Port Mortuary (2010)

16

Knocking once, I open the door that leads into Bryce’s office.

Our shared entrance is directly across from the door to my private bath, which I’ve learned to keep open a crack. When both metal gray doors are shut I have had a tendency to get mixed up and walk in on Bryce when I’m interested in coffee or washing up or I find myself about to hand paperwork to a toilet and a sink. He is at his desk with his chair rolled back and has taken off his coat, which is draped over the back, but he still has on his big designer sunglasses that look ridiculously heavy, as if drawn on with a dark-brown crayon. He struggles with a pair of L.L.Bean snow boots that don’t go with his typically deliberate ensemble, which today is a navy cashmere blazer, tight black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a tooled leather belt with a big silver buckle shaped like a dragon.

“I’ll be on the phone and can’t be disturbed,” I tell him as if I’ve been here every day for these past six months, as if I’ve never been gone. “Then I have to leave.”

“Is someone going to tell me what’s going on around here? And welcome home, boss.” He looks up at me, his eyes masked by the big, dark glasses. “I don’t suppose the unmarked cars in the parking lot are a surprise party, because I know I’m not throwing one. Not that I wouldn’t and wasn’t intending to eventually, but whoever they are, they aren’t here because of me, and when I asked one of them to be so kind as to give me an explanation and please move his ass so I could park in my spot, he was shall we say testy?”

“The case from yesterday morning,” I start to say.

“Oh, is that why? Well, no wonder.” His face brightens as if what I just said is somehow good news. “I knew it was going to be important, I somehow knew it. But he didn’t really die here, please tell me it’s not true, that you didn’t find anything to suggest anything so outrageous or I guess I’ll just start looking for another job right this minute and tell Ethan we’re not about to buy that bungalow we’ve been looking at. I’m sure you’ve figured out what happened by now, knowing you. You probably figured it out in five minutes.”

He pulls off the other boot, moving both of them to the side, and I notice he’s spiked his hair and has shaved off the mustache and beard he had when I saw him last. Compactly built, Bryce is slight but strong with a blond choirboy prettiness, to use a cliche, because it happens to be true. He doesn’t look like himself with facial hair, which is probably the point, to look like someone else, to be transformed into a formidable and virile character like James Brolin, or to be taken seriously like Wolf Blitzer, heroes of his. My top administrator and trusted right hand has many, a host of famous imagined friends he speaks of easily as if the act of tuning them into one of his big-screen TVs or saving them with TiVo makes them as real as next-door neighbors.

Seriously good at what he does for me, with degrees in criminal justice and public administration, Bryce Clark at a glance seems misplaced, as if he wandered off the set of E!, and I have used this to my advantage over the few years he’s worked for me. Outsiders and even people who work here don’t always realize that my recovering Mormon compulsive-talking clotheshorse of a chief of staff is not to be trifled with. If nothing else, he’s voyeuristic and adores “filling me in,” as he puts it. He likes nothing better than to gather information like a magpie and carry it back to his nest. He is dangerous if he detests you. It’s unlikely you’ll know it. His banter and deliberate affect are a bunker that his more dangerous self hides behind, and in that way he reminds me of my former secretary, Rose. Those who made the mistake of treating her like a silly old woman one day found themselves missing a limb.

“The FBI? Homeland Security? No one I’ve seen before.” Bryce is bent over in his chair as he unzips a nylon gym bag, his stocking feet planted on the floor.

“Probably the FBI—” But he isn’t going to let me finish.

“Well, the one who was so rude totally looked the part, all buff in a gray suit and camel-hair coat. I think the FBI fires people if they get fat. Well, good luck hiring in America. Drop-dead good-looking, I’ll give him that. Did you see him back there? Do we know his name and what field office he’s with? Not anyone I’ve met from Boston. Maybe he’s new.”

“Who?” My thoughts run into a wall.

“Lord, you are tired. The agent in that big, bad black Ford Expedition, the spitting image of the football player on Glee—oh, you probably don’t watch that, either, it’s only the best show on TV and I can’t imagine you don’t love Jane Lynch, unless you don’t know who she is, since you probably didn’t catch The L Word, but maybe Best in Show or Talladega Nights? My God, what a hoot. The Bureau boy in the black Ford looks exactly like Finn—”

“Bryce…”

“Anyway, I saw all the blood, how much the body from Norton’s Woods bled inside his pouch, and it was god-awful, and I thought to myself, This is it. The end of this place. Meanwhile, Marino’s huffing and puffing and about to blow the house down, pitching a fit as only Marino can about someone delivered alive and dying in the fridge. So I told Ethan we might have to tuck away our pennies because I might be unemployed. And the job market right now? Ten percent unemployment or some nightmare like that, and I seriously doubt Doctor G is going to hire me because every morgue worker on the planet wants to be on her show, but I would ask you to pick up the phone and recommend me to her, please, if this place goes down the toilet. Why can’t we do a reality show? I mean, really. You had your own show on CNN some years ago; why can’t we do something here?”

“I need to talk to you about—” But there’s no point when he gets like this.

“I’m glad you’re here, but sorry you had to come home for something so god-awful. I stayed awake all night wondering what I’m going to tell reporters. When I saw those SUVs behind the building, I thought it was the media, was fully expecting television trucks—”

“Bryce, you need to calm down and maybe take your sunglasses off—”

“But nothing in the news that I know of, and not one reporter has called me or left a message here or anything—”

“I need to go over a few things, and you really need to shut up, please,” I interrupt him.

“I know.” He takes off his sunglasses as he works his foot into a black high-top sneaker. “I’m just a little overwrought, Dr. Scarpetta. And you know how I get when I’m overwrought.”

“Have you heard from Jack?”

“Where’s the Mouth of Truth when you need it?” As he ties his sneakers. “Don’t ask me to pretend, and I would respectfully request that you inform him I don’t answer directly to him anymore. Now that you’re home, thank God.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because all he does is order me around as if I work in the drive-through window at Wendy’s. He barks and snaps as his hair falls out, and then I wonder if he’s going to kick someone, maybe me, or strangle me with his umpteen-degree black belt or whatever the fuck he has, excuse my French. And it’s gotten worse, and we weren’t supposed to bother you at Dover. I told everybody to leave you alone. Everybody’s told everybody to leave you alone or they’ll answer to me. I’m just realizing you’ve been up all night. You look awful.” His blue eyes look me up and down, studying the way I’m dressed, which is in the same khaki cargo pants and black polo shirt with the AFME crest that I put on at Dover.

“I came straight here and don’t have anything to change into.” I finally get a word in edgewise. “I don’t know why you bothered replacing your L.L.Beans with an old pair of Converse left over from basketball camp.”

“I know you have a better eye than that, and I know you know I never went to basketball camp, because I always went to music camp every summer. Hugo Boss, half-price at Endless-dot-com, plus free shipping,” he adds, getting up from his chair. “I’m making coffee, and you want some. And no, I’ve not heard from Jack, and you don’t need to tell me there’s a problem and it might have to do with those agents in our parking lot, who obviously have a personality disorder. I don’t know why they can’t make an effort to be friendly. If I wore a big gun and could arrest people, I’d be Little Miss Sunshine to everyone, smile and be so nice. Why not?” Bryce brushes past me, walking into my office, disappearing into the bathroom. “I can run by your house and pick up a few things if you want. Just tell me. A business suit or something casual?”

“If I get stuck here…” I start to say I might take him up on it.

“We really do need to arrange some sort of closet for you, a little haute couture at HQ. Ohhhh, wardrobe?” his voice sings out as he makes coffee. “Now if we had our own show, we’d have wardrobe, hair, makeup, and you’d never find yourself in the same dirty clothes and odiferous of death, not that I’m saying you’re… Well, anyway. Best of all would be if you went home and straight to bed.” As hot water shoots loudly through a K-Cup. “Or I could run out and get you something to eat. I find when I’m tired and sleep-deprived…” He emerges from my bathroom with two coffees and says, “Fat. There’s a time and a place for everything. Dunkin’ Donuts, their croissant with sausage and egg, how ‘bout it? You might need two. You actually look a little thin. Life in the military really doesn’t suit you, dear boss.”

“Are you aware of a woman named Erica Donahue calling here?” I ask him as I return to my desk with a coffee I’m not sure I should drink. Opening a drawer, I search for Advil in hopes there really might be a bottle hiding somewhere.

“She did. Several times.” Bryce carefully sips the hot coffee, leaning against the frame of the open doorway that connects us.

When he offers nothing else, I ask, “When did she call?”

“Starting after it was in the news about her son. That was a week ago, I think, when he confessed to killing Mark Bishop.”

“You talked to her?”

“Most recently, all I really did was direct her call to Jack again when she was looking for you.”

“‘Again’?”

“You should get his part from him. I don’t know his details,” Bryce says, and it’s not like him to be careful with me. He’s cautious suddenly.

“But he talked to her.”

“This was, let me see….” He has a habit of gazing up at the dome as if the answers to all things are there. It’s also a favorite delaying tactic of his. “Last Thursday.”

“And you talked to her. Before you transferred her call to Jack.”

“Mostly I listened.”

“What was her demeanor, and what did she say?”

“Very polite, sounded like the upper-class intelligent woman she is, based on what I hear. I mean, there’s a ton of stuff about the Donahue family and Johnny Hinckley Junior. He’s almost that notorious…. And when he saw what he had done, he holstered his trusty nail gun…. But you probably don’t read all this shit on these gore-sites like Morbidia Trivia, Wicked-whatever-pedia, Crypt-notes, or whatever, and I do have to follow them as part of my job, part of my being informed about what’s being said out there in sensational sin-loving cyberland.”

He’s comfortable again. He’s uncomfortable only when I probe him about Fielding.

“Mom was an almost famous concert pianist in a former life, played in a symphony orchestra. I think in San Francisco,” Bryce goes on. “I happened to notice some Twittering about her being taught by Yundi Li, but I seriously doubt Li gives lessons, and he’s only twenty-eight, so I don’t believe it for a second. Of course she’s in an uproar, can you imagine? They say her son is a savant, has these bizarre abilities, like knowing tire treads. The detective from Salem, Saint Hilaire, who is anything but, and you don’t know him yet, was talking about it. Apparently, Johnny Donahue can look at a tread pattern in a dirt parking lot and go, ‘That’s a Bridgestone Battle Wing front motorcycle tire.’ I just came up with that because Ethan has those on his BMW, which I wish he didn’t love so much, because to me they’re all donorcycles. Supposedly, Johnny can do math problems in his head, and I’m not talking if a banana costs eighty-nine cents how much is a bunch of six? More Einsteinian, like what is nine times a hundred and three to the square root of seven or something? But then you probably know all this. I’m sure you’ve been keeping up with the case.”

“What exactly did she want to discuss with me? Did she tell you?” I know Bryce. He wouldn’t hand off someone like Erica Donahue without letting her talk until she ran out of words or patience. He’s too much of a snoop, his mind a chatterbox gossip mill.

“Well, obviously he didn’t do it, and if someone would really look into the facts without having their mind made up, they’d see all the inconsistencies. The conflicts,” Bryce replies, blowing on his coffee, not looking at me.

“What conflicts, exactly?”

“She says she talked to him the day of the murder at around nine in the morning, before he headed off to that cafe in Cambridge that’s now become so famous right around the corner from you?” Bryce continues. “The Biscuit? Lines out the door because of all the publicity. Nothing like a murder. Anyway, he wasn’t feeling well that day, according to Mom. Has terrible allergies or something and was complaining his pills or shots or whatever weren’t working anymore, and he was dosing up big-time and felt punk is the word she used. So I guess if someone has itchy eyes and a runny nose, he’s not going to kill anyone. I didn’t want to tell her that a jury wouldn’t put much stock in a sneezy defense—”

“I need to make a call and then make my rounds,” I cut him off before he digresses the rest of the day. “Can you check with Trace Evidence and see if Evelyn is in, and if so, please tell her I have a few things that are rather urgent. What I’ve got needs to start with her and then fingerprints, then DNA, then toxicology, then one item in particular will come back up here to Lucy’s lab. There was no one over there a while ago. What about Shane, are we expecting him, because I’m going to need an opinion about a document?”

“It’s not like we’re a rugby team stranded in a blizzard in the Andes and are going to resort to cannibalism, for God’s sake.”

“It was quite a storm all night.”

“You’ve been down south too long. There’s what? Eight inches? A bit icy but nothing for around here,” Bryce says.

“Actually, if you could ask Evelyn to come upstairs immediately and let her into Jack’s office.” I decide I’m not going to wait as I remember the lab coat folded up inside the trash-can liner.

I explain to Bryce what’s in the pocket and that I want it checked right away on SEM and I also want a nondestructive chemical analysis.

“Be very, very careful not to open the bag and touch anything,” I say to Bryce. “And tell Evelyn there are fingerprints on the plastic film. Meaning there will also be DNA.”

With my administrator silently out of range on the other side of our shared shut door, I decide to hold off calling Erica Donahue until I have a chance to think about what I’m going to do. I need to think about everything.

I want to reread her letter and make sure of my intentions, and as I ponder and remember what’s happened since I left Dover, as I look out at the bright-blue sky of a new day, I know I’m still hungover from the last mother I dealt with. I feel poisoned by the memory of Julia Gabriel on the phone as someone loitered outside my closed door at Port Mortuary. The names she called me and what she accused me of were bitter and vile, but I didn’t really let it get to me in a way that gave power to her words until I found what I did in Fielding’s office. Since then a shadow that is chilled and dark like a sunless part of the moon is at the back of my thoughts and moods. I don’t know what is being said or decided about me or what has been resurrected like some cold-blooded thing that never died and now is stirring.

What records have been found, and what has been gone through that I have secretly feared all these years and at the same time forgotten? Although the truth was always there, like something unseemly out of sight in a closet, something that I never look for but, if reminded, I know it’s not gone, because it was never thrown out or returned to its rightful owner, which should never have been me. But the ugly matter was handed over as if it was mine. And it was left hanging. As long as what was done in South Africa stayed hidden in my closet instead of where it belonged, I’d be fine was the message I got when I returned to Walter Reed after working those two deaths and was thanked for my service to the AFIP, to the air force, and was free to leave early. Debt paid in full. They had just the position for me in Virginia, where I would prosper as long as I remembered loyalty and took my dirty laundry with me.

Has it happened again? Has Briggs done the same thing to me again and soon will send me packing? Where this time? Early retirement crosses my mind. It’s all coming out with more ugliness piled on, and that’s not survivable, I decide, because I don’t know what else to think. Briggs has told someone, and someone told Julia Gabriel, who has accused me of hatred, prejudice, callousness, dishonesty, and I must remember that this noxious miasma permeates any decisions I might make right now, that and fatigue. Be exceedingly careful. Use your head. Don’t give yourself up to emotions, and easy as pie drifts through my mind. What Lucy said about security recordings, and I pick up my phone and buzz Bryce.

“Yes, boss,” he says brightly, as if we haven’t chatted in days.

“Our security recordings from the closed-circuit cameras everywhere,” I say. “When was Captain Avallone here from Dover? I understand Jack gave her a tour.”

“Oh, Lord, that was a while ago. I believe November….”

“I recall she went home to Maine the week of Thanksgiving,” I tell him. “I know she was gone from Dover that week because I had to stay. We were shorthanded.”

“That sounds about right. I think she was here that Friday.”

“Were you with them on the grand tour?”

“I was not. I wasn’t invited. And Jack spent a lot of time with her in your office, just so you know. In there with the door shut. They ate lunch in there at your table.”

“This is what I need you to do,” I tell him. “Get hold of Lucy, text-message her or whatever you need to do, and let her know I want a review of every security recording that has Jack and Sophia on it, including anything in my office.”

“In your office?”

“How long has he been using it?”

“Well…”

“Bryce? How long?”

“Pretty much the entire time. He helps himself when he wants to impress people. I mean, he doesn’t use it for his casework very often, mostly when he’s being ceremonial….”

“Tell Lucy I want recordings of my office. She’ll know exactly what I mean. I want to see what Jack and the captain were talking about.”

“How delicious. I’ll get right on it.”

“I’m about to make an important call, so please don’t disturb me,” I then say. As I hang up, I realize Benton will be here soon.

But I resist the temptation to rush. Wise to slow down, to allow thoughts and perceptions to sort themselves out, to strive for clarity. You’re tired. Exercise caution, and play it smart when you’re this tired. There’s one way to do this right, and every other way is wrong. You won’t know the right way until it happens, and you won’t recognize it if you’re wound up and muddled. I reach for my coffee but change my mind about that, too. It won’t help at this point, will only make me jittery and upset my stomach more. Pulling another pair of examination gloves out of a box on the granite counter behind my desk, I remove the document from the plastic bag I sealed it in.

I slide the two folded sheets of heavy paper out of the envelope I slit open in Benton’s SUV as we drove through a blizzard what now seems like a lifetime ago but hasn’t even been twelve hours. In the light of morning and after so much has happened, it seems more unusual than it did that this classical pianist who Bryce described as intelligent and reasonable would have used duct tape on her fine engraved stationery. Why not regular tape that is transparent instead of this ugly wide strip of lead-gray across the back? Why not do what I do when I enclose a private memo in an envelope and simply sign your name or initials over the seal of the flap? What was Erica Donahue afraid would happen? That her driver might want to read what she wrote to someone named Scarpetta who he apparently had never heard of?

I smooth open the pages with my cotton-gloved hand and try to intuit what the mother of a college boy who has confessed to murder transferred to the keys of her typewriter, as if what she felt and believed as she composed her plea to me is a chemical I can absorb that will get me into her mind. It occurs to me I’ve come up with such an analogy because of the plastic film I found in the pocket of Fielding’s lab coat. Hours beyond that unnerving druggy experience, I can see just how bad it really was and that I could not have been myself with Benton, and how uncomfortable it must have been for him. Maybe that’s why he’s being so secretive and is lecturing me about divulging information to whoever happens to be nearby, as if I, of all people, don’t know better. Maybe he doesn’t trust my judgment or self-control and fears that the horrors of war changed me. Maybe he’s not so sure that the woman who came home to him from Dover is the one he knows.

I’m not who you used to know floats through my head. I’m not sure you ever knew me is a whisper in my thoughts, and as I read the neat rows of single-spaced type, I find it remarkable that in two pages there isn’t one mistake. I see no evidence of white-out or correction tape, no misspellings or bad grammar. When I think back to the last typewriter I used, a dusky pink IBM Selectric I had in Richmond the first few years I was there, I remember my chronic aggravation with ribbons that broke or having to swap out the golf ball-like element when I wanted to change fonts, and dealing with a dirty platen that left smudges on paper, not to mention my own hurried fingers hitting the wrong keys, and while my spelling and grammar are good, I’m certainly not infallible.

As my secretary Rose used to say when she’d walk in with my latest effort typed on that damn machine, “And on what page is this in Strunk and White, or maybe it’s in the MLA style guide and I just can’t find it? I’ll redo it, but every time you type something yourself?” And she’d flap her hand in that characteristic gesture of hers that said to me Why bother?, and then I stop those thoughts because it makes me sad when I think about her. I’ve missed Rose every day since she died, and if she were here right now, somehow things would be different. Things would feel different, if nothing else. For me she was my clarity. For her I was her life. No one like Rose should be gone from this earth, and I still can’t believe it, and now is not a good time to think about the blond young man in black high-top sneakers sitting next door instead of her. I need to focus. Focus on Erica Donahue. What will I do with this woman? I am going to do something, but I must be shrewd.

She must have typed her letter to me more than once, as many times as it took to make it impeccable, and I’m reminded that when her driver rolled up in the Bentley he didn’t seem to know that the intended recipient of the envelope sealed with duct tape is a woman, and indeed seemed to think a silver-haired man was me. I remind myself that the mother of Johnny Donahue also doesn’t seem aware that the forensic psychologist evaluating him, this same silver-haired man, is my husband, and also contrary to what’s in her letter, there is no unit for the “criminally insane” at McLean, nor has anyone deemed that Johnny is criminally insane, which is a legal term and not a diagnosis. According to Benton, she also has other facts wrong.

She has confused details that may very well hurt her son, possibly damaging an alibi that potentially is his strongest. Claiming he left The Biscuit in Cambridge at one p.m. instead of at two, as Johnny maintains, she has made it far more believable that he could have found transportation and gotten to Salem in time to kill Mark Bishop around four that afternoon. Then there is her reference to her son reading horror novels and enjoying horror films and violent entertainment, and finally what she said about Jack Fielding and a nail gun and a Satanic cult, none of that correct or proven.

Where did she get those dangerous details—where, really? I suppose Fielding could have put such ideas in her head when he talked to her on the phone, if it’s true he’s the one now spreading these rumors, that he’s lying, which is what Benton seems to think. Regardless of what Fielding did or didn’t do or his truths or untruths or his reasons for anything that is happening, my questions come back to the mother of Johnny Donahue. I make myself bring all of it back to her, because what I fail to see is motivation that is logical. Her delivering this letter to me really doesn’t sit well at all. It feels off. It feels wrong.

For one so meticulous about typos and sentence construction, not to mention the attention she must pay to her music, it strikes me that she doesn’t seem to care nearly as much as she should about the facts of her son’s confession to one of the most heinous acts of violence in recent memory. Every detail counts in a case like this, and how could an intelligent, sophisticated woman with expensive lawyers not know that? Why would she take the chance of divulging anything to someone like me, a complete stranger, especially in writing, when her son faces being locked up for the rest of his life in a forensic psychiatric facility like Bridgewater or, worse, in a prison, where a convicted child-killer with Asperger’s, a so-called savant who can work the most difficult math problems in his head but is impaired when it comes to everyday social cues, isn’t likely to survive very long?

I refresh myself on all these facts and relevant points at the same time I realize I’m feeling and behaving as if they matter to me. And they shouldn’t. I’m supposed to be objective. You don’t take sides, and it’s not your job to care, I tell myself. You don’t care about Johnny Donahue or his mother one way or other, and you’re not a detective or the FBI, I think sternly. You’re not Johnny’s defense attorney or his therapist, and there’s nothing for you to get involved in, I then say to myself severely, because I don’t feel convinced. I’m struggling with impulses that have become impossibly strong, and I’m not sure how to turn them off or if I can or should. I do know I don’t want to.

Some of what I’ve grown accustomed to not only at Dover but on non-combat-related matters that are the jurisdiction of the AFME or what basically is the federal medical examiner is far too compatible with my true nature, and I don’t want to go back to the staid old way of doing things. I’m military and I’m not. I’m civilian and I’m not. I’ve been in and out of Washington and lived on an air force base and routinely been sent on recovery missions of air crashes and accidents during training exercises and deaths on military installations or fatalities involving special forces, the Secret Service, a federal judge, even an astronaut in recent months, handling a multitude of sensitive situations I can’t talk about. What I’m feeling is the not part of the equation. I’m not any one thing, and I’m not feeling at all inclined to surrender to limitations, to sit on my hands because something isn’t my department.

As an officer involved in medical intelligence, I’m expected to investigate certain aspects of life and death that go far beyond the usual clinical determinations. Materials I remove from bodies, the types of injuries and wound ballistics, the strengths and failures of armor, and infections, diseases, lesions, whether from parasites or sand fleas, and extreme heat, dehydration, and boredom, depression, and drugs are all matters of national defense and security. The data I gather aren’t just for the sake of families and usually aren’t destined for criminal court but can have a bearing on the strategies of war and what keeps us safe domestically. I’m expected to ask questions. I’m expected to follow leads. I’m expected to pass along information to the surgeon general, the Department of Defense, to be intensely industrious and proactive.

You’re home now. You don’t want to come across as a colonel or a commander, certainly not as a prima donna. You don’t want to get a case null prossed or thrown out of court. You don’t want to cause trouble. Isn’t there enough already? Why would you encourage more? Briggs doesn’t want you here. Be careful you don’t justify his position. Your own staff doesn’t seem to want you here or know you’re here. Don’t make it easy for you not to be. Your only legitimate purpose in contacting Erica Donahue is to ask her kindly not to contact you or your office again, for her own good, for her own protection. I decide to use those exact words, and I almost believe my motivation as I call the home phone number typed at the end of her letter.

17

The person who answers doesn’t seem to understand what I’m saying, and I have to repeat myself twice, explaining that I’m Dr. Kay Scarpetta and I’m responding to a letter I just received from Erica Donahue, and is she available, please?

“I beg your pardon,” the well-modulated voice says. “Who is this?” A woman’s voice, I’m fairly sure, although it is low, almost in the tenor range, and could belong to a young man. In the background a piano plays, unaccompanied, a solo.

“Is this Mrs. Donahue?” I’m already getting an uncomfortable feeling.

“Who is this, and why are you calling?” The voice hardens and enunciates crisply.

I repeat what I said as I recognize a Chopin etude, and I remember a concert at Carnegie Hall. Mikhail Pletnev, who was stunning in his technical mastering of a composition that is very hard to play. The music of someone detailed and meticulous who likes everything just so. Someone who isn’t careless and doesn’t make mistakes. Someone who wouldn’t mar a fine engraved envelope by slapping on duct tape. Someone who isn’t impulsive but very studied.

“Well, I don’t know who this really is,” says the voice, what I now believe is Mrs. Donahue’s voice, stony and edged with distrust and pain. “And I don’t know how you got this number, since it’s unlisted and unpublished. If this is some sort of crank call, it’s absolutely outrageous, and whoever you are, you should be ashamed of yourself—”

“I assure you this is not a crank call,” I interrupt before she can hang up on me as I think about her listening to Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, worrying her life away, agonizing over a son who probably has caused her anguish since she gave birth to him. “I’m the director of the Cambridge Forensic Center, the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts,” I explain authoritatively but calmly, the same voice I use with families who are on the verge of losing control, as if she is Julia Gabriel and about to shriek at me. “I’ve been out of town, and when I arrived at the airport last night, your driver was there with your letter, which I’ve carefully read.”

“That’s absolutely impossible. I don’t have a driver, and I didn’t write you a letter. I’ve written no one at your office and have no idea what on earth you’re talking about. Who is this? Who really, and what do you want?”

“I have the letter in front of me, Mrs. Donahue.”

I look at it on top of my desk and smooth it open again, being careful and deliberate as it nags at me to ask her about Fielding and why she called him and what he said to her. It nags at me that I don’t want her to hate me or think I’m unfeeling and anything other than honest. It’s possible Fielding disparaged me to her the same way I suspect he did with Julia Gabriel. I’m close to asking, but I stop myself. What has been said, and what has Erica Donahue been led to believe? But not now. Self-control, I tell myself.

Mrs. Donahue asks indignantly, “What does it say that’s supposedly from me?”

“A creamy rag paper with a watermark.” I hold the top sheet of paper up to my desk lamp, adjusting the shade so the bulb shines directly through the paper, showing the watermark clearly, like the inner workings of a soft-shell crab showing through pearly skin. “An open book with three crowns,” I say, and I’m shocked.

I don’t let her hear it in my voice. I make sure she can’t begin to sense what is racing through my mind as I describe to her what I’m seeing, like a hologram, in the sheet of paper I hold up to the light: an open book between two crowns, with a third crown below, and above that three cinquefoil flowers. And it is the flowers Marino neglected to mention that so glaringly aren’t Oxford’s coat of arms, that so glaringly aren’t the coat of arms for the online City University of San Francisco. What I’m looking at isn’t what Benton found on the Internet early this morning while all of us were in the x-ray room, but it’s what I saw on the gold signet ring I took out of the evidence locker before I came upstairs after looking at the dead man’s clothes.

I open the small manila envelope and shake the ring out into the palm of my gloved hand. The gold catches the lamplight and is bright against white cotton as I turn it different ways to look at it, noting it is badly scratched and the bottom of the band is worn thin. The ring looks old, like an antique, to me.

“Well, that sounds like my crest and my paper. I admit it does,” Mrs. Donahue is saying over the phone, and then I read to her the Beacon Hill address engraved on the envelope and letterhead, and she confirms it also is hers. “My personal stationery? How is that possible?” She sounds angry, the way people get when they’re scared.

“What can you tell me about your crest? Would you mind explaining it to me?” I ask.

I look at the identical crest engraved in the yellow-gold signet ring that I now hold under a hand lens. The three crowns and the open book are large in the magnifying glass, and the engraving is almost gone in spots, the five-petal flowers, the cinquefoils especially, just a ghost of what was once deeply etched because of the age of the ring, which has been subjected to wear and tear by someone, or perhaps by a number of people, including the man from Norton’s Woods, who was wearing it on the little finger of his left hand when he was murdered. There can be no mistake he had it on, that the ring came in with his body. There was no mixup by police, a hospital, a funeral home. The ring was there when Marino removed the man’s personal effects yesterday morning and locked them up and kept the key until he turned it over to me.

“My family name is Fraser,” Mrs. Donahue explains. “It’s my family coat of arms, that particular emblazon for Jackson Fraser, a great-grandfather who apparently changed the design to incorporate elements such as Azure in base, a border Or, and a third crown Gules, which you can’t see unless you’re looking at a replica of the coat of arms that displays the tinctures, such as what is framed in my music room. Are you saying someone wrote a letter on my stationery and had a driver hand-deliver it to you? I don’t understand or see how it’s possible, and I don’t know what it means or why someone would do something like that. What kind of car was it? We certainly don’t have a driver. I have an old Mercedes, and my husband drives a Saab and isn’t in the country right now, anyway, and we’ve never had a driver. We only use drivers when we travel.”

“I’m wondering if your family coat of arms is on anything else. Embroidered, engraved, besides being framed on the wall in your music room, anywhere else it might appear. If it’s known or published, if someone could have gotten hold of it.” No matter how I phrase it, it sounds like a peculiar thing to quiz her about.

“Get hold of it to do what ultimately? What goal?”

“Your stationery, for example. Let’s think about that and what the ultimate goal might be.”

“Is what you have engraved or printed?” she then asks. “Can you tell the difference between engraved and printed by looking at what you have?”

You don’t know who he is, I’m thinking. You don’t know that the man who died wearing that ring isn’t a member of her family, a relative, and I remember Benton saying Johnny Donahue has an older brother who works at Langley. What if he happened to be in Cambridge yesterday, staying at an apartment near Harvard, maybe a friend’s apartment that has an obsolete packbot in it, a friend with a greyhound, a friend who perhaps works in a robotics lab? What if the older brother or some other man significant to Mrs. Donahue had just been overseas, in the UK, and had flown back here unexpected and is dead and she doesn’t know, the Donahue family doesn’t know? What does Johnny’s brother look like?

Don’t ask her.

“The stationery is engraved,” I answer Mrs. Donahue’s question.

What if her family is somehow connected with Liam Saltz or with someone who might have attended his daughter’s wedding on Sunday? Might the Donahues have a connection to a member of Parliament named Brown?

Stay away from it.

“Well, you can’t pull engraved stationery out of a hat, have it made in a minute,” Mrs. Donahue is saying.

Now I’m looking at the envelope, at the duct tape on the back that I didn’t cut through, that I thought to preserve.

“Especially if you don’t have the copperplates,” she adds.

We use sticky-sided tape all the time in forensics, to collect trace evidence from carpet, from upholstery, to lift fibers, paint chips, glass fragments, gunshot residue, minerals, even DNA and fingerprints, from all types of surfaces, including human bodies. Anybody could know that. Just watch television. Just Google “crime scene investigative techniques and equipment.”

“If someone got hold of my copperplates? But who? Who could have them?” she protests. “Without those, it would take weeks. And if you do press proofs, which of course I do, add several more weeks. This makes no sense.”

She wouldn’t put duct tape on the back of her elegant envelope that took many weeks to engrave. Not this precise, proud woman who listens to Chopin etudes. If someone else did, then I might have an idea why. Especially if it was someone who knows me or knows the way I think.

“And yes, the crest is on a number of things. It’s been in my family for centuries,” she adds, because she wants to talk. There is much pent up inside her, and she wants to let it out.

Allow it.

“Scottish, but you probably guessed that based on the name,” she then says. “Framed on the wall in the music room, as I mentioned, and engraved on some of my family silverware, and we did have some silver stolen years ago by a housekeeper who was fired but never charged with anything because we really couldn’t prove it to the satisfaction of the Boston police. I suppose my family silver could have ended up in a pawnshop around here. But I don’t see what that could have to do with my stationery. It sounds as if you’re implying someone might have made engraved stationery identical to mine with the goal of impersonating me. Or someone stole it. Are you suggesting identity theft?”

What to say? How far do I go?

“What about anything else that might have been stolen, anything else with your family crest on it?” I don’t want to directly ask her about the ring.

“Why do you ask? Is there something else?”

“I have a letter that is supposedly from you,” I reiterate instead of answering her questions. “It’s typed on a typewriter.”

“I still use a typewriter,” she verifies, and sounds bewildered. “But usually I write letters by hand.”

“Might I ask with what?”

“Why, a pen, of course. A fountain pen.”

“And the type style on your typewriter, which is what kind? But you might not know the typeface. Not everybody would.”

“It’s just an Olivetti portable I’ve had forever. The typeface is cursive, like handwriting.”

“A manual one that must be fairly old.” As I look at the letter, at the distressed cursive typeface made with metal typebars striking an inked ribbon.

“It was my mother’s.”

“Mrs. Donahue, do you know where your typewriter is?”

“I’m going to walk over there, to the cabinet in the library where it’s kept while I’m not using it.”

I hear her moving into another area of the house, and it sounds as if she sets what must be a portable phone down on a hard surface. Then a series of doors shut, perhaps cabinet doors, and a moment later she is back on with me and almost breathless as she says, “Well, it’s gone. It’s not here.”

“Do you remember when you saw it last?”

“I don’t know. Weeks ago. Probably around Christmas. I don’t know.”

“And it wouldn’t be someplace else. Perhaps you moved it or someone borrowed it?”

“No. This is terrible. Someone took it and probably took my stationery, too. The same one who wrote to you as if it was me. And I didn’t. I most assuredly didn’t.”

The first person to come to mind is her own son Johnny. But he is at McLean. He couldn’t possibly have borrowed her typewriter, her pen, her stationery, and then hired a man and a Bentley to deliver a letter to me. Assuming he could have known when I was flying in last night on Lucy’s helicopter, and I’m not going to ask his mother about that, either. The more I ask her, the more information I give.

“What’s in the letter?” she persists. “What did someone write as if it’s from me? Who could have taken my typewriter? Should we call the police? What am I saying? You are the police.”

“I’m a medical examiner,” I correct her matter-of-factly as Chopin’s tempo quickens, a different etude. “I’m not the police.”

“But you are, really. Doctors like you investigate like the police and act like the police and have powers they can abuse like the police. I talked to your assistant, Dr. Fielding, about what’s being blamed on my son, as I know you’re very well aware. You must know I’ve called your office about it and why. You must know why and how wrong it is. You sound like a fair-minded woman. I know you haven’t been here, but I must say I don’t understand what’s been condoned, even from a distance.”

I swivel around in my chair, facing the curved wall behind me that is nothing but glass, my office shaped exactly like the building if you laid it on its side, cylindrical and rounded at one end. The morning sky is bright blue, what Lucy calls severe clear, and I notice something moving in the security display, a black SUV parking in back.

“I was told you called to speak to him,” I reply, because I can’t say what is about to boil out of me. What isn’t fair? What have I condoned? How did she know I haven’t been here? “I can understand your concern, but—”

“I’m not ignorant,” Mrs. Donahue cuts me off. “I’m not ignorant about these things, even if I’ve never been involved in anything so awful ever before, but there was no reason for him to be so rude to me. I was within my rights to ask what I did. I fail to understand how you can condone it, and maybe you really haven’t. Maybe you aren’t aware of the entire sordid mess, but how could you not be? You’re in charge, and now that I have you on the phone, perhaps you can explain how it’s fair or appropriate or even legal for someone in his position to be involved in this and have so much power.”

The word careful flashes in my mind, as if there is a warning light in my head flashing neon-red.

“I’m sorry if you feel he was rude or unhelpful.” I abide by my own warning and am careful. “You understand we can’t discuss cases with…”

“Dr. Scarpetta.” Sharp piano notes sound as if responding to her or the other way around. “I would never and I most assuredly did not,” she says emotionally. “Will you excuse me while I turn this down? You probably don’t know Valentina Lisitsa. If only I could just listen and not have all these other dreadful things banging in my head, like pots and pans banging in my head! My stationery, my typewriter. My son! Oh, God, oh, God.” As the music stops. “I didn’t ask Dr. Fielding prying questions about someone who was murdered, much less a child. If that’s what he’s told you I called about, it’s absolutely untrue. Well, I’ll just say it. A lie. A damn lie. I’m not surprised.”

“You called wanting to speak to me,” I say, because that’s all I really know other than her claims to Bryce about Johnny and his innocence and allergies. She obviously has no idea I’ve not talked to Fielding, that no one has, it seems. And the more I downplay what she’s saying or outright ignore it, the louder she’ll get and the more she’ll volunteer.

“Late last week,” she says with energy. “Because you’re in charge and I’ve gotten nowhere with Dr. Fielding, and of course you understand my concern, and this really is unacceptable if not criminal. So I wanted to complain, and I’m sorry about your coming home to that. When I realized who you are, that it wasn’t some crank call, my first thought was it’s about my filing a complaint with your office, not anything as official as I’m making it sound, at least not yet, although our lawyer certainly knows and the CFC’s legal counsel certainly knows. And now maybe I won’t need to file anything. It depends on what you and I agree upon.”

Agree upon about what? I think but I don’t ask. She knew I was coming home, and that doesn’t fit with what she supposedly wrote to me, either. But it fits with a driver meeting me at Hans-com Field.

“What is in the letter? Can you read it to me? Why can’t you?” she says again.

“Is it possible someone else in your family might have written to me on your stationery and borrowed your typewriter?” I suggest.

“And signed my name?”

I don’t answer.

“I’m assuming I supposedly signed whatever you got or you’d have no reason to think it’s from me other than an engraved address, which could be my husband, who unavoidably is in Japan on business, has been since Friday, although it is the most inopportune time to be away. He wouldn’t write such a thing, anyway. Of course he wouldn’t.”

“The letter purports to be from you,” I reply, and I don’t tell her it is signed “Erica” above her name typed in cursive and that the envelope is addressed in an ornate script in the black ink of a fountain pen.

“This is very upsetting. I don’t know why you won’t read it to me. I have a right to know what someone said as if they’re me. I suppose our attorney will have to deal with you after all, the attorney representing Johnny, and I assume it’s about him, this letter that’s a lie, a fraud. Probably the dirty trick of the same ones who are behind all this. He was perfectly fine until he went there, and then he became Mr. Hyde, which is a harsh thing to say about your own child. But that’s the only way I can think to say it so you understand how dramatically he was altered. Drugs. It must be, although the tests are negative, according to our lawyer, and Johnny would never take them. He knows better. He knows what thin ice he already skates on because of his unusualness. I don’t know what else it could be except drugs, that somebody introduced him to something that changed him, that had a terrible effect, to deliberately destroy his life, to set him up….”

She continues to talk without pause, getting increasingly upset, as a knock sounds on my outer door and someone tries the knob, then at the same time Bryce opens our adjoining door and I shake my head no at him. Not now. Then he whispers that Benton is at my door, and can he let him in? And I nod, and he shuts one door and another opens.

I put Mrs. Donahue’s call on speakerphone.

Benton closes the door behind him as I hold up the letter to indicate whom it is I’m talking to. He moves a chair close to me while Mrs. Donahue continues to speak, and I jot a note on a call sheet.

Says didn’t write it—not her driver or Bentley.

“… at that place,” Mrs. Donahue’s voice sounds inside my office as if she is in it.

Benton sits and has no reaction, and his face is pale, drained, and exhausted. He doesn’t look well and smells of wood smoke.

“I’ve never been there because they don’t allow visitors unless they have some special event for staff….” her voice continues.

Benton picks up a pen and writes on the same call sheet Otwahl? But it seems perfunctory when he does it. He doesn’t seem particularly curious.

“And then you have to go through security on a par with the White House, or maybe more extreme than that,” Mrs. Donahue says, “not that I know it for a fact, but according to my son, who was frightened and a wreck the last few months he was there. Certainly since summer.”

“What place are you talking about?” I ask her as I write another note to Benton.

Typewriter missing from her house.

He looks at the note and nods as if he already knew that Erica Donahue’s old Olivetti manual typewriter is gone, possibly stolen, assuming what she’s just told me is true. Or maybe he somehow knows she’s told me this, and then it intrudes upon my thoughts that my office probably is bugged. Lucy’s saying she has swept my office for covert surveillance devices likely means she planted them, and my attention wanders around the room, as if I might find tiny cameras or microphones hidden in books or pens or paperweights or the phone I’m talking on. It’s ridiculous. If Lucy has bugged my office, I’m not going to know. More to the point, Fielding wouldn’t know. I hope I catch him saying things to Captain Avallone, not realizing the two of them were being recorded secretly. I hope I catch both of them in the act of conspiring to ruin me, to run me out of the CFC.

“… where he had his internship. That technology company that makes robots and things nobody is supposed to know about…” Mrs. Donahue is saying.

I watch Benton fold his hands in his lap, lacing his fingers as if he is placid when he’s anything but low-key and relaxed. I know the language of how he sits or moves his eyes and can read his restiveness in what seems the utter stillness of his body and mood. He is stressed-out and worn-out, but there is something else. Something has happened.

“… Johnny had to sign contracts and all these legal agreements promising he wouldn’t talk about Otwahl, not even what its name means. Can you imagine that? Not even something like that, what Otwahl means. But no wonder! What these damn people are up to. Huge secret contracts with the government, and greed. Enormous greed. So are you surprised things might be missing or people are being impersonated, their identities stolen?”

I have no idea what Otwahl means. I assumed it was the name of a person, the one who founded the company. Somebody Otwahl. I look at Benton. He is staring vacantly across the room, listening to Mrs. Donahue.

“… Not about anything, certainly not what goes on, and anything he did there belongs to them and stays there.” She is talking fast, and her voice no longer sounds as though it is coming from her diaphragm but from high up in her throat. “I’m terrified. Who are these people, and what have they done to my son?”

“What makes you think they’ve done something to Johnny?” I ask her as Benton quietly, calmly writes a note on the call sheet, his mouth set in a firm, thin line, the way he looks when he gets like this.

“Because it can’t be coincidental,” she replies, and her voice reminds me of the cursive typeface of her old Olivetti. Something elegant that is deteriorating, fading, less distinct and slightly bleary. “He was fine and then he wasn’t, and now he’s locked up at a psychiatric hospital and confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. And now this,” she says hoarsely, clearing her throat. “A letter on my stationery or what looks like my stationery, and of course it’s not from me and I have no idea who delivered it to you. And my typewriter is gone….”

Benton slides the call sheet to me, and I read what he wrote in his legible hand.

We know about it.

I look at him and frown. I don’t understand.

“… Why would they want him accused of something he didn’t do, and how have they managed to brainwash him into thinking he murdered that child?” Mrs. Donahue then says yet again, “Drugs. I can only assume drugs. Maybe one of them killed that little boy and they need someone as a scapegoat. And there was my poor Johnny, who is gullible, who doesn’t read situations the way others do. What better person to pick on than a teenager with Asperger’s….”

I am staring at Benton’s note. We know about it. As though if I read it more than once I’ll comprehend what it is he knows about or what it is that he and his invisible others, these entities he refers to as “we,” know about. But as I sit here, concentrating on Mrs. Donahue and trying to decipher what she is truly conveying while I cautiously extract information from her, I have the feeling Benton isn’t really listening. He seems barely interested, isn’t his typically keen self. What I detect is he wants me to end the call and leave with him, as if something is over with and it’s just a matter of finishing what has already ended, just a matter of tying up loose ends, of cleaning up. It is the way he used to act when a case had wrung him out for months or years and finally was solved or dropped or the jury reached a verdict, and suddenly everything stopped and he was left harried but spent and depressed.

“You started noticing the difference in your son when?” I’m not going to quit now, no matter what Benton knows or how spent he is.

“July, August. Then by September for sure. He started his internship with Otwahl last May.”

“Mark Bishop was killed January thirtieth.” It is as close as I dare come to pointing out the obvious, that what she continues to claim about her son being framed doesn’t make sense, the timing doesn’t.

If his personality began changing last summer when he was working at Otwahl and yet Mark Bishop wasn’t murdered until January 30, what she’s suggesting would mean someone programmed Johnny to take the blame for a murder that hadn’t happened yet and wouldn’t happen for many months. The Mark Bishop case doesn’t fit with something meticulously planned but as a senseless and sadistic violent attack on a little boy who was at home, playing in his yard, on a weekend late afternoon as it was getting dark and no one was looking. It strikes me as a crime of opportunity, a thrill kill, the evil game of a predator, possibly one with pedophilic proclivities. It wasn’t an assassination. It wasn’t the black-ops takeout of a terrorist. I don’t believe his death was premeditated and executed with a very certain goal in mind, such as national security or political power or money.

“… People who don’t understand Asperger’s assume those who have it are violent, are almost nonhuman, don’t feel the same things the rest of us do or don’t feel anything. People assume all sorts of things because of what I call unusualness, not sickness or derangement but unusual. That’s the disadvantage I mean.” Mrs. Donahue is talking rapidly and with no ordered sequence to her thoughts. “You point out behavior changes that are alarming and other people think it’s just him. Just Johnny because of his unusualness, which is a sad disadvantage, as if he needed yet one more disadvantage. Well, that’s not what this is, not about his unusualness. Something horrific got started when he did at that place, at Otwahl last May….”

It also enters my mind what Benton mentioned hours earlier, that Mark Bishop’s death might be connected to others: the football player from BC, who was found in the Boston Harbor last November, and possibly the man who was murdered in Norton’s Woods. If Benton is right, then Johnny Donahue would have to be framed for all three of these homicides, and how could he be? He was an inpatient at McLean when the killing occurred in Norton’s Woods, for example. I know he couldn’t have committed that homicide, and I fail to see how he could be set up to take the blame for it unless he wasn’t on the hospital ward, unless he was on the loose and armed with an injection knife.

Benton writes another note. We need to go. And he underlines it.

“Mrs. Donahue, is your son on any medications?” I ask.

“Not really.”

“Prescription or perhaps over-the-counter medications?” I inquire without being pushy, and it requires effort on my part, because my patience is frayed. “Maybe you can tell me anything at all he might have been taking before he was hospitalized or any other medical problems he might have.”

I almost say “might have had,” as if he is dead.

“Well, a nasal spray. Especially of late.”

Benton raises his hands palms up as if to say This isn’t news. He knows about Johnny’s medication. His patience is frayed, too, and signs of it are breaking through his imperviousness. He wants me to get off the phone and to go with him right now.

“Why of late? Was he having respiratory problems? Allergies? Asthma?” I ask as I pull a pair of gloves out of the dispenser and hand them to Benton. Then I give him the manila envelope containing the ring.

“Animal dander, pollens, dust, gluten, you name it, he’s allergic, has been treated by allergists most of his life. He was doing fine until late summer, and then nothing seemed to work very well anymore. It was a very bad season for pollens, and stress makes things worse, and he was increasingly stressed,” she says. “He did start using a spray again that has a type of cortisone in it. The name just fled from me….”

“Corticosteroid?”

“Yes. That’s it. And I’ve wondered about it in terms of it affecting his moods, his behavior. Things such as insomnia, ups and downs, and irritability, which, as you know, became extreme, culminating in him having blackouts and delusions, and ultimately our hospitalizing him.”

“He started using it again? So he’s used the corticosteroid spray before?”

“Certainly, over the years. But not since he started a new treatment, which meant he didn’t need shots anymore. For about a year it was like a magical cure; then he got bad again and resumed the nasal spray.”

“Tell me about the new treatment.”

“I’m sure you’re familiar with drops under the tongue.”

I’m not aware that sublingual immunotherapy has yet to be approved by the FDA, and I ask, “Is your son part of a clinical trial?” I scribble another note to Benton.

Spray and drops to the labs stat. And I underlined stat, which means statim, or immediately.

“That’s right, through his allergist.”

I look at Benton to see if he knows about this, and he glances at my note as he puts on the gloves, and next he glances at his watch. He’s going to look at the ring only because I asked him to. It’s as if he’s already seen it or already knows it isn’t important or has his mind made up. Something has ended. Something has happened.

“… What’s called an off-label use that his doctor supervises, but no more trips to his office for shots every week,” Mrs. Donahue says, and she seems momentarily soothed as she talks about her son’s allergies instead of everything else, her pain in remission, but it won’t last.

If someone has tampered with Johnny’s medications, it might explain why his allergies got bad again. What he was placing under his tongue or spraying up his nose might have been sufficiently altered chemically to render the medications ineffective, not to mention extremely harmful. I look at Benton as he examines the signet ring. He has no expression on his face. I hold up a sheet of stationery so he can see the watermark. He has no visible reaction, and I notice a cobweb in his hair. I reach over and remove it, and he returns the ring to the envelope. He meets my eyes and widens them the way he does at parties and dinners when he’s telegraphing Let’s go now.

“… Johnny takes several drops under his tongue daily, and for a while had excellent results. Then it stopped working as well, and he’s been miserable at times. This past August he resumed the spray but only seemed to get worse, and along with it were these very disturbing changes in his personality. They were noted by others, and he did get in trouble for acting out, was kicked out of that class, as you know, but he wouldn’t have harmed that child. I don’t think Johnny was even aware of him, much less would do something….”

Benton takes off the gloves and drops them in the trash. I point at the envelope, and he shakes his head. Don’t ask Mrs. Donahue about the ring. He doesn’t want me to mention it, or maybe it isn’t necessary for me to bring it up to her because of what Benton knows that I don’t, and then I notice his black tactical boots. They are covered with gray dust that wasn’t there earlier when we were talking in Fielding’s office. The legs of his black tactical pants also are quite dusty, and the sleeves of his shearling coat are dirty, as if he brushed up against something.

“… It was the main thing I wanted to ask, more of a personal matter directed at him as a man who teaches martial arts and is supposed to abide by a code of honor,” Mrs. Donahue says, grabbing my attention back, and I wonder if I’ve misunderstood her. I can’t possibly have heard what I just did. “It was that more than the other, not at all what you assumed or what he told you. Lying, I’m sure, because as I’ve said, if he claims I called him to ask for details about what was done to that poor child, then he was lying. I promise I didn’t ask about Mark Bishop, who wasn’t known to us personally, by the way. We only saw him there sometimes. I didn’t ask for information about him….”

“Mrs. Donahue, I’m sorry. You’re cutting in and out.” It’s not really true, but I need her to repeat what she said and to clarify.

“These portable phones. Is this better? I’m sorry. I’m pacing as I talk, pacing all over the house.”

“Thank you. Could you please repeat the last few things you said? What about martial arts?”

I listen with another jolt of disbelief as she reminds me of what she assumes I know, that her son Johnny is acquainted with Jack Fielding through tae kwon do. When she called this office several times to talk to Fielding and eventually to complain to me, it is because of this relationship. Fielding was Johnny’s instructor at the Cambridge Tae Kwon Do Club. Fielding was Mark Bishop’s instructor, taught a class of Tiny Tigers, but Johnny didn’t know Mark, and certainly they weren’t in the same class, weren’t taught together, Mrs. Donahue is adamant about that, and I ask her when Johnny started taking lessons. I tell her I’m not sure about the details and must have an accurate account if I’m to deal appropriately and fairly with her complaint about my deputy chief.

“He’s been taking lessons since last May,” Mrs. Donahue says while my thoughts scatter and bounce like caroms. “You can understand why my son, who’s never really had friends, would be easily influenced by someone he adores and respects….”

“Adores and respects? Do you mean Dr. Fielding?”

“No, not hardly,” she says acidly, as if she truly hates the man. “His friend was involved in it first, has been for quite some time. Apparently, a number of women are quite serious about tae kwon do, and when she began working with Johnny and they became friends, she encouraged him, and I wish he hadn’t listened. That and, of course, Otwahl, that place and whatever goes on there, and look what’s happened. But you can certainly imagine why Johnny would want to be powerful and able to protect himself, to feel less picked on and alone when the irony, of course, is that those days for him really were gone. He wasn’t bullied at Harvard….”

She goes on, rambling and less crisp and commanding now, and her despair is palpable. I can feel it in the air inside my office as I get up from my desk.

“… How dare him. That certainly constitutes a violation of his medical oath if anything does. How dare him continue to be in charge of the Mark Bishop case in light of what we all know the truth is,” she says.

“Can you be specific about what truth you’re referring to?” I look out my windows at the blindingly bright morning. The sun and the glare are so intense, my eyes water.

“His bias.” Her voice sounds behind me, on speakerphone. “He’s never been fond of Johnny or particularly nice to him, would make tactless comments to him in front of the others. Things such as ‘You need to look at me when I’m talking to you instead of at the goddamn light switch.’ Well, as I’m sure you’re aware, because of Johnny’s unusualness, his attention gets caught up on things that don’t make sense to others. He has poor eye contact and can be offensive because people don’t understand it’s just the way his brain works. Do you know much about Asperger’s, or has your husband…”

“I don’t know much.” I don’t intend to get into what Benton has or hasn’t told me.

“Well, Johnny gets fixated on a detail of no significance to anyone else and will stare at it while you’re talking to him. I’ll be telling him something important and he’s looking at a brooch or a bracelet I’m wearing, or he makes a comment or laughs when he shouldn’t. And Dr. Fielding berated him about laughing inappropriately. He belittled him in front of everyone, and that’s when Johnny tried to kick him. Here this man has however many degrees of a black belt someone can have, and my son, who weighs all of a hundred and forty pounds, tried to kick him, and that was when he was forced to leave the class for good. Dr. Fielding forbade him from ever coming back and threatened to blackball him if he tried to take lessons anywhere else.”

“When was this?” I hear myself as if I’m someone else speaking. “The second week of December. I have the exact date. I have everything written down.”

Six weeks before Mark Bishop was murdered, I think, dazed, as if I’m the one who has been kicked. “And you suggested to Dr. Fielding—” I start to say to the phone on my desk as if I’m looking at Mrs. Donahue and she can see me.

“I certainly did!” she says excitedly, defiantly. “When Johnny started babbling his nonsense about having killed that boy during a blackout and that their tae kwon do instructor did the autopsy! Can you imagine my reaction?”

Their tae kwon do instructor. Who else is she referring to? Johnny’s MIT friend, or are there others? Who else might Fielding have been teaching, and what could have caused Johnny Donahue to confess to a murder Benton believes he didn’t commit? Why would Johnny think he did something so horrific during a so-called blackout? Who influenced him to the extent he would admit to it and offer details such as the weapon being a nail gun when I know for a fact that isn’t true? But I’m not going to ask Mrs. Donahue anything else. I’ve gone too far; everything has gone too far. I’ve asked her more than I should, and Benton already knows the answers to anything I might think of. I can tell by the way he’s sitting in his chair, staring down at the floor, his face as hard and dark as my building’s metal skin.

18

I hang up the phone and stand before my curved wall of glass, looking out at a patchwork of slate tiles and snow punctuated by church steeples stretching out before me in the kingdom of CFC.

I wait for my heart to slow and my emotions to settle, swallowing hard to push the pain and anger back down my throat, distracting myself with the view of MIT, and beyond it, Harvard and beyond. As I stand inside my empire of many windows and look out at what I’m supposed to manage if the worst happens to people, I understand. I understand why Benton is acting the way he is. I understand what has ended. Jack Fielding has.

I vaguely remember him mentioning not long after he moved here from Chicago that he had volunteered at some tae kwon do club and couldn’t always be available to do cases on weekends or after hours because of his dedication to teaching what he referred to as his art, his passion. On occasion he would be gone to tournaments, he told me, and he assumed he would be granted “flexibility.” As acting chief during my long absences, he expected flexibility, he reiterated, almost lecturing me. The same flexibility I would have if I were here, he stated, as if it was a known fact that I have flexibility when I’m home.

I remember being put off by his demands, since he’s the one who called me asking for a job at the CFC, and the position I foolishly agreed to give him far surpasses any he’s ever had. In Chicago he wasn’t afforded much status, was one of six medical examiners and not in line for a promotion of any kind, his chief confided in me when we spoke of my hiring Fielding away from there. It would be a tremendous professional opportunity and good for him personally to be around family, the chief said, and I was deeply moved that Fielding thought of me as family. I was pleased that he had missed me and wanted to come back to Massachusetts, to work for me like in the old days.

And the irony that should have infuriated me, and one I certainly should have pointed out to Fielding instead of indulging him as usual, was this notion of flexibility, as if I come and go as I please, as if I take vacations and run off to tournaments and disappear several weekends each month because of some art or passion I have beyond what I do in my profession, beyond what I do every damn day. My passion is what I live every damn day, and the deaths I take care of every damn day and the people the deaths leave behind and how they pick up and go on, and how I help them somehow do that. I hear myself and realize I’ve been saying these things out loud, and I feel Benton’s hands on my shoulders as he stands behind me while I wipe tears from my eyes. He rests his chin on top of my head and wraps his arms around me.

“What have I done?” I say to him.

“You’ve put up with a lot from him, with way too much, but it’s not you who’s done anything. Whatever he was on, was taking and probably dealing… Well. You had a brush with it earlier, so you can imagine.” He means whatever drugs Fielding might have used to saturate his pain-relieving patches, and whatever drugs he might have been selling.

“Have you found him?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“He’s in custody? He’s been arrested? Or you’re just questioning him?”

“We have him, Kay.”

“I suppose it’s best.” I don’t know what else to ask except how Fielding is doing, which Benton doesn’t answer.

I wonder if Fielding had to be placed in a four-point restraint or maybe in a padded room, and I can’t imagine him in captivity. I can’t imagine him in prison. He won’t last. He will bat himself to death against bars like a panicked moth if someone doesn’t kill him first. It also crosses my mind that he is dead. Then it feels he is. The feeling settles numbly, heavily, as if I’ve been given a nerve block.

“We need to head out. I’ll explain as best I can, as best we know. It’s complicated; it’s a lot,” I hear Benton say.

He moves away, no longer touching me, and it is as if there is nothing holding me here and I will float out the window, and at the same time, there is the heaviness. I feel I’ve turned into metal or stone, into something no longer alive or human.

“I couldn’t let you know earlier as it became clear, not that all of it is clear yet,” Benton says. “I’m sorry when I have to keep things from you, Kay.”

“Why would he, why would anyone…?” I start to ask questions that can never be answered satisfactorily, the same questions I’ve always asked. Why are people cruel? Why do they kill? Why do they take pleasure in ruining others?

“Because he could.” Benton says what he always does.

“But why would he?” Fielding isn’t like that. He’s never been diabolical. Immature and selfish and dysfunctional, yes. But not evil. He wouldn’t kill a six-year-old boy for fun and then enjoy pinning the crime on a teenager with Asperger’s. Fielding’s not equipped to orchestrate a cold-blooded game like that.

“Money. Control. His addictions. Righting wrongs that go back to the beginning of his time. And decompensating. Ultimately destroying himself because that’s who he was really destroying when he destroyed others.” Benton has it all figured out. Everybody has it figured out except me.

“I don’t know,” I mutter, and I tell myself to be strong. I have to take care of this. I can’t help Fielding, I can’t help anyone, if I’m not strong.

“He didn’t hide things well,” Benton then says as I move away from the window. “Once we figured out where to look, it’s become increasingly obvious.”

Someone setting people up, setting up everything. That’s why it’s not hidden well. That’s why it’s obvious. It’s supposed to be obvious, to make us think certain things are true when maybe they aren’t. I won’t accept that the person behind all this is Fielding until I see it for myself. Be strong. You must take care of it. Don’t cry over him or anyone. You can’t.

“What do I need to bring?” I collect my coat off a chair, the tactical jacket from Dover that isn’t nearly warm enough.

“We have everything there,” he says. “Just your credentials in case someone asks.”

Of course they have everything there. Everything and everyone is there except me. I collect my shoulder bag from the back of my door.

“When did you figure it out?” I ask. “Figure it out enough to get warrants to find him? Or however it’s happened?”

“When you discovered the man from Norton’s Woods was a homicide, that changed things, to say the least. Now Fielding was connected to another murder.”

“I don’t see how,” I reply as we walk out together, and I don’t tell Bryce I’m leaving. At the moment I don’t want to face anyone. I’m in no mood to chat or to be cordial or even civilized.

“Because the Glock had disappeared from the firearms lab. I know you haven’t been told about that, and very few people are aware of it,” Benton says.

I remember Lucy’s comments about seeing Morrow in the back parking lot at around ten-thirty yesterday morning, about a half-hour after the pistol was receipted to him in his lab, and he couldn’t be bothered with it, according to Lucy. If she knew about the missing Glock, she withheld that crucial information, and I ask Benton if she deliberately lied by omission to me, the chief, her boss.

“Because she works here,” I say as we wait for the elevator to climb to our floor. It is stuck on the lower level, as if someone is holding open the door down there, what staff members sometimes do when they are loading a lot of things on or off. “She works for me and can’t just keep information from me. She can’t lie to me.”

“She wasn’t aware of it then. Marino and I knew, and we didn’t tell her.”

“And you knew about Jack and Johnny and Mark. About tae kwon do.” I’m sure Benton did. Probably Marino, too.

“We’ve been watching Jack, been looking into it. Yes. Since Mark was murdered last week and I found out Jack taught him and Johnny.”

I think of the photographs missing from Fielding’s office, the tiny holes in the wall from the hanging hooks being removed.

“It began to make sense that Jack took control of certain cases. The Mark Bishop case, for example, even though he hates to do kids,” Benton goes on, looking around, making sure no one is nearby to overhear us. “What a perfect opportunity to cover up your own crimes.”

Or some other person’s crimes, I think. Fielding would be the sort to cover for someone else. He desperately needs to be powerful, to be the hero, and then I remind myself to stop defending him. Don’t unless you have proof. Whatever turns out to be true, I’ll accept it, and it occurs to me that the photographs missing from Fielding’s office might have been group poses. That seems familiar. I can almost envision them. Perhaps of tae kwon do classes. Pictures with Johnny and Mark in them.

I wonder but don’t ask if Benton removed those photographs or if Marino did, as Benton continues to explain that Fielding went to great lengths to manipulate everyone into believing that Johnny Donahue killed Mark Bishop. Fielding used a compromised, vulnerable teenager as a scapegoat, and then Fielding had to escalate his manipulations further after he took out the man from Norton’s Woods. That’s the phrase Benton uses. Took out. Fielding took him out and then heard about the Glock found on the body and realized he’d made a serious tactical error. Everything was falling apart. He was losing it, decompensating like Ted Bundy did right before he was caught, Benton says.

“Jack’s fatal mistake was to stop by the firearms lab yesterday morning and ask Morrow about the Glock,” Benton continues. “A little later it was gone and so was Jack, and that was impulsive and reckless and just damn stupid on his part. It would have been better to let the gun be traced to him and claim it was lost or stolen. Anything would have been better than what he did. It shows how out of control he was to take the damn gun from the lab.”

“You’re saying the Glock the man from Norton’s Woods had is Jack’s.”

“Yes.”

“It’s definitely Jack’s,” I repeat, and the elevator is moving now, making a lot of stops on its way up, and I realize it is lunch-time. Employees heading to the break room or heading out of the building.

“Yes. The dead man has a gun that could be traced to Fielding once acid was used on the drilled-off serial number,” Benton says, and it’s clear to me that he knows who the dead man is.

“That was done. Not here.” I don’t want to think of yet something else done inside my building that I didn’t know.

“Hours ago. At the scene. We took care of the identification right there.”

“The FBI did.”

“It was important to know immediately who the gun was traced to. To confirm our suspicions. Then it came here to the CFC and is safely locked up in the firearms lab. For further examination,” Benton says.

“If Jack is the one who murdered him, he should have realized the problem with the Glock when he first was called about the case on Sunday afternoon,” I reply. “Yet he waited until Monday morning to be concerned about a gun he knew could be traced to him?”

“To avoid suspicion. If he’d started asking the Cambridge police a lot of questions about the Glock prior to the body being transported to the CFC, or demanded that the gun be brought in immediately when the labs were closed, it would have come across as peculiar. Antennas would have gone up. Fielding slept on it and by Monday morning was probably beside himself and planning what he was going to do once the gun was brought in. He would take it and flee. Remember, he hasn’t been exactly rational. It’s important to keep in mind he’s been cognitively impaired by his substance abuse.”

I think about the chronology. I reconstruct Fielding’s steps yesterday morning, based on information from his desk drawer and the indented writing on his call-sheet pad. Shortly after seven a.m. it seems he talked to Julia Gabriel before she called me at Dover, and about a half-hour later he entered the cooler, and minutes after that he told Anne and Ollie the body from Norton’s Woods was inexplicably bloody. It seems more logical to consider it was at this point that Fielding recognized the dead man and realized the Glock he’d heard about from the police would be traced to him. If he didn’t recognize the dead man until Monday morning, then Fielding didn’t kill him, I say to Benton, who replies that Fielding had a motive I couldn’t possibly know about.

The dead man’s stepfather is Liam Saltz, Benton informs me. It was confirmed a little while ago when an FBI agent went to the Charles Hotel and talked to Dr. Saltz and showed him an ID photograph Marino took of the man from Norton’s Woods. He was Eli Goldman, age twenty-two, a graduate student at MIT and an employee at Otwahl Technologies, working on special micro-mechanical projects. The video clips from Eli’s headphones were traced to a webcam site on Otwahl’s server, Benton tells me, but he won’t elaborate on who did the tracing, if Lucy might have.

“He rigged up the headphones himself?” I ask as the elevator finally gets to us and the doors slide open.

“It appears likely. He loved to tinker.”

“And MORT? How did he get that? And what for? More tinkering?” I know I sound cynical.

I know when people have their damn minds made up, and I’m not ready for my mind to be made up. Not one damn thing should be decided this fast.

“A facsimile, a model he made as a boy,” Benton explains. “Based on photographs his stepfather had taken of the real thing when he was lobbying against it some eight or nine years ago when you and Dr. Saltz testified before the Senate subcommittee. Apparently, Eli was making models of robots and inventing things since he was practically in diapers.”

We slowly sink from floor to floor while I ask why Otwahl would hire the stepson of a detractor like Liam Saltz, and I want to know what Otwahl means, because Mrs. Donahue said the name meant something. “O. T. Wahl,” Benton replies. “A play on words, because the last name of the company’s founder is Wahl. On the Wall, as in a fly on the wall, and Eli’s last name isn’t Saltz,” Benton adds, as if I didn’t hear him when he told me it’s Goldman. Eli Goldman. But Otwahl would have done a background check on him, I point out. Certainly they would have known who his step-father is, even if their last names aren’t the same.

“MORT was a long time ago,” Benton says as the elevator doors open on the lower floor. “And I don’t know that Otwahl had a clue Eli and his stepdad were philosophically simpatico.”

“How long had Eli worked there?”

“Three years.”

“Maybe three years ago Otwahl wasn’t doing anything that Eli or his stepfather would have been concerned about,” I suggest as we walk along gray tile while Phil the security guard watches us from behind his glass partition. I don’t wave at him. I’m not friendly.

“Well, Eli was worried and had been for months,” Benton says. “He was about to give his stepfather a demonstration of technology that he wasn’t going to approve of at all, a fly that could be a fly on the wall and spy and detect explosives and deliver them or drugs or poisons or who knows what.”

Nanoexplosives or dangerous drugs delivered by something as small as a fly, I think, as we walk past staff I’ve not seen in months. I don’t stop to chat. I don’t wave or say hello or even have eye contact.

“He’s about to give his stepfather important information like that and conveniently dies,” I reply.

“Exactly. The motive I mentioned,” Benton says. “Drugs,” he says again, and then he tells me more, gives me details the FBI learned from Liam Saltz just a few hours earlier.

I feel sad and upset again as I envision what Benton is saying about a young man so enamored of his famous stepfather that whenever they were to see each other, Eli always set his watch to it, mirroring Dr. Saltz’s time zone in anticipation of their reunion, a quirk that has its roots in Eli’s poignant past of broken homes and parental figures missing in action and adored from afar. I remember what I watched on the video clips, Eli and Sock walking to Norton’s Woods, and then I imagine Dr. Saltz emerging from the building in the near dark after a wedding Eli wasn’t invited to. I imagine the Nobel laureate looking around and wondering where his stepson was, having no idea of the terrible truth. Dead. Zipped up inside a pouch and unidentified. A young man, barely more than a boy. Someone Lucy and I may have crossed paths with at an exhibit in London the summer of 2001.

“Who killed him, and what for?” I say as we pass through the empty bay, the CFC van-body truck gone. “I don’t see how what you’ve just said explains Eli being murdered by Jack.”

“It all points in the same direction. I’m sorry. But it does.”

“I just don’t see why and for what.” I open the door leading outside, and it is too beautiful and sunny to be so cold.

“I know this is hard,” Benton says.

“A pair of data gloves?” I say as we begin to pick our way over snow that is glazed and slick. “A micromechanical fly? Who would stab him with an injection knife, and why?”

“Drugs.” Benton goes back to that again. “Somehow Eli had the misfortune of getting involved with Jack or the other way around. Strength-enhancing, very dangerous drugs. Probably was using and selling, and Eli was the supplier, or someone at Otwahl was. We don’t know. But Eli being killed while he was out there with a flybot and about to meet his stepfather wasn’t a coincidence. It’s the motive, I mean.”

“Why would Jack be interested in a flybot or a meeting?” I ask as we move very slowly, one step at a time, my feet about to go out from under me. “A damn ice-skating rink,” I complain, because the parking lot wasn’t plowed and it needs to be sanded. Nobody has been running this place the way it ought to be run.

“I’m sorry, we’re way over here.” As we head slowly toward the back fence. “But that’s all there was. The drug connection,” Benton then says. “Not street drugs. This is about Otwahl. About a huge amount of money. About the war, about potential violence on an international and massive scale.”

“Then if what you’re saying is right, it would seem to imply Jack was spying on Eli. Rigged up the headphones with hidden recording devices and followed him to Norton’s Woods. That would make sense if the murder was to stop Eli from showing his stepfather the flybot or turning it over to him. How else would Jack know what Eli was about to do? He must have been spying on him, or someone was.”

“I doubt Jack had anything to do with the headphones.”

“My point exactly. Jack wouldn’t be interested in technology like that or capable of it, and he wouldn’t be interested in a place like Otwahl. You’re not talking about the Jack I know. He’s much too limbically driven, too impatient, too simple, to do what you’ve just described.” I almost say too primitive, because that has always been part of his charm. His physicality, his hedonism, his linear way of coping with things. “And the headphones don’t make sense,” I insist. “The headphones make me think someone else might be involved.”

“I understand how you feel. I can understand why you’d want to think that.”

“And did Dr. Saltz know his adoring stepson was into drugs and had an illegal gun?” I ask. “Did he happen to mention the headphones or other people Eli might have been involved with?”

“He knew nothing about the headphones and not much about Eli’s personal life. Only that Eli was worried about his safety. As I said, he’d been worried for months. I know this is painful, Kay.”

“Worried about what, specifically?” I ask as we walk very slowly, and someone is going to get hurt out here. Someone is going to slip and break bones and sue the CFC. That will be next.

“Eli was involved in dangerous projects and surrounded by bad people. That’s how Dr. Saltz described it,” Benton says. “It’s a lot to explain and not what you might imagine.”

“He knew his stepson had a gun, an illegal one,” I repeat my question.

“He didn’t know that. I assume Eli wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Everyone seems to be doing a lot of assuming.” I stop and look at Benton, our breath smoking out in the brightness and the cold, and we are at the back of the parking lot now, near the fence, in what I call the hinterlands.

“Eli would know how Dr. Saltz feels about guns,” Benton says. “Jack probably sold the Glock to him or gave it to him.”

“Or someone did,” I reiterate. “Just as someone must have given him the signet ring with the Donahue crest on it. I don’t suppose Eli was also involved in tae kwon do.” I look around at SUVs that don’t belong to the CFC, but I don’t look at the agents inside them. I don’t look at anyone as I shield my eyes from the sun.

“No,” Benton answers. “The football player wasn’t, either, Wally Jamison, but he used the gym where they’re held, used Jack’s same gym. Maybe Eli had been to that gym, too.”

“Eli doesn’t look like someone who uses a gym. Hardly a muscle in his body,” I comment as Benton points a key fob at a black Ford Explorer that isn’t his and the doors unlock with a chirp. “And if Jack killed him, why?” I again ask, because it makes no sense to me, but maybe it’s my fatigue. No sleep and too much trauma, and I’m too tired to comprehend the simplest thing.

“Or maybe the connection has to do with Otwahl and Johnny Donahue and other illegal activities Jack was involved in that you’re about to find out. What he was doing at the CFC, how he was earning his money while you were gone.” Benton’s voice is hard as he says all that while opening my door for me. “Don’t know everything but enough, and you were right to ask what Mark Bishop was doing in his backyard when he was killed. What kind of playing he was doing. I almost couldn’t believe it when you asked me that, and I couldn’t tell you when you asked. Mark was in one of Jack’s classes, as Mrs. Donahue implied, for three- to six-year-olds, had just started in December and was practicing tae kwon do in his yard when someone, and I think we know who, appeared, and again, you’re probably right about how it happened.”

As he goes around to the driver’s side to get in, and I dig in my bag for my sunglasses, impatient and frustrated as a lipstick, pens, and a tube of hand cream spill on the plastic floor mat. I must have left my sunglasses somewhere. Maybe in my office at Dover, where I can scarcely remember being anymore. It seems like forever ago, and right now I am sickened beyond what I could possibly describe to anyone, and it doesn’t please me to hear I was right about anything. I don’t give a damn who is right, just that someone is, and I don’t think anybody is. I just don’t believe it.

“A person Mark had no reason to distrust, such as his instructor, who lured him into a fantasy, a game, and murdered him,” Benton goes on as he starts the SUV. “And then trumped up a way to blame it on Johnny.”

“I didn’t say that part.” I stuff items back into my bag as I grab my shoulder harness and fasten up, then I decide to take my jacket off, and I undo the seat belt.

“What part?” Benton enters an address in the GPS.

“I never said Jack trumped up a way to make Johnny believe he drove nails into Mark Bishop’s head,” I reply, and the SUV is warm from when Benton drove it here, and the sun is hot as it blazes through glass.

I take off my jacket and toss it in back, where there is a large, thick box with a FedEx label. I can’t tell whom it is for and I’m not interested, probably some agent Benton knows, probably whoever Douglas is, and I suppose I’ll find out soon enough. I fasten my shoulder harness again, working so hard I’m practically out of breath, and my heart is pounding.

“I didn’t mean that part was from you. There are a lot of questions. We need you to help us answer everything we possibly can,” Benton says.

We begin backing up, pulling out of my parking lot, waiting for the gate to open, and I feel handled. I feel humored. I’m not sure I remember ever feeling so nonessential in an investigation, as if I’m an obstruction and a nuisance people have to be politically correct with because of my position, but not taken seriously and unwanted.

“I thought I’d seen it all. I’m warning you it’s bad, Kay.” Benton’s voice has no energy as he says that. It sounds hollow, like something gutted.

19

The gray frame house with the old stone foundation and a cold cellar in back were built by a sea captain in centuries past. The property is scrubbed and eroded by harsh weather, directly exposed to what blows in from the sea, and sits alone at the end of a narrow, icy street coarsely sanded by city emergency crews. Where branches have snapped, ice is shattered on the frozen earth and sparkles like broken glass in a high sun that offers no warmth, only a blinding glare.

Sand makes a gritty sound against the underside of the SUV while Benton drives very slowly, looking for a place to park, and I look out at the brightness of the sandy road and the heaving deep-blue of the sea and the paler blue of the cloudless sky. I no longer feel the need for sleep or that I could if I tried. Having last gotten up at quarter of five yesterday morning in Delaware, I have been awake some thirty hours since, which isn’t unheard of for me, isn’t really remarkable if I pause to calculate how often it happens in a profession where people don’t have the common courtesy to kill or to die during business hours. But this is a different type of sleeplessness, foreign and unfamiliar, with the added excitement bordering on hysteria from being told or having it implied at least that I’ve lived much of my life with something deadly and I’m the reason it turned deadly.

No one is stating such a thing in exactly those words, but I know it to be true. Benton is diplomatic, but I know. He’s not said it’s my fault people are brutally dead and countless others have been disrespected and defiled, not to mention those harmed by drugs, people whose names we may never know, guinea pigs or “lab rats,” as Benton put it, for a malevolent science project involving a potent form of anabolic steroid or testosterone laced with a hallucinogenic to build strength and muscle mass and enhance aggression and fearlessness. To create killing machines, to turn human beings into monstrosities with no frontal cortex, no concept of consequences, human robots that savagely kill and feel no remorse, feel virtually nothing at all, including pain. Benton has been describing what Liam Saltz told the FBI this morning, the poor man bereft and terrified.

Dr. Saltz suspects Eli got involved with a treacherous and unauthorized technology at Otwahl, found himself in the midst of DARPA research gone bad, gone frighteningly wrong, and was about to warn his humanitarian Nobel laureate stepfather and to offer proof and to beg him to put a stop to it. Fielding put a stop to Eli because Fielding was using these dangerous drugs, perhaps helping to distribute them, but mostly my deputy chief with his lifelong lust for strength and physical beauty and his chronic aches and pains was addicted. That’s the theory behind Fielding’s vile crimes, and I don’t believe it is that simple or even true. But I do believe other comments Benton has continued to make. I was too good to Fielding. I’ve always been too good to him. I’ve never seen him for what he is or accepted his potential to do real harm, and therefore I enabled him.

Snow turned to freezing rain where the ocean warms the air, and the power is still out from downed lines in this area of Salem Neck called Winter Island, where Jack Fielding owns a historic investment property I had no idea about. To get to it you have to pass the Plummer Home for Boys, a lovely mossy green mansion set on a gracious spread of lawn overlooking the sea, with a distant view of the wealthy resort community of Marblehead. I can’t help but think about the way things begin and end, the way people have a tendency to run in place, to tread water, to really not get beyond where and how it all started for them.

Fielding stopped his life where it took off for him so precipitously, in a picturesque setting for troubled youths who can no longer live with their families. I wonder if it was deliberate to pick a spot no more than a stone’s throw from a boys’ home, if that factored into his subconscious when he decided on a property I’m told he intended to retire to or perhaps sell for a profit in the future when the real-estate market turns around and after he’d finished much-needed improvements. He’d been doing the work on the house and its outbuilding himself and doing it poorly, and I’m about to see the manifestation of his disorganized, chaotic mind, the handiwork of someone profoundly out of control, Benton has let me know. I’m about to see the way my enabled protege lived and ended.

“Are you still with us? I know you’re tired,” Benton says as he touches my arm.

“I’m fine.” I realize he’s been talking and I tuned him out.

“You don’t look fine. You’re still crying.”

“I’m not crying. It’s the sun. I can’t believe I left my sunglasses somewhere.”

“I’ve said you can have mine.” His dark glasses turn toward me as he creeps along the sandy, gritty-sounding road in the glaring sun.

“No, thank you.”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on with you, because we’re not going to have a chance to talk for a while,” he says. “You’re angry with me.”

“You’re just doing your job, whatever it is.”

“You’re angry with me because you’re angry at Jack, and you’re afraid to be angry at him.”

“I’m not afraid of what I feel about him. I’m more afraid of everyone else,” I reply.

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“It’s something I sense, and you don’t agree with me, so we should leave it at that,” I say to him as I look out the window at the cold, blue ocean and the distant horizon, where I can make out houses on the shore.

“Maybe you could be a little more specific. What do you sense? Is this a new thought?”

“It isn’t. And it’s nothing anybody wants to hear,” I answer him as I stare out at the bright afternoon while we continue to troll for a place to park.

I’m not really helping him look for a spot. Mostly I’m sitting and staring out the window while my mind goes where it wants to, like a small animal darting about, looking for a safe place. Benton probably thinks I’m pretty useless. He’s aided and abetted my uselessness by waiting this long to come get me for something that’s been going on for hours. I’m showing up in medias res, as if this is a musical or an opera and it’s no big deal for me to wander in during the middle or toward the end, depending on which act we’re in.

“Christ, this is ridiculous. You would think someone would have left us something. I should have had Marino put cones out, save us something.” Benton vents his anger at parked cars and the narrow street, then says to me, “I want to hear whatever it is. New thought or not. Now, while we have a minute alone.”

There is no point in saying the rest of it, of telling him again what I sense, which is a calculating, cruel logic behind what was done to Wally Jamison, Mark Bishop, and Eli Goldman, behind what happened to Fielding, behind everything, a precisely formulated agenda, even if it didn’t turn out as planned. Not that I know the plan in its entirety, maybe not even most of it, but what I sense is palpable and undeniable, and I won’t be talked out of it. Trust your instincts. Don’t trust anything else. This is about power. The power to control people, to make them feel good or frightened or to suffer unbearably. Power over life and death. I’m not going to repeat what I’m sure sounds irrational. I’m not going to tell Benton yet again that I sense an insatiable desire for power, that I feel the presence of a murderous entity watching us from a dark place, lying in wait. Some things are over, but not everything is, and I don’t say any of this to him.

“I’m just going to have to tuck it in here, and the hell with it.” He isn’t really talking to me but to himself, easing as close to a rock wall as he can so we don’t stick halfway out into the slick, sandy street. “We’ll hope some yahoo doesn’t hit me. If so, he’ll be in for an unpleasant surprise.”

I suppose he means it wouldn’t be fun to realize the door you just dinged or the bumper you just scraped or the side you just swiped is the property of the FBI. The SUV is a typical government vehicle, black with tinted glass and cloth seats, and emergency strobes hidden behind the grille, and on the floor in back are two coffee cups neatly held in place inside their cardboard to-go box along with a balled-up food bag. The war wagon of a busy agent who is tidy but not always in a convenient spot to toss out trash. I didn’t know that Douglas was a woman until Benton referred to the special agent who’s assigned this car as “she” a little while ago while he was telling me about her running the license plate of the Bentley that met us at Hanscom last night, a 2003 four-door black Flying Spur personally owned by the CEO of a Boston-based niche service company that supplies “discreet concierge-minded chauffeurs” who will drive any vehicle requested, explaining why the Bentley didn’t have a livery license plate.

The reservation was made online by someone using an e-mail address that belongs to Johnny Donahue, an inpatient at McLean with no Internet access when the e-mail was sent yesterday from an IP address that is an Internet cafe near Salem State College, which is very close to here. The credit card used belongs to Erica Donahue, and as far as anybody knows, she doesn’t do anything online and won’t touch a computer. Needless to say, the FBI and the police don’t believe she or her son booked the Bentley or the driver.

The FBI and the police believe Fielding did, that he likely got access to Mrs. Donahue’s credit card information from payments she made to the tae kwon do club for lessons her son took until he was told not to come back after he tried to kick his instructor, my deputy chief, a grandmaster with a seventh-degree black belt. It isn’t clear how Fielding might have gained access to Johnny’s e-mail account unless he somehow manipulated the vulnerable and gullible teenager into giving him the password at some point or learned it by some other means.

The chauffeur, who isn’t suspected of anything except not bothering to research Dr. Scarpetta before he delivered something to her, received the assignment from dispatch, and according to dispatch, no one who works at the elite transportation company ever met the alleged Mrs. Donahue or talked to her over the phone. In the notes section of the online reservation, an “exotic luxury car” was requested for an “errand” with the explanation that further instructions and a letter to be delivered would be dropped off at the private driving company’s headquarters. At approximately six p.m., a manila envelope was slipped through the mail slot in the front door, and some four hours later, the chauffeur showed up at Hanscom Field with it and decided that Benton was me.

We get out into the cold, clean air, and ice is everywhere, lit up by the sun as if we are inside an illuminated crystal chandelier. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I watch the dark-blue sea as it rolls and contracts like muscle, pushing itself inland to smash and boil against a rock-strewn shore where no one lives. Right here a sea captain once looked out at a view that I doubt has changed much in hundreds of years, acres of rugged coastline and beach with copses of hardwood trees, untouched and uninhabitable because it is part of a marine recreational park, which happens to have a boat launch.

A little farther down, past the campground, where the Neck wraps around toward the Salem Harbor, is a yacht yard where Fielding’s twenty-foot Mako was shrink-wrapped and on a jack stand when police found it this morning. I’m vaguely aware he has a dive boat because I’ve heard him mention it, but I didn’t know where he keeps it. I never would have imagined twenty-four hours ago that it might become the focus of a homicide investigation, or that his dark-blue Navigator SUV with its missing front license plate would, or that his Glock pistol with its drilled-off serial number would, or that everything Fielding owns and has done throughout his entire existence would.

Overhead, an orange Dauphin helicopter, an HH-65A, also known as a Dolphin, beats low across the cold, blue sky, its enclosed Fenestron ten-bladed tail rotor making a distinctive modulated sound that is described as low noise but to me has a quiet high pitch, is ominously whiny, reminding me a bit of a C-17. Homeland Security is conducting air surveillance, and I’ve been told that, too. I don’t know why federal law enforcement has taken to the air or the land or the sea unless there is a concern about the overall security of the Salem Harbor, a significant port with a huge power plant. I have heard the word terrorism mentioned, just in passing by Benton and also by Marino when I had him on the phone a few minutes ago, but these days I hear that word a lot. In fact, I hear it all the time. Bioterrorism. Chemical terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Industrial terrorism. Nanoterrorism. Technoterrorism. Everything is terrorism if I stop to think about it. Just as every violent crime is hateful and a hate crime, really.

I continue going back to Otwahl, everything leading me back to Otwahl, my thoughts carried on the wing of a flybot or, as Lucy puts it, not a flybot but the holy grail of flybots. Then I think about my old nemesis MORT, a life-size model of it perched like a giant mechanical insect inside a Cambridge apartment rented by Eli Goldman, and next I worry about the controversial scientist Dr. Liam Saltz, who must be heartbroken beyond remedy. Maybe he simply got caught in one of those ghastly coincidences that happens in life, his tragic misfortune to be the stepfather of a brilliant young man who slipped into bad science, bad drugs, and illegal firearms.

A kid too smart for his own good, as Benton puts it, murdered while wearing an antique signet ring missing from Erica Donahue’s house, just as her stationery is missing, and her typewriter and a fountain pen, items that Fielding must have gotten hold of somehow. He must have gotten his hands on all sorts of things from the rich Harvard student he bullied, Johnny Donahue, and it doesn’t matter if it all feels wrong to me. I can’t prove that Fielding didn’t exchange the gold ring for drugs. I can’t prove he didn’t exchange the Glock for drugs. I can’t say that’s not why Eli had the ring and the gun, that there’s some other reason far more nefarious and dangerous than what Benton and others are proposing.

I can say and have said that Eli Goldman was an obstruction to the mercenary progress of a company like Otwahl, and Otwahl is the common denominator in everything, more so than tae kwon do or Fielding. As far as I’m concerned, if Fielding is as directly and solely responsible as everyone is claiming, then we should be taking a very hard and different look at Otwahl and wonder what he had to do with the place beyond being a user or a research subject or even someone who helped distribute experimental drugs until they brought about his complete annihilation.

“Otwahl and Jack Fielding,” I said to Benton a little while ago. If Fielding is guilty of murder and case-tampering and obstruction of justice and all sorts of lies and conspiracies, then he’s intimately connected with Otwahl, right down to its parking lot, where his Navigator likely got tucked out of sight last night during a blizzard. “You have to make that connection in a meaningful way,” I repeatedly told Benton on our drive to this desolate spot that is achingly beautiful and yet ruined, as if Fielding’s property is an ugly stain on the canvas of an exquisite seascape.

“Otwahl Technologies and an eighteenth-century sea captain’s house on Salem Neck,” I said to my husband, and I asked his opinion, his honest and objective opinion. After all, he should have a very well-informed and completely objective opinion because of his alliance with the well-informed and completely objective we‘s, as I stated it, these anonymous comrades of his, the shadowy rank and file of an FBI he doesn’t belong to anymore, he claims, and of course I don’t believe him. He is FBI, all right, as secretive and driven as I remember him from times long past, and maybe I could put up with that if I didn’t feel so utterly alone.

He’s not even listening to me anymore, pretty much checked out when I made the comment a few minutes ago that Fielding must have some link to Otwahl beyond his teaching martial arts to a few brainy students who had internships with the technology behemoth. The connection must be more than just drugs, I said. Drug-impregnated pain-relieving patches can’t be the entire explanation for what I’m about to find inside a tiny stone outbuilding that Fielding was turning into a guest quarters before he supposedly found another use for it that has earned it several new names.

The Kill Cottage, I think darkly, bitterly. The Semen’s House, I think cynically.

Destined to be Salem’s latest attraction during Halloween, which lasts all of October, with a million people making a pilgrimage here from all over the land. Another example of a place made famous by atrocities that don’t seem real anymore, tall tales, almost cartoonish, like the witch on her broom depicted on the Salem logo that is on police patches and even painted on the police cruiser doors. Be careful what you hate and murder, because one day it will own you. The Witch City, as people have dubbed the place where those men and women were herded up to what is now called Gallows Hill Park, a spot similar to where Fielding bought a sea captain’s house. Places that don’t change much. Places that are now parks. Only Gallows Hill is ugly, and it should be. An open field ravaged by the wind, and barren. Mostly rocks, weeds, and patchy, coarse grass. Nothing grows there.

Thoughts like these are solar flares, and peak and spike with a timing I can’t seem to control, as Benton touches my elbow, then grips it firmly, while we cross the sandy dead-end street that has turned into a parking lot of law-enforcement vehicles, marked and unmarked, some with the Salem logo, silhouettes of witches straddling their brooms. Pulled up close to the sea captain’s house, almost right up against the back of it, is the CFC’s white van-body truck that Marino drove here hours earlier while I was in the autopsy room and then upstairs, having no idea what was happening some thirty miles northeast. The back of the truck is open, and Marino is inside, wearing green rubber boots and a bright-yellow hard hat and a bright-yellow level-A suit, what we use for demanding jobs that require protection from biological and chemical hazards.

Cables snake over the diamond-steel floor and out the open metal doors, over the unpaved icy drive, and disappear through the front of the stone cottage, what must have been a charming, cozy outbuilding before Fielding turned it into a construction site of exposed foundation blocks, the ground frozen with ice that is gray. The area behind the sea captain’s house is an eyesore of spilled cement and toppled piles of lumber and bricks, and rusting tools, shingles, weather stripping, and nails everywhere. A wheelbarrow is covered loosely with a black tarp that flaps, the entire perimeter strung with yellow crime scene tape that shakes and jumps in the wind.

“We got enough juice in this thing for lights and that’s it, got about a hundred and twenty minutes of run time left,” Marino says to me as he digs inside a built-in storage bin.

What he’s referring to is the auxiliary power unit, the APU, which can keep the truck’s electrical system running while the engine is off and supplies a limited amount of emergency power externally.

“Assuming the power doesn’t come back on, and maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ve heard it could anytime, the main problem being those poles knocked over by snapped-off trees you probably drove past on Derby Street on your way here. But even if we get the electricity back, it won’t help much in there.” He means in the stone outbuilding. “No heat in there. It’s cold as shit, and after a while it gets to you, I’m just telling you,” he says from inside the truck while Benton and I stand outside in the wind and I flip up the collar of my jacket. “Cold as our damn fridge at the morgue, if you can imagine working in there for hours.”

As if I’ve never worked a scene in frigid weather and am unfamiliar with a morgue cooler.

“Course, there are some advantages to that if the power goes out, which it’s going to do in these parts when you get storms, and he didn’t have a backup generator,” Marino continues.

He means that Fielding didn’t.

“And that’s a lot of money to lose if the freezer quits. Which is why plugging in a space heater and turning it on high was for the obvious reason of ruining the DNA so we’d never know who he’d taken the shit from. Do you think that’s possible?” he asks me.

“I’m not sure which part of it—” I start to say.

“That we won’t ID them. Possible we won’t?” Marino continues talking nonstop, as if he’s been drinking coffee since I saw him last. His eyes are bloodshot and glassy.

“No,” I reply. “I don’t think it’s possible. I think we’ll find out.”

“So you don’t think it’s as worthless as tapioca.”

“Christ,” Benton says. “I could have done without that. Christ, I wish you’d stop with the fucking food analogies.”

“Low copy number.” I remind Mario we can get a DNA profile from as little as three human cells. Unless virtually every cell is degraded, we’ll be okay, I assure him.

“Well, it’s only fair we really try.” Marino talks to me as if Benton’s not here, directing his every comment to me as if he’s in charge and doesn’t want to be reminded of my FBI or former FBI husband. “I mean, what if it was your son?”

“I agree we have to ID them and let their next of kin know,” I reply.

“And get sued, now that I think of it,” Marino reconsiders. “Well, maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone. Seems to me we just need to know who it came from. Why tell the families and open a can of worms?”

“Full disclosure,” Benton says ironically, as if he really knows what that is. He is looking at his iPhone, reading something on it, and he adds, “Because a lot of them probably already know. We’re assuming Fielding arranged with them up front to pay for the service he was offering. It’s not possible to hide anything.”

“We’re not going to,” I answer. “We don’t hide things, period.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I’m thinking we really should install cameras inside our cooler, not just outside in the hall and the bay and certain rooms but actually in there,” Marino says to me, as if it has always been his belief that we should have cameras inside the coolers, probably inside the freezer, too. In fact, he’s never mentioned the idea before now. “I wonder if cameras would work in a cooler….” he is saying.

“They work outdoors. It gets colder in the winter around here than it is in the cooler,” Benton comments dully, barely listening to Marino, who is full of himself, enjoying his role in the drama that has unfolded, and he’s never liked Fielding. I can’t think of a bigger I told you so.

“Well, we got to do it,” Marino says to me. “Cameras and no more of this shit, of people doing shit they think they can get away with.”

I look behind us at boots and shoes lined up outside the opening that leads into the cottage. The Kill Cottage, the Semen’s Cottage. Some cops are calling it the Little Shop of Horrors.

“Cameras,” I hear Marino as I stare at the stone cottage. “If we had them in the cooler, we’d have it all on tape. Well, hell, maybe it’s a good thing. Shit, imagine if something like that got leaked and ended up on YouTube. Fielding doing that to all these dead bodies. Jesus. I bet you have cameras like that at Dover, though.”

He hands us folded bright-yellow suits like his.

“Dover must have cameras in the coolers, right?” he goes on. “I’m sure DoD would spring for it, and nothing like the present to ask, right? In light of the circumstances, I don’t think anything’s off the table when it comes to beefing up security at our place….”

I realize Marino is still talking to me, but I don’t answer because I’m worrying about what’s in the cab of the truck. I’m suddenly overwhelmed by pity as I stand outside in the cold and wind and glare, my level-A suit folded up and tucked under my arm while Benton is putting his on.

And Marino goes on quite cheerfully, as if this is quite the carnival, “… Like I said, a good thing it’s cold. I can’t imagine working this on one of those ninety-degree days like we used to get in Richmond, where you can wring water out of the air and nothing’s stirring. I mean, what a fucking pig. Don’t even look at the toilet in there; probably the last time it was flushed was when they were still burning witches around here….”

“They were hanged,” I hear myself say.

Marino looks at me with a blank expression on his big face, and his nose and ears are red, the hard hat perched on top of his bald head like the bonnet of a yellow fireplug.

“How’s he doing?” I indicate the cab of the truck and what’s inside it.

“Anne’s a regular Dr. Dolittle. Did you know she wanted to be a vet before she decided to be Madam Curie?” He still says curry, like curry powder, no matter how many times I’ve told him it’s Cure-ee, like the element curium that’s named after Madame Cure-ee.

“I tell you what, though,” he then says to me. “It’s a good thing the heat hadn’t been off in the house more than five, six hours before anybody got here. Dogs like that don’t have much more hair than I do. He’d dug himself under the covers in Fielding’s rat’s nest of a bed and was still shivering like he was having a seizure. Of course, he was scared shitless. All these cops, the FBI storming in with all their tactical gear, the whole nine yards. Not to mention I’ve heard that greyhounds don’t like to be left alone, have what do you call it, separation anxiety.”

He opens another storage bin and hands me a pair of boots, knowing my size without asking.

“How do you know it’s Jack’s bed?” I ask.

“It’s his shit everywhere. Who else’s would it be?”

“We need to be sure of everything.” I’m going to keep saying it. “He was out here in the middle of nowhere. No neighbors, no eyes or ears, the park deserted this time of year. How do you know for a fact he was alone out here? How can you be absolutely certain he didn’t have help?”

“Who? Who the hell would help him do something like this?” Marino looks at me, and I can see it on his big face, what he thinks. I can’t be rational about Fielding. That’s exactly what Marino thinks, probably what everybody thinks.

“We need to keep an open mind,” I reply, then I indicate the cab of the truck again and ask again about the dog.

“He’s fine,” Marino says. “Anne got him something to eat, chicken and rice from that Greek diner in Belmont, made him a nice comfy bed, and the heat’s blasting, feels like an oven, probably sucking up more to keep his skinny ass warm than we’re using in the cellar. You want to meet him?”

He hands us heavy black rubber gloves and disposable nitrile ones, and Benton blows on his hands to warm them as he continues text-messaging and reading whatever is landing on his phone. He doesn’t seem interested in anything Marino and I are saying.

“Let me take care of things first,” I tell Marino, because I don’t have it in me at the moment to see an abandoned dog that was left alone in a pitch-dark house with no heat after his master was murdered by the person who stole him. Or so the theory goes.

“Here’s the routine,” Marino then says, grabbing two bright-yellow hard hats and handing them to us. “Over there, where you’ll see plastic tubs for decon.” He points at an area of dirt near a sheet of plywood that serves as the cottage’s front door. “You don’t want to track anything beyond the perimeter. Suits and boots go on and off right over there.”

Lined up next to three plastic tubs filled with water is a bottle of Dawn dish-washing detergent and rows of footwear, the boots and shoes of the people inside, including what I recognize as a pair of tan combat boots, men’s size. Based on what I’m seeing, there are at least eight investigators working the scene, including someone who might be army, someone who might be Briggs. Marino bends over to check the status display on the diamond steel-encased APU in the back of the truck, then thuds down the diamond-steel steps out into the glare and sparkle of ice that coats bare trees as if they have been dipped in glass. Hanging everywhere are long, sharp icicles that remind me of nails and spears.

“So what you can do is put your gear on now,” Marino says for my benefit as Benton wanders off, busy with his phone, communicating with someone and not listening to us.

Marino and I begin walking to the cottage, careful not to slip on ice that is frozen unevenly over rutted dirt and mud and debris that Fielding never cleaned up.

“Leave your shoes here,” Marino tells me, “and if you need to use the facilities or go out for fresh air, just make sure you swish your boots off before you go back in. There’s a lot of shit in there you don’t want to be tracking everywhere. We don’t even know exactly what shit, could be shit we don’t know about, my point is. But what we do know isn’t something you want to be tracking all over, and I know they say the AIDS virus can’t live very long postmortem or whatever, but don’t ask me to find out.”

“What’s been done?” I unfold my suit, and the wind almost blows it out of my hands.

“Things you’re not going to want to do and shouldn’t be your problem.” Marino works his huge hands into a pair of purple gloves.

“I’ll do anything that needs to be done,” I remind him.

“You’re going to need your heavy rubber gloves if you start touching a lot of stuff in there.” Marino puts those on next.

I feel like snapping at him that I’m not here to sightsee. Of course I’ll be touching things. But I don’t intend to stoop to saying I’ve shown up to work a crime scene as if I’m one of the troops reporting to Marino and will be saluting him next. It’s not that I don’t understand what Marino is doing, what Benton is doing, what everyone is doing. Nobody wants me guilty of the very thing Mrs. Donahue accused Fielding of, ironically. Not that I want to have a conflict, either, and I understand I shouldn’t be the one examining someone who worked for me and who, as rumor has it, I had sex with at some point in my life.

What I don’t understand is why I’m not bothered more than I am. The only sadness I’m aware of right now is what I feel about a dog named Sock who is sleeping on towels in the cab of the CFC truck. If I see the dog I’m afraid I’ll break down, and every other thought is an anxious one about him. Where will he go? Not to an animal shelter. I won’t allow that. It would make sense if Liam Saltz took him, but he lives in England, and how would he get the dog back to the UK unless it is in the cargo area of a jet, and I won’t permit that, either. The pitiful creature has been through enough in this life.

“Just be careful.” Marino continues his briefing as if I don’t know a damn thing about what is going on around here. “And just so you know, we got the van making runs back and forth like clockwork.”

Yes, I know. I’m the one who set it up. I watch Benton wander back toward the truck, talking to someone on his phone, and I feel forgotten. I feel extraneous. I feel I’m not helpful or of interest to anything or anyone.

“Pretty much nonstop, already thirty or forty DNA samples in the works, a lot of it not completely thawed, so maybe you’re right and we’ll be lucky. The van makes an evidence run and then turns around and comes right back, is on its way back here now even as we speak,” Marino says.

I bend over and untie one of my boots.

“Anne drives like a damn demon. I didn’t know that. I always figured she’d drive like an old lady, but she’s been sliding in and out of here like the damn thing’s on skis. It’s something,” Marino says, as if he likes her. “Anyway, everybody’s working like Santa’s helpers. The general says he can bring in backup scientists from Dover. You sure?”

At the moment I don’t know what I want, except a chance to evaluate the situation for myself, and I’ve made that clear.

“It’s not your decision,” I answer Marino, untying my other boot. “I’ll handle it.”

“Seems like it would be helpful to have AFDIL.” Marino says it in a way that makes me suspicious, and I eye the tan combat boots by the decon tubs.

It’s awkward enough that Briggs is here, and it enters my mind that he might not be the only one who’s shown up from Dover.

“Who else?” I ask Marino as I lean against cinderblocks for balance. “Rockman or Pruitt?”

“Well, Colonel Pruitt.”

Another army man, Pruitt is the director of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, AFDIL.

“He and the general flew in together,” Marino adds.

I didn’t ask either of them to come, but they didn’t need me to ask, and besides, Marino asked, at least he admitted to inviting Briggs. Marino told me about it during the drive here, over the phone. He said by the way he hoped I didn’t mind that he took the liberty, especially since Briggs supposedly had been calling and I supposedly hadn’t been answering, so Briggs hunted down Marino. Briggs wanted to know about Eli, the man from Norton’s Woods, and Marino told him what was known about the case and then told him “everything else,” Marino informed me, and he hoped I didn’t mind.

I replied that I did mind, but what’s done is done. I seem to be saying that a lot, and I said as much to Marino while I was on the phone with him during the car ride here. I said certain things were done because Marino had done them, and I can’t run an office like that, although what was implicit but not stated was that Briggs is here for that very reason. He’s here because I can’t run an office. Not like that. Not at all. If I could run the CFC as the government and MIT and Harvard and everyone expected, nobody would be working this crime scene, because it wouldn’t exist.

My yellow suit is stiff and digs into my chin as I pull my green rubber boots on, and Marino moves the makeshift plyboard door out of the way. Behind it is a wide sheet of heavy translucent plastic nailed to the top of the door frame, hanging like a curtain.

“Just so we’re clear, I’m maintaining the chain of custody,” I tell him the same thing I said earlier. “We’re doing this the way we always do it.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

I have a right to say so. Briggs isn’t above the law. He has to honor jurisdiction, and for better or for worse, this case is the jurisdiction of Massachusetts and the principalities where the crimes have occurred.

“I just think any help we can get…” Marino says.

“I know what you think.”

“Look, it’s not like there’s going to be a trial,” he then says. “Fielding saved the Commonwealth a lot of fucking money.”