Port Mortuary

12

Please shut the door.” It occurs to me I’m starting to act like Lucy. “I don’t know where to begin, so many things are the matter.”

Benton closes the door, and I notice the simple platinum band on his left ring finger. Sometimes I’m still caught by surprise that we’re married, so much of our lives consumed by each other whether we’ve been together or apart, and we always agreed we didn’t have to do it, to be official and formal, because we’re not like other people, and then we did it anyway. The ceremony was a small, simple one, not a celebration as much as a swearing in, because we really meant it when we said until death do us part. After all we’d been through, for us to say it was more than words, more like an oath of office or an ordination or perhaps a summary of what we’d already lived. And I wonder if he ever regrets it. For example, right now does he wish he could go back to how it was? I wouldn’t blame him if he thinks about what he’s given up and what he misses, and there are so many complications because of me.

He sold his family brownstone, an elegant nineteenth-century mansion on the Boston Common, and he can’t have loved some places we’ve lived or stayed in because of my unusual profession and preoccupations, what is a chaotic and costly existence despite my best intentions. While his forensic psychology practice has remained stable, my career has been in flux these past three years, with the shutting down of a private practice in Charleston, South Carolina, then my office in Watertown closing because of the economy, and I was in New York and then Washington and Dover, and now this, the CFC.

“What the hell is going on in this place?” I ask him as if he knows and I don’t understand why he would. But I feel he does, or maybe I’m just wishing it because I’m beginning to experience desperation, that panicky sensation of falling and flailing for something to grab hold of.

“Black and extra-bold.” He sits back down and slides the mug of coffee closer. “And not hazelnut. Even though you have quite a stash of it, I hear.”

“Jack’s still not shown up, and no one has heard from him, I assume.”

“He’s definitely not here. I think you’re as safe in his office as he’s been in yours.” Benton says it as if he means more than one thing, and I notice how he’s dressed.

Earlier he had on his winter coat and in the x-ray room was covered in a disposable gown before heading upstairs to Lucy’s lab. I didn’t really notice what he was wearing underneath his layers. Black tactical boots, black tactical pants, a dark red flannel shirt, a rubber waterproof watch with a luminescent dial. As if he’s anticipating being out in the weather or some place that might be hard on his clothes.

“So Lucy told you it appears he’s been using my office,” I say. “For what purpose I don’t know. But maybe you do.”

“Nobody’s needed to tell me there’s a looting mentality at what is it Marino calls this place? CENTCOM? Or does that just refer to the inner sanctum or what’s supposed to be the inner sanctum, your office. No captain of the ship, and you know what happens. The Jolly Roger flag goes up, the inmates run the asylum, the drunks manage the bar, if you’ll excuse me for mixing metaphors.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I don’t work at the CFC. Or for it. Just an invited guest on occasion,” he says.

“That’s not an answer, and you know it. Why wouldn’t you protect me?”

“You mean in the manner you think I should,” he says, because it’s silly to suggest he wouldn’t protect me.

“What has been going on around here? Maybe if you tell me, I can figure out what needs to be done,” I then say. “I know Lucy’s been catching you up. It would be nice if someone would catch me up. In detail, and with openness and full disclosure.”

“I’m sorry you’re angry. I’m sorry you’ve come home to a situation that is upsetting. Your homecoming should have been joyful.”

“Joyful. What the hell is joyful?”

“A word, a theoretical concept. Like full disclosure. I can tell you what I’ve witnessed firsthand, what happened when I met here several times. Case discussions. There have been two that involved me.” He stares off. “The first was the BC football player from last fall, not long after the CFC took over the Commonwealth’s forensic cases.”

Wally Jamison, age twenty, Boston College’s star quarterback. Found floating in the Boston Harbor on November 1 at dawn. Cause of death exsanguination due to blunt-force trauma and multiple cutting injuries. Tom Booker’s case, one of my other MEs.

“Jack didn’t do that one,” I remind him.

“Well, if you ask him, you might get a different impression,” Benton informs me. “Jack reviewed the Wally Jamison case as if it was his. Dr. Booker wasn’t present. This was last week.”

“Why last week? I don’t know anything about it.”

“New information, and we wanted to talk to Jack, and he seemed eager to cooperate, to offer a wealth of information.”

“‘We’?”

Benton lifts his coffee, then changes his mind and sets it back down on Fielding’s sloppy desk with all its collectibles that are all about him. “I think Jack’s attitude is he may not have done the autopsy, but that’s just a technicality. An NFL draft was right up the alley of your ironman freak of a deputy chief.”

“‘Ironman freak’?”

“But I suppose it was his bad luck to be out of town when Wally Jamison got beaten and hacked to death. Wally’s luck was a little worse.”

Believed to have been abducted and murdered on Halloween. Crime scene unknown. No suspect. No motive or credible theory. Just the speculation of a satanic cult initiation. Target a star athlete. Hold him hostage in some clandestine place and kill him savagely. Chatter on the Internet and on the news. Gossip that’s become gospel.

“I don’t give a shit what Jack’s feeling is or what’s right up his goddamn alley,” says a hard part of me that’s old and scarred over, a part of me that is completely fed up with Jack Fielding.

I realize I’m enraged by him. I’m suddenly aware that at the core of my unhealthy relationship with him is molten fury.

“And Mark Bishop, also last week. Wednesday was the football player. Thursday was the boy,” Benton says.

“A boy whose murder might be related to some initiation. A gang, a cult,” I interject. “A similar speculation about Wally Jamison.”

“Speculation being the operative word. Whose speculation?”

“Not mine.” I think angrily of Fielding. “I don’t speculate unless it’s behind closed doors with someone I trust. I know better than to put something out there, and then the police run with it, then the media runs with it. Next thing I know, a jury believes it, too.”

“Patterns and parallels.”

“You’re connecting Mark Bishop and Wally Jamison.” It seems incredible. “I fail to see what they might have in common besides speculation.”

“I was here last week for both case consults.” Benton’s eyes are steady on me. “Where was Jack last Halloween? Do you know for a fact?”

“I know where I was, that’s about the only fact I know. While I’ve been at Dover, that’s all I’ve known and all I was supposed to know. I didn’t hire him so I could goddamn babysit him. I don’t know where the hell he was on Halloween. I guess you’re going to tell me he wasn’t out somewhere taking his kids trick-or-treating.”

“He was in Salem. But not with his kids.”

“I wouldn’t know that and don’t know why you do or why it’s important.”

“It wasn’t important until very recently,” Benton says.

I stare at his boots again, then at his dark pants with their flannel lining and cargo and rear slash pockets for gun magazines and flashlights, the type of pants he wears when he’s working in the field, when he goes to crime scenes or is out on the firing or explosive-ordnance-disposal ranges with cops, with the FBI.

“Where were you before you picked me up at Hanscom?” I ask him. “What were you doing?”

“We have a lot to deal with, Kay. I’m afraid more than I thought.”

“Were you dressed in field clothes when you picked me up at the airport?” It occurs to me that he might not have been. He’s changed his clothes. Maybe he hasn’t done anything yet but is about to.

“I keep a bag in my car. As you know,” Benton says. “Since I never know when I might get called.”

“To go where? You’ve been called to go somewhere?”

He looks at me, then out the window at the chalky skyline of Boston in the snowy dark.

“Lucy says you’ve been on the phone.” I continue to prod him for information I can tell I’m not going to get right now.

“I’m afraid nonstop. I’m afraid there’s more than I thought,” and then he doesn’t continue. That’s all he’s going to say about it. He’s headed out somewhere, has someplace to go. It’s not a good place. He’s been talking to people and not about anything good and he’s not going to inform me right now. Full disclosure and joy. When there is such a thing, it is only a taste, a hint of what we don’t have the rest of the time.

“You met on Wednesday and then on Thursday. Discussing the Wally Jamison and Mark Bishop cases here at the CFC.” I go back to that. “And I assume Jack was in on the Mark Bishop discussion as well. He was involved in both discussions. And you didn’t mention this a little while ago when we were talking in the car.”

“Not such a little while ago. More than five hours ago. And a lot has happened. There have been developments since we were in the car, as you know. Not the least of which is what we now realize is another murder. Number three.”

“You’re linking the man from Norton’s Woods to Mark Bishop and Wally Jamison.”

“Very possibly. In fact, I’d say yes.”

“What about the meetings last week? With Jack? He was there,” I push.

“Yes. Last Wednesday and Thursday. In your office.”

“What do you mean my office? This building? This floor?”

“Your personal office.” Benton indicates my office next door.

“In my office. Jack conducted meetings in my office. I see.”

“He conducted both meetings in your office. At your conference-room table in there.”

“He has his own conference table.” I look at the black lacquered oval table with six ergonomic chairs that I got at a government auction.

Benton doesn’t respond. He knows as well as I do that Fielding’s inappropriate decision to use my personal office has nothing to do with the furniture. I think of what Lucy mentioned about sweeping my office for covert surveillance devices, although she never directly said who might be doing the spying or if anyone was. The most likely candidate for the sort of individual who might bug my office and get away with it is my niece. Maybe motivated by the knowledge that Fielding was helping himself to what isn’t rightfully his. I wonder if what’s been going on in my private space during my absence has been secretly recorded.

“And you never mentioned this to me at that time,” I continue. “You could have told me when it happened. You could have fully disclosed to me that he was using my damn office as if he’s the damn chief and director of this goddamn place.”

“The first I knew of it was last week when I met with him. I’m not saying I hadn’t heard things about the CFC and about him.”

“It would have been helpful if I’d known these things you were hearing.”

“Rumors. Gossip. I didn’t know certain things for a fact.”

“Then you should have told me a week ago when you knew it for a fact. On the Wednesday you had your first meeting and discovered it was in my office, in an office Jack didn’t have permission to use. What else haven’t you told me? What new developments?”

“I’m telling you as much as I can and when I can. I know you understand.”

“I don’t understand. You should have been telling me things all along. Lucy should have. Marino should have.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Betrayal is very simple.”

“No one is betraying you. Marino and Lucy aren’t. I’m certainly not.”

“Implying that somebody is. Just not the three of you.”

He is quiet.

“You and I talk every day, Benton. You should have told me,” I then say.

“Let’s see when I might have overwhelmed you with all this, overwhelmed you with a lot of things while you’ve been at Dover. When you’d call at five a.m. before you’d head over to Port Mortuary to take care of our fallen heroes? Or at midnight when you’d finally log out of your computer or quit studying for your boards?”

He doesn’t say it defensively or unkindly, but I get his not-so-subtle point, and it’s justified. I’m being unfair. I’m being hypocritical. Whose idea was it that when we have virtually no time for each other we shouldn’t dwell on work or domestic minutiae or they will be all that’s left? Like cancer, I’m quick to offer my clever medical analogies and brilliant insights when he’s the psychologist, he’s the one who used to head the FBI’s profiling unit at Quantico, he’s the one on the faculty of Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry. But it’s me with all the wisdom, all the profound examples, comparing work and niggling domestic details and emotional injuries to cancers, to scarring, to necrosis, and my prognostications that if we’re not careful, one day there’s no healthy tissue left and death will follow. I feel embarrassed. I feel shallow.

“No, I didn’t approach certain subjects until we were driving here, and now I’m telling you more, telling you what I can,” Benton says to me with stoical calm, as if we are in a session of his and any moment he will simply announce we have to stop.

I won’t stop until I know what I must. Some things he must tell me. It’s not just fairness, it’s about survival, and I realize I’m feeling unsure of Benton as if I don’t quite know him anymore. He’s my husband, and I’m touched by a perception that something has been altered, a new ingredient has been added to the house special.

What is it?

I study what I’m intuiting as if I can taste what has changed.

“I mentioned my concern that Jack’s interpretation of Mark Bishop’s injuries is problematic,” Benton goes on, and he’s guarded. He’s calculating every word he says as if someone else is listening or he will be reporting our conversation to others. “Well, based on what you’ve described about the hammer marks on the little boy’s head, Jack’s interpretation is just damn wrong, couldn’t be more wrong, and I suspected it at the time when he was going over the case with us. I suspected he was lying.”

“‘Us’?”

“I told you I’ve heard things, but I honestly haven’t been around Jack.”

“Why do you say ‘honestly’? As opposed to dishonestly, Benton?”

“I’m always honest with you, Kay.”

“Of course you aren’t, but now is not the time to go into it.”

“Now isn’t. I know you understand.” And he holds my stare for a long moment. He’s telling me to please let it go.

“All right. I’m sorry.” I will let it go, but I don’t want to.

“I hadn’t seen him for months, and what I saw for myself was… Well, it was pretty obvious during those discussions last week that something’s off with him, severely off,” Benton resumes. “He looked bad. His thoughts were racing all over the map. He was hyperfluent, grandiose, hypomanic, aggressive, and red-faced, as if he might explode. I certainly felt he wasn’t being truthful, that he was deliberately misleading us.”

“What do you mean ‘us’?” And it begins to occur to me what I’m picking up.

“Has he ever been in a psychiatric hospital, been in treatment, maybe been diagnosed with a mood disorder? He ever mentioned anything like that to you?” Benton questions me in a way that I find unexpected and unnerving, and I’m reminded of what I sensed in the car when we were driving here. Only now it’s more pronounced, more recognizable.

He is acting the way he used to when he was still an agent, when he was empowered by the federal government to enforce the law. I detect an authority and confidence he hasn’t manifested in years, a sure-footedness he lacked after his reemergence from protective deep cover. He came back feeling lost, weak, like nothing more than an academician, he often complained. Emasculated, he would say. The FBI eats its young, and they’ve eaten me, he would say. That’s my reward for going after an organized-crime cartel. I finally get my life back and don’t want what’s left of it, he would say. It’s a husk. I’m a husk. I love you, but please understand I’m not what I was.

“He ever been delusional or violent?” Benton is asking me, and it isn’t just a clinician talking.

I’m feeling interrogated.

“He had to expect you would tell me he’s been using my office as if it’s his. Or that I’d find out.” I think of Lucy again, of spying and covert recordings.

“I know he has a temper,” Benton says, “but I’m talking about physical violence possibly accompanied by dissociative fugue, disappearing for hours, days, weeks, with little or no recall. What we’re seeing with some of these men and women who return from war, disappearances and amnesia triggered by severe trauma and often confused with malingering. The same thing Johnny Donahue is supposedly suffering from, only I’m not sure how much of it has been suggested to that poor damn kid. I wonder where the idea came from, if someone’s suggested it to him.”

He says it as if he really doesn’t wonder it.

“Jack’s certainly famous for coming across as a malingerer, of avoiding his responsibilities going back to the beginning of time,” Benton then says.

I created Fielding.

“What haven’t you told me about him?” Benton goes on.

I made Fielding what he is. He is my monster.

“A psychiatric history?” Benton says. “Off-limits even to me, even to the FBI. I could find out, but I won’t violate that boundary.”

Benton and the FBI. One and the same again. Not a street agent again. I can’t imagine that. A criminal investigative analyst, a criminal intelligence analyst, a threat analyst. The Department of Justice has so many analysts, agents who are a combination academic and tactical. If you’re going to go to prison or get shot, may as well be at the hand of a cop who’s got a Ph.D.

“What might you know about Jack your protege that I don’t?” Benton asks me. “Besides that he’s a sick fuck. Because he is. Somewhere some part of you knows it, Kay.”

I’m Briggs’s monster, and Fielding is mine. Going back to the beginning of time.

“I’m well aware of sexual abuse,” Benton says blandly, as if he doesn’t care what happened to Fielding when he was a child, as if Benton really doesn’t give a damn.

Not a psychologist but something else speaking, and I’m sure. Cops, federal agents, prosecutors, those who protect and punish, are hardened to excuses. They judge “subjects” and “persons of interest” by what they do, not by what was done to them. People like Benton don’t give a damn about why or if it couldn’t be helped, doesn’t matter the definitions, distillations, and predictions he so astutely, so skillfully, renders. In his heart Benton has no sympathy for hateful, harmful people, and his years of being a clinician and consultant have been cruel to him, have been unfulfilling and have felt fake, he’s confessed to me more than once.

“That much is a matter of public record since the case went to trial.” Benton feels the need to tell me something I’ve never asked Fielding about.

I don’t remember when and how I first heard of the special school Fielding attended as a boy near Atlanta. Somehow I know, and all that comes to mind is references he’s made to a certain “episode” in his past, that what he experienced with a certain “counselor” makes it excruciatingly difficult for him to handle any tragedy involving children, especially if they were abused. I’m certain I never pushed him to volunteer the details. Back in those days especially, I wouldn’t have asked.

“Nineteen seventy-eight,” Benton says, “when Jack was fifteen, although he was twelve when it started, went on for several years until they were caught having sex in the back of her station wagon parked at the edge of the soccer field as if she wanted to be caught. She was pregnant. Anther pathetic story about boarding schools, this one, thank God, not Catholic but for troubled teens, one of these private treatment center-slash-academies that has ranch in its name. What the therapist did to get convicted of ten counts of sexual battery on a minor isn’t what you haven’t told me about Jack.”

“I don’t know the details,” I finally answer him. “Not all of them or even most of them. I don’t remember her name, if I ever knew it; didn’t know she was pregnant. His child? Did she have it?”

“I’ve reviewed the case transcripts. Yes. She had it.”

“I wouldn’t have had a reason to look at the case transcripts.” I don’t ask why Benton has a reason. He’s not going to reveal that to me right now, and maybe he never will. “What a shame there’s one more child in the world Jack’s raised poorly. Or not at all,” I add. “How sad.”

“Kathleen Lawler hasn’t had such a good life, either,” Benton starts to say.

“How sad,” I repeat.

“The woman convicted of molesting Jack,” he says. “I don’t know about the child, a girl, born in prison, given up for adoption. Considering the mutant genetic loading, probably in prison, too, or dead. Kathleen Lawler was in one mess after another, currently in a correctional facility for female offenders in Savannah, Georgia, serving twenty years for DUI manslaughter. Jack communicates with her, is a prison pen pal, although he uses a pen name, and that’s not what you haven’t told me, because I doubt you know about it. Actually, I can’t imagine you do.”

“Who else was at the meetings last week?” I’m so cold my fingernails are blue, and I wish I’d brought my jacket in here. I notice a lab coat on the back of Fielding’s door.

“It crossed my mind while we were sitting in your office,” says Benton the former FBI agent, the former protected witness and master of secrets, who isn’t acting like a former anything anymore.

He’s acting like he’s investigating a case, not just a consultant on one. I’m convinced that what I suspect is true. He’s back with the Feds. Things end where they begin and begin where they end.

“An affective disorder. I’ve thought hard about it, tried to remember him from the old days. Done a lot of reflecting on the old days.” Benton talks matter-of-factly, as if he has no feelings about what he’s divulging and accusing me of. “He’s never been normal. That’s my point. Jack has significant underlying pathology. That’s why he was sent off to boarding school. To learn to manage his anger. When he was six years old he stabbed another little kid in the chest with a ballpoint pen. When he was eleven he hit his mother in the head with a rake. Then he was sent to the ranch near Atlanta, where he only got angrier.”

“I have no idea what he did when he was growing up,” I reply. “It’s not a common practice to conduct extensive background checks on doctors one might hire, in fact, was unheard of when I was getting started, when he was getting started. I’m not an FBI agent,” I add pointedly. “I don’t dig up everything I can about people and go around questioning neighbors they grew up around. I don’t question their teachers. I don’t track down their pen pals.”

I get up from Fielding’s desk.

“Although I probably should have. I probably will from now on. But I’ve never covered up for him,” I go on. “Never protected him that way. I admit I’ve been too forgiving. I admit I’ve fixed his disasters or tried to. But never covered up something I shouldn’t, if that’s what you’re saying I’ve done. I would never do anything unethical for him or anyone.” Not anymore, I add silently. I did it once but never again, and I never did it for Jack Fielding. Not even for myself but for the highest law of the land.

I walk across the office, cold and exhausted and ashamed of myself. I remove Fielding’s lab coat from the hook at the top of the closed door.

“I don’t know what it is you think I’ve not told you, Benton. I have no idea what he’s involved with or whom. Or his delusions or dissociative states and blackouts. Not in my presence, and he’s never shared information like that, if it’s true.”

I put on the lab coat, and it is huge, and I detect the faint sharp odor of eucalyptus, like Vicks, like Bengay.

“Maybe a mood disorder with a touch of narcissism and intermittent explosive anger,” Benton goes on as if I just said nothing. “Or it could be the drugs, maybe his damn performance-enhancement drugs as usual, the sorry bastard. He doesn’t represent the CFC well, I’m sorry as hell to make the understatement of the century, and it wasn’t lost on Douglas and David, and that got the CFC off on the wrong foot, as long ago as early November, when they got involved in the Wally Jamison kidnapping and murder. You can imagine what’s gotten back to Briggs and others. Jack is one inch from ruining everything, and that opens up a place to opportunists. Like I said, it creates a looting mentality.”

I pause before a window and look down on the dark, snowy street as if I might find something there that will remind me of who I am. Something to give me strength, something to find comfort in.

“He’s done a lot of damage.” Benton’s voice behind me. “I don’t know that it’s been intentional. But I suspect some of it has been because of his complicated relationship with you.”

Snow is blowing at a sharp angle, hitting the window almost horizontally and making rapid clicks that remind me of fingernails tapping, of something restless and disturbed. When I look at the snow as it hits the glass, it makes me dizzy. It gives me vertigo to look at it and then to look down.

“Is that what this is about, Benton? My complicated relationship with him?”

“I need to know about it. It’s better it’s me instead of someone else asking you.”

“You’re saying everything is damaged and ruined because of it. That it’s the root of everything wrong.” I don’t turn around but stare out and down until I can’t look at the flying flakes of ice and the road below and the dark river or the volatile winter night any longer. “That’s what you believe.” I want him to verify what he just said. I want to know if what’s been damaged and ruined while I’ve been gone includes Benton and me.

“I just need to know anything you haven’t told me,” he answers instead.

“I’m sure you and others need to know.” I don’t say it nicely as my pulse picks up.

“I understand things from the past don’t get resolved easily. I understand complications.”

I turn around and meet his stare, and what I see in it isn’t just cases and dead people or my mutinous office or my deranged deputy chief. I see Benton’s distrust of me and my past. I see him doubting my character and who I am to him.

“I never slept with Jack,” I tell him. “If that’s what you’re trying to find out so someone else is spared the discomfort of asking me. Or is it my discomfort you’re so worried about? I never did. It won’t come out because it isn’t there. If that’s what you’re trying to ask me, that’s your answer. You can pass it along to Briggs, to the FBI, to the attorney general, to whoever you goddamn want.”

“I would understand when Jack was your fellow, when both of you were just getting started in Richmond.”

“I try not to make it a practice to have sex with people I mentor,” I say with a surprising flare of irritability. “I’d like to think I bear no similarity to what’s-her-name Lawler, the former therapist locked up in Georgia.”

“Jack wasn’t twelve when you met him.”

“It never happened. I don’t do that with people I mentor.”

“And when people mentor you?” Benton’s eyes are steady on me as I stand by the window.

“That’s not why John Briggs and I have a problem,” I answer angrily.

13

I return to Fielding’s desk and sit back down in his chair as I finger something slick and filmy inside one of his lab coat pockets. I pull out a square of transparent plastic that is paper-thin.

“The CFC didn’t need to make a bad first impression with the Feds, but I’m confident you’ll change it.” Benton says it as if he regrets what he’s just asked me, as if he’s sorry about what he just confronted me with in the line of duty.

I sniff what Fielding must have peeled off a eucalyptus-laced pain-relieving patch, and resentfully think, Yes, indeed, the Feds. I’m so glad I can change what the goddamn Feds must think of me.

“I don’t want you to feel negative about everything here, every thing you’ve come home to,” Benton continues. “It wouldn’t be helpful if you are. There is a lot to take care of, but we’ll get there. I know we will. I’m sorry our conversation had to move in certain directions. I’m really sorry we had to get into all this.”

“Let’s talk about Douglas and David.” I remind him of names he referred to moments earlier. “Who are they?”

“I have no doubt you’ll prevail and make this place work, make it what it was meant to be, which is stellar and unlike anything anywhere. Better than what they have in Australia, in Switzerland, even better than any place where they were doing it first, including Dover, right? I have complete confidence in you, Kay. I don’t want you to ever forget that.”

The more Benton assures me of his confidence, the less I believe it.

“Law enforcement respects you, the military does,” he adds, and I don’t believe that, either.

If it were true, he wouldn’t have to say it. So what? I then think, with hostility that seems to come from nowhere. I don’t need people to like or respect me. It isn’t a popularity contest. Isn’t that what Briggs always says? It’s not a popularity contest, Colonel, or if he’s being more personable, It’s not a popularity contest, Kay, and he smiles wryly, a steely glint of mischief in his eyes. He doesn’t give a shit if anybody likes him, and in fact thrives on people not liking him, and I’m going to start thriving on it, too. The hell with everyone. I know what I need to do, which is something. I will do something, oh, yes, I will. Thinking I’m going to come home to this and just take it, do nothing about it, let whoever it is have his way? No. Hell, no. Not going to happen. Whoever would entertain an idea like that sure as hell doesn’t know me.

“Who are Douglas and David?” I again ask, and I sound snappish.

“Douglas Burke and David McMaster,” Benton says.

“I don’t know them, and who are they to you?” Now I’m the one doing the interrogating.

“FBI’s Boston Field Office, Metro Boston Homeland Security. You haven’t gotten to know the locals, not key ones, but you will. Including the coast guard. I’m going to help you get to know every one around here if you’ll permit me to. For once I might be useful. I’ve missed being useful to you. I know you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“Your face is flushed. You look upset. I don’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry I have. But it’s something I’ve needed to know for several reasons.”

“And are you satisfied?”

“It’s critical to know where you are in all this and who you are in it,” he says as I hold the flimsy plastic backing, a square about the size of a cigarette pack.

I lift it up to the light and see Fielding’s large fingerprints on the transparent film and smaller ones that must be mine. Fielding is chronically straining muscles, always achy and sore, especially when he’s abusing anabolic steroids. When he’s back to his old, bad tricks he smells like a damn menthol cough drop.

“What do Homeland Security, the coast guard, have to do with anything we’re talking about?” I’m opening desk drawers, looking for Nuprin, Motrin, or Bengay patches, for Tiger Balm, for anything that might confirm what I suspect.

“Wally Jamison’s body was floating in the harbor at the coast guard’s ISC, their Integrated Support Command. Right there under their nose. Which I believe was the point,” Benton replies as he watches me.

“Or the point was the wharf right there that’s deserted after dark. One of the few wharfs in the area that you can drive a car on. I sure as hell know that area. So do you. We know it, and some of the people who work there probably would recognize us, we’ve walked around there so many times, right next door to where we stay once in a blue moon when we can get away and be alone and be civil to each other.” I sound sarcastic and mean.

“Authorized personnel only. Might I ask what you’re looking for? I’m sure it’s something that will be in plain view.”

“It’s my office. This entire place is my office. I’ll look at whatever the hell I want. Plain view or not.” My pulse is flying, and I feel agitated.

“The wharf isn’t open to the public. Not just anybody can drive a car on it,” Benton replies as he watches me carefully, worried. “I didn’t mean to upset you this much.”

“We walk over there all the time and no one asks for our IDs. They’re not standing around with submachine guns. It’s a tourist area.” I’m argumentative and combative, and I don’t want to be.

“The coast guard ISC isn’t a tourist area. There’s a guard gate you have to go through to get out on the pier,” Benton says very calmly, very reasonably, and he continues looking at his iPhone. He looks at it and then at me, back and forth, reading both of us.

“I miss it. Let’s spend a few days there soon.” I try to sound nice because I’m acting awful. “Just the two of us.”

“Yes. We will. Soon,” he says. “We’ll talk and get everything straight.”

I imagine it with startling clarity, our favorite suite that reaches out into the water like a fingertip at the Fairmont hotel on Battery Wharf, directly next door to the coast guard ISC. I see the ruffled dark-green water of the harbor and hear it washing against pilings as if I’m there. I hear the creaking of docks, the clanking of rigging lines against masts, and the bass tones of the horns the big ships sound as if all of it is audible inside Fielding’s office.

“And we won’t answer our phones, and we’ll go for walks and get room service and watch the tall ships, the tugboats, the tankers from our window. I would love that. Wouldn’t you love it?” But I don’t sound nice as I say it. I sound pushy and angry.

“We’ll do it this weekend if you want. If we can,” he says as he reads something on his iPhone, scrolling down with his thumb.

I move my coffee away and the corner of the desk looks rounded, not squared. Too much caffeine and my heart is beating hard. I feel light-headed and edgy.

“I hate it when you look at your phone all the time,” I say before I can stop myself. “You know how much I hate it when we’re talking.”

“It can’t be avoided right now,” he says as he looks at it.

“Exit off Ninety-three, get on Commercial Street, and you’re right there,” I resume arguing. “A convenient way to get rid of a body. Drive it there and dump it in the harbor. Nude, so whatever trace evidence there might have been from the car trunk, for example, was probably washed away.” I shut a bottom drawer and sound peculiar to myself as I mutter distractedly, “Pain-relieving patches. None. And I didn’t see any in my desk drawers, either. Only chewing gum. I’ve never been a gum chewer. Well, when I was a little kid. Dubble Bubble at Halloween, with the colorful waxy yellow wrapper that’s twisted on the ends.”

I see it. I smell it. My mouth waters.

“Here’s a secret I’ve never told anyone. I’d recycle. Chew it and wrap it up again. For days until there was no flavor left.”

My mouth is watering, and I swallow several times.

“I stopped chewing gum when I stopped trick-or-treating. See, you’ve reminded me of trick-or-treating, something I haven’t thought of in so many years I can’t believe it’s just popped into my head. Sometimes I forget I was ever a child. Ever young and stupid and trusting.”

My hands are shaking.

“Better not to like something you can’t afford, so I didn’t make a habit of gum.”

I’m trembling.

“Better not to look like you grew up low-class, especially if you did grow up low-class. When have you ever seen me chew gum? I won’t. It’s low-class.”

“Nothing about you is low-class.” Benton watches me carefully, guardedly, and I see what is in his eyes. I’m scaring him.

But I can’t stop myself. “I’ve worked damn hard in life not to look low-class. You didn’t know me when I was getting started and had no idea what people are really like, people who have complete power over you, people you worship really, and what they’re capable of luring you into so that you never feel the same about yourself. And then you bury it like that beating heart under the floorboards in Edgar Allan Poe, but you always know it’s there. And you can’t tell anyone. Even when it keeps you awake at night. You can’t even tell the person you’re closest to that there’s this cold, dead heart under the floorboards and it’s your fault it’s under there.”

“Christ, Kay.”

“It’s odd that everything we love seems to be in close proximity to something hateful and dead,” enters my mind next. “Well, not everything.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just stressed out, and who the hell wouldn’t be? Our house is across the street from Norton’s Woods, where someone was murdered yesterday, and he may have been at the Courtauld Gallery at the same time Lucy and I were the summer before Nine-Eleven, which she thinks was caused by us, by the way. Liam Saltz was there, too, at the Courtauld, one of the lecturers. I didn’t meet him then, but Lucy has him on CD. I can’t remember what he talked about.”

“I’m curious why you would bring him up.”

“A link on a website that Jack was looking at for some reason.”

Benton doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t take his eyes off me.

“You and I go in The Biscuit when I’m home on weekends, maybe we’ve been in there at the same time Johnny Donahue and his MIT friend were,” I go on and can’t keep up with my thoughts. “We love Salem and the oils and candles in the shops there, the same shops that sell iron spikes, devil’s bone. Our favorite getaway in Boston is next to where Wally Jamison’s body was found the morning after Halloween. Is someone watching us? Does someone know everything we do? What was Jack doing in Salem on Halloween?”

“Wally’s body got where it was by boat, not the wharf,” Benton replies, and I don’t know where he got the information.

“All these things in common. You’d think we live in a small town.”

“You don’t look good.”

“You’re sure it was a boat. I feel like I’m having a hot flash.” I touch my cheek, press my hand against it. “Lord. That will be next. So much to look forward to.”

“More relevant is the fact that someone deliberately dumped his body where the hundred-foot cutters are homeported with guardsmen on board.” Benton watches my every move. “And starting around daybreak, support staff and other personnel show up for work and the wharf is a parking lot. All these people getting out of their cars and seeing a mutilated body floating in the water. That’s brazen. Killing a little kid in his own backyard while his parents are inside the house is brazen. Killing someone on Super Bowl Sunday in Norton’s Woods while a VIP wedding is going on is brazen. Doing all this in our own neighborhoods is brazen. Yes.”

“First you know it’s a boat. Next you know it was a VIP wedding, not just a wedding but a VIP wedding.” I don’t ask but state. He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t know it. “Why was Jack in Salem? Doing what there? You can’t even get a hotel room in Salem on Halloween. You can’t even drive, there are so many people.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Do you think it’s personal?” I ask as I obsess about what a small world it is. “I come home and this is my welcome. To have all this ugliness and death and deceit and betrayal practically in my lap.”

“To some extent, yes,” Benton says.

“Well, thank you for that.”

“I said ‘to some extent.’ Not everything.”

“You said you think it’s personal. I want to know exactly how it is personal.”

“Try to calm down. Breathe slowly.” He reaches for my hand, and I won’t let him touch me. “Slowly, slowly, Kay.”

I pull away from him, and he returns his hand to his lap, to the iPhone in it that flashes red every other second as messages land. I don’t want him to touch me. It’s as if I have no skin.

“Is there anything to eat in this place? I can send out for something,” Benton says. “Maybe it’s low blood sugar. When did you eat last?”

“No. I couldn’t right now. I’ll be fine. Why do you say ‘VIP’?” I hear myself ask.

He looks at his phone again, the tiny red light flashing its alert. “Anne,” he says to me as he reads what just landed. “She’s on her way, should be here in a few minutes.”

“What else? I can download the scan in here, take a look.”

“She didn’t send it. She tried to call you. Obviously, you’re not at your desk. There were undercover agents at the wedding. Protecting a VIP, but obviously he wasn’t the one who needed it,” Benton says. “Nobody was looking for the one who needed protecting. We didn’t know he was going to be there.”

I take another deep breath, and I try to diagnose a heart attack, if I might be having one.

“Did the agents see what happened?” Mount Auburn would be the closest hospital. I don’t want to go to the hospital.

“Ones stationed by the outside doors weren’t looking at him and didn’t see it. They saw people rushing around him when he collapsed. There was no reason he was of interest, and the agents maintained their posts. They had to. In case it was some diversionary maneuver. You always maintain your post when you’re on a protective detail; with rare exception, you don’t divert.”

I focus on the discomfort in the center of my chest and my shortness of breath. I’m sweating and light-headed, but there’s no pain in my arms. No pain in my back. No pain in my jaw. No, radiating pain and heart attacks don’t cause altered thinking, and I look at my hands. I hold them in front of me as if I can see what’s on them.

“When you saw Jack last week, did he smell like menthol?” I ask, and then I say, “Where is he? What exactly has he done?”

“What about menthol?”

“Extra-strength Nuprin patches, Bengay patches, something like that.” I get up from Fielding’s desk. “If he’s wearing them all the time and reeks of eucalyptus, of menthol, it’s usually an indication he’s abusing himself physically, tearing the hell out of himself physically in the gym, in his tae kwon do tournaments, has chronic and acute muscle and joint pain. Steroids. When Jack’s on steroids, well… That’s always been the prelude to other things.”

“Based on what I saw last week, he’s on something.”

I’m already taking off Fielding’s lab coat. I fold it into a neat square and place it on top of his desk.

“Is there a place you can lie down?” Benton says. “I think you should lie down. The on-call room downstairs. There’s a bed. I can’t take you home. You can’t be there right now. I don’t want you going out of this building, not without me.”

“I don’t need to lie down. Lying down won’t help. It will make it worse.” I walk into Fielding’s bathroom and snatch a trash basket liner from a box under the sink.

Benton is on his feet, watching what I’m doing, keeping an eye on me as I tuck the folded lab coat inside the liner and return to the bathroom. I scrub my hands and face with soap and hot water. I wash any area of skin that might have come into contact with the plastic film I found in Fielding’s lab coat pocket.

“Drugs,” I announce when I sit back down.

Benton returns to his chair, tensely, as if he might spring up again.

“Something transdermal that certainly isn’t Nuprin or Motrin. Don’t know what, but I will find out,” I let him know.

“The piece of plastic you were touching.”

“Unless you poisoned my coffee.”

“Maybe a nicotine patch.”

“You wouldn’t poison me, would you? If you don’t want to be married anymore, there are simpler solutions.”

“I don’t see why he’d be on nicotine unless as a stimulant? I guess so. Something like that.”

“It’s not something like that. I used to live off nicotine patches and never felt like this, not even when I would light up while I still had a twenty-one-milligram patch on. A true addict. That’s me. But not drugs, not whatever this is. What has he done?”

Benton stares at his coffee mug, tracing the AFME crest on the black glazed ceramic. His silence confirms what I suspect. Whatever Fielding is involved in, it’s connected to everything else: to me, to Benton, to Briggs, to a dead football player, to a dead little boy, to the man from Norton’s Woods, to dead soldiers from Great Britain and Worcester. Like planes lit up at night, connected to a tower, connected in a pattern, at times seeming at a standstill in the dark air but having been somewhere and going somewhere, individual forces that are part of something bigger, something incomprehensibly huge.

“You need to trust me,” Benton says quietly.

“Has Briggs been in contact with you?”

“Some things have been going on for a while. Are you all right? I don’t want to go before I know you are.”

“This is what I’ve trained for, made so many sacrifices for.” I decide to accept it. Acceptance makes it easier for me to know what to do. “Six months of being away from you, of being away from everyone, of giving up everything so I could come home to something that’s been going on for a while. An agenda.”

I almost add just like in the beginning, when I was barely a forensic pathologist and was too naive to have a clue about what was happening. When I was quick to salute and respect authority, and worse, to trust it, and much worse, to respect it, and even worse than that, to admire it, and worst of all, to admire John Briggs so much I would do anything he wanted, absolutely anything. Somehow I’ve managed to land in the same spot. The same thing again. An agenda. Lies and more lies, and innocent people who are disposable. Crimes as coldly carried out as any I’ve ever seen. Joanne Rule and Noonie Pieste are graphically in my mind, as real as they’ve ever been.

I see them on dented gurneys with rust in their welded seams and wheels that stick, and I remember my feet sticking as I walked across an old white stone floor that would not stay clean. It was always bloody in the Cape Town morgue, with bodies parked everywhere, and the week I was there I saw cases as extreme in their grotesqueness as that continent is extreme in its magnificent beauty. People hit by trains and run over on the highway, and domestic and drug deaths in the shantytowns, and a shark attack in False Bay and a tourist who died from a fall on Table Mountain.

I have the irrational thought that if I go downstairs and walk into my cooler, the bodies of those two slain women will be waiting for me just as they were on that December morning after I’d flown nineteen hours in a small coach seat to get to them. Only they had already been looked at by the time I showed up, and that would have been true if I’d flown Mach II on the Concorde or been a block away from them when they were murdered. It wasn’t possible for me to get to them fast enough. Their bodies may as well have been on a movie set, they were so staged. Innocent young women murdered for the sake of a news story, for the sake of power and influence and votes, and I couldn’t put a stop to it.

I not only couldn’t stop it, I helped make it happen, because I made it possible for it to happen, and I replay what PFC Gabriel’s mother said about hate crimes and being rewarded for them. My office at Dover is right next to Briggs’s command suite. I remember someone walking past my closed door several times while I was talking to her. Whoever it was paused at least twice. It crossed my mind at the time that someone might be waiting to come in but could hear through the door that I was on the phone and was unwilling to interrupt. The more likely answer is that someone was listening. Briggs has started something, or someone allied with him has, and Benton’s right, it’s been going on for a while.

“Then these last six months have been nothing more than a political ploy. How sad. How tawdry. How disappointing.” My voice is steady, and I sound completely calm, the way I get before I do something.

“Are you okay? Because we should go downstairs if you’re okay. Anne is here. We should talk to her, and then I need to go.” Benton has gotten up and is near the door, waiting for me with his phone in hand.

“Let me guess. Briggs made sure I got this position so he could keep it open for whomever he really has in mind.” I go on and my heart has slowed and my nerves feel steadier, as if they’re firing normally again. “Wanted me to keep the seat warm. Or was I the excuse to get this place built, to get MIT, get Harvard, get everybody on board, to justify some thirty million in grants?”

Benton reads something else as messages drop out of the thin air, one after another.

“He could have saved himself a lot of trouble,” I say as I get up from the desk.

“You’re not going to quit,” Benton says, reading what someone has just sent to him. “Don’t give them that satisfaction.”

“‘Them.’ Then it’s more than one.”

He doesn’t answer as he types with his thumbs.

“Well, it’s always been more than one. Take your pick,” I say as we walk out together.

“If you quit, you give them exactly what they want.” As he reads and scrolls down on his phone.

“People like that don’t know what they want.” I shut Fielding’s door behind us, making sure it’s locked. “They just think they do.”

We begin our descent in my bullet-shaped building that on dark nights and gloomy days is the color of lead.

I’m explaining to Benton the indented writing on a pad of call sheets as we glide down in an elevator I researched and selected because it reduces energy consumption by fifty percent. It can’t be a coincidence that Fielding was interested in a keynote address Dr. Liam Saltz just gave at Whitehall, I say, while numbers change on a digital display, while we gently sink from floor to floor in the soft glow of LEDs in my environmentally friendly hoisting machine that no one who works here appreciates in the least, from what I’ve heard. Mostly there are complaints because it is slow.

“He’s one extreme, and DARPA’s certainly the other, neither of them always right, that’s for sure.” I describe Dr. Saltz as a computer scientist, an engineer, a philosopher, a theologian, whose sport, whose art, most assuredly isn’t war. He hates wars and those who make them.

“I know all about him and his art.” Benton doesn’t say it in a positive way as we stop gently and the steel door slides open with scarcely a sound. “I certainly remember from that time at CNN when you and I got into a spat because of him.”

“I don’t remember getting into a spat.” We are back in the receiving area, where Ron is sternly alert behind his glass partition, exactly as we left him long hours ago.

In split screens of video displays I see cars parked in the lot behind the building, SUVs that aren’t covered with snow and have their headlights on. Agents or undercover police, and I remember windows glowing in MIT buildings rising above the CFC fence, I remember noticing it at the time Benton drove us here, and now I know why. The CFC has been under surveillance, and the FBI, the police, aren’t making any effort to disguise their presence now. I feel as if the CFC is on lockdown.

Ever since I walked out of Port Mortuary at Dover, I have been accompanied or locked inside a secured building, and the reason isn’t what was presented, at least not the only reason. No one was trying to get me home as quickly as possible because of a body bleeding inside the cooler. That was a priority but certainly not the only one and maybe not even the top one. Certain people used that as an excuse to escort me, certain people, such as my niece, who was armed and playing bodyguard, and I can’t believe Benton wasn’t involved in that decision, no matter what he did or didn’t know at the time.

“Maybe you remember him hitting on you,” Benton is saying as we follow the gray corridor.

“You seem to think I’m having sex with everyone.”

“Not with everyone,” he says.

I smile. I almost laugh.

“You’re feeling better,” he says, touching my arm tenderly as he walks with me.

Whatever got into me has passed, and I wish it wasn’t such a godforsaken hour of the morning. I wish someone was in the trace evidence lab so we could take a look at the plastic film I was exposed to, probably try the scanning electron microscope first, then Fourier transform infrared or whatever detectors it takes to figure out what is on Fielding’s pain-relieving patches. I’ve never taken anabolic steroids and don’t know firsthand how that would feel, but I can’t imagine it’s what I felt upstairs. Not that quickly.

Cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, LSD, whatever could get into my system instantly and transdermally, hopefully nothing like that, either, but what would I know about how that would feel? Not an opioid like fentanyl, which is the most common narcotic delivered by a patch. A strong pain reliever like fentanyl wouldn’t have caused me to react the way I did, but again, I’m not sure. I’ve never been on fentanyl. Everybody reacts differently to medications, and uncontrolled substances can be contaminated with impurities and have variable doses.

“Really. You seem like yourself.” Benton touches me again. “How are you feeling? You okay for sure?”

“Worn off, whatever it was. I wouldn’t do the case if it wasn’t, if I felt even remotely impaired,” I tell him. “I guess you’re coming to the autopsy room.” Since we’re headed there.

“A drink. Right.” He is back to Liam Saltz. “He bumps into you at CNN and asks you to have a drink with him at midnight. That’s not exactly normal.”

“I’m not sure how to take that. But I don’t feel flattered.”

“His reputation with women is on a par with certain politicians who will remain unnamed. What’s the buzzword these days? A sexual addiction.”

“Well, if you’re going to have one.”

We walk past the x-ray room, and the door is shut, the red light off because the scanner isn’t in use. The lower level is empty and silent, and I wonder where Marino is. Maybe he’s with Anne.

“He had any contact with you since then? That was what? About two years ago?” Benton asks. “Or maybe with some of your compatriots at Walter Reed or Dover?”

“Not with me. I wouldn’t know about others, except no one involved with the armed forces is a fan of Dr. Saltz’s. He’s not considered patriotic, which really isn’t fair if you analyze what he’s actually saying.”

“Problem is nobody seems to understand what anybody is saying anymore. People don’t listen. Saltz isn’t a communist. He’s not a terrorist. He hasn’t committed treason. He just doesn’t know how to curb his enthusiasm and muzzle his big mouth. But he’s not of interest to the government. Well, he wasn’t.”

“Suddenly, he is.” I assume that’s what Benton will tell me next. “He wasn’t at Whitehall yesterday. Wasn’t even in London.” Benton waits until now to inform me of this as we pause before the locked double steel doors of the autopsy room. “I don’t guess you found that part on the Internet when you were trying to make heads or tails of Jack’s indented writing,” Benton adds in a tone that is shaded with other meanings. A hint of hostility, not directed at me but at Fielding.

“How do you know where Liam Saltz was or wasn’t?” I ask at the same time I think about what Benton mentioned upstairs. He referred to the event at Norton’s Woods as a VIP wedding and mentioned a security presence. Undercover agents, Benton told me, although it was during an interval when I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have been.

“Did his keynote address by satellite on a big video screen. Well attended by the audience at Whitehall,” Benton says as if he was there. “He had a complication, a family matter, and had to leave the country.”

I think of the man beyond these closed steel doors. A man whose wristwatch when he died may have been set to UK time. A man with an old robot called MORT inside his apartment, the same robot that Liam Saltz and I testified against, persuading people in power to disallow its use.

“Is that why Jack was looking him up, looking up RUSI or whatever he was looking at early yesterday morning?” I ask as I scan open the lock to the autopsy room.

“I’m wondering how that happened, if he got a call and then looked him up or maybe knew he was in Cambridge for some reason,” Benton replies. “I’m wondering a lot of things that hopefully will get answered soon. What I do know is Dr. Saltz was here for the wedding. The daughter of his current wife, whose biological father was supposed to give her away, then got the swine flu.”

“I text-messaged you,” Anne tells me, and she’s shrouded in blue as she works on a computer that is contained in a waterproof stainless-steel enclosure, the sealed keyboard mounted at a height suitable for typing while standing. Behind her on the autopsy table of station one, which is now shiny and clean, is the man from Norton’s Woods.

“I’m sorry,” I say to her abstractedly as I think of Liam Saltz and worry what his connection might be to this dead man, beyond robots, particularly MORT. “My phone’s in my office, and I’ve not been in there,” I say to Anne, and then I ask Benton, “Does he have other children?”

“He’s at the Charles Hotel,” Benton replies. “Someone’s on the way to talk to him. But to answer your question, yes, he does. He has a number of children and stepchildren from multiple marriages.”

“I wanted to let you know I didn’t feel comfortable uploading his scans and e-mailing them,” Anne then says to me. “Don’t know what we’re dealing with and thought it was better to play it extra-safe. If you’re going to hang around, you need to cover up.” She directs this to Benton. “Got no clue what this one’s been exposed to, but he didn’t set off any alarms. At least he’s not radio active. Whatever he’s got in him isn’t, thank God.”

“I assume all was quiet at the hospital. No incidents,” Benton says to her. “I’m not staying.”

“Security escorted us in and out, and we didn’t see anyone else—no patients or staff, at any rate.”

“You found something in him?” I ask her.

“Trace amounts of metal.” Anne’s gloved hands move on the computer’s keyboard and click the mouse, both freshly overlaid with industrial silicone. Fielding’s sloppy presence is noticeably gone from the autopsy room, and I see water in the sink of station one—my station—and a big sponge, the surgical instruments bright and shiny and neatly arranged on the dissecting board. I spot a mop that wasn’t here earlier, and a whetstone on a counter-top.

“I’m amazed,” I say to her as I look around.

“Ollie,” she says, clicking the mouse. “I called him, and he drove back and spruced up the place.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It’s not that we haven’t tried while you were gone. Jack’s been using this work space, and we’ve learned to stay away.”

“How can there be metal that didn’t show up on CT?” Benton watches her scroll through files she created at the neuroimaging lab, looking for the images she wants from the MRI.

“If it’s really small,” I explain to him how it’s possible. “A threshold size of less than point-five millimeters and I wouldn’t expect it to be detected on CT. That’s why we wanted to rule out the possibility by using MR, and apparently it’s a good thing.”

“Although maybe not if he was alive,” Anne says, clicking on a file. “You don’t want something ferromagnetic in a living person, because it’s going to torque. It’s going to move. Like metal shavings in the eyes of people involved in professions that expose them to something like that. They may not even know it until they get an MRI. Then they know it; boy, do they ever. Or if they have body piercings they don’t tell us about, and we’ve seen that enough times,” she says to Benton. “Or, God forbid, a pacemaker. Metal moves, and it heats up.”

“Theories?” I ask her, because I can’t imagine an event or a weapon that could create what has just filled the video display.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she answers as we study high-resolution images of the dead man’s internal damage, a dark distorted area of signal voids that starts just inside the buttonhole wound and becomes increasingly less pronounced the deeper the penetration inside the organs and soft tissue structures of the chest.

“Because of the magnetic field, even with what must be particles incredibly minute, you’re going to get artifact. Right here,” I point out to Benton. “These very dark and distorted areas where there’s no signal penetration. You get this blooming artifact along the wound track, what’s left of the wound track, because the signal’s been blown out by metal. He’s got some sort of ferromagnetic foreign bodies inside him, all right.”

“What could do that?” Benton asks.

“I’m going to have to recover some of it, analyze it.” I think of what Lucy said about thermite. It would be ferromagnetic just as bullets are, both metal composites having iron oxide in common.

“Point-five? The size of dust?” Benton’s eyes are distracted by other thoughts.

“A little bigger,” Anne replies.

“About the size of gunshot residue, grains of unburned powder,” I add.

“A projectile like a bullet could be reduced to frag no bigger than grains of gunshot powder,” Benton considers, and I can tell he is connecting what I’m saying with something else, and I think of my niece and wonder exactly what she said to him while they were together in her lab this morning. I think of shark bang sticks and nanoexplosives, but there are no thermal injuries, no burns. It wouldn’t make sense.

“No projectile I’ve ever seen,” Anne says, and I agree. “Do we know anything more about who he might be?” She means the body on the table. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.”

“Hopefully soon,” Benton replies.

“It sounds like you might have an idea,” Anne says to him.

“Our first clue was he showed up at Norton’s Woods at the same time Dr. Saltz was inside the building, and that was something to check because of certain interests these two individuals would have in common.” He means robots, I suspect.

“I don’t think I know who that is,” Anne says to him.

“A scientist who won a Nobel Prize and is an expatriate,” Benton says, and as I observe him with Anne I’m reminded they are colleagues and friends, that he treats her with an easy familiarity, with trust that he doesn’t exhibit around most people. “And if he”—Benton indicates the dead man—”knew Dr. Saltz was coming to Cambridge, the question was how.”

“Do we know if he knew that?” I ask.

“Right now we don’t for a fact.”

“So Dr. Saltz was at the wedding. But this one wasn’t dressed for a wedding.” Anne indicates the nude dead body on the table. “He had his dog with him. And a gun.”

“What I know so far is the bride is a daughter from a different marriage,” Benton says as if this detail has been carefully checked. “The daughter’s father, who was supposed to give her away, got sick. So she asked her stepfather, Dr. Saltz, at the last minute, and he couldn’t physically be in two places at once. He flew into Boston on Saturday and made his appearance at Whitehall via satellite. A sacrifice on his part. The last thing he felt like doing, I’m sure, was to reenter the US and show up at Cambridge.”

“The undercover agents?” I ask. “For him? If so, why? I know he has enemies, but why would the FBI be offering protection to a civilian scientist from the UK?”

“That’s the irony,” Benton says. “The security at the event wasn’t about him, was about those attending the wedding, most of them from the UK because of the groom’s family. The groom is Russell Brown’s son, David. Both Liam Saltz’s stepdaughter Ruth and David attend Harvard Law, which is one reason the wedding was here.”

Russell Brown. The shadow secretary of state for defense, whose speech I just read on the RUSI website.

“He shows up at an event like that and is armed,” I say as I move closer to the steel table. “A gun with the serial number eradicated?”

“Right. Why?” Benton asks. “To protect himself, or was he a potential assailant? Or to protect himself for a reason that’s unrelated to the wedding and the people I’ve just mentioned.”

“Possibly top-secret technology he was involved in,” I offer. “Technology worth quite a lot of money,” I add. “Technology people might kill for.”

“And maybe did kill for,” Anne says as she looks at the dead young man.

“Hopefully, we’ll know soon,” Benton says.

I look at the dead man rigidly on his back, his curled fingers and the position of his arms, his legs, his hands, his head, exactly as they were earlier, no matter how much he has been disturbed during transport and scans. Rigor mortis is complete, but he won’t resist me strenuously as I examine him, because he’s thin. He doesn’t have much muscle fiber for calcium ions to have gotten trapped in after his neurotransmitters quit. I can break him easily. I can bend him to my will.

“I’ve got to go,” Benton says to me. “I know you want to get this taken care of. I’ll need your help with something by the time you’re ready to get away from here, and you’re not to get away on your own. Make sure she calls me,” he says to Anne as she labels test tubes and specimen containers. “Call me or call Marino,” he adds. “Give us an hour advance notice.”

“Marino will be with you…?” I start to ask.

“We’re working on something. He’s already there.”

I no longer question what Benton is referring to when he says “we,” and he looks one more time at me, his eyes meeting mine with the intimacy of a lingering touch, and he leaves the autopsy room. I hear the receding sound of his brisk footsteps along the hard tile corridor, then his voice and another voice as he talks to someone, perhaps Ron. I can’t make out a word they are saying, but they sound serious and intense before silence returns abruptly. I imagine Benton has left the receiving area, and on a video display I’m startled by him. Picked up by security cameras, he walks through the bay as he zips up the shearling coat I gave him so long ago I don’t remember the year, only that it was in Aspen, where he used to have a place.

I watch him on closed-circuit TV opening the side door that is next to the massive bay door, and then another camera picks him up outside my building as he walks past his green SUV parked in my spot. He gets into a different SUV, dark and big with bright headlights that the snow slashes through, the wipers sweeping side to side, and I can’t see who is driving. I watch the SUV in my snow-covered lot, backing up, moving forward, and pausing as the big gate opens, and finally out of sight in the bitter weather at the empty hour of four a.m., with my husband in the passenger’s seat, driven by someone, maybe his FBI friend Douglas, both of them headed to a destination that for some reason I’ve not been told about.

14

Inside the anteroom I prepare for battle the way I always do, suiting up in armor made of plastic and paper.

I never feel like a doctor, not even a surgeon, as I get ready to conduct a postmortem examination, and I suspect only people who deal with the dead for a living can understand what I mean by that. During my medical-school residencies I was no different from other doctors, tending to the sick and injured on wards and in emergency rooms, and I assisted in surgical procedures in the OR. So I know what it is to incise warm bodies that have a blood pressure and something vital to lose. What I’m about to do couldn’t be more different from that, and the first time I inserted a scalpel blade into cold, unfeeling flesh, made my first Y-incision on my first dead patient, I gave up something I’ve never gotten back.

I abandoned any notion that I might be godlike or heroic or gifted beyond other mortals. I rejected the fantasy that I could heal any creature, including myself. No doctor has the power to cause blood to clot or tissue or bone to regenerate or tumors to shrink. We don’t create, only prompt biological functions to work or not work properly on their own, and in that regard, doctors are more limited than a mechanic or an engineer who actually builds something out of nothing. My choice of a medical specialty, which my mother and sister still consider morbid and abnormal, probably has made me more honest than most physicians. I know that when I administer my healing touch to the dead they are unmoved by me or my bedside manner. They stay just as dead as they were before. They don’t say thank you or send holiday greetings or name their children after me. Of course I was cognizant of all this when I decided on pathology, but that’s like saying you know what combat is when you enlist in the marines and get deployed to the mountains of Afghanistan. People don’t really know what anything is really like until it really happens to them.

I can never smell the acrid, oily, pungent odor of unbuffered formaldehyde without being reminded of how naive I was to assume that the dissection of a cadaver donated to science for teaching purposes is anything like the autopsy of an unembalmed person whose cause of death is questioned. My first one took place in the Hopkins hospital morgue, which was a crude place compared to what is beyond this room where I am this minute folding my AFME field clothes and placing them on a bench, not bothering with the locker room or modesty at this hour. The woman whose name I still recall was only thirty-three and left behind two small children and a husband when she died of postoperative complications from an appendectomy.

To this day I’m sorry she was my science project. I’m sorry she was ever put in a position to be any pathology resident’s project, and I remember thinking how absurd it was that such a healthy young human being had succumbed to an infection caused by the removal of a rather useless wormlike pouch from the large intestine. I wanted to make her better. As I worked on her, practiced on her, I wanted her to come to and climb off that scratched-up steel pedestal table in the center of the dingy floor inside that dreary subterranean room that smelled like death. I wanted her alive and well and to feel I’d had something to do with it. I’m not a surgeon. What I do is excavate so I can make my case when I go to war with killers or, less dramatically but more typically, with lawyers.

Anne was thoughtful enough to find a pair of freshly laundered scrubs, size medium and the institutional green I’m accustomed to, and I put them on, then over them a disposable gown, which I tie snugly in back before I pull shoe covers out of a dispenser and cover a pair of rubber medical clogs Anne dug up somewhere. Next are protective sleeves, a hair cover, a mask, and a face shield, and finally I double-glove.

“Maybe you could scribe for me,” I say to her as I return to the autopsy room, a big, empty vista of gleaming white and bright steel. Only the three of us are here, if I include my patient on the first table. “In the event I don’t get to dictate my findings directly afterward, and it appears I may have to leave.”

“Not by yourself,” she reminds me.

“Benton took the car key,” I remind her.

“Wouldn’t stop you, since we have vehicles, so don’t try to fool me. When it’s time, I’m calling him, and there won’t be an argument.” Anne can say almost anything and not sound disrespectful or rude.

She takes photographs while I swab the entrance wound on the lower back. Then I swab orifices in the off chance this homicide might involve a sexual assault, although I don’t see how, based on what has been described.

“Because we’re looking for a unicorn.” I seal anal and oral swabs in paper envelopes and label and initial them. “Not your everyday pony, and I’m not going to believe anything, anyway, since I didn’t go to the scene.”

“Well, nobody did,” Anne says. “Which is a shame.”

“Even if somebody had, I’d still be looking for a unicorn.”

“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t trust what anybody says if I were you.”

“If you were me.” I lock a new blade into a scalpel as she fills a labeled plastic jar with formalin.

“Unless it’s me who’s talking,” she replies without looking at me. “I wouldn’t lie or cheat or help myself to things that aren’t mine. I would never treat this place as if it belongs to me. Never mind. I shouldn’t get into it.”

I won’t let her get into it. It isn’t necessary to put her in a position like that, betraying the people who have betrayed me. I know what it feels like to be put in a position like that. It’s one of the worst feelings there is and promotes lying, overtly or by omission, and I know that feeling, too. An untruth that lodges intact in the core of your being like undigested corn found in Egyptian mummies. There’s no getting rid of such a thing, of undoing it, without going in to get it, and I’m not sure I have the courage for that, as I think of the worn wooden steps leading down into the basement of the house in Cambridge. I think of the rough stonewalls belowground and the fifteen-hundred-pound safe with its two-inch-thick composite triple-lock door.

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard any rumors about where everybody is,” I then say. “When you were with Marino at McLean.” I begin the Y incision, cutting from clavicle to clavicle, then long and deep straight down with a slight detour around the navel and terminating at the pubic bone in the lower abdomen. “Did you get any idea of who is in our parking lot and what’s going on? Since I seem to be under house arrest for reasons no one has been inclined to make completely clear.”

“The FBI.” Anne doesn’t tell me something I don’t know as she walks to the wall where clipboards hang from hooks next to rows of plastic racks for blank forms and diagrams. “At least two agents in the parking lot, and one followed us. Someone did.” She collects paperwork she needs and selects a clipboard after making sure the ballpoint pen attached to it by a cord has ink. “A detective, an agent. I don’t know who followed us to the hospital, but someone who clearly had alerted security before we got there.” She returns to the table. “When we rolled up at the neuroimaging lab, there were three McLean security guys, most excitement they’ve had in years. And then this person in an SUV, a dark-blue Ford, an Explorer or an Expedition.”

Maybe what Benton just drove away in, and I ask Anne, “Did he or she get out of the SUV? I assume you didn’t talk to whoever it was?” I reflect back soft tissue. The man is so lean he has just the thinnest layer of yellow fat before the tissue turns beefy red.

“It was hard to see, and I wasn’t going to walk right up and stare. The agent was still sitting in the SUV when we left and followed us back here.”

She picks up rib cutters from the surgical cart and helps me remove the breastplate, exposing the organs and significant hemorrhage, and I smell the beginning of cells breaking down, the faintest hint of what promises to be putrid and foul. The odors emitted by the human body as it decomposes are uniquely unpleasant. It isn’t like a bird or an opossum or the largest mammal one can think of. In death we are as different from other creatures as we are in life, and I would recognize the stench of decaying human flesh anywhere.

“How do you want to do this? En bloc? And deal with the metal after we have the organs on the cutting board?” Anne asks.

“I think we need to synchronize what we’re doing inch by inch, step by step. Line things up with the scans as best we can, because I’m not sure I’m going to be able to see whatever these ferromagnetic foreign bodies are unless I’m looking right at them with a lens.” I wipe my bloody gloved hands on a towel and step closer to the video display, which Anne has divided into quadrants to give me a choice of images from the MRI.

“Distributed a lot like gunshot powder,” she suggests. “Although we can’t see the actual metal particles because they canceled the signal.”

“True. More blooming artifact, more voids at the beginning than the end. Greatest amount at the entrance.” I point my bloody gloved finger at the screen.

“But no residue of anything on the surface,” she says. “And that’s different from a gunshot wound, a contact wound.”

“Everything about this is different from a gunshot wound,” I answer.

“You can see that whatever this stuff is, it starts here.” She indicates the entrance wound on the lower back. “But not at the surface. Just beneath it, maybe half an inch beneath it, which is really weird. I’m trying to imagine it and can’t. If you pressed something against his back and fired, you’d get gunshot residue on the clothes and in the entrance wound, not just an inch inside and then deeper.”

“I looked at his clothes earlier.”

“No burns or soot, no evidence of GSR,” she says.

“Not grossly,” I correct her, because not being able to see gunshot residue doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

“Exactly. Nothing visually.”

“What about Morrow? I don’t suppose he came downstairs yesterday while Marino had the body in ID, printing him, collecting personal effects. I don’t suppose someone thought to ask Morrow to do a presumptive test for nitrites on the clothing, since we didn’t know at that time there could be GSR or that there was even an entrance wound that correlates with cuts in the clothing.”

“Not that I know of. And he left early.”

“I heard. Well, we still can test presumptively, but I’d be really surprised if that’s what we’re seeing on MR. When Morrow or maybe Phillip gets in, let’s get them to do a Griess test just to satisfy my curiosity before we move on to something else. I’m betting it will be negative, but it’s not destructive, so nothing lost.”

It’s a simple, quick procedure involving desensitized photographic paper that is treated with a solution of sulfanilic acid, distilled water, and alpha-naphthol in methanol. When the paper is pressed against the area of clothing in question and then exposed to steam, any nitrite residues will turn orange.

“Of course, we’re going to do SEM-EDX,” I add. “But these days it’s a good idea to do more than one thing, since slowly but surely lead is going to disappear from ammunition, and most of these tests are looking for lead, which is toxic to the environment. So we need to start checking for zinc and aluminum alloys, plus various stabilizers and plasticizers, which are added to the gunpowder during manufacturing. Here in the US, at any rate. Not so much in combat, where poisoning the environment with heavy metals is considered a fine idea, since the goal is to create dirty bombs, the dirtier the better.”

“Not our goal, I hope.”

“No, not ours. We don’t do that.”

“I never know what to believe.”

“I do know what to believe, at least about some things. I know what comes back to us when our service people are returned to Dover,” I reply. “I know what’s in them. I know what isn’t. I know what’s manufactured by us and what’s manufactured by others, the Iraqi insurgency, the Taliban, the Iranians. That’s one of the things we do, materials analysis to figure out who is making what, who is supplying it.”

“So when I hear these things about weapons or bombs made in Iran…”

“That’s where it comes from. It’s how the US knows. Intelligence from our dead, from what they teach us.”

We leave it at that, our talk of the war, because of this other war that has killed a man who is too young to be finished. A man who took an old greyhound for a walk in the civilized world of Cambridge and ended up in my care.

“They’ve developed some really interesting technology in Texas that I want us to look into.” I return to gunshot residue because it is safer to talk about that. “Combining solid phase micro-extraction with gas chromatography coupled with a nitrogen phosphorus detector.”

“As Texas should, since it’s a state law that everybody carry a gun. Or is it that firearms are tax-deductible, like farming and raising livestock is around here?”

“Well, not quite,” I reply. “But we’ll want to look into doing something similar at the CFC, since of all places I would expect a growing prevalence of green ammunition.”

“Of course. Don’t pollute the environment while you’re doing a drive-by shooting.”

“What scientists have come up with at Sam Houston can detect as little as one gunpowder particle, which isn’t relevant in this case, since we know this man has metal in him, almost at a microscopic level but plenty of it. Preliminarily, at any rate, Marino should have used a GSR kit on the hands at least. Since this man was armed.”

“I do know that he did that much before he printed him,” Anne says. “Because of the gun, although no sign it had been fired. But I saw him using a stub on the hands when I walked into ID at one point.”

“But not the wound, because you discovered it later. It wasn’t swabbed.”

“I haven’t done anything. I wouldn’t have. Not my department.”

“Good. I’ll take care of it when I get to it, when we turn him over,” I decide. “Let’s take out the bloc so I can blot the raw surfaces of the injured track. I’m going to use the MRI as my map and blot as much of the metal material as I can, in hopes that even if we can’t see it, we’re getting some of it. We know it’s metal. The question is, what kind of metal and what is it from?”

In wall-mounted steel cabinets with glass doors I find a box of blotting paper while Anne lifts the bloc of organs out of the body and places it on the dissecting board.

“I can’t tell you what a problem it is these days, people with metal in them,” she comments as she collects organ fragments from the chest cavity, which is opened and empty like a china cup, the ribs gleaming opaquely through glistening red tissue. “Including old bullets of the non-green variety. We get these research subjects in after the hospital’s advertised for volunteers, and of course I mean the normals, right? All these people who come in and they’re just as normal as the day is long, right? And have nothing to report. Uh, right. Like it’s real normal to have an old bullet in you.”

She returns fragments of the left kidney, the left lung, and the heart to their correct anatomical positions on the bloc of organs as if she’s piecing together a puzzle.

“Happens more often than you think,” she says. “Well, not more often than someone like you would think, since we see things like that in the morgue all the time. And then you get the old routine that bullets are lead, and lead isn’t magnetic, so it’s fine to scan the person. Usually, one of the psychiatrists who doesn’t know any better and can’t seem to remember from one time to the next that, no, wrong again. Lead, iron, nickel, cobalt. All bullets, pellets, are ferromagnetic, I don’t care if they’re so-called green, they’re going to torque because of the magnetic field. That could be a problem if someone’s got a fragment in him that’s in close proximity to a blood vessel, an organ. God forbid something was left in the brain if some poor person was shot in the head eons ago. Paxil, Neurontin, or the like aren’t going to help the poor person’s mood disorder if an old bullet relocates to the wrong place.”

She rinses a fragment of kidney and places it on the dissecting board.

“We’re going to need to measure how much blood is in the peritoneum.” I’m looking at the hole in the diaphragm that I saw hours earlier when I followed the wound track during the CT scan. “I’m going to guess at least three hundred MLs, originating through the lacerated diaphragm, and at least fifty MLs in his pericardium, which normally might suggest some time interval before death because of how much he bled. But the severity of these injuries, which are similar to blast injuries? He had no survival time. Only as long as it took for his heart and respiration to quit. If I were willing to use the term instant death, this would qualify as one.”

“This is unusual.” Anne hands me a tiny fragment of kidney that is hard and brown with tan discoloration and retracted edges. “I mean, what is that? It almost looks fixed or cooked or something.”

There is more. As I pull a light closer and look at the bloc of organs, I notice hard, dry fragments of the left lung’s lower lobe and of the heart’s left ventricle. Using a steel beaker, I scoop pooled blood and hematoma out of the mediastinum, or the middle section of the chest cavity, and find more fragments and tiny, hard, irregular blood clots. Looking closely at the disrupted left kidney, I note perirenal hemorrhage and interstitial emphysema, and more evidence of the same abnormal tissue changes in areas closest to the wound track, areas most susceptible to damage from a blast. But what blast?

“Reminds me of tissue that’s been frozen, almost freeze-dried,” I say as I label sheets of blotting paper with an abbreviation for the location the sample came from. LLL for left lower lobe and LK for left kidney and LV for left ventricle of the heart.

In the strong light of a surgical lamp and the magnification of a hand lens I can barely make out dark silvery specks of whatever was blasted through this man when he was stabbed in the back. I see fibers and other debris that won’t be discernible until they are looked at under a microscope, but I feel hopeful. Something was deposited that likely was unintended by the perpetrator, trace evidence that might give me information about the weapon and the person who used it. I turn the fume hood on the lowest setting so there is nothing more than an exchange of air, and I begin gently blotting.

I touch the sterile paper to the surfaces of fragmented tissue and the edges of wounds, and one by one lay the sheets inside the hood, where the gently circulating air will facilitate evaporation, the drying of blood without disturbing anything adhering to it. I collect samples of the freeze-dried-looking tissue and save them in plasticized cartons and also in small jars of formalin, and I tell Anne we’re going to want a lot of photographs and that I’ll ask colleagues of mine to look at images of internal damage and of the tannish tough tissue. I’ll ask if they’ve ever seen anything like it before, and as I’m saying all this, I’m wondering who I mean. Not Briggs. I wouldn’t dare send anything to him. Certainly not Fielding. No one who works here. No one at all comes to mind except Benton and Lucy, whose opinions won’t help or matter. It’s up to me whether I like it or not.

“Let’s turn him over,” I say, and empty of organs, he is light in the torso and head-heavy.

I measure the entrance wound and describe what it looks like and exactly where it is, and I examine the wound track through the bloc of organs, finding every area that was punctured by what I’m now certain was a narrow double- and single-edged blade.

“If you look at the wound, you can clearly see the two sharp ends of it, the corners of the buttonhole made by two sharp edges,” I explain to Anne.

“I see.” Her eyes are dubious behind her plastic glasses.

“But look here, where the wound track terminates in the heart. Can you see how both ends of the wound are identical, both very sharp?” I move the light closer and hand her a magnifying lens.

“Slightly different from the wound on his back,” she says.

“Yes. Because when the blade terminated in the heart muscle, it didn’t penetrate as deeply; just the tip went in. As opposed to when these other wounds were made.” I show her. “The tip penetrated and was followed by the length of the blade running through, and as you can see, the one end of the wound is just a little blunted and slightly stretched. You especially can see it here, where it penetrated the left kidney and kept going.”

“I think I see what you’re saying.”

“Not what you would expect with a butterfly knife, a boning knife, a dagger, all of which are double-edged, both sides of the blade sharp from tip to handle. This brings to mind something spear-tipped—sharp on both sides at the tip but single-edged after that, like I’ve seen in some fighting knives or, in particular, something like a bowie knife or bayonet, where the top of the blade has been sharpened on both edges to make penetration easier in stabbings. So what we’ve got is an entrance that is three-eighths of an inch linear; both ends of the wound are sharp with one that is slightly more blunted than the other. And the width expands to five-eighths of an inch.” I measure, and Anne writes it down on a body diagram.

“So the blade is three-eighths of an inch at the tip, and at its widest it’s five-eighths. That’s pretty narrow. Almost like a stiletto,” she says.

“But a stiletto is double-edged, the entire blade is.”

“Homemade? A blade that injects something that explodes?”

“Without causing thermal injury, without causing burns. In fact, what we’re seeing is more consistent with frostbite, where the tissue feels hard and is discolored,” I remind her as I measure the distance from the wound on the man’s back to the top of his head. “Twenty-six inches, and two inches to the left of the mid-spine. Direction is up and anterior, with extensive subcutaneous and tissue emphysema along the track, perforating the transverse process on the left twelfth rib paraspinally. Perforating paraspinal muscle, perirenal fat, left adrenal, left kidney, diaphragm, left lung, and pericardium, terminating in the heart.”

“How long a blade for something to perforate all that?”

“At least five inches.”

She plugs in the autopsy saw, and we turn the body on its back again. I place a headrest under the neck and incise the scalp from ear to ear, following the hairline so the sutures won’t be visible afterward. The top of the skull is white like an egg as I reflect the scalp back and pull the face down like a sock, like something sad, the features collapsing as if he is crying.

15

Idon’t realize the sun is up and the arctic front has marched off to the south until I open my office door and am greeted by a clear blue sky beyond tall windows.

I look down seven floors, and there are a few cars moving slowly on the white-frosted furrowed road below, and going the other way, a snowplow truck with its yellow blade held up like a crab claw as it scuttles along, looking for the right spot, then lowering the blade with a clank I can’t hear from up here and scraping pavement that’s not going to be completely cleared because of ice.

The riverbank is white, and the Charles is the color of old blue bottle glass and wrinkled by the current, and beyond in the distance the skyline of Boston catches the early light, the John Hancock Tower soaring far above any other high-rise, overbearing and sturdy, like a solitary column left standing in the ruins of an ancient temple. I think about coffee, and it is a fleeting urge as I wander into my bathroom and look at the coffeemaker on the counter by the sink and the boxes of K-Cups that include hazelnut.

I’m beyond being helped by stimulants, not sure I’d feel caffeine except in my gut, which is empty and raw. Intermittently, I’m stabbed by nausea, then I’m hungry, then nothing at all, just the gauziness of sleeplessness and the persistent hint of a headache that seems more remembered than real. My eyes burn, and thoughts move thickly but push with force like a heavy surf pounding against the same unyielding questions and tasks to be done. I won’t wait for anyone, given a choice. I can’t wait. There is no choice. I will overstep boundaries if need be, and why shouldn’t I? Boundaries I’ve set have been stepped on right and left by others. I will do things myself, those things I know how to do. I am alone, more alone than I was because I’ve changed. Dover has changed me. I will do what is necessary, and it might not be what people want.

It is half past seven, and I’ve been downstairs all this time because Anne and I took care of other cases after we finished with the Norton’s Woods man, whose name we are no closer to discovering, or if it is known, I’ve not been informed. I know intimate details about him that should be none of my business, but not the most important facts: who he is, what he was and hoped to become, his dreams, and what he loved and hated. I sit down at my desk and check the notes Anne made for me downstairs and add a few of my own, making sure I will remember later he had eaten something with poppy seeds and yellow cheese shortly before he died and the total amount of blood and clot in the left hemithorax was one thousand three hundred milliliters and the heart was disrupted into five irregular fragments that were still attached at the level of the valves.

I will want to emphasize this to the prosecution, it occurs to me, because I’m thinking about court. For me it all ends there, at least on the civilian side of my life. I imagine the prosecutor using inflammatory language I can’t use, telling the jury that the man ate cheese and a poppy-seed bagel and took his rescued old dog for a walk, that his heart was blown to pieces, causing him to hemorrhage almost three units of blood or more than a third of all the blood in his body in a matter of minutes. The autopsy didn’t reveal the purpose of the man’s death, although provisionally at least the cause of it is simple, and I absently write it down as I continue to ponder and meditate and make plans.

Atypical stab/puncture to the left back.

A pathological diagnosis that seems trite after what I just saw, and one that would give me pause, were I to come across it somewhere. I’d find it cryptic, almost tongue-in-cheek and coy, like a bad joke if one knows the rest of it, the massive blastlike disruption of the organs and that the death is a vicious and calculated homicide. I envision the hem of the long, black coat quickly flapping past and what must have happened just seconds before when the person wearing it plunged a blade into the victim’s lower back. For an instant he felt the physical response, the shock and pain as he exclaimed “Hey… !” and clutched his chest, collapsing on his face on the slate path.

I imagine the person in the black coat quickly bending over to snatch off the man’s black gloves and briskly walking away, perhaps tucking the blade up a sleeve or into a folded newspaper or I don’t know. But as I imagine it, I believe the person in the long, black coat is the killer and was covertly recorded by the dead man’s headphones, and it causes me to wonder again who was doing the spying. Did the killer plant micro-recording devices in the victim’s headphones so he could be followed? And I imagine a figure in a long, black coat walking swiftly through the shaded woods, coming up behind the victim, who couldn’t hear anything but the music in his headphones as he’s stabbed in the back, and he falls too fast to turn around. I wonder if he died not knowing who did this to him. And afterward? Is it what Lucy proposed? Did the person in the long, black coat view the video files and decide it wasn’t necessary to delete them from a webcam site somewhere, that in fact it was clever to leave them?

There are reasons for all things, I tell myself what has always been true but never feels that way while I’m in the middle of the problem. There are answers, and I will find them, and while the physics of how the fatal injury was executed may seem difficult to divine, I assure myself there are tracks the killer left behind. I have captured footprints on blotting paper. I will follow them to who did this. You won’t get away with it, I think, as if I’m talking to the person in the long, black coat. I hope whoever you are, you have nothing to do with me, that you aren’t someone I taught to be meticulous and clever. I have decided that Jack Fielding is on the run or in custody. It even enters my mind that he might be dead. But I’m exhausted. I’m sleep-deprived. My thoughts aren’t as disciplined as they should be. He can’t be dead. Why would he be dead? I have seen the dead downstairs, and he wasn’t among them.

My other patients of the morning were simple enough and asked little of me as I tended to them: a motor-vehicle fatality, and I could smell the booze and his bladder was full, as if he’d been drinking until the moment he left the bar and climbed behind the wheel in a snowstorm that careened him into a tree; a shooting in a run-down motel, and the needle tracks and prison tattoos of yet one more among us who died the way he lived; an asphyxia by a plastic dry-cleaning bag tied around an old widow’s neck with an old red satin ribbon, maybe left over from a holiday during better times, her stomach full of dissolved white tablets and next to the bed, an empty bottle of a benzodiazepine prescribed for sleeplessness and anxiety.

I have no messages on my office and cell phones, no e-mails that matter to me at the moment and under the circumstances. When I checked Lucy’s lab, she wasn’t there, and when I checked with security, I discovered that even Ron has left, replaced by a guard I’ve never met, gangly and jug-eared like Ichabod Crane, someone named Phil who says Lucy’s car isn’t in the lot and the instructions are that the security guards aren’t to let anyone into the building, not through the lower level or the lobby, without clearing it with me. Not possible, I let Phil know. Employees should be showing up already, or they will be at any minute, and I can’t be the gatekeeper. Let anybody in who has a right to be here, I told him before I came upstairs. Except Dr. Fielding, and when I added that, I could tell it wasn’t necessary. The guard named Phil clearly was aware that Fielding can’t just show up or won’t or maybe isn’t able to, and besides, the FBI dominates my parking lot. I can see their SUVs clear as the bright, cold day on the video display on my desk.

I swivel my chair around to the polished black-granite countertop behind me, to my arsenal of microscopes and what accompanies them. Pulling on a pair of examination gloves, I slit open one of the white envelopes I sealed with white paper tape right before I came upstairs, and I pull out a sheet of blotting paper that is stained with a generous smear of dried blood that came from the area of the left kidney where I saw a dense collection of metallic foreign bodies in the MRI. Turning on the lamp of my materials microscope, a Leica I have depended on for years, I carefully move the paper to the stage. I tilt the eyetubes to a viewing angle that won’t strain my neck and shoulders, and realize right away that the settings have been changed for someone much taller than me who is right-handed, someone who drinks coffee with cream and chews spearmint gum, I suspect. The ocular focus and interocular distance have been changed, too.

Switching to left-hand operation and adjusting the height so it is better suited for me, I start with a magnification of 50X, manipulating the focus knob with one hand as I use the other to move the sheet of blotting paper on the stage, lining up the bloody smear until I find what I’m looking for, bright whitish-silver chips and flakes in a constellation of other particles so minute that when I bump the magnification up to 100X, I can’t make out their characteristics, only the rough edges and scratches and striations on the largest particles, what looks like unburned metal chips and filings that have been milled by a machine or a tool. Nothing I see reminds me of gunshot residue, doesn’t even remotely resemble the flakes, disks, or balls I associate with gunpowder or the ragged fragments or particulate of a projectile or its jacket.

More curious is other debris mixed with blood and its obvious elements, the colorful confetti of detritus that constitutes everyday dust tangled with red cells piled up like coins, and granular leukocytes reminiscent of amoeba that are caught as if frozen in time, swimming and cavorting with a louse and a flea that at a magnified size remind me why seventeenth-century London went into a panic when Robert Hooke published Micrographia and revealed the piercing mouthparts and claws of what infested cats and mattresses. I recognize fungi and spores that look like sponges and fruit, spiny pieces of insect legs and insect egg cases that look like the delicate shells of nuts or spherical boxes carved of porous wood. As I move the paper on the stage, I find more hairy appendages of long-dead monsters, such as midges and mites and the wide compound eyes of a decapitated ant, the feathery antenna of what may have been a mosquito, the overlapping scales of animal hair, maybe from a horse or a dog or a rat, and reddish-orange flecks that could be rust.

I reach for the phone and call Benton. When he answers, I hear voices in the background and am subjected to a bad connection.

“A knife sharpened or shaped on something like a lathe, possibly a rusty one in a workshop or basement, possibly an old root cellar where there are mold, bugs, decaying vegetables, probably damp carpet,” I say right off as I begin an Internet search on my computer, typing the keywords knife and exploding gases.

“What was sharpened?” Benton asks, and then he says something to someone else, something like need the keys or need to keep. “I’m moving, not in a good place,” he gets back to me.

“The weapon used to stab him. A lathe, a grinder, possibly old or not taken care of, with traces of rust, based on the metal shavings and very fine particulate I’m seeing. I think the blade was honed, perhaps to make it thinner and to sharpen the tip on both edges, to turn the tip into a spear, so whatever might have been used for sharpening and polishing, a rasp, a file.”

“You’re talking about power tools that are old and rusty. A lot of rust?”

“Metalworking tools of some type, not necessarily power tools; I’m not in a position to be that detailed. I’m not an expert in metalworking and I don’t know how much rust. Just that I found what looks like flakes of it.” Exploding intestines. How to clean your spark plugs. Common gases associated with metalworking and hand-forged knives, I silently read what is on my computer screen as I then say to Benton, “Not that I pretend to be a trace-evidence examiner, but microscopically it’s nothing I’ve not seen before, just never seen it blown into a body. But then I’ve never really looked. I’ve never had a reason to look for something like this, am unaccustomed to using blotting paper internally when someone has been stabbed. I suppose there could be all sorts of invisible fibers, debris, particulate, injected inside people who’ve been shot, stabbed, impaled, or God knows what.”

I type injection knife into the search field because as I listen to myself, I’m reminded of remote delivery darts, of weapons powered by CO₂ to fire what’s basically a long-range immobilization or tranquilizing missile with a small explosive charge and a hypodermic needle. Why couldn’t you do the same thing with a knife, as long as it had a way to be powered and a narrow channel bored through the blade with an outlet hole near the tip?

“I’m walking outside to the car now,” Benton says. “Will be there in forty-five minutes to an hour if the traffic’s not too bad. The roads aren’t bad. One-twenty-eight isn’t too bad.”

“Well, this wasn’t hard.” I’m disappointed. Nothing with so much potential for lethal damage should be this easy to find.

“What isn’t hard?” Benton says as I look in amazement at an image of a steel combat knife with a gas outlet hole near the tip and a neoprene handle in a foam-lined plastic case.

“A CO₂ cartridge screws into the handle….” I skim out loud. “Thrust the five-inch stainless-steel blade into the target as you use your thumb to push the release button, which it appears is part of the guard hub….”

“Kay? Who’s with you right now?”

“Injects a freezing ball of gas the size of a basketball or more than forty cubic inches at eight hundred pounds of pressure per square inch,” I go on, looking at images on an elaborate website as I wonder how many people have such a weapon in their homes, their cars, their camping gear, or are walking around with it strapped to their sides. I have to admit it is ingenious, possibly one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. “Can drop a large mammal in a single stab…”

“Kay, are you by yourself?”

“Freezes wound tissue instantly, thus delaying bleeding and attracting other predators, so if you have to defend yourself against a great white shark, for example, it won’t begin bleeding into the water and attracting other sharks until you are well out of the way.” I skim and summarize and feel sickened. “It’s called a WASP. You can add it into your shopping cart for less than four hundred dollars.”

“Let’s talk about it when I see you,” Benton says over the phone.

“I’ve never heard of it.” I read more about a compressed gas injection knife I can order right now as long as I’m over eighteen years of age. “Advertised for Special Ops, SWAT, pilots who are stranded in open water, scuba divers. Apparently developed to kill large marine predators—as I said, sharks, mammals, maybe whales and those in wet suits….”

“Kay?”

“Or grizzly bears, for example, while you’re minding your own business on a friendly hike through the mountains.” I make no effort to keep the sarcasm out of my tone, to hide the anger I feel. “And, of course, military, but nothing I’ve seen in military casualties—”

“I’m on a cell phone,” Benton interrupts me. “I’d rather you don’t mention this to anyone else. No one in your office, or have you already?”

“I haven’t already.”

“You’re by yourself?” he asks me again.

Why wouldn’t I be? But I say, “Yes.”

“And maybe you could delete it from your history, empty your cache, in case anybody decides to view your recent searches.”

“I can’t stop Lucy from doing that.”

“I don’t care if Lucy does it.”

“She’s not here. I don’t know where she went.”

“I know,” he says.

“All right, then.” He’s not going to tell me where she is or where anybody is, it seems. “I’ll make evidence rounds, take care of as much as I can and meet you downstairs in back when you get here.” I hang up and try to reason through what just happened. I try not to feel hurt by him as I logically sort it out.

Benton didn’t sound surprised or especially concerned. He didn’t seem alarmed by what I’ve discovered but by my discovering it and the possibility that I might have told someone else, and that probably means the same thing I’ve been sensing since I returned home from Dover. Maybe I’m not the one finding things out. Maybe I’m simply the last one to know and nobody wants me to find out anything. What an unexpected predicament to be in, if not an unprecedented one, I think, as I do what Benton asked and empty the cache and clear the history, making it problematic for anyone to see what I’ve been searching on the Internet. As I do this I wonder who really asked: My husband, or was it the FBI asking? Who was just talking to me and telling me what to do as if I don’t know better?

It’s almost nine, and most of my staff is already here, those who aren’t using the snow as an excuse to stay home or to go somewhere else they’d rather be, such as skiing in Vermont. On the security monitor I’ve watched cars pull into the lot and seen some people coming through the back door but far more arriving by way of the civilized entrance on the ground floor, through the stone lobby with its formidable carvings and flags, avoiding the dreary domain of the dead on the lower level. The scientists rarely need to meet the patients whose body fluids and belongings and other evidence they test, and then I hear the sounds of my administrator, Bryce, unlocking the door in the hallway that opens onto his adjoining office.

I reseal the blotting paper in a clean envelope and unlock a drawer to gather other items I’ve been keeping safe as I try not to sink into a dark space, thinking dark thoughts about what I just looked at on a website and what it implies about human beings and their capacity to create imaginative ways to do harm to other creatures. In the name of survival, it crosses my mind, but then rarely is it really about staying alive; instead, it’s about making sure something else doesn’t, and the power people feel when they can overpower, maim, kill. How terrible, how awful, and I have no doubt about what happened to the man from Norton’s Woods, that someone came up behind him and stabbed him with an injection knife, blasting a ball of compressed gas into his vital organs, and if it was CO₂, there is no test that will tell us. Carbon dioxide is ubiquitous, literally as present as the air we exhale, and I envision what I saw on CT, the dark pockets of air that had been blown into the chest and what that must have felt like and how I will answer the same question I’m always asked.

Did he suffer?

The truthful answer would be no one knows such a thing except the person who is dead, but I would say no, he didn’t suffer. I would say he felt it. He felt something catastrophic happening to him. He wasn’t conscious long enough to suffer during the agonal last moments of his life, but he would have felt a punch to his lower back accompanied by tremendous pressure in his chest as his organs ruptured, all of it happening at once. That would have been the last thing he felt except possibly a glimmer, a flash, of a panicked thought that he was about to die, and then I stop thinking about it because to obsess and imagine further would become useless and self-indulgent theorizing that is paralyzing and nonproductive. I can’t help him if I’m upset.

I’m worthless to anyone if I feel what I feel, just as it was when I took care of my father and became an expert at pushing down emotions that climbed up inside me like some desperate creature trying to get out. “I worry what you have learned, my little Katie,” my father said to me when I was twelve and he was a skeleton in the back bedroom, where the air was always too warm and smelled like sickness and light seeped wanly through the slatted shades I kept closed most of the way his last months. “You have learned things you shouldn’t ever have to learn but especially at your age, my little Katie,” he said to me as I made the bed with him still in it, having learned to wash him religiously so he wasn’t overcome by pressure sores, to change his soiled sheets by moving his body, a body that seemed hollowed out and dead except for the heat of his fever.

I would gently rock my father to his side, holding him up on one side, then the other, leaning him against me because he could not get up in the end, couldn’t even sit up. He was too weak to help me move him during what his doctor called the blast phase of chronic myeloid leukemia, and at times he enters my mind and I feel the weight of him against me when I’m swathed in protective clothing, peering through protective glasses, at work at my hard steel table.

I fill out lab analysis requests that will need to be signed by each scientist I receipt various items to so I can keep the chain of evidence intact. Then I get up from my desk.