would have had severe pain and been dead within minutes, which is consistent with what’s been described by witnesses, that he clutched his chest and collapsed.”

“Then why all the blood after the fact?” Marino says. “Why wouldn’t he have been hemorrhaging instantly? How the hell’s it possible he didn’t start bleeding until after he was pronounced and on his way here?”

“I don’t know the answer, but he didn’t die in our cooler.” I am at least sure of that. “He was dead before he got here, would have been dead at the scene.”

“But we got to prove he started bleeding after he was dead. And dead people don’t start bleeding like a damn stuck pig. So how do we prove he was dead before he got here?” Marino persists.

“Who do we need to prove it to?” I look at him.

“I don’t know who Fielding’s told since we don’t even know where the hell he is. What if he’s told somebody?”

Like you did, I think, but I don’t say it. “That’s why one should be careful about divulging details when we don’t have all the information.” I couldn’t sound more reasonable.

“We got no choice about it.” Marino won’t let it go. “We have to prove why a dead person started bleeding.”

I collect my jacket and tell Anne, “A head and full-body CT scan first. And on MR, full-body coil, every inch of him, and upload what you find. I’ll want to see it right away.”

“I’m driving,” Marino says to her.

“Well, pull it into the bay to warm it up. One of the vans.”

“We don’t want him warming up. Matter of fact, think I’ll put the AC on full-blast.”

“Then you can ride just the two of you. I’ll meet you there.”

“Seriously. He warms up, he might start bleeding again.”

“You’ve been watching too much Saturday Night Live.”

“Dan Aykroyd doing Julia Child? Remember that? ‘You’ll need a knife, a very, very sharp knife.’ And blood spurting everywhere.”

The three of them bantering.

“That was so funny.”

“The old ones were better.”

“No kidding. Roseanne Roseannadanna.”

“Oh, God, I love her.”

“I’ve got them all on DVD.”

I hear them laughing as I walk away.

Scanning my thumb, I let myself into the area that is the first stop after Receiving, where we do identifications, a white room with gray countertops that we simply call ID.

Built into a wall are gray metal evidence lockers, each of them numbered, and I use the key Marino gave me to open the top one on the left, where the dead man’s personal effects have been safely stored until we receipt them to a funeral home or to a family when we finally know who he is and who should claim him. Inside are paper bags and envelopes neatly labeled, and attached to each are forms Marino has filled out and initialed to maintain chain of custody. I find the small manila envelope containing the signet ring, and initial the form and put down the time I removed it from the locker. At a computer station I pull up a log and enter the same information, and then I think about the dead man’s clothes.

I should look at them while I’m down here, not wait until I do the autopsy, which will be hours from now. I want to see the hole made by the blade that penetrated the man’s lower back and created such havoc inside him. I want to see how much he might have bled from that wound, and I leave ID and walk along the gray tile corridor, backtracking. I pass the x-ray room, and through its open door I catch a glimpse of Marino, Anne, and Ollie, still in there, getting the body ready for transport to McLean, joking and laughing. I quickly go past without them noticing, and I open the double steel doors leading into the autopsy room.

It is a vast open space of white epoxy paint and white tile and exposed shiny steel tracks with cool filtered lighting running horizontally along the length of the white ceiling. Eleven steel tables are parked by wall-mounted steel sinks, each with a foot-operated faucet control, a high-pressure spray hose, a commercial disposal, a specimen rinse basket, and a sharps container. The stations I carefully researched and had installed are mini-modular operating theaters with down-draft ventilation systems that exchange air every five minutes, and there are computers, fume hoods, carts of surgical instruments, halogen lights on flexible arms, dissecting surfaces with cutting boards, containers of formalin with spigots, and test-tube racks and plastic jars for histology and toxicology.

My station, the chief’s station, is the first one, and it occurs to me that someone has been using it, and then I feel ridiculous for thinking it. Of course people would have been using it while I’ve been gone. Of course Fielding probably did. It doesn’t matter, and why should I care? I tell myself as I notice that the surgical instruments on the cart aren’t neatly lined up the way I would leave them. They are haphazardly placed on a large white polyethylene dissecting board as if someone rinsed them and didn’t do it thoroughly. I grab a pair of latex gloves out of a box and pull them on because I don’t want to touch anything with my bare hands.

Normally, I don’t worry about it, not as much as I should, I suppose, because I come from an old school of forensic pathologists who were stoical and battle-scarred and took perverse pride in not being afraid of or repulsed by anything. Not maggots or purge fluid or putrefying flesh that is bloated and turning green and slipping, not even AIDS, at least not the worries we have now when we live with phobias and federal regulations about absolutely everything. I remember when I walked around without protective clothing on, smoking, drinking coffee, and touching dead patients as any doctor would, my bare skin against theirs as I examined a wound or looked at a contusion or took a measurement. But I was never sloppy with my work station or my surgical instruments. I was never careless.

I would never return so much as a teasing needle to a surgical cart without first washing it with hot, soapy water, and the drumming of hot water into deep metal sinks was a pervasive sound in the morgues of my past. As far back as my Richmond days—even earlier, when I was just starting at Walter Reed—I knew about DNA and that it was about to be admissible in court and become the forensic gold standard, and from that point forward, everything we did at crime scenes and in the autopsy suite and in the labs would be questioned on the witness stand. Contamination was about to become the ultimate nemesis, and although we don’t make a routine of autoclaving our surgical instruments at the CFC, we certainly don’t give them a cursory splash under the faucet and then toss them onto a cutting board that isn’t clean, either.

I pick up an eighteen-inch dissecting knife and notice a trace of dried blood in the scored stainless-steel handle and that the steel blade is scratched and pitted along the edge and spotted instead of razor-sharp and as bright as polished silver. I notice blood in the serrated blade of a bone saw and dried bloodstains on a spool of waxed five-cord thread and on a double-curved needle. I pick up forceps, scissors, rib shears, a chisel, a flexible probe, and am dismayed by the poor condition everything is in.

I will send Anne a message to hose down my station and wash all of its instruments before we autopsy the man from Norton’s Woods. I will have this entire goddamn autopsy room cleaned from the ceiling to the floor. I will have all of its systems inspected before my first week home has passed, I decide, as I pull on a fresh pair of gloves and walk to a countertop where a large roll of white paper—what we call butcher paper—is attached to a wall-mounted dispenser. Paper makes a loud ripping sound as I tear off a section and cover an autopsy table midway down the room, a table that looks cleaner than mine.

I cover my AFME field clothes with a disposable gown, not bothering with the long ties in back, then return to my messy station. Against the wall is a large white polypropylene drying cabinet on hard rubber casters with a double clear acrylic door, which I unlock by entering a code in a digital keypad. Hanging inside are a sage-green nylon jacket with a black fleece collar, a blue denim shirt, black cargo pants, and a pair of boxer briefs, each on its own stainless-steel hanger, and on the tray at the bottom are a pair of scuffed brown leather boots, and next to them, a pair of gray wool socks. I recognize some of the clothing from the video clips I saw, and it gives me an unsettled feeling to look at it now. The cabinet’s centrifugal fan and HEPA exhaust filters make their low whirring sound as I look at the boots and the socks by picking them up one by one, finding nothing remarkable. The boxer briefs are white cotton with a crossover fly and elastic waistband, and I note nothing unusual, no stains or defects.

Spreading the coat open on the butcher paper-covered table, I slip my hands into the pockets, making sure nothing has been left in them, and I collect a clothing diagram and a clipboard and begin to make notes. The collar is a deep-pile synthetic fur and covered with dirt and sand and pieces of dry brown leaves that adhered to it when the man collapsed to the ground, and the heavy knit cuffs are dirty, too. The sage nylon shell is a very tough material, which appears to be tear-resistant and waterproof with a black fiberfill insulation, none of it easily penetrable unless the blade was strong and very sharp. I find no evidence of blood inside the liner of the coat, not even around the small slit in the back of it, but the areas of the outer shell, the shoulders, the sleeves, the back, are blackened and stiff with blood that collected in the bottom of the body pouch after the man was zipped inside it and then was transported to the CFC.

I don’t know how long he might have bled out while he was inside the bag and then the cooler, but he didn’t bleed from his wound. When I spread open the denim shirt, long-sleeved, a men’s size small, that still smells faintly of a cologne or an after-shave, I find only a spot of dark blood that has dried stiffly around the slit made by the blade. What Marino and Anne have reported seems to be accurate, that the man began bleeding from his nose and mouth while he was fully clothed inside the body bag, his head turned to the side, probably the same side it was turned to when I examined him in the x-ray room a little while ago. Blood must have dripped steadily from his face and into the bag, pooling in it and leaking from it, and I can see that easily when I look at it next, an adult-size cadaver pouch, typical of ones used by removal services, black with a nylon zipper. On the sides are webbing handles attached with rivets, and that’s often where the problem with leakage occurs, assuming the bag is intact with no tears or flaws in the heat-sealed seams. Blood seeps through rivets, especially if the pouch is really cheap, and this one is about twenty-five dollars’ worth of heavy-duty PVC, likely purchased by the case.

As I imagine what I just saw on the CT scan and realize how quickly the damage occurred in what clearly was a blitz attack, the bleeding makes no sense at all. It makes even less sense than it did when Marino first told me about it in Dover. The massive destruction to the man’s internal organs would have resulted in pulmonary hemorrhage that would have caused blood to drain out of the nose and mouth. But it should have happened almost instantly. I don’t understand why he didn’t bleed at the scene. When the paramedics were working to resuscitate him, he should have been bleeding from his face, and this would have been a clear indication that he hadn’t dropped dead from an arrhythmia.

As I leave the autopsy room to go upstairs, I envision the video clips again and remember my wondering about his black gloves and why he put them on when he entered the park. Where are they? I haven’t seen a pair of gloves. They weren’t in the evidence locker or in the drying cabinet, and I checked the pockets of the coat and didn’t find them. Based on what I saw in the recordings covertly made by the man’s headphones, he had the gloves on when he died, and I envision what I saw on Lucy’s iPad when I was riding in the van to the Civil Air Terminal. A black-gloved hand entered the frame as if the man was swatting at something and there was a jostling sound as his hand hit the headphones while his voice blurted out, “What the…? Hey… !” Then bare trees rushing up and around, then chipped bits of slate looming large on the ground and the thud of him hitting, and then the hem of a long, black coat flapping past. Then silence, then the voices of people surrounding him and exclaiming that he wasn’t breathing.

The x-ray room door is closed when I get to it, and I check inside, but everyone is gone, the control room empty and quiet, the CT scanner glowing white in the low lights on the other side of the lead-lined glass. I pause to try the phone in there, hoping Anne might answer her cell, but if she’s already at McLean and in the neuroimaging lab, it will be impossible to reach her through the thick concrete walls of that place. I am surprised when she answers.

“Where are you?” I ask, and I can hear music in the background.

“Pulling up now,” she says, and she must be inside the van with Marino driving and the radio on.

“When you removed his clothing,” I say, “did you see a pair of black gloves? He may have been wearing a pair of thick black gloves.”

A pause, and I hear her say something to Marino and then I hear his voice, but I can’t make out what they’re saying to each other. Then she tells me, “No. And Marino says when he had the body in ID first thing, there were no gloves. He doesn’t remember gloves.”

“Tell me exactly what happened yesterday morning.”

“Just sit right here for a minute,” I hear her say to Marino. “No, not there yet or they’ll come out. The security guys will. Just wait here,” she says to him. “Okay,” she says to me. “A little bit after seven yesterday morning, Dr. Fielding came to x-ray. As you know, Ollie and I are always in early, by seven, and anyway, he was concerned because of the blood. He’d noticed blood drips on the floor outside the cooler and also inside it, and that the body was bleeding or had bled. A lot of blood in the pouch.”

“The body was still fully clothed.”

“Yes. The coat was unzipped and the shirt was cut open, the EMTs did that, but he was clothed when he came in and nothing was done until Dr. Fielding went in there to get him ready for us.”

“What do you mean, ‘to get him ready’?”

I’ve never known Fielding to get a body ready for autopsy, to actually go to the trouble to move it out of the refrigerator and into x-ray or the autopsy room, at least not since the old days when he was in training. He leaves what he considers mundane tasks to those whom he still calls dieners and whom I call autopsy technicians.

“I only know he found the blood and then hurried to get us because he took the call from Cambridge PD, and as you know, it was assumed the guy was a sudden death that was natural, like an arrhythmia or a berry aneurysm or something.”

“Then what?”

“Then Ollie and I looked at the body, and we called Marino and he came and looked, and it was decided not to scan him or do the post yet.”

“He was left in the cooler?”

“No. Marino wanted to process him in ID first, to get his prints, swabs, so we could get started with IAFIS and DNA, with anything that might help us figure out who he is. The important point is there were no gloves at that time, because Marino would have had to take them off the body so he could print him.”

“Then where are they?”

“He doesn’t know, and I don’t, either.”

“Can you put him on, please?”

I hear her hand him the phone, and he says, “Yeah. I unzipped the pouch but didn’t take him out of it, and there was a lot of blood in it, like you know.”

“And you did what, exactly?”

“I printed him while he was in the pouch, and if there had been gloves, I sure as hell would have seen them.”

“Possible the squad removed the gloves at the scene and put them inside the pouch and you didn’t notice? And then they got misplaced somehow?”

“Nope. I looked for any personal effects, like I told you. The watch, ring, keychain, the stash box, the twenty-dollar bill. Took everything out of his pockets, and I always look inside the pouch for the very reason you just said. In case the squad or the removal service tucks something in there, like a hat or sunglasses or whatever. The headphones, too. And the satellite radio. They were in a paper bag and came in with the body.”

“What about Cambridge PD? I know Investigator Lawless brought in the Glock.”

“He receipted it to the firearms lab around ten a.m. That was all he brought in.”

“And when Anne put his clothing inside the drying cabinet, well, obviously she didn’t have the gloves if you say they weren’t there in the first place.”

I hear him say something, and then Anne is back on the phone, saying, “No. I didn’t see gloves when I put everything else in the cabinet. That was around nine p.m., almost four hours ago, when I undressed the body to get it ready for the scan, not long before you got to the CFC. I cleaned the cabinet to make sure it was sterile before I put his other clothing in there.”

“I’m glad something’s sterile. We need to clean my station.”

“Okay, okay,” she says, but not to me. “Wait. Jesus, Pete. Hold on.”

And then Marino’s voice in my ear: “There were other cases.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We had other cases yesterday morning. So maybe someone removed the gloves, but I got no friggin’ idea why. Unless they maybe got picked up by mistake.”

“Who did the cases?”

“Dr. Lambotte, Dr. Booker.”

“What about Jack?”

“Two cases in addition to the guy from Norton’s Woods,” Marino says. “A woman who got hit by a train and an old guy who wasn’t under the care of a physician. Jack didn’t do shit, was gone with the wind,” Marino says. “He doesn’t bother with the scene, and so we get a body that starts bleeding in the fridge and now we got to prove the guy was dead.”

9

The directorate of what officially is called the Cambridge Forensic Center and Port Mortuary is on the top floor, and I have discovered that it is difficult to tell people how to find me when a building is round.

The best I’ve been able to do on the infrequent occasions I’ve been here is to instruct visitors to get off the elevator on the seventh floor, take a left, and look for number 111. It’s only one door down from 101, and to comprehend that 101 is the lowest room number on this floor and 111 is the highest requires some imagination. My office suite, therefore, would occupy a corner at the end of a long hallway if there were corners and long hallways, but there aren’t. Up here there is just one big circle with six offices, a large conference room, the reading room for voice-recognition dictation, the library, the break room, and in the center a windowless bunker where Lucy chose to put the computer and questioned documents lab.

Walking past Marino’s office, I stop outside 111, what he calls CENTCOM for Central Command. I’m sure Marino came up with the pretentious appellation all on his own, not because he thinks of me as his commander but rather he’s come to think of himself as answering to a higher patriotic order that is close to a religious calling. His worship of all things military is new. It’s just one more thing that is paradoxical about him, as if Peter Rocco Marino needs yet another paradox to define his inconsistent and conflicted self.

I need to calm down about him, I say to myself as I unlock my heavy door with its titanium veneer. He isn’t so bad and didn’t do anything so terrible. He’s predictable, and I shouldn’t be surprised in the least. After all, who understands him better than I do? The Rosetta stone to Marino isn’t Bayonne, New Jersey, where he grew up a street fighter who became a boxer and then a cop. The key to him isn’t even his worthless alcoholic father. Marino can be explained by his mother first and foremost, and then his childhood sweetheart Doris, now his ex-wife, both women seemingly docile and subservient and sweet but not harmless. Not hardly.

I push buttons to turn on the flush-mount lighting built into the struts of the geodesic glass dome that is energy-efficient and reminds me of Buckminster Fuller every time I look up. Were the famed architect-inventor still among the living, he would approve of my building and possibly of me but not of our morbid raison d’etre, I suspect, although at this stage of things I would have a few quibbles with him, too. For example, I don’t agree with his belief that technology can save us. Certainly, it isn’t making us more civilized, and I actually think the opposite is true.

I pause on gunmetal-gray carpet just inside my doorway as if waiting for permission to enter, or maybe I’m hesitant because to appropriate this space is to embrace a life I’ve rather much put off for the better part of two years. If I’m honest about it I should say I’ve put it off for decades, since my earliest days at Walter Reed, where I was minding my own business in a cramped, windowless room of AFIP headquarters when Briggs walked in without knocking and dropped an eight-by-eleven gray envelope on my desk with CLASSIFIED stamped on it.

December 4, 1987. I remember it so vividly I can describe what I was wearing and the weather and what I ate. I know I smoked a lot that day and had several straight Scotches at the end of it because I was excited and horrified. The case of all cases, and the DoD wanted me, picked me over all others. Or more accurately, Briggs did. By spring of the following year, I was discharged from the air force early, not on good behavior but because the Reagan administration wanted me gone, and I left under certain conditions that are shameful and cause pain even now. It is karmic that I find myself in a building of circles. Nothing has ended or begun in my life. What was far away is right next to me. Somehow it’s all the same.

The most blatant sign of my six-month absence from a position I’ve yet to really fill is that Bryce’s adjoining administrative office is comfortably cluttered while mine is empty and stark. It feels forlorn and lonely in here, my small conference table of brushed steel bare, not even a potted plant on it, and when I inhabit a space there are always plants. Orchids, gardenias, succulents, and indoor trees, such as areca and sago palms, because I want life and fragrances. But what I had in here when I moved in is gone and has been gone, overwatered and too much fertilizer. I gave Bryce detailed instructions and three months to kill everything. It took him less than two.

There is virtually nothing on my desk, a bow-shaped modular work station constructed of twenty-two-gauge steel with a black laminate surface and a matching hutch of file drawers and open shelves between expansive windows overlooking the Charles and the Boston skyline. A black granite countertop behind my Aeron chair runs the length of the wall and is home to my Leica Laser Microdissection System and its video displays and accoutrements, and nearby is my faithful back-up Leica for daily use, a more basic laboratory research microscope that I can operate with one hand and without software or a training seminar. There isn’t much else, no case files in sight, no death certificates or other paperwork for me to review and initial, no mail, and very few personal effects. I decide it’s not a good thing to have such a perfectly arranged, immaculate office. I’d rather have a landfill. It’s peculiar that being faced with an empty work space should make me feel so overwhelmed, and as I seal Erica Donahue’s letter in a plastic bag I finally realize why I’m not a fan of a world that is fast becoming paperless. I like to see the enemy, stacks of what I must conquer, and I take comfort in reams of friends.

I’m locking the letter in a cabinet when Lucy silently appears like an apparition in a voluminous white lab coat she wears for its warmth and what she can conceal beneath it, and she’s also fond of big pockets. The oversized coat makes her seem deceptively nonthreatening and much younger than her years, in her low thirties is the way she puts it, but she’ll forever be a little girl to me. I wonder if mothers always feel that way about their daughters, even when the daughters are mothers themselves, or in Lucy’s case, armed and dangerous.

She probably has a pistol tucked into the back waistband of her cargo pants, and I realize how selfishly happy I am that she’s home. She’s back in my life, not in Florida or with people I have to force myself to like. Manhattan prosecutor Jaime Berger is included in this mix. As I look at my niece, my surrogate only child, walking into my office, I can’t avoid a truth I won’t tell her. I’m glad if she and Jaime have called it quits. That’s really why I haven’t asked about it.

“Is Benton still with you?” I inquire.

“He’s on the phone.” She shuts the door behind her.

“Who’s he talking to at this hour?”

Lucy takes a chair, pulling her legs up on the seat, crossing them at the ankles. “Some of his people,” she says, as if to imply he’s talking to colleagues at McLean, but that’s not it. Anne is handling the hospital, and she and Marino are there and getting started on the scan. Why would Benton be talking to them or anyone else at McLean?

“It’s just the three of us, then,” I comment pointedly. “Except for Ron, I assume. But if you want the door shut, I suppose that’s fine.” It’s my way of letting her know that her hypervigilant and secretive behavior isn’t lost on me and I wish she would explain it. I wish she would explain why she feels it necessary to be evasive if not blatantly untruthful to me, her aunt, her almost-mother, and now her boss.

“I know.” She slides a small evidence pillbox out of her lab coat pocket.

“You know? What do you know?”

“That Anne and Marino went to McLean because you want an MRI. Benton filled me in. Why didn’t you go?”

“I’m not needed and wouldn’t be particularly helpful, since MR scans aren’t my specialty.” There is no MRI scanner at Dover’s port mortuary, where most bodies are war casualties and are going to have metal in them. “I thought I’d take care of a few things, and when I’m satisfied I know what I’m looking for, I’ll get started on the autopsy.”

“Kind of a backward way to look at things, when you stop to think about it,” Lucy muses, her eyes green and intensely fixed on me. “It used to be you did the autopsy so you knew what you were looking for. Now it’s just a confirmation of what you already know and a means of collecting evidence.”

“Not exactly. I still get surprises. What’s in the box?”

“Speaking of.” She slides the small white box across the unobstructed surface of my ridiculously clean desk. “You can take it out and don’t need gloves. But be careful with it.”

Inside the box on a bed of cotton is what looks like the wing of an insect, possibly a fly.

“Go ahead, touch it,” Lucy encourages, leaning forward in her chair, her face bright with excitement, as if she’s watching me open a gift.

I feel the stiffness of wire struts and a thin transparent membrane, something like plastic. “Artificial. Interesting. What is this exactly, and where did you get it?”

“You familiar with the holy grail of flybots?”

“I confess I’m drawing a blank.”

“Years and years of research. Millions and millions of research dollars spent on building the perfect flybot.”

“Not intimately aware of it. Actually, I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

“Equipped with micro-cameras and transmitters for covert surveillance, literally for bugging people. Or for detecting chemicals or explosives or possibly even biological hazards. The work’s been going on at Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, a number of places here and overseas, even before cyborgs, those insects with embedded micro-electromechanical systems, machine-insect interfaces. Which then spread to doing shit like that to other living creatures, like turtles, dolphins. Not DARPA’s finest moments, you ask me.”

I place the wing back on the square of cotton. “Let’s back up. Start with where you got this.”

“I’m worried.”

“You and me both.”

“When Marino had him in ID this morning”—Lucy means the dead man from Norton’s Woods—”I wanted to tell him about the recording system I discovered in the headphones, so I go downstairs. He’s fingerprinting the body, and I notice what at a glance looks like a fly wing stuck to the guy’s coat collar along with some other debris, like dirt and pieces of dead leaves from his being on the ground.”

“It didn’t get dislodged by the EMTs,” I comment. “When they opened his coat.”

“Obviously, it didn’t. Was snagged on the fur, the fake-fur collar,” Lucy says. “Something struck me about it, you know, I got a funny feeling and I took a closer look.”

I get a hand lens out of my desk drawer and turn on an examination light, and in the bright illumination the magnified wing doesn’t look natural anymore. What one would assume is the base of the wing, where it attaches to the body, is actually some sort of flexure joint, and the veins running through the wing tissue are shiny like wires.

“Probably a carbon composite, and there are fifteen joints in each wing drive, which is pretty amazing.” Lucy describes what I’m seeing. “The wing itself is an electroactive polymer frame, which responds to electrical signals, causing the fanfold wings to flap as fast as the real deal, your everyday housefly. Historically, a flybot takes off vertically like a helicopter and flies like an angel, which has been one of its major design obstacles. That and coming up with something micromechanical that’s autonomous but not bulky—in other words, biologically inspired so it has the necessary power to move around freely in whatever environment you put it in.”

“Biologically inspired, like da Vinci’s conceptualized inventions.” I wonder if she is reminded of the exhibition I took her to in London and if she noticed the poster in the living room of the dead man’s apartment. Of course she noticed. Lucy notices everything.

“The poster over the couch,” she says.

“Yes, I saw it.”

“In one of the video clips, when he was putting the leash on his dog. How creepy is that?” Lucy says.

“I’m not sure I know why it’s creepy.”

“Well, I had the luxury of looking at the recordings more carefully than you did.” Lucy’s demeanor again, the nuances I’ve come to recognize as surely as I detect the subtle changes in tissue under the microscope. “It’s for the same exhibition you took me to at the Courtauld, has the date on it for that same summer,” she says calmly and with a certain goal in mind. “We might have been there when he was, assuming he went.”

That’s the goal. This is what Lucy thinks. A connection between the dead man and us.

“Having the poster doesn’t mean he did,” she goes on. “I realize that. It doesn’t mean it in a way that would hold up in court,” she adds with a hint of irony, as if she’s making a dig at Jaime Berger, the prosecutor I’m increasingly suspicious she’s no longer with.

“Lucy, do you have some idea of who this man is?” I go ahead and ask.

“I just think it’s bizarre to consider he might have been at that gallery when we were. But I’m certainly not saying he was. Not at all.”

It’s not what she really thinks. I can see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice. She suspects he might have been there when we were. How could she begin to conclude such a thing about a dead man whose name we don’t know?

“You’re not hacking again,” I say bluntly, as if I’m asking about smoking or drinking or some other habit that could be bad for her health.

I’ve thought more than once that Lucy might have found a way to trace the covertly recorded video files to a personal computer or server somewhere. To her, a firewall and other security measures to protect proprietary data are nothing more than a speed bump on the road to getting what she wants.

“I’m not a hacker,” she says simply.

That’s not an answer, I think but don’t say.

“I just find it an unusual coincidence that he might have been at the Courtauld when we were,” she goes on. “And I think it’s likely he has that poster because he has some connection to that exhibit. You can’t buy them now. I checked. Who would have one unless they went or someone close to them did?”

“Unless he’s much older than he looks, he would have been a child then,” I point out. “That was in the summer of 2001.”

I’m reminded that the time on his watch was five hours ahead of what it should have been for this part of the world. It was set for the United Kingdom’s time zone, and the exhibition was in London. That proves nothing. A consistency but not evidence, I tell myself.

“That exhibit was exactly the kind of thing a precocious little inventor in the making would love,” Lucy says.

“The same way you did,” I reply. “I think you walked through it four times. And you bought the lecture series on CD, you were so enthralled.”

“It’s quite a thought. A little boy in the gallery at the exact moment we were.”

“You say that as if it’s a fact.” I continue to push the same point.

“And almost a decade later I’m here, you’re here, and his dead body is here. Talk about six degrees of separation.”

It jolts me to hear her refer to something else I was thinking about earlier. First the London exhibit, now the great web that is all of us, the way lives around the planet somehow interconnect.

“I never really get used to it,” she is saying. “Seeing someone and then later they’re murdered. Not that I can envision him as a boy at a gallery in London, not that I see some little kid’s face in my mind. But I might have been standing next to him or even talked to him. In retrospect it’s always hard to comprehend that if you had known what was ahead, maybe you could have changed someone’s destiny. Or your own.”

“Did Benton tell you the man from Norton’s Woods was murdered, or did you get that from someone else?”

“We were catching up.”

“And you told him about the flybot while you were just now catching up inside your lab.” It’s not a question.

I feel sure she’s told Benton about the robotic fly wing and whatever else she thinks he should know. She’s the one who was emphatic in the helicopter a little while ago that he is the only person she really trusts right now, except for me. Although I don’t exactly feel trusted. I sense she is sifting through information and selective about what she offers when I wish she wouldn’t hold back. I wish she wouldn’t be evasive or lie. But one thing I’ve learned about Lucy is that wishing makes nothing true. I can wish my life away with her and it won’t change her behavior. It won’t change what she thinks or does.

I turn off the lamp and return the small white box to her. “What do you mean, ‘flies like an angel’?”

“Those artistic renderings of angels hovering. I know you’ve seen them.” Lucy reaches for a pad of call sheets and a pen neatly placed next to the phone. “Their bodies are vertical, like someone with a jet pack on, as opposed to insects and birds, whose bodies are horizontal in flight. These little flybots fly vertically, like angels, and that’s been one of their flaws, that and their size. Finding the solution is what I mean by ‘holy grail.’ It’s eluded the best and the brightest.”

She sketches something to show me, a stick figure that looks like a cross flying through the air.

“If you want an insect like a common housefly to literally be a fly on the wall conducting covert surveillance,” she continues, “it should look like a fly, not like a tiny body that’s upright with wings attached. If I were having a meeting in Iran with Ahmadinejad and something flew by vertically and landed vertically on a windowsill like a micro-Tinker Bell, I believe I’d notice it and be slightly suspicious.”

“If you were meeting with Ahmadinejad in Iran, I’d be slightly suspicious for a lot of reasons. Forgetting why my patient had the wing of one of these things on his coat, assuming this wing is part of an intact flybot—” I start to say.

“Not exactly a flybot,” she interrupts. “Not necessarily a spy-bot, either. That’s what I’m getting to. I think this is the holy grail.”

“Then whatever it is, what might it have been used for?”

“Let your imagination be the limit,” she answers. “I could make quite a list but can’t know definitively, not from one wing, although I can tell a few things that are significant. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the rest of it.”

“You mean on the body, on his coat? Find it where?”

“At the scene.”

“You went to Norton’s Woods.”

“Sure,” she says. “As soon as I realized what the wing was from. Of course I headed straight there.”

“We were together for hours.” I remind her that she could have told me before now. “Just you and me in the cockpit all the way here from Dover.”

“Funny thing about the intercom. Even when I’m sure it’s off in back, I’m still not sure. Not if it’s something I can’t afford having anyone overhear. Marino shouldn’t know about this.” She indicates the small white box with the wing in it.

“Why exactly?”

“Believe me, you don’t want him to know a damn thing about it. It’s a very small piece of something a lot bigger in more ways than one.”

She goes on to assure me that Marino knows nothing about her going to Norton’s Woods. He is unaware of the tiny mechanical wing or that it was a motivating factor in her encouraging him to bring me home from Dover early, to safely escort me in her helicopter. She didn’t mention any of this to me until now, she continues to explain, because she doesn’t trust anyone at the moment. Except Benton, she adds. And me, she adds. And she’s very careful where she has certain conversations, and all of us should be careful.

“Unless the area has been cleared,” she says, and what she means is swept, and the implication is that my office is safe or we wouldn’t be having this conversation inside it.

“You checked my office for surveillance devices?” I’m not shocked. Lucy knows how to sweep an area for hidden recorders because she knows how to spy. The best burglar is a locksmith. “Because you think who might be interested in bugging my office?”

“Not sure who’s interested in what or why.”

“Not Marino,” I then say.

“Well, that would be as obvious as a RadioShack nanny cam if he did it. Of course not. I’m not worried about him doing something like that. I just worry that he can’t keep his mouth shut,” Lucy replies. “At least not when it comes to certain people.”

“You talked about MORT in the helicopter. You weren’t worried about the intercom, about Marino, when it came to MORT.”

“Not the same thing. Not even close,” she says. “Doesn’t matter if Marino runs his mouth to certain people about a robot in the guy’s apartment. Other people already know about it, you can rest assured of that. I can’t have Marino talk about my little friend.” She looks at the small white box. “And he wouldn’t mean anything bad. But he doesn’t understand certain realities about certain people. Especially General Briggs and Captain Avallone.”

“I didn’t realize you know anything about her.” I’ve never mentioned Sophia Avallone to Lucy.

“When she was here. Jack showed her around. Marino bought her lunch, was kissing her uniformed ass. He doesn’t get it about people like that, about the fucking Pentagon, for that matter, or someone he stupidly assumes is one of us, you know, is safe.”

I’m relieved she realizes it, but I don’t want to encourage her to distrust Marino, not even slightly. She’s been through enough with him and finally they are friends again, close like they were when she was a child and he taught her to drive his truck and to shoot and she aggravated the hell out of him and it was mutual. She gets science from my genetics, but she gets her affinity for cop stuff, as she refers to it, from him. He was the big, tough detective in her life when she was a know-it-all difficult wunderkind, and he has loved and hated her as many different times as she has loved and hated him. But friends and colleagues now. Whatever it takes to keep it that way. Be careful what you say, I tell myself. Let there be peace.

“From which I conclude Briggs doesn’t know about this.” I indicate the small white box on my desk. “And Captain Avallone doesn’t.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Is my office bugged right now?”

“Our conversation is completely safe,” she replies, and it isn’t an answer.

“What about Jack? Possible he knows about the flybot? Well, you didn’t tell him.”

“No damn way.”

“So unless someone’s called him looking for it. Or maybe its wing.”

“You mean if the killer called here looking for a missing flybot,” Lucy says. “And I’m just going to call it that for purposes of simplicity, although it’s not just a garden-variety flybot. That would be pretty stupid. That would imply the caller had something to do with the guy’s homicide.”

“We can’t rule out anything. Sometimes killers are stupid,” I reply. “If they’re desperate enough.”

10

Lucy gets up and goes into my private bathroom, where there is a single-cup coffeemaker on a counter. I hear her filling the tank with tap water and checking the small refrigerator. It is almost one a.m. and the snow hasn’t eased up, is falling hard and fast, and when the small flakes blow against the windows, the sound is like sand blasting the glass.

“Skim milk or cream?” Lucy calls out from what is supposed to be my private changing area, which includes a shower. “Bryce is such a good wife. He stocked your refrigerator.”

“I still drink it black.” I start opening my desk drawers, not sure what I’m looking for.

I think about my sloppy work station in the autopsy room. I think of people helping themselves to what they shouldn’t.

“Yeah, well, then why is there milk and cream?” Lucy’s loud voice. “Green Mountain or Black Tiger? There’s also hazelnut. Since when do you drink hazelnut?” The questions are rhetorical. She knows the answers.

“Since never,” I mutter, seeing pencils, pens, Post-its, paper clips, and in a bottom drawer, a pack of spearmint gum.

It is half-full, and I don’t chew gum. Who likes spearmint gum and would have reason to go into my desk? Not Bryce. He’s much too vain to chew gum, and if I caught him doing it, I would disapprove, because I consider it rude to chew gum in front of other people. Besides, Bryce wouldn’t root around inside my desk, not without permission. He wouldn’t dare.

“Jack likes hazelnut, French vanilla, shit like that, and he drinks it with skim milk unless he’s on one of his high-protein, high-fat diets,” Lucy continues from inside my bathroom. “Then he uses real cream, heavy cream, like what’s in here. I suppose if you had guests, were expecting visitors, you might have cream.”

“Nothing flavored, and please make it strong.”

“He’s a superuser just like you are,” Lucy’s voice then says. “His fingerprints are stored in every lock in this place just like yours are.”

I hear the spewing of hot water shooting through the K-Cup and use it as a welcome interruption. I refuse to engage in the poisonous speculation that Jack Fielding has been in my office during my absence, that maybe he’s been helping himself while he drinks coffee, chews gum, or who the hell knows what he’s been up to. But as I look around, it doesn’t seem possible. My office feels unlived-in. It certainly doesn’t appear as if anyone has been working in here, so what would he be doing?

“I went over to Norton’s Woods before Cambridge PD did, you know. Marino asked them to go back because of the serial number being eradicated from the Glock. But I got there first.” Lucy talks on loudly from inside the bathroom. “But I had the disadvantage of not knowing exactly where the guy went down, where he was stabbed, we now know. Without the scene photographs, it’s impossible to get an exact location, just an approximate one, so I combed every footpath in the park.”

She walks out with steaming coffee in black mugs that have the AFME’s unusual crest, a five-card poker draw of aces and eights, known as the dead man’s hand, what Wild Bill Hickok supposedly was holding when he was shot to death.

“Talk about a needle in a haystack,” she continues. “The flybot’s probably half the size of a small paper clip, about the size of, well, a housefly. No joy.”

“Just because you found a wing doesn’t mean the rest of it was ever out there,” I remind her as she sets a coffee in front of me.

“If it’s out there, it’s maimed.” Lucy returns to her chair. “Under snow as we speak and missing a wing. But very possibly still alive, especially when it gets exposed to light, assuming it’s not further damaged.”

“‘Alive’?”

“Not literally. Likely powered by micro-solar panels as opposed to a battery that would already be dead. Light hits it and abracadabra. That’s the way everything is headed. And our little friend, wherever he is, is futuristic, a masterpiece of teeny-tiny technology.”

“How can you be so sure if you can’t find most of it? Just a wing.”

“Not just any wing. The angle and flexure joints are ingenious and suggest to me a different flight formation. Not the flight of an angel anymore. But horizontal like a real insect flies. Whatever this thing is and whatever its function, we’re talking about something extremely advanced, something I’ve never seen before. Nothing’s been published about it, because I get pretty much every technical journal there is online, plus I’ve been running searches with no success. By all indications, it’s a project that’s classified, top secret. I sure hope the rest of it is out there on the ground somewhere, safely covered with snow.”

“What was it doing in Norton’s Woods in the first place?” I envision the black-gloved hand entering the frame of the hidden video camera, as if the man was swatting at something.

“Right. Did he have it, or did someone else?” She blows on her coffee, holding the mug in both hands.

“And is someone looking for it? Does someone think it’s here or think we know where it is?” I ask that again. “Has anyone mentioned to you that his gloves are gone? Did you happen to notice when you were downstairs while Marino was printing the body? It appears the victim put on a pair of black gloves as he arrived at the park, which I thought was curious when I watched the video clips. I assume he died with the gloves on, and so where are they?”

“That’s interesting,” Lucy says, and I can’t tell if she already knew the gloves are missing.

I can’t tell what she knows and if she’s lying.

“They weren’t in the woods when I was walking around yesterday morning,” she informs me. “I would have seen a pair of black gloves, saying they were accidentally left by the squad, the removal service, the cops. Of course, they could have been and were picked up by anybody who happened along.”

“In the video clips, someone wearing a long, black coat walks past right after the man falls to the ground. Is it possible whoever killed him paused just long enough to take his gloves?”

“You mean if they’re some type of data gloves or smart gloves, what they’re using in combat, gloves with sensors embedded in them for wearable computer systems, wearable robotics,” Lucy says, as if it is a normal thing to consider about a pair of missing gloves.

“I’m just wondering why his gloves might be important enough for someone to take them, if that’s what’s happened,” I reply.

“If they have sensors in them and that’s how he was controlling the flybot, assuming the flybot is his, then the gloves would be extremely important,” Lucy says.

“And you didn’t ask about the gloves when you were downstairs with Marino? You didn’t think to check gloves, clothing, for sensors that might be embedded?”

“If I had the gloves, I would have had a much better chance of finding the flybot when I went back to Norton’s Woods,” Lucy says. “But I don’t have them or know where they are, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I am asking that because it would be tampering with evidence.”

“I didn’t. I promise. I don’t know for a fact that the gloves are data gloves, but if they are, it would make sense in light of other things. Like what he’s saying on the video clip right before he dies,” she adds thoughtfully, working it out, or maybe she’s already worked it out but is leading me to believe what she’s saying is a new thought. “The man keeps saying ‘Hey, boy.’”

“I assumed he was talking to his dog.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“And he said other things I couldn’t figure out,” I recall. “‘And for you’ or ‘Do you send one’ or something like that. Could a robotic fly understand voice commands?”

“Absolutely possible. That part was muffled. I heard it, too, and thought it was confusing,” Lucy says. “But maybe not if he was controlling the flybot. ‘For you’ could be four-two, maybe, as in the number four? ‘And’ could be ‘N,’ as in north? I’ll listen again and do more enhancement.”

“More?”

“I’ve done some. Nothing helpful. Could be he was telling the flybot GPS coordinates, which would be a common command to give a device that responds to voice—if you’re telling it where to go, for example.”

“If you could figure out GPS coordinates, maybe you could find the location, find where it is.”

“Sincerely doubt it. If the flybot was controlled by the gloves, at least partially controlled by sensors in them, then when the victim waved his hand, probably at the moment he was stabbed?”

“Right. Then what.”

“I don’t know, but I don’t have the flybot, and I don’t have the gloves,” Lucy says to me while looking at me intently, her eyes directly on mine. “I didn’t find them, but I sure wish I had.”

“Did Marino mention that someone may have been following Benton and me after we left Hanscom?” I ask.

“We looked for the big SUV with xenon lights and fog lamps. I’m not saying it means anything, but Jack’s got a dark-blue Navigator. Pre-owned, bought it back in October. You weren’t here, so I guess you haven’t seen it.”

“Why would Jack follow us? And no. I don’t know anything about him buying a Navigator. I thought he had a Jeep Cherokee.”

“Traded up, I guess.” She drinks her coffee. “I didn’t say he would follow you or did. Or that he would be stupid enough to ride your bumper. Except in a blizzard or fog, when visibility’s really bad, a rather inexperienced tail might follow too close if the person doesn’t know where the target is going. I don’t see why Jack would bother. Wouldn’t he assume you were on your way here?”

“Do you have an idea why anyone would bother?”

“If someone knows the flybot is missing,” she says, “he or she sure as hell’s looking for it, and possibly would spare nothing to find it before it gets into the wrong hands. Or the right hands. Depending on who or what we’re dealing with. I can say that much based on a wing. If that’s why you were followed, it would make me less likely to suspect that whoever killed this guy found the flybot. In other words, it could very well still be missing or lost. I probably don’t need to tell you that a top-secret proprietary technical invention like this could be worth a fortune, especially if someone could steal the idea and take credit for it. If such a person is looking for it and has reason to fear it may have come in with the body, maybe this person wanted to see where you were going, what you were up to. He or she might think the flybot is here at the CFC or might think you have it off-site somewhere. Including at your house.”

“Why would I have it at my house? I haven’t been home.”

“Logic has nothing to do with it when someone is in over-drive,” Lucy answers. “If I were the person looking, I might assume you instructed your former FBI husband to hide the flybot at your house. I might assume all kinds of things. And if the flybot is still at large, I’m still going to be looking.”

I remember what the man exclaimed, can hear his voice in my head. “What the…? Hey… !” Maybe his startled reaction wasn’t due solely to the sudden sharp pain in his lower back and tremendous pressure in his chest. Maybe something flew at his face. Maybe he had on data gloves, and his startled reaction is what caused the flybot to get broken. I imagine a tiny device mid-flight, and then struck by the man’s black gloved hand and crushed against his coat collar.

“If someone has the data gloves and looked for the flybot before the snow started, is it really possible the person wouldn’t have found it?” I ask my niece.

“Sure it’s possible. Depends on a number of things. How badly damaged is it, for example. There was a lot of activity around the man after he went down. If the flybot was there on the ground, it could have been crushed or damaged further and rendered completely unresponsive. Or it could be under something or in a tree or a bush or anywhere out there.”

“I assume a robotic insect could be used as a weapon,” I suggest. “Since I don’t have a clue what caused this man’s internal injuries, I need to think about every possibility imaginable.”

“That’s the thing,” Lucy says. “These days, almost anything you can imagine is possible.”

“Did Benton tell you what we saw on CT?”

“I don’t see how a micromechanical insect could cause internal damage like that,” Lucy answers. “Unless the victim was somehow injected with a micro-explosive device.”

My niece and her phobias. Her obsession with explosives. Her acute distrust of government.

“And I sure as hell hope not,” she says. “Actually, we’d be talking about nanoexplosives if a flybot was involved.”

My niece and her theories about super-thermite, and I remember Jaime Berger’s comment the last time I saw her at Thanksgiving when all of us were in New York, having dinner in her penthouse apartment. “Love doesn’t conquer all,” Berger said. “It can’t possibly,” she said as she drank too much wine and spent a lot of time in the kitchen, arguing with Lucy about 9/11, about explosives used in demolitions, nanomaterials painted on infrastructures that would cause a horrendous destruction if impacted by large planes filled with fuel.

I have given up reasoning with my phobic, cynical niece, who is too smart for her own good and won’t listen. It doesn’t matter to her that there simply aren’t enough facts to support what has her convinced, only allegations about residues found in the dust right after the towers collapsed. Then, weeks later, more dust was collected and it showed the same residues of iron oxide and aluminum, a highly energetic nanocomposite that is used in making pyrotechnics and explosives. I admit there have been credible scientific journal articles written about it, but not enough of them, and they don’t begin to prove that our own government helped mastermind 9/11 as an excuse to start a war in the Middle East.

“I know how you feel about conspiracy theories,” Lucy says to me. “That’s a big difference between us. I’ve seen what the so-called good guys can do.”

She doesn’t know about South Africa. If she did, she would realize there isn’t a difference between the two of us. I know all too well what so-called good guys can do. But not 9/11. I won’t go that far, and I think of Jaime Berger and imagine how difficult it would be for the powerful and established Manhattan prosecutor to have Lucy as a partner. Love doesn’t conquer all. It really is true. Maybe Lucy’s paranoia about 9/11 and the country we live in has driven her back into a personal isolation that historically is never broken for long. I really thought Jaime was the one, that it would last. I now feel certain it hasn’t. I want to tell Lucy I’m sorry for that and I’m always here for her and will talk about anything she wants, even if it goes against my beliefs. Now is not the time.

“I think we need to consider that we might be dealing with some renegade scientist or maybe more than one of them up to no good,” Lucy then tells me. “That’s the big point I’m trying to make. And I mean serious no good, extreme no good, Aunt Kay.”

It relieves me to hear her call me Aunt Kay. I feel all is right with us when she calls me Aunt Kay, and she rarely does it anymore. I don’t remember the last time she has. When I’m her Aunt Kay I can almost ignore what Lucy Farinelli is, which is a genius who is marginally sociopathic, a diagnosis that Benton scoffs at, nicely but firmly. Being marginally sociopathic is like being marginally pregnant or marginally dead, he says. I love my niece more than my own life, but I’ve come to accept that when she is well behaved, it is an act of will or simply because it suits her. Morals have very little to do with it. It’s all about the end justifying the means.

I study her carefully, even though I won’t see what’s there. Her face never gives away information that could really hurt her.

I say to her, “I need to go ahead and ask you one thing.”

“You can ask more than one.” She smiles and doesn’t look capable of hurting anything or anyone unless you recognize the strength and agility in her calm hands and the rapid changes in her eyes as thoughts flash behind them like lightning.

“You aren’t involved in whatever this is.” I mean the small white box and the flybot wing inside it. I mean the dead man who is getting an MRI at McLean—someone we may have crossed paths with at a da Vinci exhibition in London months before 9/11, which Lucy incredibly believes was orchestrated from within our own government.

“Nope.” She says it simply and doesn’t flinch or look the slightest bit uncomfortable.

“Because you’re here now.” I remind her she works for the CFC, meaning she works for me, and I answer to the governor of Massachusetts, the Department of Defense, the White House. I answer to a lot of people, I tell her. “I can’t have—”

“Of course you can’t. I’m not going to get you into trouble.”

“It isn’t just you anymore—”

“No need to have this conversation,” she interrupts again, and her eyes blaze. They are so green they don’t look real. “Anyway, he doesn’t have thermal injury, right? No burns?”

“None that I can see so far. That’s correct,” I reply.

“Okay. So if someone poked him with a modified shark bang stick? You know, one of those speargun shafts with something like a shotgun cartridge attached to the tip? Only in this case, a tiny, tiny charge containing nanoexplosives?”

I push the power button to start my desktop computer. “It wouldn’t look like what I just saw. It would look like a contact gunshot wound minus the patterned abrasion made by the muzzle of a gun. Even if we’re talking about using nanoexplosives as opposed to some type of firearm ammunition on the tip of a shaft or something shaftlike, you’re right, you’d see thermal injury. There should be burns at the entrance and also to underlying tissue. I assume you’re implying something like a flybot could be used to deliver nanoexplosives. Is that what you fear this so-called renegade scientist or more than one of them might be doing?”

“Deliver. Detonate. Nanoexplosives, drugs, poisons. Like I said, let your imagination be the limit what a device like this might be capable of.”

“I need to take a look at the security footage that shows the body bag leaking.” As I look for files in my computer. “I’m not going to have to go see Ron for that, am I?”

Lucy comes around to my side of the desk and starts typing on my keyboard, entering her system administrator’s password that grants complete access to my kingdom.

“Easy as pie.” She taps a key to open a file.

“Nobody could get into my files without your knowing.”

“Not in cyberspace. But I can’t know if someone’s been in your physical space, especially since I’m not up here all the time, in fact, not even most of the time, because I work remotely when I can,” she says, but I’m not sure I believe she wouldn’t know.

In fact, I don’t believe it.

“But no way anyone has gotten into your password-protected files,” she says, and that I do believe. Lucy wouldn’t permit it. “You can monitor the security cameras from anywhere, by the way. Even from your iPhone if you want. All you need is access to the Internet. I found this earlier and saved it as a file. Five-forty-two p.m. That’s what time it was yesterday when this was captured by a closed-caption security camera in the receiving area.”

She clicks on play and turns up the volume, and I watch two attendants in winter coats pushing a stretcher bearing a black body bag along the lower level’s gray tile hallway.

Wheels click as they park the stretcher in front of the cooler, and now I can see Janelle, stocky with short brunette hair, tough-looking with a surprising number of tattoos, as best I recall. Someone Fielding found and hired.

Janelle opens the massive stainless-steel door, and I hear the rush of blowing air.

“Put it…” She points, and I notice she is wearing her coat, a dark jacket with FORENSICS in large, bright-yellow letters on the back. She’s in scene clothes, including a CFC baseball cap, as if she’s going out in the cold or just came in.

“That tray there?” an attendant asks as he and his partner lift the body bag off the stretcher. The bag bends freely as they carry it, the body inside it as flexible as in life. “Shit, he’s dripping. Dammit. He’d better not have AIDS or something. On my pants, my damn shoes.”

“The lower one.” Janelle directs them to a tray inside the cooler, stepping out of the way and not interested that blood is dripping from the body bag and spotting the gray floor. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“Janelle the magnificent,” Lucy comments as the video recording ends abruptly.

“Do you have the MLI log?” I want to see what time the medicolegal investigator—in other words, Janelle—came and went yesterday. “Obviously, she was on call during the evening?”

“She worked a double shift on Sunday, worker bee that she is,” Lucy says. “Filled in for Randy, who was scheduled for evenings over the weekend but called in sick. Meaning he stayed home to watch the Super Bowl.”

“I hope not.”

“And Dandy Randy’s not here now because of the weather. Supposedly on call at home. Must be nice to have a take-home SUV and get paid for staying home,” Lucy says, and I hear the contempt in her flinty tone and see it in the hardness of her face. “I guess you can tell you got your work cut out for you. Assuming you ever quit making excuses for people.”

“I don’t make them for you.”

“That’s because there aren’t any.”

I look at the log Janelle kept yesterday, a template on my video display that has very few fields filled in.

“I don’t mean to state what’s as plain as the nose on my face, but there’s not much you really know about what goes on,” Lucy says. “You don’t know the finer points of the day-to-day in this place. How could you?” She returns to her side of the desk and picks up her coffee, but she doesn’t sit back down. “You haven’t been here. You’ve sort of never been here since we opened for business.”

“This is it? This is the entire log for yesterday?”

“Yup. Janelle came in at four. If what she entered into the log is to be believed.” Lucy stands and drinks her coffee, eyeing me. “And she runs with quite a pack, by the way. Forensic fuck buddies. Most of them cops, a few of them data-entry and clerical. Whoever she can be a hero to. You know she’s on a dodgeball team? What kind of person plays dodgeball? Someone with finesse.”

“If she came in at four, why is she dressed in scene clothes, including her jacket? As if she just came in from the cold?”

“Like I said, if what she entered in the log is to be believed.”

“And David was on before that and didn’t respond to anything, either?” I ask. “Jack could have sent him to Norton’s Woods. David was sitting right here, so why didn’t Jack tell him to go to the scene? It’s maybe fifteen minutes from here.”

“And you don’t know that, either.” Lucy walks into the bathroom and rinses her mug. “You don’t know if David was sitting right here,” she says as she walks back out and hovers near my closed office door. “I don’t want to be the one to tell you….”

“It would seem you are the only one to tell me. No one else is telling me a damn thing,” I reply. “What the hell is happening around here? People just show up when they feel like it?”

“Pretty much. The other MEs, the MLIs, in and out, marching to their own drummer. It trickles down from the top.”

“It trickles down from Jack.”

“At least on your side of things. The labs are another story, because he’s not interested in them. Except firearms.” She leans against the closed door, slipping her hands into the pockets of her lab coat.

“He’s supposed to be in charge in my absence. Jack’s the co-director of the entire CFC-Port Mortuary.” I can’t keep the protest out of my tone, the note of outrage.

“Not interested in the labs, and scientists don’t pay any attention to him, anyway. Except firearms, like I said. You know Fielding and guns, knives, crossbows, hunting bows. Never met a weapon he didn’t love. So he messes with the firearms and tool-mark lab and has managed to fuck them up, too. Piss off Morrow until he’s on the verge of quitting. I do know he’s actively looking for another job, and there’s no good reason his lab didn’t finish with the Glock the dead guy had on him. The eradicated serial number. Shit. He bolted out of here this morning and didn’t bother.”

“He bolted out of here?”

“He was driving off when I was returning from Norton’s Woods. This was about ten-thirty.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. I don’t know, but I don’t understand why he didn’t make sure someone took care of the Glock. Using acid on a drilled-off serial number? How long does that take to at least try? He must have known it was important.”

“He might not have,” I answer. “If the Cambridge detective is the only one who talked to him, why would he think the Glock was important? At that time, no one had a clue the man from Norton’s Woods is a homicide.”

“Well, I guess that’s a relevant point. Morrow probably doesn’t even know we went to get you, that you’re back from Dover. Fielding vanished, too, when he knew damn well there was a major problem that most people with a brain in their head would decide was his fault. He’s the one who took the call about the guy in Norton’s Woods. He’s the one who didn’t go to the scene or make sure somebody did. The reason Janelle is dressed for the great outdoors, in my opinion? She didn’t get here at four, the time she entered into the log. She got here just in time to let in the attendants and sign in the body and then turned right around and left. I can find out. There will be an entry for when she disabled the alarm to enter the building. Depends on whether you want to make a federal case out of it.”

“I’m surprised Marino hasn’t made sure I know the extent of the problems.” It’s all I can think to say. The inside of my head has gone dark.

“Like the boy crying wolf,” Lucy says, and it’s true.

Marino complains so much about so many people, I scarcely hear him. Now we’re back to my failures. I haven’t paid attention. I haven’t listened. Maybe I wouldn’t have listened no matter who told me.

“I’ve got a few things to take care of. You know how to find me,” Lucy says, and she opens my door and leaves it open after she walks out.

I pick up the phone and try Fielding’s numbers again. I don’t leave any messages this time, and it crosses my mind that his wife isn’t answering their home phone, either. She would see my office name and number on caller ID. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t pick up, because she knows it’s me. Or maybe his family has gone somewhere, is out of town. On a Monday night in the middle of a snowstorm, when he knows damn well I’ve rushed home from Dover to take care of an emergency case?

I walk out and scan my thumb to unlock the door to the right of mine. I stand inside my deputy chief’s office and slowly scan it as if it is a crime scene.

11

I picked his office, insisting on one as nice as mine, generously large, with a private shower. He has a river and city view, although his shades are down, which I find unnerving. He must have closed them when it was still light out, and I don’t know why he would do that. Not for a good reason, I think. Whatever Jack Fielding has done, it all bodes badly.

I walk around and open each shade, and through expansive glass that is a reflective gray tint, I can make out the blurred lights of downtown Boston and billowing waves of freezing moisture, an icy snow that clicks and bites like teeth. The tops of high-rises, the Prudential and Hancock towers are obscured, and gusting wind moans in low tones around the dome over my head. Below, Memorial Drive is churned up by traffic, even at this hour, and the Charles is formless and black. I wonder how deep the snow is by now and how deep it will get before it moves off to the south. I wonder if Fielding will ever return to this room I designed and furnished for him, and somehow it feels that he won’t, even though there is no evidence he’s gone for good.

The biggest difference between our work spaces is his is crowded with reminders of the occupant, his various degrees, certificates, and commendations, his collectibles on shelves, autographed baseballs and bats, tae kwon do trophies and plaques, and models of fighter planes and a piece from a real one that crashed. I go over to his desk and survey Civil War relics: a belt buckle, a mess kit, a powder horn, a few minie balls that I remember him collecting during our early days in Virginia. But there are no photo graphs, and that makes me sad. In some places I can see what’s gone in blank spaces of wall where he’s not bothered to fill in the tiny holes left from hanging hooks he removed.

It stings that he no longer displays familiar pictures taken when he was my forensic pathology fellow, candid shots of us in the morgue or the two of us out at death scenes with Marino, the lead homicide detective for Richmond PD in the late eighties, the early nineties, when both Fielding and I were just getting started, although in completely different ways. He was the good-looking doctor beginning his career, while I was shifting mine into the private sector, transitioning into civilian life and the role of chief, doing my best not to look back. Maybe Fielding isn’t looking back, although I don’t know why. His old days were good days compared to mine. He didn’t help cover up a crime. He’s never had anything on par with that to hide from. Not that I know of, but I have to wonder. What do I know anymore?

Not much, except I sense he’s gotten rid of me, maybe gotten rid of all of us. I sense he’s gotten rid of more than he ever has before. It is something I’m convinced of without knowing exactly why. Certainly his personal property is still here, his Gore-Tex rain suit on a hanger, and his neoprene hip waders, his dive bag of scuba gear and scene case stowed in a closet, and his collection of police patches and police and military challenge coins. I remember helping him move into this office. I even helped him arrange his furniture, both of us complaining and laughing and then griping some more as we moved the desk, then his conference table, then moved them again and again.

“What is this, Laurel and Hardy?” he said. “You going to push a mule up the stairs next?”

“You don’t have stairs.”

“I’m thinking of getting a horse,” he said as we moved the same chairs we’d just moved earlier. “There’s a horse farm about a mile from the house. I could board the horse there, maybe ride it to work, to crime scenes.”

“I’ll add that to the employee handbook. No horses.”

We joked and teased each other, and he looked good that day—vital and optimistic, his muscles straining against the short sleeves of his scrubs. He was just incredibly built and healthy-looking then, his face still boyishly handsome, his dark blond hair messy, and he hadn’t shaved for several days. He was sexy and funny, and I remember the whispers and giggles of some of the female staff as they walked past his open door, finding excuses to stare at him. Fielding seemed so happy to be here and with me, and I remember both of us placing photographs and reminiscing about our early days together—photographs that now are gone.

In their place are ones I don’t recall. The pictures are prominently arranged on his shelves and walls, formal poses of him with politicians and military brass, one with General Briggs and even Captain Avallone, perhaps from the tour Fielding gave her. He looks wooden and bored. In a photograph of him in tae kwon do white, mid-flight and kicking an imagined enemy, he looks angry. He looks red-faced and hateful. As I study recent family portraits, I decide he doesn’t look content in them, either, not even when he is holding his two little girls or has his arm around his wife, Laura, a delicate blonde whose prettiness is eroding, as if a trying existence is mapping its course on her physically, etching lines and furrows into a topography that once was graceful and smooth.

She is number three for him, and I can trace his decline as I scan his captured moments in chronological order. When he married her, he looked energetic, with no sign of a rash, and he didn’t have any unseemly bald patches. I pause to admire how amazing he was, shirtless and as hard-bodied as stone in running shorts, washing his Mustang, a ‘67, cherry red with Le Mans stripes down the center of the hood. Then as recently as this past fall, the thickening around his middle; the splotchy, flushed skin; the strands of hair combed back and held in place with gel to hide his alopecia. At a martial-arts competition not even a month ago, he doesn’t look as fit or as spiritually balanced in his grandmaster’s uniform and black belt. He doesn’t look like someone who finds joy in beautiful form or technique. He doesn’t look like someone who honors other people or has self-control or respect for anything. He looks dissipated. He looks slightly deranged. He looks perfectly miserable.

Why? I silently ask that earlier photograph of him with his prized car, when he was stunning to behold and seemed carefree and vital, the sort of man it would be easy to fall in love with or to place in charge or to trust with your life. What changed? What made you so unhappy? What was it this time? He hates working for me. He hated it the last time, in Watertown, where he didn’t stay long, and now the CFC, and he hates that more, it’s obvious. This past late summer, when he started looking so bad, is when we finally opened our doors to criminal justice, taking cases. But I wasn’t even in Massachusetts then, just one weekend over Labor Day. It can’t be my fault. It’s always been my fault. I’ve always blamed myself for Fielding’s downfalls, and he’s had more of them than I care to count.

I pick him up and he falls again, only harder each time. It gets uglier. It gets bloodier. Again and again. Like a child who can’t walk, and I won’t accept it until he’s injured beyond fixing. The drama that will always end predictably is the way Benton has described it. Fielding shouldn’t be a forensic pathologist, and it’s because of me that he is. He would have been better off if he’d never met me in the spring of 1988 when he wasn’t sure what he wanted in life and I said I know what you should do. Let me show you. Let me teach you. If he’d never come to Richmond, if he’d never run into me, he might have picked a way to spend his days that would have suited him. His career, his life, would have been about him and not about me.

That really is the bottom line, that he does the best he can in an environment totally destructive to him and finally can’t take it any longer and decompensates, disintegrates, and remembers why he is what he is and who shaped him, and then I loom as huge in his wretched life as a billboard. His answer to these crises is always the same. He vanishes. One day he simply drops off the radar, and what I find in his wake is awful. Cases he mishandled or neglected. Memos that showed his lack of control and dangerous judgment. Hurtful voicemails he didn’t bother to delete because he wanted me to hear them. Damaging e-mails and other communications he hoped I’d find. I sit in his chair and start opening drawers. I don’t have to rummage long.

The file folder isn’t labeled and contains four pages printed at eight-oh-three yesterday morning, February 8, a speech that based on other information in the header and news section is from the Royal United Services Institute’s website. A centuries old British think tank with satellite offices strategically located around the world, RUSI is dedicated to advanced innovations in national and international security, and I can’t imagine Fielding’s interest. I can’t fathom him caring about a keynote address given by Russell Brown, the shadow secretary of state for defense, on his views about the “defense debate.” I skim the conservative member of Parliament’s not-so-startling comments that it isn’t a given the UK will always act as part of an alliance and the economic impact of the war is catastrophic. He makes repeated allusions to misinformation methodically propagated, which is as close as the respectable MP is going to come to outright accusing the United States of orchestrating the invasion of Iraq and dragging the UK along for the ride.

Unsurprisingly, the speech is political, as is almost everything right now in Britain, which holds its general election in three months. Six hundred and fifty seats are being contested, and a major campaign issue is the more than ten thousand British troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Fielding isn’t military, has never paid much attention to foreign affairs or elections, and I don’t know why he would have the slightest interest in what is happening in the UK. I don’t recall that he’s ever even been to the UK. He’s not the sort to be interested in a general election over there or RUSI or any think tank, and knowing him as well as I do, I suspect he intended for me to find this file. He wanted me to see it after he pulled another one of his vanishing stunts. What is it he wants me to know?

Why is he interested in RUSI? And did he come across the speech himself on the Internet, or did someone send it to him? If it was sent to him, by whom? I consider asking Lucy to go into Fielding’s e-mail, but I’m not ready to be that heavy-handed, and I don’t want to be caught. I can lock the door, but my superuser deputy chief could still walk in, because I don’t have confidence that Ron or anyone else will keep Fielding in the security area if he shows up. I have no faith that Ron, who was unfriendly to me and seems to have little regard for me, will detain Fielding or try to get hold of me to ask for clearance. I don’t trust that my staff is loyal to me or feels safe with me or follows my orders, and Fielding could reappear at any moment.

That would be like him. To vanish without warning, then show up just as unexpectedly and catch me red-handed, sitting at his desk, going through his electronic files. It’s just one more thing he’ll use against me, and he’s used plenty against me over the years. What has he been doing behind my back? Let’s see what else I find, and then I’ll know what to do. I look at the time stamp again and imagine Fielding sitting in this very chair at eight-oh-three this morning, printing the speech while Lucy, Marino, Anne, and Ollie, while everybody, was in an uproar because of what was in the cooler downstairs.

How odd that Fielding would be up here in his office while that was going on, and I wonder if he even cared that a man might have been locked inside our refrigerator while still alive. Of course, Fielding would have to care. How could he not? If the worst had turned out to be true, he would be blamed. Ultimately, I would be the one all over the news and likely out of a job, but he would go down with me. Yet he was up here on the seventh floor, in his office and out of the fray, as if he already had his mind made up, and it occurs to me that his disappearance may be related to something else. I lean back in his chair and look around, my attention landing on the pad of call sheets and a ballpoint pen near his phone. I notice faint indentations on the top sheet of paper.

Turning on a lamp, I pick up the pad and hold it at various angles, trying to make out indented writing left like a footprint when someone wrote a note on a top sheet of paper that is no longer there. One thing about Fielding, he doesn’t have a light touch, not when he’s wielding a scalpel or typing on a keyboard or writing something by hand. For a devotee of martial arts, he is surprisingly rough, is easily frustrated and quick to flare up. He has a childish way of holding a pencil or pen with two fingers on top instead of one, as if he’s using chopsticks, and it’s not uncommon for him to break lead or nibs, and he’s hell on Magic Markers.

I don’t need ESDA or a Docustat or vacuum box or some other indented writing-recovery unit to detect what I can see the old-fashioned way in oblique lighting with my own eyes. Fielding’s barely legible scribble. What appears to be two separate notes. One is a phone number with a 508 area code and “MVF8/18/UK Min of Def Diary2/8.” Then a second one: “U of Sheffield today @ Whitehall. Over and out.” I look again, making sure I read the last three words correctly. Over and out. The end of a radio transmission, like Roger Wilco over and out but also a song performed by a heavy-metal band that Fielding used to play in his car all the time when he first came to Richmond. “Over and out / every dog has its day.” What he’d sing to me when he’d threaten to quit, when he’d had enough or when he was teasing, flirting, pretending to be fed up. Did he write over and out on a call sheet with me in mind or for some other reason?

I find a legal pad in a drawer and write what I’ve discovered indented on the pad of call sheets and begin doing the best I can to figure out what Fielding was up to and thinking about what it is he wants me to know. If I came in here to snoop, I was going to find the printout and the indented writing. He knows me. He would think that way, because he knows damn well how my mind works. The University of Sheffield is one of the top research institutions in the world, and Whitehall is where RUSI is headquartered, literally in the former Whitehall Palace, the original location of Scotland Yard.

Logging on to Intelliquest, a search engine Lucy created for the CFC, I type in RUSI and the date February 8 and Whitehall. What comes up is the title of a keynote address, Civilian-Military Collaboration, the lecture Fielding must be referring to that was delivered at RUSI at ten a.m. UK time, what is now yesterday morning for me. The speaker was Dr. Liam Saltz, the controversial Nobel laureate whose doomsday opinions about military technology make him a natural enemy of DARPA. I wasn’t aware he was on the faculty at the University of Sheffield. I thought he was at Berkeley. He used to be at Berkeley, and now he’s at Sheffield, I read on the Internet as I think, rather dazed, of the exhibit at the Courtauld in the summer before 9/11, where Lucy and I heard Dr. Saltz lecture. Not long after that, Dr. Saltz, like me, was a vocal critic of MORT.

I ponder the title of the lecture Dr. Saltz delivered not even twenty-four hours ago. Civilian-Military Collaboration. That certainly sounds tame for the rabble-rousing Dr. Saltz, who is as jolting as an air-raid siren in his warnings that America’s two-hundred-plus-billion-dollar allocation to future combat systems— specifically, unmanned vehicles—has put us on the road to ultimate annihilation. Robots might seem to make sense when you consider sending them into the battlefield, he rails, but what happens when they come home like used Jeeps and other military surplus? Eventually they will find their way into the civilian world, and what we’ll have is more policing and surveillance, more insensate machines doing the jobs of humans, only these machines will be armed and equipped with cameras and recording devices.

I’ve heard Dr. Saltz on the news, painting terrifying scenarios of “copbots” responding to crime scenes and unmanned “robo-cruisers” pursuing vehicles to write up occupants for traffic violations or hauling people in for outstanding warrants or, God forbid, getting a message from sensors to use force. Robots Tasering us. Robots shooting us to death. Robots that look like huge insects dragging our wounded and dead off a battlefield. Dr. Saltz testifying before the same Senate subcommittee I did but not at the same time. Both of us wreaking havoc for a technology company named Otwahl that I’d completely forgotten about until just hours ago.

I’ve met him only once, when both of us happened to be on CNN and he pointed at me and quipped, “Autbotsies.”

“I beg your pardon,” I answered, unclipping my mike as he walked onto the set.

“Robotic autopsies. Someday they’ll take your place, my good doctor, maybe sooner than you think. We should have a drink after the show.”

He was a bright-eyed man who looked like a lost hippie with his long, graying ponytail and wasted face, and he had the electricity of an exposed live wire. That was two years ago, and I should have taken him up on his invitation and waited around CNN. I should have had a drink with him. I should have gotten better versed in what he believes, because it isn’t all crazy. I haven’t seen him since then, although I can’t escape his presence in the media, and I try to recall if I’ve ever mentioned him to Fielding for any reason at all. I don’t think so. I can’t figure out why I would. Connections. What are they? I search some more.

The University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire has an excellent medical school, that much I already know. Rerum Cognoscere Causas, its motto, to discover the causes of things, how apropos, how ironic. I need causes. Research, and I click on that. Global warming, global soil degradation, rethinking engineering with pioneering computer software, new findings in human embryonic stem cells’ DNA changes. I go back to the indented notes on the call sheet.

MVF8/18/UK Min of Def Diary2/8.

MVF is our abbreviation for motor-vehicle fatality, and I instigate another search, this time mining the CFC database. I enter MVF and the date 8/18, August 18 last summer, and a record is returned, the case of a twenty-year-old British man named Damien Patten who was killed in a taxicab accident in Boston. Fielding didn’t do the autopsy, one of my other MEs did, and in the narrative I notice that Damien Patten was a lance corporal in the 14 Signal Regiment and was on leave and had come to Boston to get married when he was killed in the taxicab accident. I get a funny feeling. Something registers.

I execute another search using the keywords February 8 and UK Ministry of Defense Diary. I end up on its official news blog, and an entry in the diary lists British soldiers killed in Afghanistan yesterday. I run down the list of casualties, looking for anything that might mean something to me. A lance corporal from 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. A lance sergeant from 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. A kingsman from 2nd Battalion Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment. Then there is a sapper, or combat engineer, with the Counter-Improvised Explosive Device Task Force who was killed in the mountainous terrain of northwestern Afghanistan. In the Badghis Province. Where my patient PFC Gabriel was killed on Sunday, February 7.

I execute another search, although one detail I already know without having to look it up is how many NATO troops died in Afghanistan on February 7. At Dover, we always know. It’s as routine as preparing for ugly storms, a depressingly morbid report that controls our lives. Nine casualties, and four of them were Americans killed by the same roadside improvised explosive device that turned PFC Gabriel’s Humvee into a blast furnace. But again, that was on the seventh, not the eighth. It occurs to me that the British soldier who died on the eighth might have been injured the day before.

I check and I’m right. The IED sapper, Geoffrey Miller, was twenty-three, recently married, and was wounded in a roadside bombing in the Badghis Province early Sunday but died the next day in a military medical center in Germany. Possibly the same roadside bombing that killed the Americans we took care of at Dover yesterday morning—in fact, it’s likely. I wonder if Sapper Miller and PFC Gabriel knew each other, and how the British man killed in a taxicab, Damien Patten, might be connected. Was Patten acquainted with Miller and Gabriel in Afghanistan, and what does Fielding have to do with any of this? How is Dr. Saltz or MORT or the dead man from Norton’s Woods connected, or are they?

Miller’s body will be repatriated this Thursday, returned to his family in Oxford, England, I read on, but I can’t find anything else about him, although I certainly am capable of getting more information about a slain British soldier if I need it. I can call the press secretary Rockman. I can call Briggs, and I should, anyway, I remember. Briggs asked me—in fact, ordered me to—demanding that I keep him informed about the Norton’s Woods case, to wake him up if need be the minute I have information. But I won’t. No way. Not now. I’m not sure whom I can trust, and as that thought lingers, I realize the trouble I’m in.

What does it say when you can’t ask for help from the very people you work with? It says everything, and it’s as if the ground is opening up beneath my feet and I’m falling into the unknown, a cold, lightless, empty space where I’ve been before. Briggs wanted to do an end run, to usurp my authority and transfer the Norton’s Woods case to Dover. Fielding has been sneaking around in my absence, meddling in affairs that are none of his business and even using my office, and now he’s ducking me, or at least I hope that’s all it is. My staff is committing mutiny, and any number of people, strangers to me, seem to know the details of my return home.

It is almost two a.m., and I’m tempted to try the indented telephone number Fielding scribbled on a call sheet and surprise whoever answers, wake the person up and perhaps get a clue as to what is going on. Instead, I do a police computer search to see who or what the number with the 508 area code might belong to. The report summary shocks me, and for a moment I sit very still and try to calm myself. I try to push back the walls of dismay and confusion crowding in.

Julia Gabriel, mother of PFC Gabriel.

On the screen in front of me are her home and business addresses, her marital status, the salary she earns as a pharmacist in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the name of her only child and his age, which was nineteen when he died in Afghanistan on Sunday. I was on the phone with Mrs. Gabriel for the better part of an hour before I autopsied her son, trying to explain as gently as I could the impossibility of collecting his sperm while she raised her voice at me and cried and accused me of personal choices that aren’t mine to make and ones I didn’t make and would never make.

Saving sperm from the dead and using it to impregnate the living isn’t something that causes me a moral dilemma. I really have no personal opinion about what truly is a medical and legal question, not a religious or ethical one, and the choice should be up to those involved, certainly not up to the practitioner. What matters to me is that the procedure, which has become increasingly popular because of the war, is done properly and legally, and my supposed views on posthumous reproduction rights were moot in PFC Gabriel’s case, anyway. His body was burned and decomposing, his pelvis so charred that his scrotum was gone and the vas deferens containing semen along with it, and I wasn’t about to tell Mrs. Gabriel that. I was as compassionate and gentle as I could be and didn’t take it personally as she vented her grief and rage on the last doctor her son would ever see on this earth.

Peter had a girlfriend who was willing to have his children just like his friend was doing, it was a pact they’d made, Mrs. Gabriel went on, and I had no idea whose friend or what she was talking about. Peter’s friend told him of another friend who got killed in Boston on his wedding day this past summer, only Mrs. Gabriel never mentioned Damien Patten by name, the British man killed in a taxicab this past August 18. “All three of them dead now, three young beautiful boys dead,” Mrs. Gabriel said to me over the phone, and I had no idea who she was talking about. I think I do now. I think she meant Patten for sure, the friend of the friend whom PFC Gabriel had some sort of pact with. I wonder if the friend of Patten’s was this other casualty that Fielding seems to have led me to, Geoffrey Miller, an IED sapper.

All three of them dead now.

Did Fielding discuss the Patten case with Mrs. Gabriel, and who did she talk to first, Fielding or me? She called me at Dover at around quarter of eight. I always fill out a call sheet, and I remember writing down the time as I sat in my small office at Dover’s Port Mortuary, looking at the CT scans and their coordinates that would help me locate with GPS precision the frag and other objects that had penetrated the badly burned body of her son. Based on what she said to me as I now try to reconstruct that conversation, she likely talked to Fielding first. That might explain her repeated references to “other cases.”

Someone had planted an idea in her head about what we do for other cases. She was under the distinct impression that we routinely extract semen from casualties and in fact encourage it, and I recall being puzzled, because the procedure has to be approved and is fraught with legal complications. I couldn’t imagine what had given her such an idea, and I might have asked her about it, had she not been so busy castigating me and calling me names. What kind of monster would prevent a woman from having her dead boyfriend’s children or stop the mother of a dead son from being a grandmother? We do it for our other cases, why not her son? she wept. “I have no one left,” she cried. “This is bullshit bureaucracy, go on and admit it,” she yelled at me. “Bureaucratic bullshit to cover up yet another hate crime.”

“Anyone home?” Benton is in the doorway.

Mrs. Gabriel called me a military bigot. “You do unto others as long as they’re white,” she said. “That’s not the Golden Rule but the White Rule,” she said. “You took care of that other boy who got killed in Boston, and he wasn’t even a US soldier, but not my son, who died for his country. I suppose my son was the wrong color,” she went on, and I had no idea what she meant or what she was basing such an accusation on. I didn’t try to figure it out because it seemed like hysteria, nothing more, and I forgave her for it on the spot. Even though it obviously hurt me badly and I’ve not been able to put it out of my mind since.

“Hello?” Benton is walking in.

“Another hate crime, only it will be found out and people like you won’t get rewarded this time,” and she wouldn’t explain what she was thinking when she said something so terrible as that. But I didn’t ask her to elaborate, and I didn’t give her venomous comments much credence at the time, because being yelled at, cursed, threatened, and even attacked by people who are otherwise civilized and sane isn’t a new experience. I don’t have shatterproof glass installed in the lobbies and viewing rooms of offices where I’ve worked because I’m afraid of the dead throwing a fit or assaulting me.

“Kay?”

My eyes focus on Benton holding two coffees and trying not to spill them. Why would Julia Gabriel have called here before calling me at Dover? Or did Fielding call her, and in either event, why would he have talked to her? Then I remember Marino telling me about PFC Gabriel being the first casualty from Worcester and the media calling the CFC as if the body was here instead of at Dover, about a number of phone calls here because of the Massachusetts connection. Maybe that’s how Fielding found out, but why would he get on the phone with the slain soldier’s mother, even if she called here by mistake and needed to be reminded her son was at Dover? Of course she knew that. How could Mrs. Gabriel not know her son was flown into Dover? I can’t see any legitimate reason for Fielding to have talked to her or what he possibly could have said that was helpful, and how dare him.

He’s not military or even a consultant for the AFME. He’s a civilian and has no right to probe into details relating to war casualties or national security or to engage in conversations about such matters, which are plainly defined as classified. Military and medical intelligence are none of his business. RUSI is none of his business. The election in the UK isn’t, either. The only thing that should be Fielding’s damn business is what he has so resoundingly neglected, which is his enormous responsibility here at the CFC and what should be his damn loyalty to me.

“That’s nice of you,” I say to Benton in a detached way. “I could use a coffee.”

“Where were you just now? Besides in the middle of an imagined fight. You look like you might kill someone.”

He comes close to the desk, watching me the way he does when he’s trying to read what I’m thinking because he’s not about to trust what I say. Or maybe he knows what I have to say is only the beginning of things and that I’m clueless about the rest of it.

“You okay?” He sets the coffees on the desk and moves a chair close.

“No, I’m not okay.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I think I just discovered what it means when something reaches critical mass.”

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“Everything.”