Port Mortuary

20

The air is heavy with the smell of wood smoke, and I notice that the fireplace in the far wall is crammed with partially burned pieces of lumber topped by billowy clouds of whitish-gray ash, delicate, as if spun by a spider, but in layers. Something clean-burning, like cotton cloth, I think, or an expensive grade of paper that doesn’t have a high wood-pulp content.

Whoever built the fire did so with the flue closed, and the assumption is that Fielding did, but no one seems quite sure why, unless he was out of his mind or hoping that eventually his Little Shop of Horrors would burn to the ground. But if that was his intention, he certainly didn’t go about it in the right way, and I make a mental note of a gas can in a corner and cans of paint thinner and rags and piles of lumber. Everywhere I look I see an opportunity for starting a conflagration easily, so the fireplace makes no sense unless he was too deranged in the end to think clearly or wasn’t trying to burn down the building but to get rid of something, perhaps to destroy evidence. Or someone was.

I look around in the uneven, harsh illumination of temporary low-voltage extension lights hanging from hooks and mounted on poles, their bulbs enclosed in cages. Strewn over an old scarred paint-spattered workbench are hand tools, clamps, drill bits, paint-brushes, plastic buckets of L-shaped flooring nails and screws, and power tools, such as a drill with screwdriver attachments, a circular saw, a finishing sander, and a lathe on a metal stand. Metal shavings, some of them shiny, and sawdust are on the bench and the concrete floor, everything filthy and rusting, with nothing protecting Fielding’s investment in home improvement from the sea air and the weather but heavy plastic and more plyboard stapled and nailed over windows. Across the room is another doorway that is wide open, and I can hear voices and other sounds drifting up from stairs leading down into the cellar.

“What have you collected in here?” I ask Marino as I look around and imagine what I saw under the microscope. If I could magnify samples from Fielding’s work space, I suspect I would see a rubbish dump of rust, fibers, molds, dirt, and insect parts.

“Well, it’s obvious when you look at the metal shavings some of them are recent because they haven’t started rusting and are really shiny,” Marino replies. “So we got samples, and they’ve gone to the labs to find out if under the scope they look anything like what you found in Eli Saltz’s body.”

“His last name isn’t Saltz,” I remind him for the umpteenth time.

“You know, to compare tool marks,” Marino says. “Not that there’s much of a reason to doubt what Fielding did. We found the box.”

The box the WASP came in.

“A couple spent CO-two cartridges, a couple extra handles, even the instruction book,” Marino goes on. “The whole nine yards. According to the company, Jack ordered it two years ago. Maybe because of his scuba diving.” He shrugs his big shoulders in his big yellow suit. “Don’t know, except he didn’t order it two years ago to kill Eli. That’s for damn sure, and two years ago Jack was in Chicago, and I guess you might ask what he needed a WASP for.” Marino walks around in his big green boots and keeps looking at the opening to the stairs leading down, as if he’s curious about what’s being said and done down there. “The only thing that will kill you in the Great Lakes that I know of is all the mercury in the fish.”

“It’s with us. We have the box and the CO-two cartridges. We have all of it.” I want to know which labs. I want to make sure Briggs isn’t sending my evidence to the AFME labs in Dover.

“Yeah, all that stuff. Except the knife that was in the box, the WASP itself. It still hasn’t shown up. My guess is he ditched it after stabbing the guy, maybe threw if off a bridge or something. No wonder he didn’t want anyone going to the Norton’s Woods scene, right?” Marino’s bloodshot eyes look at me, then distractedly look around, the way people act when nothing they are looking at is new. He’d been here many hours before I showed up.

“What about in here?” I squat in front of the fireplace, which is open and built of old firebrick that is probably original to the building. “What’s been done here?” My hard hat keeps slipping over my eyes, and I take it off and set it on the floor.

“What about it?” Marino watches me from where he’s standing.

I move my gloved finger toward the whitish ashes, and they are weightless, lifting and stirring as the air moves, as if my thoughts are moving them. I contemplate the best way to preserve what I’m seeing, the ashes much too fragile to move in toto, and I’m pretty sure I recognize what has happened in the fireplace, or at least some of what occurred. I’ve seen this before but not recently, maybe not in at least ten years. When documents are burned these days, usually they were printed, not typed, and were generated on inexpensive copying paper with a high wood-pulp content that combusts incompletely, creating a lot of black sooty ash. Paper with a high cotton-rag content has a completely different appearance when it is burned, and what comes to mind immediately is Erica Donahue’s letter that she claims she never wrote.

“What I recommend,” I say to Marino, “is we cover the fireplace so the ashes aren’t disturbed. We need to photograph them in situ before disturbing them in any way. So let’s do that before we collect them in paint cans for the documents lab.”

His big booted feet move closer, and he says, “What for?”

What he’s really asking is why I am acting like a crime scene investigator. My answer, should I give one, which I won’t, is because somebody has to.

“Let’s finish this the way it should be done, the way we know how and have always done things.” I meet his glassy stare, and what I’m really saying is nothing is over. I don’t care what everyone assumes. It’s not over until it is.

“Let’s see what you’ve got.” He squats next to me, our yellow suits making a plastic sound as we move around, and their faint odor reminds me of a new shower curtain.

“Typed characters on the ash.” I point, and the ashes stir again.

“Now you’re a psychic and ought to get a job in one of the magic shops around here if you can read something that’s been burned.”

“You can read some of it because the expensive paper burns clean, turns white, and the inked characters made by a typewriter can be seen. We’ve looked at things like this before, Marino. Just not in a long time. Do you see what I’m looking at?” I point, and the air moves and the ashes stir some more. “You can actually see the inked engraving of her letterhead, or part of it. Boston and part of the zip code. The same zip code on the letter I got from Mrs. Donahue, although she says she didn’t write it and her typewriter is missing.”

“Well, there’s one in the house. A green one, an old portable on the dining-room table.” He gets up and bends his legs as if his knees ache.

“There’s a green typewriter next door?”

“I figured Benton told you.”

“I guess he couldn’t tell me everything in an hour.”

“Don’t get pissed. He probably couldn’t. You won’t believe all the shit next door. Appears when Fielding moved here he never really moved his shit in. Boxes everywhere. A fucking landfill over there.”

“I doubt he had a portable typewriter. I doubt that’s his.”

“Unless he was in cahoots with the Donahue kid. That’s the theory of where a lot of shit has come from.”

“Not according to his mother. Johnny disliked Jack. So how does it make sense that Jack would have Mrs. Donahue’s typewriter?”

“If it’s hers. We don’t know it is. And then there’s the drugs,” Marino says. “Obviously, Johnny’s been on them since about the time he started taking tae kwon do lessons from Fielding. One plus one equals two, right?”

“We’re going to find out what adds up and what doesn’t. What about stationery or paper?”

“Didn’t see any.”

“Except what seems to be in here.” I remind him it appears some of Erica Donahue’s stationery might have been burned, or maybe all of it was, whatever was left over from the letter someone wrote to me, pretending to be her.

“Listen…” Marino doesn’t finish what he’s about to say.

He doesn’t need to. I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to remind me I can’t be reasonable about Fielding, and Marino thinks he should know, all right. Because of our own history. Marino was around in the early days, too. He remembers when Fielding was my forensic pathology fellow in Richmond, my protege, and in the minds of a lot of people, it seems, a lot more than that.

“This was here just like this?” I then ask, indicating a roll of lead-gray duct tape on the workbench.

“Okay. Sure,” he says as he squats by an open crime scene case on the floor and gets out an evidence bag, because the roll of tape can be fracture-matched to the last strip torn off it. “So tell me how the hell he might have gotten hold of it, and what for?”

He means Fielding. How did Jack Fielding get hold of Erica Donahue’s typewriter, and what was his purpose in writing a letter allegedly from her and having it hand-delivered to me by a driver-for-hire who usually works events like bar mitzvahs and weddings? Did Johnny Donahue give Fielding the typewriter and stationery? If so, why? Maybe Fielding simply manipulated Johnny. Lured him into a trap.

“Maybe a last-ditch effort to frame the kid,” Marino then says, answering his own question and voicing what I’m pondering and about to dismiss as a possibility. “A good question for Benton.”

But Benton is off somewhere, talking on his phone or maybe conferring with his FBI compatriots, maybe with the female agent named Douglas. It bothers me when I think about her, and I hope I’m just paranoid and raw and have no reason to be concerned about the nature of his relationship with Special Agent Douglas. I hope the extra coffee cup in the back of her SUV wasn’t Benton’s, that he hasn’t been riding around with her, spending a lot of time with her while I was at Dover and then before that, in and out of Washington. Not just an enabler and a bad mentor, now I’m a bad wife, it occurs to me. Everything feels wrecked. It feels over with. It feels as if I’m working my own death scene, as if the life I knew somehow didn’t survive while I was away, and I’m investigating, trying to reconstruct what did me in.

“This is what we need to do right now,” I tell Marino. “I assume no one has touched the typewriter, and is it an Olivetti, or do you know?”

“We’ve been pretty tied up over here.” What he’s saying is that the police have more important matters to tend to than an old manual typewriter. “We found the dog in there, like I told you. And a bedroom it appears Fielding was using, and you can tell he was in and out living here, but this is where it happened.” He indicates the outbuilding we’re in. “The typewriter’s in a case on the dining-room table. I opened it to see what was inside, but that’s it.”

“Swab the keys for DNA before you pack it up and transport it to the labs, and I want those swabs going out on the next evidence run the van makes. I want those swabs analyzed first, because they might tell us who wrote that letter to me,” I tell him.

“I think we know who.”

“Then the typewriter goes to Documents so we can compare the typeface to what’s on the letter I got, a cursive typeface, and we’ll analyze the duct tape that’s on the envelope and see if it came from the roll we just found and what trace is on it or DNA or fingerprints or who knows what. Don’t be surprised if it points to the Donahues. If trace is from their house or fingerprints or DNA is from that source.”

“Why?”

“Framing their son.”

“I didn’t know Jack was that damn smart,” Marino says.

“I didn’t say he framed anyone. I’ve not tried and convicted him or anyone,” I reply flatly. “We have his DNA profile and fingerprints for exclusionary purposes, just as we have all of ours. So he should be easy to include or exclude, and any other profiles, and if there are? If we find DNA from more than once source, which we certainly should expect? We run the profiles through CODIS immediately.”

“Sure. If that’s what you want.”

“We run them right away, Marino. Because we know where Jack is. But if anyone else is involved, including the Donahues? We can’t waste time.”

“Sure, Doc. Whatever you want,” Marino says, and I can read his thoughts.

This is Jack Fielding’s house, it’s his Kill Cellar, his Little Shop of Horrors. Why go to all this trouble? But Marino’s not going to say it to me. He’s assuming I’m in denial. I’m holding out the remote and irrational hope that Fielding didn’t kill anyone, that someone else magically was using his property and his belongings and is responsible for all of this, someone other than Fielding, who is the victim and not the monster everyone now believes he is.

“We don’t know if his family’s been here,” I remind Marino patiently and quietly, but in a sobering tone. “His wife, his two little girls. We don’t know who’s been in the house and touched things.”

“Not unless they’ve been coming here from Chicago to stay in this dump.”

“When exactly did they move out of Concord?” That’s where his family was living with him, in a house Fielding had rented that I helped him find.

“Last fall. And it fits with everything,” Marino makes yet one more assumption. “The football player and what happened after Fielding’s family moved back to Chicago and he came here, fixing up this place while he was living in it like a hobo. He could have sent you a goddamn e-mail and let you know it wasn’t working out for him personally around here. That his wife and kids bolted not long after the CFC started taking cases.”

“He didn’t tell me. I’m sorry he didn’t.”

“Yeah, well, don’t say I should have.” Marino seals the roll of duct tape in a plastic evidence bag. “It wasn’t my business. I wasn’t going to start out my new career here by ratting on the staff and telling you that Fielding was the usual fuck-up right out of the box and you sure as hell should have expected it when you thought it was such a brilliant idea to take him back.”

“I should have expected this?” I hold Marino’s bloodshot, resentful stare.

“Put on your hard hat before you go down. There’s a lot of shit hanging from the ceilings, like all these damn lights strung up like it’s Christmas. I got to go back out to the truck, and I know you need a minute.”

I adjust the ratchet of my hard hat, making it tighter, and the reason Marino isn’t going into the cellar with me isn’t because I need a minute. It isn’t because he’s sensitive enough to offer me a chance to deal with what’s down there without him by my side, breathing down my neck. That might be what he’s talked himself into, but as I listen to him swishing his boots in the tubs just outside the door, stepping in and out of the water, I can only imagine how distasteful a scene like this must be to him. It has little to do with the unpleasantness of body fluids thawing and breaking down or even his squeamishness about hepatitis or HIV or some other virus and everything to do with how the body fluids got here. Marino’s ablution in the plastic tubs filled with water and dish-washing fluid are his attempt to cleanse himself of the guilt I know he feels.

He never saw Fielding doing any of it, and that’s the problem Marino faces. The way he would think about it is he should have noticed, and as I’ve explained to Benton while we were driving here and then explained to Marino over the phone, the extraction of sperm isn’t much different from a vasectomy, except when such a procedure is performed on a dead body, it’s even quicker and simpler, for obvious reasons. No local anesthesia is needed, and the doctor doesn’t have to be concerned with how the patient is feeling or if he might have second thoughts or any other emotional response.

All Fielding had to do was make a small puncture on one side of the scrotum and inject a needle into the vas deferens to extract sperm. He could have done this in minutes. He probably didn’t do it during the autopsy but before it by going into the cooler when nobody was around, making certain he got to the body as quickly after death as possible, which in retrospect might explain why he noticed the man from Norton’s Woods was bleeding before anybody else did. Fielding went into the cooler first thing when he got to the building early Monday morning to acquire his latest involuntary sperm donation, and that’s when he noticed blood in the tray under the body bag. So he walked rapidly down the corridor and notified Anne and Ollie.

If anybody would have noticed something like this going on during the six months I was at Dover it was Anne, I told Marino. She never saw what Fielding was doing or had a clue, and we know he extracted sperm from at least a hundred patients based on what has been found in a freezer in the cellar and what’s broken all over the floor, potentially a hundred thousand dollars, maybe much more, depending on what he charged and if he did it on a sliding scale, taking into account what the family or other interested party could afford. Liquid gold, as cops are calling what Fielding was selling on a black market of his own creation, and I can’t stop thinking about his choice of Eli as an involuntary donor, assuming this was Fielding’s intention, and we’ll never really know.

But at the time Fielding went into the cooler yesterday morning, there was only one young male body fresh enough to be a suitable candidate for a sperm extraction, and that was Eli Goldman. The other male case was elderly, and it’s highly unlikely he had loved ones who might be interested in buying his semen, and a third case was a female. If Fielding murdered Eli with the injection knife, would he then be so brazen and reckless as to take the young man’s sperm, and who was he planning to sell it to without incriminating himself? If he’d tried something like that, he may as well have confessed to the homicide.

It continues to tug at my thoughts that Fielding didn’t know who the unidentified dead young male was when he was notified about the case on Sunday afternoon. Fielding didn’t bother going to the scene, wasn’t interested, and had no reason at that time to be interested. I continue to suspect he didn’t have a clue until he walked into the cooler, and then he recognized Eli Goldman because they had a connection somehow. Maybe it was drugs, and that’s why Eli had one of Fielding’s guns. Maybe Fielding had given or sold the Glock to Eli. For sure someone did. Drugs, the gun, maybe something else. If only I could have been in Fielding’s mind when he walked into the cooler at shortly after seven yesterday morning. Then I would know. I would know everything.

I move a hanging light out of my way so it doesn’t knock my hard hat as I go down stone steps in my bulky yellow suit and big rubber boots.

A cold sweat is rolling down my sides, and I am worrying about Briggs and what it will be like when I’m confronted with him, and I’m worrying about a greyhound named Sock. I am worrying about everything I can possibly worry about because I can’t bear what I’m about to see, but it is better this way, and as much as I complain about Marino, he really did do the right thing. I wouldn’t have wanted Fielding’s body transported to the CFC. I wouldn’t want to see it for the first time in a pouch on a steel gurney or tray. Marino knows me well enough to decide that given the choice, I would demand to see Fielding the way he died, to satisfy myself that it was exactly as it appears, and that what Briggs determined when he examined the body hours earlier is the same thing I observe and that Briggs and I share the same opinion about Fielding’s cause and manner of death.

The cellar is whitewashed stone with a vaulted stone ceiling and no windows, and it is too small a space for so many people, all of them dressed the way I am, in bright yellow with thick black gloves and green rubber boots and bright yellow hard hats. Some people have on face shields, others surgical masks, and I recognize my own scientists, three from the DNA lab, who are swabbing an area of the stone floor that is littered with shattered glass test tubes and their black plastic stoppers. Nearby is the space heater Marino mentioned, and an upright stainless-steel laboratory cryogenic freezer, the same make and model that we use in labs where we have to store biological samples at ultra-low temperatures.

The freezer door is open wide, the adjustable shelves inside empty because someone, presumably Fielding, removed all the specimens and smashed them to the stone floor, then turned on the space heater. I notice partial labels adhering to glass fragments on a floor that is otherwise clean, the cellar appearing whitewashed with something nonglossy, like primer, like a wine-maker’s cave that has been turned into a laboratory with a steel sink and steel countertop, and racks for test tubes, large steel tanks of liquid nitrogen, and central to the main room I’m in, a long metal table that Fielding probably was using for shipping, and several chairs, one of them pulled out a little, as if someone might have been sitting in it. I look at the chair first, and I look for blood, but I don’t see any.

The table is covered with white butcher paper, and arranged on it are pairs of elbow-length bright-blue cryogloves, ampoules, rollerbases, smudge-proof pens, and long corks and measuring sticks for storage canisters, and stacked underneath are white cardboard boxes called CryoCubes, which are inexpensive vapor shippers we typically use for sending biological materials that are placed inside an aluminum canister, where they can remain frozen at minus-one-hundred-and-fifty degrees centigrade for up to five days. These special packing containers can also be used to ship frozen semen, and in fact are often referred to as “semen tanks” and are favored by animal breeders.

I can only assume that Fielding’s equipment and materials for his illegal and outrageous cottage industry were purloined from the CFC, that in the dark of night or after hours, he somehow managed to sneak what he wanted out of the labs without security batting an eye. Or it is possible he simply ordered what he needed and charged it to us but had it shipped directly here, to the sea captain’s house. Even as I’m piecing together what he might have done, he is so close to me I could touch him, under a disposable blue sheet on his clean white primer-painted floor that is stained with blood at one edge of the plasticized paper, a spot of blood that is part of a large pool under his head, based on what I know. From where I’m standing, I can see the blood has begun to separate and coagulate, is in the early stages of decomposition, a process that would have been dramatically slowed because of the ambient temperature in the cellar. It is cold enough to see your breath, as cold as a morgue refrigerator.

The flashgun of a camera goes off, and then goes off again as a broad-shouldered figure in blaze yellow photographs the one area of whitewashed wall down here that is blackened and foul, where a total station on a bright yellow tripod has been set up, and I’m guessing the electro-optical distance-measuring system has already mapped the scene, recording the coordinate data of every feature, including what Colonel Pruitt is photographing. He catches me looking at him and lowers the camera to his side as I walk over to a wall where I smell death, the faintest musty pungent stench of blood that has broken down and dried over months in a sunless, cold environment. I smell mildew. I smell dust, and I notice piles of torn dirty carpet and plywood nearby against a different wall, and I can tell by dust and dirt on the white floor that the carpet and wood was recently dragged to where it is.

Bolted into stone at the height of my head are a series of steel screw pin anchor shackles that I associate with sling assemblies used in hoisting. Based on coils of rope, grease guns, clamps, a cargo trolley, and grab hooks and swivel rings in the ceiling, I surmise that Fielding devised a creative rig for changing out the heavy tanks of liquid nitrogen, and at some point the system was perverted into one I suspect he never intended when he began extracting semen and selling it.

“From what I’m able to figure out so far, the main thing used was the splitting maul, which would account for both the blunt-force and cutting injuries,” Pruitt begins without so much as hello, as if our meeting here is normal, nothing more than a continuum of our time together at Dover. “Basically, a long-handled sledgehammer on one side, the other side sharp like an ax. It was under carpet and wood, along with a Boston College letter jacket, a pair of sneakers, other items of clothing that we think were Wally Jamison’s. This entire area was under that stuff over there.” He indicates the carpet and wood that was moved, what I surmise was used to cover the crime scene. “All of it, including the splitting maul, of course, has been packaged and sent to your place already. Did you see the weapon yet?” Pruitt says, shaking his head.

“No.”

“Can’t imagine someone coming after me with something like that. Jesus. Shades of Lizzie Borden. And pieces of bloody rope from being strung up.” He points to the shackles and rings bolted into stone that is crusty and black with old blood, and I almost imagine I can smell fear down here, the unimaginable terror of the football player tortured and murdered on Halloween.

“Why didn’t he clean this up?” I ask the first question that comes to mind as I look at a scene that doesn’t appear to have been touched after Wally Jamison was brutally and sadistically murdered down here.

“I guess he took the path of least resistance and just covered everything up with plyboard and old carpet,” Pruitt replies. “That’s why there’s a lot of dirt and fibers everywhere. Appears after the homicide, he didn’t bother washing things down at all. Just heaped old carpet on top and leaned all these boards against the wall.” He points again to the pile of old torn carpet of different colors, and near it, the large sheets of plyboard stacked on the white floor near a closed access door that leads outside the cellar.

“I don’t know why he wouldn’t have washed it down,” I repeat. “That was three months ago. He just left a crime scene, practically left it like a time capsule? Just threw carpet and plyboard over it?”

“One theory is he got off on it. Like people who photograph or film what they do so they can continue getting off on it after the fact. Every time he came down here, he knew what was behind the boards and carpet, what was hidden under them, and got off on it.”

Or someone got off on it, I think. Jack Fielding has never gotten off on gore. For a forensic pathologist, he was actually rather squeamish. Benton will say it was the influence of drugs. Everyone is probably saying that, and maybe it’s true. Fielding was altered, that much I don’t doubt.

“Some of us can help you with this, you know,” Pruitt then says, looking at me through a plastic face shield that clouds up intermittently as he breathes the cold cellar air. His hazel eyes are alert and friendly as they look at me, but he is troubled. How could anybody not be, and I wonder if he senses what I do. I wonder if he has a feeling in his gut that something is wrong with all this. I wonder if he’s asking the question I am right now as I look at the blackened whitewashed wall with the rusting shackles bolted into the stone.

Why would Jack Fielding do something like this?

Extracting semen to sell to bereft families is almost understandable. One can easily blame greed or even a lust for the gratification, the power he must have felt when he was able to give back life where it had been taken. But as I envision the photographs, video recordings, and CT scans I’ve seen of Wally Jamison’s mutilated body, I’m reminded of what went through my thoughts at the time. His murder seemed sexually and emotionally driven, as if the person who swung the weapon at him had feelings for him, certainly had a rage that didn’t quit until Wally was lacerated, sliced, cut, and contused beyond recognition and bled to death. Afterward, his nude body was transported, probably by boat, probably by Fielding’s boat, and dumped in the harbor at the coast guard station, an act that Benton describes as brazen, as a taunt to law enforcement. And that doesn’t sound like Fielding, either. For such a fierce muscle-bound grandmaster, he was rather much a coward.

“Thank you. Let’s see what’s needed,” I say to Pruitt.

“Well, you know the DNA that’s needed. Hundreds of samples already, not just the semen that needs to be reconnected with its donor but everything else being swabbed.”

“I know. It’s a huge job and will go on for quite a while because we don’t know what’s happened in here. Just part of it. What was in the freezer and then whatever else was done in addition to what I’m supposing must have been the homicide of the BC student, Wally Jamison.” As I say his name I envision him, square-jawed with curly black hair and bright blue eyes, and powerfully built. Then what he looked like later. “What time did you get here?”

“John and I flew in early, got here about seven hours ago.”

I don’t ask him where Briggs is now.

“He did the external exam and will go over those details with you when you’re ready,” Pruitt adds.

“And nobody had touched him prior to that.” Fielding’s body was discovered shortly after three a.m. Or that’s what I’ve been told.

“When John and I got here, the body was covered just like he is now. The Glock isn’t here. After the FBI restored the eradicated serial number, the gun was bagged and is now at your labs,” Pruitt tells me what Benton did.

“I didn’t know about it until a little while ago. When I was being driven here.”

“Look. If I’d been here at three a.m. and it was up to me?” He starts to say he would have told me everything that was going on. “But the FBI wanted to keep things contained, since no one’s been sure if he was a lone wolf.” He means if Fielding was. “Because of all the other factors, like Dr. Saltz and the MP and so on. The fear of terrorism.”

“Yes. Only not the brand of terrorism the Bureau usually has to worry about. This is a different brand of terrorism,” I comment. “It feels personal. Doesn’t it feel personal? What are you thinking about all this?”

“Nobody had touched the body when the police, the FBI found it.” Pruitt doesn’t want to tell me what he thinks about it. “I do know he was the same temperature as the room by then, had been down here for a while, but you should talk to John about it.”

“You’re saying his body was the same temperature as the ambient air at five a.m.”

“It’s forty degrees, or around that. Maybe a few degrees warmer because of all the people down here. But you need to get the details from John.”

Pruitt stares off at the human-shaped mound draped with a blue sheet on the other side of the cellar, near the freezer, near thawing fluids on the stone floor, where investigators have knee pads on and are collecting one shard of glass at a time and swabbing, and packaging each item separately in paper envelopes that they label with permanent markers. I won’t do the calculations until I check the body, but already what I’m hearing adds to what I suspect. Something is wrong.

21

The stain on the whitewashed wall is an ugly darkness some six feet above the stone floor, probably where Wally Jamison’s head and neck were when he was shackled and beaten and cut to death.

Spraying out from the largest stain are a constellation of pinpoint spatters, tiny black marks that at close inspection are elongated, are angled, the cast-off blood from the weapon as it was repeatedly swung, as it was repeatedly bloodied from impacting with human flesh, and I envision the wood-splitting maul Pruitt mentioned, and I agree with him. What a terrible way to die. Then I think of the injection knife. Another horrendous way to die. Sadism.

“He should have had a system of keeping track of the samples,” I say to Pruitt as I watch the investigators in bright yellow, on their hands and knees, some of them people I don’t know. Maybe St. Hilaire from Salem. Maybe Lester “Lawless” Law from Cambridge. I’m not sure who is here, really, just that the FBI is working in conjunction with a special task force comprising investigators from various departments who are members of the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, NEMLEC. “If he really was selling extracted semen,” I continue my train of thought, “I would assume he had a way of logging the specimens.” I direct his attention to bits of gummy labels still adhering to broken glass on the floor. “Finding information like that will help us with identification, maybe preliminarily supply it, and then we can verify through DNA. If all of the specimens came from CFC cases, we should have DNA on blood-spot cards in each case file.”

“I know Marino is looking into that, has somebody pulling every case of young males who would have been viable candidates. Especially if Fielding did the autopsies.”

“With all due respect, that was my direction, not Marino’s.” I hear the defensiveness I can’t keep out of my tone, but I’ve had enough of my new self-appointed acting chief Pete Marino. I’ve had enough references that imply he runs my office.

“We’ve not found a log yet,” Pruitt adds. “But Farinelli’s over there with his laptop, which was as dead as he was when we got here. Maybe the log will be on that.”

It always seems strange when investigators refer to my niece by her last name. Lucy must be next door in the house, where there are no lights or heat, unless the power has come back on. I realize that down here I might not know, since we are using auxiliary lights brought in and set up. I walk over to an open Pelican case near the bottom of the stairs and find a flashlight, then return to the wall to shine the light over bloodstains to see what else they have to tell me before I look at the person who supposedly caused them, my deputy chief, working alone in his Kill Cellar. My deputy chief, the lone wolf who had no help in all this, I think skeptically and with growing anger at the police, the FBI, at everyone who started working the scene without me.

Below the darkest area on the whitewashed wall is a corresponding dark area on the whitewashed floor, a myriad of drips that combine into a solid stain, what I can tell was a pool of blood that is almost black and flaking, much of it having soaked into the porous whitewashed stone. Some of the drops at the edge of the large stained area are perfectly round, with only a small amount of distortion or scalloping around the edges from the roughness of the stone, passive spatters from the victim bleeding. Other stains are smeared from someone, possibly the assailant, stepping on them or dragging something over them while they were still wet. Maybe dragging carpet and plyboards over them, I think. The only bloodstains that show a direction of travel are those on the wall and the ceiling, black and elongated or with a teardrop shape, and I believe most of these were projected by the repeated swings and impacts of the weapon.

The victim was upright when he bled, shackled to the wall, it would seem, and what I can’t tell is the timing of at least one blow that I know was fatal. Did it happen early on or later? The earlier, the better, I can’t help but think as I imagine what was done, as I reconstruct the pain and suffering and most of all his terror. I hope he hadn’t been subjected to the abuse for long when an artery was breached, most likely the carotid on the left side of his neck. The distinctive wave pattern on the wall is from arterial blood spurting out under high pressure in rhythm to the beats of his heart, and I remember photographs I saw, the deep gashes to his neck.

Wally Jamison would have lived only minutes after receiving such an injury, and I wonder how long the cutting and beating went on after it was too late to hurt him anymore. I wonder about the rage and what the connection might have been between Wally Jamison and Jack Fielding. It had to be more than that they simply went to the same gym. Wally wasn’t involved in martial arts, and as far as anyone knows, he wasn’t acquainted with Johnny Donahue or Eli Goldman or Mark Bishop. He didn’t work or intern at Otwahl, either, and apparently had nothing to do with robotics or other technologies. What I know about Wally Jamison is that he was from Florida, a senior at BC, where he was majoring in history and somewhat of a celebrity because of football, and a partier, a ladies’ man. I can’t come up with a single reason why Fielding might have known him, unless it was some chance encounter they had, perhaps because of the gym and then perhaps drugs, the hormonal cocktail Benton mentioned.

Wally Jamison’s toxicology was negative for illegal or therapeutic drugs or alcohol, but we don’t routinely test for steroids unless we have reason to suspect a death may be related to them. Wally’s cause of death wasn’t a question. There certainly was no reason to think steroids killed him, at least not directly, and now it may be too late to go back. We’re not going to get another sample of his urine, although we can try testing his hair, where the molecules of drugs, including steroids, might have accumulated inside the hair shaft. A test like that would be a long shot for detecting steroids, and it isn’t going to tell us if Wally got them from Fielding or knew Fielding or was murdered by him. But I’m willing to try anything, because as I look around this cellar and see the shape of Fielding’s body under a sheet on the floor, I want to know why. I have to know and won’t accept that he was crazy, that he’d lost his mind. That’s just not good enough.

Returning to the Pelican case near the stairs, I find a pair of knee pads and put them on before kneeling by the rounded blue sheet, and when I pull it back from Jack Fielding’s face, I’m not prepared for how present he looks. That’s the word that comes to mind, present, as if he’s still here, as if he’s asleep but not well. There is nothing vital or vibrant about him, and my brain races through the details I’m seeing, the stiff strands of hair from the gel he used to hide his baldness, the red splotches on his face, which is puffy and pale, and I pull the sheet off, and it rustles as I move it out of my way. I sit back on the heels of my rubber boots and look him over, taking in his gelled sandy-brown hair that was thinning on top and gone in spots, and the dried blood around his ear and pooled under his head.

I imagine Fielding pointing the barrel of the Glock inside his left ear and pulling the trigger. I try to get into his mind, try to conjure up his last thoughts. Why would he do that? Why his ear? The side of the head is common in gunshot suicides, but not the ear, and why his left side and not his right? Fielding was right-handed. I used to tease him about having what I called “extreme handedness” because he couldn’t do anything useful with his left hand, nothing that required any degree of dexterity or skill. He certainly didn’t shoot himself in his left ear while holding the pistol in his right hand, not unless he’d become a contortionist in my absence, and maybe that will be one more speculation everyone will come up with. But I need to check the angle. I point my right finger into my left ear canal as best I can, pretending my index finger is the barrel of the Glock.

“Things really aren’t that bad,” a deep voice says. “It hasn’t come to that, has it?” General John Briggs says.

I look up at him standing over me, his legs spread, his hands behind his back, big and bulky in bright yellow, but he’s not wearing a face shield or gloves or a hard hat, his face ruggedly compelling, hawklike, it’s been described as, and shadowed with stubble. He’s a dark man, and no matter how often he shaves, he always looks as if he needs to, his eyes the same dark gray as the titanium veneer on my building, his black hair thick with very little gray for his age, which is exactly sixty.

“Colonel,” he then says, and he squats next to me and picks up the flashlight I was using earlier and had left upright on the stone floor. “I imagine you’re wondering the same thing I am.” He turns on the light.

“I seriously doubt it,” I reply as he shines the light inside Fielding’s left ear.

“I’m wondering where he was,” Briggs says. “Looking for high-velocity spatter, something to indicate if he was right here? Because why? Was he standing by his cryogenic freezer and just stuck a gun in his ear?”

I take the light from him so I can direct it where I want as I look inside Fielding’s ear, and mostly what I see is dark dried blood that is crusty, but as I lean closer I can make out the small black entrance wound, a contact wound, and that is elongated. It is angled. A large amount of blood is under his head, a dried pool of it that is thick and looks sticky because the cellar is moist, and I smell blood that is beginning to break down, the sweetish foul odor that is faint, and I detect alcohol. It wouldn’t surprise me if Fielding was drinking in the end. Whether he shot himself or someone else did, he probably was compromised, and I remember the big SUV with the xenon lights that tailed Benton and me some sixteen hours ago while we were driving through a blizzard to the CFC. The current assumption is that Fielding was in that SUV, that it was his Navigator and he’d removed the front plate so we couldn’t tell who was behind us.

Nobody has satisfactorily offered why he might have decided to tail Benton and me or how he managed to disappear instantly, seemingly in thin air, after Benton stopped in the middle of the snowy road in hopes whoever was on our bumper would pass us. I seem to be the only one consumed by the fact that Otwahl Technologies is very close to the area where the big SUV with xenon lights and fog lamps vanished, and if someone had a gate opener or code to that place or was familiar to the private police, that person could have tucked the Navigator in there, rather much like vanishing in the Bat Cave, is how I described it to Benton, who didn’t seem impressed. “Why would Jack Fielding have that kind of access to Otwahl?” I asked Benton as we were driving here. “Even if he was involved with some of the people who work there, would he have access to its parking lot? Could he have pulled in so quickly and been confident the private police who patrol the grounds would have been fine with it?”

“With all the white-painted surfaces in here,” Briggs is saying to me, “you’d think we could find something that might indicate where the shooting occurred.”

I look at Fielding’s hands. They are as cold as the stone in the cellar, and he is completely rigorous. As muscle-bound as he is, it is like moving the arms of a marble statue as I shine the flashlight on his thick, strong hands, examining them, noting his clean trimmed nails and surprised by them. I expected them to be dirty, as crazy and out of control as everyone believes he was. I notice his calluses, which he’s always had from using free weights in the gym or working on his cars or doing home repairs. It appears he died holding the pistol in his left hand, or it is supposed to look like he did, his fingers curled tightly and the impression in his palm made by the Glock’s nonslip stippled grip. But I don’t notice a fine mist of blood that might have blown back on his skin when he pulled the trigger. Back spatter is an artifact that can’t be staged or faked.

“We’ll do GSR on his hands,” I comment, and I notice that Fielding isn’t wearing his wedding band. The last time I saw him, he had it on, but that was in August, and he was still living with his family, from what I understand.

“The muzzle of the gun had blood,” Briggs tells me. “Internal muzzle staining from blood being sucked in.”

The phenomenon is caused by explosive gases when the barrel of a gun is pressed against the skin and fired.

“The ejected cartridge case?” I inquire.

“Over there.” He indicates an area of the whitewashed floor about five feet from Fielding’s right knee.

“And the gun? In what position?” I slide my hands under Fielding’s head and feel the hard lump of jagged metal under the scalp above his right ear, where the bullet exited his skull and is trapped under his skin.

“Still gripped in his left hand. I’m sure you noticed the way his fingers are curled and the impression of the grip in his palm. We had to pry the gun out of his hand.”

“I see. So he shot himself with his left hand even though he’s right-handed. Not impossible but unusual, and he either was already lying right here on the floor when he did it or fell with the gun still gripped in his hand. A cadaveric spasm and he clenched it hard. And fell neatly on his back just like this. Well, that’s quite a thing to imagine. You know me and cadaveric spasms, John.”

“They do happen.”

“Like winning the lottery,” I answer. “That happens, too. Just never to me.”

I feel fractured bone shift beneath my fingers as I gently pal-pate Fielding’s head and envision a wound path that is upward and slightly back-to-front, the bullet lodging approximately three inches from the lower angle of his right jaw.

“He shot himself like this?” I turn my left hand into a gun again, and point my purple nitrile-gloved index finger at an awkward angle, as if I’m going to shoot myself in the left ear. “Even if he held the pistol in his left hand when he wasn’t left-handed, it’s slightly awkward and unusual, the way my elbow has to be down and behind me, don’t you think? And I might expect a fine mist of back spatter on his hand. Of course, these things aren’t set in stone,” I say inside Fielding’s white-painted stone cellar.

“Odd thing about shooting yourself in the ear,” I comment, “is people generally are squeamish because of the anticipated noise, not rational, because you’re about to die, anyway, but it’s human nature. Like shooting yourself in the eye. Almost nobody does.”

“You and I need to talk, Kay,” Briggs says.

“And most of all, the timing of when the cryogenic freezer was gone into,” I then say. “And the space heater turned on and what was burned upstairs, possibly Erica Donahue’s stationery. If Jack did all that before he killed himself, then why is there no semen or broken glass on the floor under him?” I am manipulating Fielding’s big body, and he is dead weight, completely stiff and unwilling as I move him a little, looking under him at a floor that is white and clean. “If he came down here and broke all these test tubes and then shot himself in the ear, there should be glass and semen under his body. It’s all around him but none under him. There’s a shard of glass in his hair.” I pick it out and look at it. “Someone broke all this after he was dead, after he was already lying here on the floor.”

“He could have gotten glass in his hair when he broke test tubes, violently smashed everything,” Briggs says, and he sounds patient and kind for him. He almost seems to feel sorry for me. My insecurities again.

“Do you have your mind made up, John? You and everyone else?” I look up into his compelling face.

“You know damn better than that,” he says. “We have a lot to talk about, and I’d rather not do it here in front of the others. When you’re ready, I’ll be next door.”

The power came back on in Salem Neck at about half past two, about the time I was finishing with Jack Fielding, kneeling next to him on that cold stone floor until my feet started tingling and my knees were aching and burning, despite the pads I had on.

The flush-mounted lights in his old outdated kitchen are illuminated, the house quite chilly but with the promise of warmth in the forced air I feel coming out of floor vents as I walk around in my tactical boots and field clothes and jacket, having taken off my protective gear except for disposable gloves. The white porcelain sink is filled with dishes, and the water is scummy with soap, a coagulated slick of yellowish grease floating on it, and the sheer yellow curtain covering the window over the sink is stained and dingy.

Wherever I look I find remnants of food and garbage and hard drinking and am reminded of the squalor of countless scenes I’ve worked, of their rot and spoilage, their musty mildewy smells, of how often it is that the life preceding the death was the real crime. Fielding’s last months on earth were far more tortured than he deserved, and I can’t accept that he wanted anything he made for himself. This is not what he scripted for his ultimate destiny, it’s not what he was born to, and I continue thinking of that favorite phrase of his when he would remind me he wasn’t born to this or born to that, especially if I asked him to do something he found distasteful or boring.

I pause by a wooden table with two wooden chairs beneath a window that faces the icy street and the choppy dark-blue water beyond it, and the table is deep in old newspapers and magazines that I spread around with my gloved hand. The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Salem News, as recent as Saturday, I note, and I recall seeing several papers covered with ice on the sidewalk in front, as if they were tossed there and no one brought them inside the house before the big storm. There are about half a dozen Men’s Health magazines, and I notice the mailing labels are for Fielding’s Concord address. The January and February issues were forwarded here, as was a lot of other mail in the pile I sift through. I recall that Fielding’s rental of the house in Concord began almost a year ago, and based on the clutter and furniture I recognize as his and what I’ve been told about his domestic problems, it would make sense that he didn’t renew the lease. He relocated to a drafty antique house that is completely lacking in charm because of the run-down condition it’s in, and while I can imagine what he envisioned when he fell in love with the place, something changed for him.

What happened to you? I look around at the squalor he’s left in his wake. Who were you in the end? I envision his dead hands and remember their coldness and their rigor and how heavy they felt as I held them. They were clean, his nails well kempt, and that very small detail doesn’t seem to fit with everything else I’m seeing. Did you make this appalling mess? Or did someone else? Has some other person who is slovenly and crazed been inside your house? But I also know that consistency really is the hobgoblin of little minds, that what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote is true. People aren’t easily explained or defined, and what they do isn’t always consistent. Fielding may very well have been falling apart along with everything around him but was still vain enough to have good hygiene. It could be true.

But I’m not going to know. His CT scan, his autopsy won’t tell me. There’s so much I won’t know, including why he never told me about his place in Salem. Benton says that Fielding purchased the house right after he moved to Massachusetts, which was a year ago this past January, but he never mentioned it to me. I’m not sure he was hiding anything criminal he was up to or intended to be up to, but rather I have a feeling he wanted something that was just his, something that didn’t concern me and that I had no opinion about and wasn’t going to improve or change or help him with. He didn’t want my mentoring him as he set about to turn an eighteenth-century sea captain’s safe harbor into his own or into an investment or whatever he originally dreamed of having all to himself.

If that’s the truth, then how sad, I think as I look out at water sparkling like sapphires, rolling and crashing against the gray, rocky shore across the icy, sandy street. I walk through a wide opening that once had pocket doors, into a dining room of exposed dark oak beams in a white plaster ceiling that is water-stained, noting that the tarnished brass hanging onion lantern belongs in an entryway, not over the walnut table, which is dusty and surrounded by chairs that don’t match and need new upholstery. I don’t blame Fielding for not wanting me here. I’m too critical, too sure of my goddamn good taste and informed opinions, and it’s no wonder I drove him to distraction. Not just an enabler but also a bad mother when I had no right to even be a good one. It wasn’t my place to be anything to him except a responsible boss, and if he were here I would tell him I’m sorry. I would ask him to forgive me for knowing him and caring, because what help was it? What damn good did I do?

I focus on a disturbed area of dust at one end of the table, where someone was eating or working, perhaps where the Olivetti typewriter was, and the chair in front of it is in better shape than the others. Its faded threadbare red-velvet cushion is intact and probably safe to sit on, and I think about Fielding in here typing. I try to place him at this table with its old casement windows, the view in here a dreary one of the gravel drive, and it’s impossible for me to envision him hunched over in a small chair beneath a hanging lantern, typing a two-page letter over and over on engraved watermarked paper until he had a final version that was flawless.

Fielding and his big, impatient fingers, and he was never much of a typist, was self-taught, what he called “hunt and pick” instead of hunt and peck, and the point of that document supposedly from Erica Donahue is illogical if it came from him. Considering the condition Fielding was in, based on what Benton saw when he met with him last week in my office, it doesn’t seem plausible to me that my deputy chief would have gone to such lengths to set up and frame a Harvard student for Mark Bishop’s homicide. Why would Fielding have killed that six-year-old boy? I don’t buy what Benton says, that Fielding was killing himself as a child when he drove nails into Mark Bishop’s head. Fielding was putting an end to his own childhood of abuse, Benton told me, and I’m not persuaded.

But I have to remind myself that there are many things in life that make sense to the people who are doing them while the rest of us never figure it out. Even when we’re told why, the explanation often doesn’t fit with any template that has rhyme or reason. I pause before a casement window, not quite ready to leave this room and enter the next one, where I can hear Briggs walking around in his desert boots. He is talking to someone on his phone, and I pull out mine to check my text messages and see that there is one from Bryce.

Can U call Evelyn!?

I try her in the trace evidence lab and another microscopist answers, a young scientist named Matthew.

“You anywhere near a computer?” Matthew’s voice, confident and tense with excitement. “Evelyn’s just down the hall in the ladies’ room, but we want to send you something totally weird, and I keep thinking it’s a mistake or like the weirdest contamination ever. You know a hair is about eighty thousand nanometers, right? So imagine something four nanometers, in other words, a hair would be twenty thousand times the diameter of what we found. And it’s not organic, even though the elemental fingerprint is mostly pure carbon, but we’ve also detected trace residues of what appears to be phencyclidine….”

“You found PCP?” I interrupt his breathless talk.

“PCP, angel dust, a really trace amount, just a miniscule amount. Using FTIR. At a magnification of one hundred, just plain ol’ light microscopy, and you can see the granules and a lot of other microscopic debris, especially cotton fibers, on the backing of the pain-relieving patch, okay? Probably some of these granular structures are PCP, maybe Nuprin, Motrin, too, whatever the patch originally was, possibly other chemicals there.”

“Matthew, slow down.”

“Well, at one hundred and fifty thousand X with SEM you’ll see what I’m talking about as big as a bread box, Dr. Scarpetta, what we want to send you.”

“Go ahead, and if nothing else, I’ll go out to the truck and log in. Send PDFs, though, and I’ll try on my iPhone. What are you talking about, exactly?”

“Sort of like buckyballs, like a dumbbell made out of bucky-balls but with legs. It’s definitely manmade, about the size of a strand of DNA, like I said, four nanometers and pure carbon, except for whatever it was meant to deliver. And also traces of polyethylene glycol that we’re conjecturing was the outer coating for what was meant to be delivered.”

“Explain the meant-to-deliver part. Something built on nanoscale to deliver a trace amount of PCP or what?”

“This isn’t my area, obviously, and we don’t have an AFM, an atomic force microscope, here, hint, hint. Because I’d say we’ve just entered a new day where we have to start looking for things like this, things you might need to magnify millions of times. And in my opinion, something like an AFM would have to have been used to assemble this, do the nanoassembly, to manipulate the nanotubes, the nanoparticles, while you’re trying to get them to stick together, using a nanoprobe or whatever. Well, we could probably handle a lot of this with SEM, but an AFM would be a good idea if this is what’s headed down the pike and about to slam into us head-on, Dr. Scarpetta.”

“You don’t know what you’ve found, but it’s a nanobot of some type, possibly, in your opinion, for the delivery of a drug or drugs? You found one on the film backing that was in the lab-coat pocket?” I don’t say whose lab coat.

“Just one admixed with the particulate and fibers and other debris because we didn’t analyze the entire piece of film, just the specimen we mounted on a stub. The rest of the plastic film’s at fingerprints right now, and then it’s going to DNA, then to GC-Mass-Spec,” Matthew says. “And it’s broken or degraded.”

“What is?”

“The nanobot. Or it looks broken, or maybe it’s deteriorating, like it was supposed to have eight legs but I’m seeing four on one side and two on the other. I’m e-mailing this to you now, a couple photographs we took so you can see it for yourself.”

I’m able to pull up the images on my iPhone, and it is an inexplicable feeling to note the eerie symmetry, to have it enter my mind that the nanobot looks like a molecular version of a micro-mechanical fly. I can’t know if Lucy’s holy grail of flybots looks like this nanobot magnified thousands of times, but the artificial structure in the photographs is insectlike with its grayish bucky-ball elongated body. The delicate nanowire arms or legs that are still intact are bent at right angles with gripperlike appendages on the tips, possibly for grabbing onto the walls of cells or burrowing into blood vessels or organs, to find the target, in other words, and adhere to it while delivering medicine or perhaps illegal drugs destined for certain brain receptors.

No wonder Johnny Donahue’s drug screen was negative, it occurs to me. If nanobots were added to his sublingual allergy exacts or, better yet, to his corticosteroid nasal spray, the drugs might have been below the level of detection. More astonishingly, the drugs may not have penetrated the blood-brain barrier at all, but would have been programmed to bind to receptors in the frontal cortex. If the drugs never entered the bloodstream, they wouldn’t have been excreted in urine. They wouldn’t have ended up in hair, and that’s the point of nanotechnology’s use in medicine, to treat diseases and disorders with drugs that aren’t systemic and therefore are less harmful. As is true with everything else, whatever can be used for good most assuredly will be used for evil.

Fielding’s living room is bare floors and walls, and stacked almost to the ceiling are dusty brown boxes, all the same size, with the moving company Gentle Giant’s logo on the sides, scores of cartons in cubed piles as if they’ve never been touched since they were carried in here.

In the midst of this cardboard bunker Briggs sits, reminding me of a Matthew Brady photograph of a Civil War general, in his muted sandy-green fatigues and boots, a Mac notebook in his lap, his broad-shouldered back straight against the straight-back chair. I decide it would be like him to sit and make me stand, to choreograph our conversation so I feel small and subservient to him, but he gets up, and I tell him no, thank you. I’ll stand. So both of us do, moving to a window, where he places his laptop on a sill.

“I find it interesting he has a wireless network in here,” Briggs says right off, looking out at the view of the ocean and the rocks across the icy street that is covered with tan sand. “With all you’ve seen in here, would you expect him to have wireless?”

“Maybe he wasn’t the only person in here.”

“Maybe.”

“At least you’ll entertain the possibility. That’s more than anybody else seems to be doing.” I place my iPhone on the window-sill so he can see what is in the small display, and he looks at it, and then he looks away.

“Imagine two types of nanobots,” he says, as if he’s talking to someone on the other side of the wavy old window, as if his attention is out there in the sunlight and sparkling water and not with the woman standing next to him, a woman who always feels young and insecure with him, no matter her age or who she grew up to become.

“A nanobot that is biodegradable,” he says, “that vanishes at some point after delivering a minute dose of a psychoactive drug, and then a second type of nanobot that self-replicates.”

I always feel like someone else with Briggs, someone other than myself, and as I stand next to him, our sleeves touching and feeling his heat, I think of the wonderful and the terrible ways he has shaped me.

“The self-replicating one is what worries us most. Imagine if you got something like that inside you,” he says, and what’s inside me is the irresistible force that is General John Briggs, and I understand what Fielding felt and how much he must have revered and resented me.

I understand how awful and wonderful it is to be overwhelmed by someone. Like a drug, it occurs to me. An addiction you desperately want to get over and desperately want to keep. Briggs will always have the same effect on me, I think. I won’t get over it in this life.

“And the self-replicating nanobot enables the sustained release of something like testosterone,” Briggs says, and I feel his energy, the intensity of him, and I’m aware of how close we are standing to each other, drawn to each other, just as we’ve always been and should never have been. “A drug like PCP couldn’t replicate, of course, so that would be a dead-end hit, would be repeated only as the subject repeats his or her nasal spray or injections or applies a new transdermal patch impregnated with biodegradable nanobots. But something your body naturally produces could be programmed to replicate, so the nanobot is replicating, flowing freely through the body, through your arteries, latching onto target areas, like the frontal cortex of your brain, without the need of a battery. Self-propelled and replicating.”

Briggs looks at me, and his eyes are hard but there is something in them that he’s always held for me, an attachment that is as constant as it is conflicted. I’m vividly reminded of who we were at Walter Reed, when our futures held mystery and limitless possibility, when he was older and profoundly formidable to me and I was a prodigy. He called me Major Prodigy, and then I returned from South Africa and went to Richmond and he didn’t call me at all, not for years. What we had with each other was complex and unfathomable, and I’m reminded all over again when I’m with him.

“We wouldn’t need wars anymore,” he says. “Not the sort of wars you and I know, Kay. We’re on the threshold of a new world where our old wars will seem easy and humane.”

“Jack Fielding wasn’t that kind of scientist,” I reply. “He didn’t manufacture those patches and probably would have been extremely resistant and unnerved, had someone attempted to entice him into using drugs delivered by nanobots. I would be stunned if he even knew what a nanobot is or would have a clue this was what he was letting loose in his system. He probably thought he was taking some new form of steroid, a designer steroid, something that would help him in his bodybuilding, help alleviate his chronic pain from decades of overuse, help him fight aging. He hated getting older. Getting old wasn’t an option to him.”

“Well, he won’t have to worry about it.”

No, he won’t, that’s for sure. What I say is, “I don’t accept that he killed himself because he didn’t want to get old. I haven’t accepted he killed himself, and have extreme doubts about it.”

“I understand you got an exposure to one of his patches,” Briggs then says, “and I’m sorry about that, but if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t know the rest of it. Kay Scarpetta high. Now, that’s quite a thought. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see that.”

Benton must have told him.

“This is what we’re up against, Kay,” Briggs says. “Our brave new world, what I call neuroterrorism, what the Pentagon is calling it, the big fear. Make us crazy and you win. Make us crazy enough and we’ll kill ourselves, saving the bad guys the trouble. In Afghanistan, give our troops opium, give them benzodiaze-pines, give them hallucinogenics, something to take the edge off their boredom, and then see what happens when they climb into their choppers and fighter jets and tanks and Humvees. See what happens when they come home addicts, come home deranged.”

“Otwahl,” I comment. “We’re developing weapons like this?”

“We aren’t. That’s not what DARPA’s paying all these millions for, dammit. But someone at Otwahl is, and we don’t think it’s just one. A cell of superbrains engaging in experiments not authorized or approved, and in fact as dangerous as it gets.”

“I assume you know who.”

“Damn kids,” he says, gazing out at the bright afternoon. “Seventeen, eighteen, with IQs off the charts and full of passion but nothing home up here.” He taps his forehead. “I don’t need to tell you about boys especially, their frontal lobes not done, half-baked like a cookie until they’re in their early to mid-twenties, and yet there they are, fucking around in nanotech labs or with superconductors and robotics and synthetic biology, you name it. Difficult enough we give them guns and throw them into stealth bombers, but we have rules,” he says in a hard tone. “We have structures, regimens, leadership, the strictest of supervision, but what the hell do you think goes on at a place like Otwahl where the objective isn’t national security and discipline but money and ambition? Those damn whiz kids like Johnny Donahue and his gang over there don’t know shit about Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq, for Christ’s sake. They’ve never set foot on a military base.”

“I don’t see Jack’s connection to it beyond his teaching martial arts to a few of them.” The sky is a spotless deep turquoise, and below it, the blue ocean heaves.

“He got tangled up with them, and my guess is unwittingly became a science project. You know all too well what goes on with research projects and clinical trials, only the type we’re familiar with are supervised and strictly monitored by human-study review boards. So where do you get volunteers if you’re an eighteen-year-old Harvard or MIT technical engineer at Otwahl? We can only guess that Jack made his contacts, likely through the gym, through tae kwon do. All of us are painfully aware of his lifelong problems with substance abuse, mainly steroids, so now someone is going to deliver the elixir of life, the fountain of youth, through pain-relieving patches. But he sure as hell didn’t get what he bargained for. Neither did Wally Jamison, Mark Bishop, or Eli Goldman.”

“Wally Jamison didn’t work at Otwahl.”

“For a while he dated someone who does. Dawn Kincaid, another one of the neuroterrorists over there.”

“Johnny Donahue’s best friend,” I say. “And where is she right now?” I ask. “It seems everyone you’ve mentioned is dead. Except her.” I feel an alarm going off inside me.

“Missing in action,” Briggs says. “Didn’t show up at Otwahl yesterday or today, supposedly is on vacation.”

“I’m sure.”

“Exactly. We’ll find her and get the rest of the story, because no question she’s going to be the one to tell it, since her expertise is nanoengineering, nanoscale chemical synthesis. Based on what we’ve learned, she’s likely the one developing these nasty little nanobots that found their way to Jack Fielding and turned him into a Mr. Hyde, to put it mildly.”

“Mr. Hyde,” I repeat. “The same thing Erica Donahue says happened to her son,” I point out. “Only I doubt Johnny killed anyone.”

“He didn’t kill that boy.”

“You’re convinced Jack did.”

“Out of control, sloppy,” Briggs says.

“And then he killed Eli.” My comment hangs in the air, and I wonder if it sounds as hollow to Briggs as it does to me. I wonder if he can hear how strongly I don’t believe it.

“You realize this is because of the damn swine flu.” He continues staring out at the day blazing beyond dusty old glass. “If the stepdaughter’s biological father hadn’t gotten sick, Liam Saltz wouldn’t have had the pleasure of giving her away at her wedding, and he wouldn’t have come to the US, to Cambridge, to Norton’s Woods, at the last minute. And Jack wouldn’t have had to stab Eli in the back with a damn injection knife.”

“To stop him from telling Dr. Saltz what you’re telling me.”

“We can’t ask Jack, unfortunately.”

“Maybe I could understand it if Eli was going to tell Dr. Saltz or someone that Jack was selling semen he was stealing from dead bodies. Maybe that would be a motive.”

“We don’t know what Eli knew. But he likely was aware of Jack and his drugs, obviously was well enough acquainted with him to have one of his guns. That must have been a bad feeling when Jack found out from the Cambridge police that the dead man had a Glock on him with an eradicated serial number.”

“Sounds like Marino’s filled you in. Told you all this as if it’s an irrefutable case history. And it’s not. It’s a theory. We don’t have tangible evidence that Jack killed anyone.”

“He knew he was in trouble. That much I think is safe to say,” Briggs replies.

“As much as anything is safe to say. I agree he wouldn’t have removed the Glock from the lab, had he not feared he had a problem. My question is whether he was covering for himself or for someone else.”

“He knew damn well we’d restore the serial number, that we’d trace the pistol to him.”

“‘We,’” I reply. “I’ve been hearing that word a lot of late.”

“I know how you feel about it.” Briggs plants his hands on the windowsill and leans forward, as if his lower back aches. “You think I’m trying to take something away from you. You believe it.” He smiles grimly. “Captain Avallone came here last fall.”

“Someone that junior? So it wouldn’t raise suspicions?”

“Exactly, to appear casual, an informal drop-in while she was on her way somewhere else. When the fact is we were hearing things we didn’t like about how your second in command was running the CFC. And I don’t need to tell you we have a vested interest. The AFME does, DoD does, a lot of people do. It isn’t yours to ruin.”

“It isn’t mine at all,” I answer. “Obviously, I did a terrible job before I even started—”

“You haven’t done a terrible job,” he cuts me off. “I’m just as much to blame. You picked Jack or, better put, gave in to his wish to come back, and I didn’t get in your way, and I sure as hell should have. I didn’t want to step on you, and I should have stepped all over you about that decision you made. I figured in four months you’d be home, and I honestly didn’t imagine the havoc that man could cause in such a short period of time, but he was mixed up with the Otwahl Laboratory Rat Pack, doing drugs and losing it.”

“Is that why you delayed my leaving Dover? So you could find time to replace the leadership at the CFC? Find time to replace me?” I say it as bravely as I can.

“The opposite. To keep you out of it. I didn’t want you tarred by it. I delayed you as many times as I could without an out-and-out abduction, and then the father of the bride in London gets the damn swine flu, and a dead body starts bleeding. And your niece shows up in her chopper at Dover, and I tried to get you to stay by offering to transport the body to Dover, but you wouldn’t, and that was the end of it. And here we are again.”

“Yes, again.”

“We’ve been in our messes before. And we probably will again.”

“You didn’t send Lucy to pick me up.”

“I did not. And I don’t think she’s likely to take orders from me. Thank God she never thought about enlisting. Would end up in Leavenworth.”

“You didn’t ask her to bug my office.”

“A suggestion made in passing so we could know exactly what Jack was doing.”

“Your making a suggestion in passing is like a cannibal offhandedly inviting someone to dinner,” I reply.

“Quite an analogy.”

“People pay attention to your suggestions, and you know it.”

“Lucy pays attention if it suits her.”

“What about Captain Avallone? Did she conspire with Jack, conspire against me?”

“Never. I told you why she showed up last November for her tour. She’s quite loyal to you.”

“So loyal that she told Jack about Cape Town.” I surprise myself by saying it out loud.

“That never happened. Sophia knows nothing about Cape Town.”

“Then how did Julia Gabriel know?”

“When she was yelling at you? I see,” he says, as if I’ve just answered a question I didn’t know he’d asked. “I stopped outside your door to have a word with you and could hear you talking on the phone, could hear you were somewhat intensely involved. She talked to me, too. Talked to a number of people after getting word on the grapevine that we routinely extract semen at Dover, that every medical examiner office does this routinely, which is utter bullshit. We would never do such a thing unless it was absolutely proper and approved. She got this impression because Jack was covertly doing that at the CFC and had done so in the case of the man who got killed in a Boston taxicab on his wedding day. Someone connected to Mrs. Gabriel’s son. And I think you can understand how she got the idea that her son Peter should get the same special treatment.”

“She knows nothing about me personally. She didn’t mean it personally. You’re sure.”

“Why would you believe these negative things about you personally?” he says.

“I think you know why, John.”

“No damn way she was referring to anything specific. She’s an angry, militant woman and was just venting when she called you the same names she called me, called several other people at Dover. Bigots. Racists. Nazis. Fascists. A lot of staff got christened a lot of ugly names that morning.”

Briggs steps back away from the window and collects his laptop off the sill, his way of saying he has to go. He can’t have a conversation that lasts more than twenty minutes, and in fact the one we just had is lengthy for him and has tried his patience and gotten too close to too many things.

“One favor you could do for me that would be greatly appreciated,” he says. “Please stop telling people I thought MORT was the best thing since sliced bread.”

Benton, I think. I guess the two of them have gotten quite cozy.

“Not so, but I understand your remembering it that way, and I’m sorry we butted heads about it,” Briggs goes on. “However, given a choice of a robot dragging a dead body off the battlefield and a living person risking his life and limb to do it? That’s what I call a Sophie’s choice. No good choice, only two bad ones. You weren’t right, and I wasn’t, either.”

“Then we’ll leave it at that,” I answer. “Both of us made bad decisions.”

“It’s not like we hadn’t made them before,” he mutters.

He walks with me out of the sea captain’s house, passing through rooms I’ve already been in. Every space seems empty and depressing, as if there never was anybody home. It doesn’t feel that Fielding ever lived here, just parked himself as he worked demonically on his renovations and labored secretly in his cellar, and I just don’t know what drove him. Maybe it was money. He’d always wanted money and was never going to get it in our trade, and that bothered him about me, too. I do better than most. I plan well, and Benton has his inheritance, and then there is Lucy, who is obscenely rich from computer technologies she’s been selling since she was no older than the neuroterrorists Briggs just talked about. Thank God Lucy’s inventions are legal, as best I know.

She’s inside the CFC truck with Marino and Benton, and the yellow suits and hard hats are off, and everyone looks tired. Anne has driven off in the van again, making another delivery to the labs while more evidence waits for her here, white boxes filled with white paper evidence bags.

“There’s a package for you in your car,” Briggs says to me in front of the others. “The latest, greatest, level-four-A armor, specifically designed for females in theater, which would be fine if you ladies would bother with the plates.”

“If the vest isn’t comfortable,” I start to say.

“I think it is, but I’m built a little different from you. Problem’s going to be if it won’t completely close on the sides. We’ve seen that too many times, and the projectile finds that one damn opening.”

“I’ll try it out for you,” Lucy offers.

“Good,” Marino says to her. “You put it on, and I’ll start shooting, see if it works.”

“Or trauma from blunt force, which is what most people seem to forget about,” I tell Briggs. “The round doesn’t penetrate the body armor, but if the blunt force from the impact goes as deep as forty-four millimeters, it’s not survivable.”

“I haven’t been to the range in a while,” Lucy chats with Marino. “Maybe we can borrow Watertown’s. You been to their new one?”

“I bowl with their range master.”

“Oh, yeah, your team of cretins. What’s it called? Gutter Balls.”

“Spare None. You should bowl with us sometime,” Marino says to Briggs.

“Would it be acceptable to you, Colonel, if AFDIL sends in backup scientists to help out at the CFC, for God’s sake?” Briggs is saying to me. “Since it seems we have an avalanche of evidence that just keeps coming.”

“Any help would be greatly appreciated,” I reply. “I’ll work on the vest right away.”

“Get some sleep first.” Briggs says it like an order. “You look like hell.”

22

Massachusetts Veterinary Referral Hospital has twenty-four-hour emergency care, and although Sock doesn’t seem to be in any distress as he snores curled up like a teacup dog, a Chihuahua or poodle that can fit in a purse, I need to find out what I can about him. It is almost dark, and Sock is in my lap, both of us in the backseat of the borrowed SUV, driving north on I-95.

Having identified the man who was murdered while walking Sock, I intend to bestow the same kindness toward the rescued race dog, because no one seems to know where he came from. Liam Saltz doesn’t know and wasn’t aware his stepson Eli had a greyhound, or any pet. The superintendent of the apartment building near Harvard Square told Marino that pets aren’t allowed. By all accounts, when Eli rented his unit there last spring, he didn’t have a dog.

“This doesn’t really need to be done tonight,” Benton says as we drive and I pet the greyhound’s silky head and feel great pity for him. I’m careful about his ragged ears because he doesn’t like them touched, and he has old scars on his pointed snout. He is quiet, like something mute. If only you could talk, I think.

“Dr. Kessel doesn’t mind. We should just do it while we’re out,” I reply.

“I wasn’t thinking about whether some vet minded or not.”

“I know you weren’t.” As I stroke Sock and feel that I might want to keep him. “I’m trying to remember the name of the woman who is Jet Ranger’s nanny.”

“Let’s not go there.”

“Lucy’s never home, either, and it works out just fine. I think it’s Annette, or maybe Lanette. I’ll ask Lucy if Annette or Lanette could stop by during the day, maybe first thing each morning. Pick up Sock and take him to Lucy’s place so he and Jet Ranger can keep each other company. Then Annette or whatever her name is could bring Sock back to Cambridge at night. What would be so hard about that?”

“We’ll find Sock a home when the time is right.” Benton takes the Woburn exit, the sign illuminating an iridescent green as our headlights flash over it and he slows down on the ramp.

“You’re going to have a lovely home,” I tell Sock. “Secret Agent Wesley just said so. You heard him.”

“The reason you can’t have a dog is the same reason it’s always been a bad idea,” Benton’s voice says from the dark front seat. “Your IQ drops about fifty points.”

“It would be a negative number, then. Minus ten or something.”

“Please don’t start baby talk or gibberish or whatever it is you speak to animals.”

“I’m trying to figure out where to stop for food for him.”

“Why don’t I drop you off and I’ll run to a convenience store or market and pick up something,” Benton then says.

“Nothing canned. I need to do some research first about brands, probably a small-batch food for seniors because he’s not a spring chicken. Speaking of, let’s do chicken breasts, white rice, whitefish like cod, maybe a healthy grain like quinoa. So I’m afraid you’ll need a real grocery store. I think there’s a Whole Foods somewhere around here.”

Inside Mass Vet Referral, I’m shown along a long, bright corridor lined with examination rooms, and the technician who accompanies us is very kind to Sock, who is rather sluggish, I notice. He is light on his small feet, slowly ambling along the corridor as if he’s never run a race in his life and couldn’t possibly.

“I think he’s scared,” I say to the tech.

“They’re lazy.”

“Who would think that of a dog that can run forty miles an hour,” I comment.

“When they have to, but they don’t want to. They’d rather sleep on the couch.”

“Well, I don’t want to tug him. And his tail’s between his legs.”

“Poor baby.” The tech stops every other second to pet him.

I suspect Dr. Kessel alerted the staff of the greyhound’s sad circumstances, and we’ve been shown nothing but consideration and compassion and quite a lot of attention, as if Sock is famous, and I sincerely hope he won’t be. It wouldn’t be helpful if news of him became public, becoming chatter on the Internet and voyeurism or the usual tasteless jokes that seem to crop up around me. Do I take Sock to the morgue? Is Sock being trained as a cadaver dog? What does Sock do when I come home smelling like dead bodies?

He doesn’t have a fever, and his gums and teeth are healthy, his pulse and respiration are normal, and no sign of a heart murmur or dehydration, but I won’t allow Dr. Kessel to draw blood or urine. We’ll reserve a thorough checkup for another time, I suggest, because the dog doesn’t need more trauma. “Let him get to know me before he associates me with pain and suffering,” I suggest to Dr. Kessel, a thin man in scrubs who looks much too young to have finished veterinary school. Using a small scanner he calls a wand, he looks for a microchip that might have been implanted under the skin of Sock’s bony back as the dog sits on the examination table and I pet him.

“Well, he’s got one, a nice little RFID chip right where it ought to be over his shoulders,” Dr. Kessel says as he looks at what appears in the wand’s display. “So what we have is an ID number, and let me give the National Pet Registry a quick call and we’ll find out who this guy belongs to.”

Dr. Kessel makes the calls and takes notes. Momentarily, he hands me a piece of paper with a phone number and the name Lost Sock.

“That’s quite a name for a race dog, huh, boy?” the vet says to him. “Maybe he lived up to it and that’s why he got put out to pasture. A seven-seven-zero area code. Any idea?”

“I don’t know.”

He goes to a computer on a countertop and types the area code into a search field and says, “Douglasville, Georgia. Probably a vet’s office there. You want to call from here and see if it’s open? You’re a long way from home,” he says to Lost Sock, and I already know I won’t call him that.

“You won’t be lost ever again,” I tell him as we return to the car, because I don’t want to make the phone call in front of an audience.

The woman who answers simply says hello, as if I’ve reached a home number, and I tell her I’m calling about a dog that has this phone number on a microchip.

“Then he’s one of our rescues,” she says, and she has a Southern drawl. “Probably from Birmingham. We get a lot of them retired from the racetrack there. What’s his name?”

I tell her.

“Black and white, five years old.”

“Yes. That’s correct,” I reply.

“Is he all right? Not hurt or anything? He hasn’t been mistreated.”

“Curled up in my lap. He’s fine.”

“A sweetheart, but they all are. The nice thing about him is he’s cat- and small dog-tolerant and does fine with children as long as they don’t yank or tug on his ears. If you hold on a minute, I’ll pull him up on my computer and see what I can find out about where he’s supposed to be and with whom. I remember a student took him but can’t think of her name. Up north. He was wandering loose or what? And where are you calling from? I know he’s been trained and socialized, went through the program with flying colors, so you have a really nice dog, and I’m sure his owner must be just beside herself looking for him.”

“‘Trained and socialized’?” I ask as I think about Sock being owned by a female student. “What program? Is your rescue group involved in a special program of some sort that takes greyhounds to retirement communities or hospitals, something like that?”

“Prisons,” she says. “He was released from the racetrack last July and went through our nine-week program where inmates do the actual training. In his case, he went to Chatham in Savannah, Georgia.”

I remember Benton telling me about the woman incarcerated in a prison located in Savannah, the therapist convicted of molesting Jack Fielding when he was a troubled boy and sent to live on a ranch near Atlanta.

“We got involved with them because they were already training bomb-sniffing dogs, and we thought why not see if they want to do something a little more warm and fuzzy,” the woman says, and I put her on speakerphone and turn up the volume, “like taking one of these sweet babies. The inmate learns patience and responsibility, and what it feels like to be loved unconditionally, and the greyhound learns commands. Anyway, Lost Sock was trained by a female inmate at Chatham who said she wanted him when she finally gets out, but I’m afraid that won’t be for a while. He was then adopted by someone she recommended, the young woman in Massachusetts. Do you have something to write with?”

She gives me the name Dawn Kincaid and several phone numbers. The address is the one where we just were in Salem, Jack Fielding’s house. I seriously doubt Dawn Kincaid lived there all of the time, but she may have been there often. I doubt she was living with Eli Goldman all of the time, either, but it could be that he babysat her dog. Obviously, he knew her, both of them at Otwahl, and I remember that Briggs said Dawn Kincaid’s area of expertise was chemical synthesis and nanoengineering. Anyone who is an expert in nanoengineering likely would consider it child’s play to rig a pair of headphones with hidden micro-audio and -video recorders. She likely would have had easy access to Eli’s headphones and portable satellite radio. She worked with him. Her dog was in his apartment, meaning she may have been a frequent visitor there. She may have stayed there. She might have a key.

Bryce is still at the CFC when I reach him, and I tell him I made a photocopy of Erica Donahue’s letter before it was submitted to the labs, and to please find the file and read the phone numbers. I jot them down and ask what’s going on with the DNA lab.

“Working around the clock,” Bryce says. “I hope you’re not coming back here tonight. Get some rest.”

“Did Colonel Pruitt return to Dover, or is he at the labs?”

“I saw him a little while ago. He’s here with General Briggs, and some of their people are coming from Dover. Well, they’re your people, too, I guess….”

“Get hold of Colonel Pruitt and ask him if per my directive the profiles from the typewriter are going into CODIS immediately, before everything else. Maybe they already have? He’ll know what I mean. But what’s really important is I want a familial search done, checking any profiles against Jack Fielding’s exclusionary DNA, and a familial search done in CODIS that includes a comparison with the profile of an inmate at Chatham Correctional Institute in Savannah, Georgia. Her name is Kathleen Lawler.” I spell the name for him. “A repeat offender…”

“Where?”

“Chatham, a women’s prison near Savannah, Georgia. Her DNA should be in the CODIS database….”

“What’s that got to…?”

“She and Jack had a child together, a girl. I want a familial search to see if we get a match with anything recovered….”

“He what? He what with who?”

“And the latent prints on the plastic film…” I start to say. “Okay. Now you’re scrambling my brains….”

“Bryce. Get unscrambled and be quiet, and you’d better be writing this down.”

“I am, boss.”

“I want the prints from the film compared to Fielding and to me, and I want DNA done ASAP on that, too. See who else might have touched the film. Maybe whoever made or altered the patch the film came from. And my guess is Otwahl might print its employees, have their prints on file over there. A place that security-minded. It’s really important we know exactly who supplied those tampered-with patches. Colonel Pruitt and General Briggs will understand all this.”

Next I get Erica Donahue on the phone as Benton drives through Cambridge, taking the same roads Eli did the last time he walked here with Sock on Sunday, on his way to meet his stepfather, to blow the whistle on Otwahl Technologies to a man who could do something about it.

“A welcome guest meaning how often?” I ask Mrs. Donahue after she tells me over speakerphone that Dawn Kincaid has been to the Donahues’ home on Beacon Hill many times and is always a welcome guest. The Donahues adore her.

“For dinner or just dropping by, especially on the weekends. You know she came up the hard way, had to work for everything and has had so much misfortune, her mother killed in a car crash, and then her father dying tragically, I forget from what. Such a lovely girl, and she’s always been so sweet to Johnny. They met when he started at Otwahl last spring, although she’s older, in a Ph.D. program at MIT, transferred from Berkeley, I believe, and just incredibly bright and so attractive. How do you know her?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. We’ve not met.”

“Johnny’s only friend, really. Certainly the closest one he’s ever had. But not romantic, although I’ve hoped for it, but I don’t think that will ever be. I believe she’s seeing someone else at Otwahl, a scientist she’s working with there.”

“Do you know his name?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t recall it if I ever knew. I think he’s originally from Berkeley as well, and then ended up here because of MIT and Otwahl. A South African. I’ve heard Johnny rather rudely refer to the Afrikaans nerd Dawn dates, and some other names I won’t repeat. And before that it was a dumb jock, according to my son, who’s a bit jealous….”

“A dumb jock?” I ask.

“A terribly rude thing to say about someone who died so tragically. But Johnny lacks tact. That’s part of his unusualness.”

“Do you know the name of the man who died?”

“I don’t remember. That football player they found in the harbor.”

“Did Johnny talk about that case with you?”

“You’re not going to imply that my son had something to do with—”

I calmly reassure her I’m not implying anything of the sort, and I end the call as the SUV crunches through the frozen snow blanketing our Cambridge driveway. At the end of it, under the bare branches of a huge oak tree, is the carriage house, our remodeled garage, its double wooden doors illuminated in our headlights.

“You heard that for yourself,” I say to Benton.

“It doesn’t mean Jack didn’t do it. It doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Wally Jamison or Mark Donahue or Eli Goldman,” he says. “We need to be careful.”

“Of course we need to be careful. We’re always careful. None of this you already knew?”

“I can’t tell you what a patient told me. But let’s put it this way, what Mrs. Donahue just said is interesting, and I didn’t say I’m convinced about Fielding. I’m saying we just need to be careful because we don’t know certain things for a fact right now. But we will. I can promise you that. Everyone’s looking for Dawn Kincaid. I’ll pass this latest information along,” Benton says, and what he’s really saying is there’s nothing we can do about it or nothing we should do about it, and he’s right. We can’t go out like a two-party posse and track down Dawn Kincaid, who probably is a thousand miles from here by now.

Benton stops the SUV and points a remote at the garage. A wooden door rolls up, and a light goes on inside, illuminating his black Porsche convertible and three other empty spaces.

He tucks the SUV next to his sports car, and I slip the lead over Sock’s long, slender neck and help him out of my lap, then out of the backseat and into the garage, which is very cold because of the missing window in back. I walk Sock across the rubberized flooring and look through the gaping black square and at our snowy backyard beyond it. It is very dark, but I can make out disturbed snow, a lot of footprints, the neighborhood children again using our property as a shortcut, and that’s going to stop. We have a dog, and I will get the backyard walled or fenced in. I will be the mean, crabby neighbor who doesn’t allow trespassing.

“What a joke,” I comment to Benton as we walk out of the detached garage and onto the slick snowy driveway, the night sharply cold and white and very still. “You decide to get an alarm system for the garage. So we have one that doesn’t work and anybody could climb right in. When are we getting a new window?”

We head to the back door, walking carefully over crusty snow, which Sock clearly doesn’t like, snatching his paws up as if he’s walking over hot coals, and shivering. Dark trees rock in the wind, the night sky scattered with stars, the moon small and bone-white high above the roofs and treetops of Cambridge.

“It sucks,” he says, shifting the bag of groceries to his other arm as he finds the door key. “I’ll make sure to get them out here tomorrow. It’s just I haven’t been around and someone has to be home.”

“How big a deal to get fencing in back for Sock? So we can let him out and not be afraid he’ll run off.”

“You told me he doesn’t like to run.” Benton unlocks the door of the glassed-in porch.

Beyond it are the dark shapes of trees in Norton’s Woods. The timber building with its three-tiered metal roof hulks darkly against the night, no lights on inside. I feel sad as I look at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences headquarters and think of Liam Saltz and his slain stepson. I wonder if the maimed flybot is still out there somewhere, buried and frozen, no longer alive, as Lucy put it, because the sun can’t find it. I have a funny feeling someone has it. Maybe the FBI, I decide. Maybe people from DARPA, from the Pentagon. Maybe Dawn Kincaid.

“I think we need boots for him,” I say. “They make little booties for dogs, and he needs something like that so he doesn’t cut his paws on the ice and frozen snow.”

“Well, he won’t go very far in this cold.” Benton opens the door and the alarm begins to beep. “Trust me. You’ll have a hard time making him go out in this weather. I hope he’s housebroken.”

“He needs a couple of coats. I’m surprised Eli or Dawn or whoever didn’t have coats for him. Greyhounds need them up here. This really isn’t the right part of the world for greyhounds, but it is what it is, Sock. You’re going to be warm and well fed and fine.”

Benton enters the code on the keypad and resets the alarm the instant he’s shut the door behind us, and Sock leans against my legs.

“You build a fire, and I’m making drinks,” I tell Benton. “Then I’ll cook chicken and rice or maybe switch to cod and quinoa but not right now. He’s been eating chicken and rice all day, and I don’t want him sick. What would you like? Or maybe I should ask what’s in the house.”

“Some of your pizza’s still in the freezer.”

I turn on lights, and the stained-glass windows in the stairwell are dark but will be gorgeous from the outside, backlit by lights inside the house. I imagine the French wildlife scenes brilliantly lit up when I take Sock out at night and how cheerful that will be. I imagine playing with him in the backyard in the spring and summer, when it’s warm, and seeing the vibrant windows lit up at night and of how peaceful and civilized that will be. Living on the edge of Harvard and coming home from the office to my old dog, and I’ll plant a rose garden in back, and I think how good that sounds.

“Nothing to eat for me right now,” Benton says, taking off his coat. “First things first. A very strong drink, please.”

He goes into the living room, and Sock’s nails click against hardwood, then are silent on rugs as we pass from room to room and into the kitchen, where I feel him leaning against my legs as I open dark cherry cabinets above stainless-steel appliances. Wherever I move, he moves and presses against me, pushing against the back of my legs as I get out tumblers, then ice from the freezer, and then a bottle of our very best Scotch, a Glenmorangie single-malt aged twenty-five years that was a Christmas gift from Jaime Berger. My heart aches as I pour drinks and think of Lucy and Jaime breaking up and of people who are dead, and of what Fielding did to his life, and now he’s dead. He’d been killing himself all along, and then someone finished it for him, stuck a Glock in his left ear and pulled the trigger, most likely when he was standing near the cryogenic freezer, where he stored ill-gotten semen before shipping it to wives, mothers, and lovers of men who died young.

Who would Fielding trust so much as to allow the person into his cellar, to share his illegal venture capitalism with, to let borrow his sea captain’s house and probably everything he owned? I remember what his former boss told me, the chief in Chicago. He commented he was glad Jack was moving to Massachusetts to be near family, only he wasn’t referring to Lucy, Marino, and me, not to any of us, not even to his current wife and their two kids. I have a feeling the chief meant someone I never knew existed before now, and if I weren’t so selfish and egotistical, maybe the thought would have occurred to me sooner.

How typical of me to assume such importance in Fielding’s life, and he wasn’t thinking of me at all when he told his former chief what he did about family. Fielding probably meant the daughter from his first love, probably the first woman he ever had sex with, the therapist at the ranch near Atlanta who bore his daughter, and then gave her up just as Fielding was given up. A girl with genetic loading, as Benton put it, that would land her in prison if she didn’t end up dead. And she moved here last year from Berkeley, and then Fielding moved back here from Chicago.

“Nineteen seventy-eight,” I say as I walk into the dark, cozy living room of built-in bookcases and exposed old beams. The lights are out, and a fire crackles and glows on the brick hearth, and sparks swarm as Benton moves a log with the poker. “She would be about Lucy’s age, about thirty-one.” I hand him a tumbler of Scotch, a generous pour with only a few cubes of ice. The whisky looks coppery in the firelight. “Do you think it’s her? That Dawn Kincaid is his biological daughter? Because I do. I hope you didn’t already know about her.”

“I promise I didn’t. If it’s true.”

“You really weren’t focused on Dawn Kincaid or a child Fielding had with the woman in prison.”

“I really wasn’t. You need to remember how recent this all has been, Kay.” We settle next to each other on the sofa, and then Sock settles in my lap. “Fielding wasn’t on anybody’s radar until last week, at least not for anything criminal, nothing violent. But I should have gone to the trouble to find out about the baby adopted,” Benton says, and he sounds slightly angry with himself. “I know I would have eventually, and I hadn’t yet because it didn’t seem important.”

“In the grand scheme of things and at the time, it wasn’t. I’m not trying to put you on the defensive.”

“I knew from the records I reviewed that the baby, a girl, was given up for adoption while the mother was in prison the first time. An adoption agency in Atlanta,” he says. “Maybe like some adopted children, she set about to find out who her biological parents were.”

“As smart as she is, that probably wasn’t hard.”

“Christ.” Benton takes a swallow of Scotch. “It’s always the one thing you think doesn’t matter, the one thing you think can wait.”

“I know. That’s almost always how it works out. The detail you don’t want to bother with.”

We sit on the sofa, looking at the fire, and Sock is curled up on top of me. He is attached to me. He won’t let me out of his sight. He has to be touching me, as if he’s certain I’ll disappear and he’ll be abandoned in a run-down house again where horrible things happen.

“I think there is a very good probability that’s what the DNA is going to tell us about Dawn Kincaid,” Benton continues in a flat tone. “I wish we could have known it before, but there wasn’t a reason to look.”

“You don’t have to keep saying that. Why would you have looked? What would a baby he fathered when he was a teenager have to do with what’s gone on?”

“Obviously, it might have.”

“Twenty-twenty hindsight.”

“I knew he was writing Kathleen Lawler, e-mailing her, but there’s nothing criminal about that, nothing even suspicious, and no mention of anyone by the name of Dawn, just an interest they had in common. I recall that phrase, the interest they shared. I thought he fucking meant crime, maybe their old crime and how it changed who they were forever, that was the interest they had in common,” he says ruefully, trying to figure it out as he talks. “Now I have to wonder if the interest they shared might be their child, might even be Dawn Kincaid. Just unfortunate that Jack never got past that part of his life, that he was still connected to Kathleen Lawler, and probably she to him. And then a daughter who got his intelligence, his good parts and his bad parts. And the mother’s good and really bad parts. And who the hell knows all the places that daughter’s been bounced around to but never lived with her father, who I suspect she never knew while she was growing up. Of course, this is complete speculation on our part.”

“Not really. It’s like an autopsy. Most of the time it tells me what I already know.”

“I’m afraid we might know. I’m afraid we really might, and it’s a horror story, really. Talk about bad seed and the sins of the father.”

“Some would say it was the sins of the mother in this case.”

“I should make some phone calls,” Benton says as he drinks and sits in front of the fire, staring into it.

He is angry with himself. He can’t tolerate missing that one thing, as he calls it. In his mind, he should have made it a burning priority to track down a baby born to a woman in prison more than thirty years ago, and that really is unreasonable. Why would he think it mattered?

“Jack never mentioned Dawn Kincaid to me or a daughter who was given up for adoption, absolutely nothing like that. I had no idea.” The whisky has heated me up, and I pet Sock, feeling the bumps of his ribs, like a washboard, and feeling the sadness that has settled inside me and won’t go away. “I seriously doubt she ever lived with him until maybe very recently, don’t see how. Not in Richmond, absolutely not. And it’s unlikely his wives would have allowed a daughter from that early criminal liaison to be part of their lives, assuming they knew. He probably didn’t tell them, except to allude to his difficulty with cases involving dead children. If he even said that much to the women in his life.”

“He said it to you.”

“I wasn’t just a woman in his life. I was his boss.”

“That’s not all.”

“Please not again, Benton. Really. It’s getting to be ridiculous. I know you’re in a mood and both of us are tired.”

“It’s the thought of you not being honest with me. I don’t care what you did back then. I don’t have a right to care about what you did before we were together.”

“Well, you do care, and you have a right to care about anything you want. But how many times do I have to tell you?”

“I remember the first time we socialized.”

“How dated that sounds, no pun intended. Like two people on a Sunday night in the fifties.” I reach for his hand.

“Nineteen eighty-eight, that Italian place in the Fan. Remember Joe’s?”

“Every time I was out with the cops, that’s where we’d end up. Nothing like a big plate of baked spaghetti after a homicide scene.”

“You hadn’t been the chief long.” Benton talks to the fire, and he strokes my hand gently, both of our hands resting on top of Sock. “I asked you about Jack because you were so industrious about him, so vigilant, so focused, and I thought it was unusual. The more I probed, the more evasive you got. I’ve never forgotten it.”

“It wasn’t because of him,” I answer. “It was because of the way I felt about me.”

“Because of Briggs. Not an easy man to be under. And I don’t mean that the way it just came out. Not that you would necessarily be the one under him or anyone. Probably on top.”

“Please don’t be snide.”

“I’m teasing you, and both of us are too tired and frayed around the edges for teasing. I apologize.”

“What happened is my fault, anyway. I won’t blame him or anyone,” I continue. “But he was God back then. To someone like me. I was really very sheltered. I think all I’d ever done was go to school, study, consumed by residencies, Lord, how many years of them, like a long dream of working hard and rarely sleeping, and of course doing what I was told by people in authority. In the early days hardly questioning it. Because I felt I didn’t deserve to be a doctor. I should have run my father’s small grocery store, been a wife and mother, lived simply, like everyone else in my family.”

“John Briggs was the most powerful person you’d ever come across. I can see why,” Benton says, and I sense he might know Briggs better than I’ve imagined. I wonder how much they’ve talked these past six months, not only about Fielding but about everything.

“Please don’t be threatened by him,” I’m saying as I wonder what Benton knows about Briggs and, most of all, what Benton knows about me. “My past with him doesn’t matter anymore. And it was about my perception, anyway. I needed him to be powerful. I needed that back then.”

“Because your father was anything but powerful. All those years he was ill, with you taking care of him, taking care of everyone. You wanted someone who would take care of you for once.”

“And when you get what you want, guess what happens. John took terrible care of me. Or it would be more accurate if I said that I took terrible care of myself. I knew—better yet, was persuaded— to go against my conscience and to be led into something that wasn’t right.”

“Politics,” Benton says as if he knows.

“What would you know about what happened back then?” I look at him, and shadows move on his keenly handsome face in the firelight.

“I think it’s something like two years’ service for every year of medical or law school paid for by the military. So unless my math is really bad, you owed the US government eight years of service with the air force, more specifically, the AFIP, AFME.”

“Six. I finished Hopkins in three years.”

“Okay, that’s right. But you served what, a year? And every time I’ve asked about it, you give me the same song and dance about the AFIP wanting to set up a fellowship program in Virginia and they decided to plant you there as chief.”

“We did start an AFIP fellowship program. In those days there weren’t that many offices if you were AFIP and wanted to specialize in forensics. So we added Richmond. And now, of course, us. The CFC. We’ll be gearing up for that soon. Any minute I’ve got to get that going.”

“Politics,” Benton says again as he takes a drink of Scotch. “You’ve always felt guilty about something, and for the longest time I thought it was Jack. Because you’d had an affair with him, repeating his original injury. A powerful woman in charge of him has sex with him, victimizing him again, returning him to the scene of the original crime. For you? That would have been unpardonable.”

“Except I didn’t.”

“You promise.”

“I promise.”

“Well, you did something.” He’s not going to stop until we have it before us.

“Yes, I did, but it was before Jack,” I answer.

“You did what you were ordered to do, Kay. And you’ve got to let it go,” he says, because he knows. It’s obvious he does.

“I never told their families,” I reply, and Benton doesn’t say anything. “The two women murdered in Cape Town. I couldn’t call their families and tell them what really happened. They think it was racism, Afrikaans gang members during Apartheid. A high crime rate of blacks killing whites suited certain political leaders back then. They wanted it to be true. The more, the better.”

“Those leaders are gone now, Kay.”

“You should make your phone calls, Benton. Call Douglas or whoever and tell them about Dawn Kincaid and who she probably is and the tests I’ve ordered.”

“The Reagan administration is long gone, Kay.” Benton’s going to make me talk about it, and I’m convinced it’s been talked about before. Briggs probably said something to him because Briggs knows damn well how haunted I am.

“What I did isn’t long gone,” I reply.

“You didn’t do a damn thing that was wrong. You have nothing to do with their deaths. I don’t have to know all the details to say that much,” Benton says as he laces his fingers in mine, our joined hands gently rising and sinking in rhythm to Sock’s breathing.

“I feel as if I had everything to do with it,” I answer.

“You didn’t,” he says. “Other people did, and you were forced to be silent. Do you know how often it is I can’t tell what I know? My whole life has been like that. The alternative is to make things worse. That’s the test. Does telling make it worse and cause others to be persecuted and killed. Primum non nocere. First, do no harm. That’s what I weigh everything against, and I sure as hell know you do the same.”

I don’t want a lecture right now.

“Do you think she did it?” I ask as Sock breathes slowly, contentedly, as if he’s lived here always and is home. “Killed all of them?”

“Now I’m wondering.” He looks at his drink, and it turns the color of honey in the firelight.

“To put Jack out of his misery?”

“She probably hated him,” Benton says. “That’s why she would have been drawn to him, wanted to get to know him as an adult, if that’s what she did.”

“Well, I don’t think he shackled Wally Jamison in his cellar and hacked him to death. If Wally came to the house in Salem willingly, probably it was upon Dawn’s invitation, to see her. Maybe play out some fantasy, a game, a macabre sex game on Halloween. Maybe she did a similar thing to Mark Bishop, and when she has them under control, under her spell, exactly where she wants them, she strikes. A rush, a thrill, for someone diabolical like that.”

“Liam Saltz’s second wife, Eli’s mother, is South African,” Benton says. “As is her husband from that earlier marriage, Eli’s biological father, and Eli was wearing a ring that likely was taken from the Donahue house, likely taken by Dawn along with the typewriter, the stationery. Maybe used the duct tape to collect fibers, trace evidence, DNA from the Donahue house, while she was at it. Make it look like the letter really did come from the mother, making sure that Johnny’s alibi was weakened further by it.”

“Now you’re thinking irrationally like me,” I reply wryly. “That’s what I believe happened, or close to it.”

“The game,” Benton muses in that tone he has when he hates what someone has done. “Games and more games, elaborate, intricate dramas. I can’t wait to meet the fucking bitch. I really can’t wait.”

“Maybe you’ve had enough Scotch.”

“Not half enough. Who better to manipulate Johnny Donahue than someone like that, some attractive brain trust of a woman who’s older? To plant the idea in that poor kid’s head that he murdered a six-year-old while he was delusional and having memory lapses because of drugs she was spiking his meds with? Spiking Fielding’s meds with. Who knows who else? A poisonous person who destroys the people she’s supposed to love, pays them back for every crime committed against her, and you pile on her genetic predisposition and maybe the same cocktail Fielding was on?”

“That would be the perfect storm, as they say.”

“Let’s see what kind of killing machine I can be and get away with it,” he says in that tone of his, and if I could look into his eyes, I know what would be in them. Complete contempt. “And after it’s ended, no one is left standing but her. Fucking bulletproof.”

“You could be right.” And I remember the box I left in the car. “Why don’t you make your phone calls.”

“Borderline, sadistic, manipulative, narcissistic.”

“I guess some people are everything.” I set down my glass on the coffee table and ease Sock off my lap and onto the rug.

“Some people just about are.”

“I forgot the box Briggs left for me,” I say as I get up from the sofa. “And I’ll take Sock out back. You ready to go potty?” I ask the dog. “Then I’ll warm up pizza. I don’t suppose we have anything for salad. What the hell have you eaten the entire time I’ve been gone? Let me guess. You run over to Chang An for Chinese food and live on that for the next three days.”

“That would be really good right now.”

“You’ve probably been doing it every week.”

“I’d rather have your pizza anytime.”

“Don’t try to be nice,” I reply.

I walk into the kitchen for Sock’s lead and slip it around his neck and find a flashlight in a drawer, an old Maglite that Marino gave me aeons ago, long and black aluminum, powered by fat D batteries, reminding me of the old days, when police used to carry flashlights the size of nightsticks instead of everything being so small, like the SureFire lights Lucy likes and what Benton keeps in his glove box. I disarm the alarm system and worry about Sock, about how cold it is, realizing as we go down the back steps in the dark that I didn’t bother with a coat for me, and I notice that the motion-sensor light attached to the garage is out. I try to remember if it was out an hour or so ago when we got home, but I’m not sure. There is so much to fix, so much to change, so much to do. Where will I start when tomorrow comes?

Benton didn’t lock the door to the detached garage, because what would be the point with an open window the size of a big-screen TV? Inside the remodeled carriage house it is dark and bitterly cold, and air blows in through the open black square that I can barely make out, and I turn on the Maglite and it doesn’t work. The batteries must be dead, and how stupid of me not to check before I left the house. I point the key at the SUV, and the lock chirps but the interior light doesn’t go on because it’s a damn Bureau car, and Special Agent Douglas isn’t about to have an interior light that comes on. I feel around on the backseat for the box, which is quite large, and I realize it won’t be easy to carry it and deal with Sock. In fact, I can’t.

“I’m sorry, Sock,” I say to the dog as I feel him shivering against my legs. “I know it’s cold in here. Just give me a minute. I’m so sorry. But as you’re discovering, I’m a very stupid person.”

I use the car key to slit the tape on top of the box and pull out a vest that is familiar even if I’ve not examined this particular brand, but I recognize the feel of tough nylon and the stiffness of ceramic-Kevlar plates that Briggs or someone has already inserted into the internal pockets. I tear open the Velcro straps on the sides to open up the vest so I can sling it over my shoulder. I feel the weight of the vest draped over me as I shove the car door shut, and Sock jumps away from me like a rabbit. He yanks the lead out of my hand.

“It’s just the car door, Sock. It’s all right, come here, Sock….” I start to call out at the same time something else moves inside the garage near the open window, and I turn around to see what it is, but it is too dark to see anything.

“Sock? Is that you over there?”

The dark, frigid air moves around me, and the blow to my back feels like a hammer hitting me between my shoulder blades, as if a loud hissing dragon is attacking me, and I lose my balance.

A piercing scream and hissing, and a warm, wet mist spatters my face as I fall hard against the SUV and swing with all my might at whatever it is. The Maglite cracks like a bat against something hard that gives beneath the weight of the blow and then moves, and I swing again and hit something again, something that feels different. I smell the iron smell of blood and taste it on my lips and in my mouth as I swing again and again at air, and then the lights are on and the glare is blinding and I’m covered with a fine film of blood as if I’ve been spray-painted with it. Benton is inside the garage, pointing a pistol at the woman in a huge black coat facedown on the rubberized floor. I notice blood pooling under her right bloody hand, and near it, a severed fingertip with a glittery white French nail, and near that, a knife with a thin steel blade and a thick black handle with a release button on the shiny metal guard.

“Kay? Kay? Are you all right? Kay! Are you all right?”

I realize Benton is shouting at me as I crouch by the woman and touch the side of her neck and find her pulse. I make sure she is breathing and turn her over to check her pupils. Neither of them is fixed. Her face is bloody from the Maglite smashing into it, and I am startled by the resemblance, the dark blond hair cut very short, the strong features, and the full lower lip that look like Jack Fielding’s. Even the small ears close to the sides of her head look like his, and I feel the strength in her upper body, her shoulders, although she isn’t a large person, maybe five-foot-six or -seven and slender but with large bones like her dead father. All this is flooding my senses as I tell Benton to rush into the house and call 911, and to bring a container of ice.

23

A warm front moved in during the night and brought more snow, this time a gentle snow that falls silently, muting all sound, covering everything that is ugly, softly rounding whatever is sharp and hard.

I sit up in bed inside the master bedroom on the second floor of the house in Cambridge, and snow is coming down, piling in the bare branches of an oak tree on the other side of the big window nearest me. A moment ago a fat gray squirrel was there, perfectly balanced on the smallest twig, and we were eye to eye, his cheeks moving as he stared through the window at me while I sifted through the paperwork and photographs in my lap. I smell old paper and dust and the medicine smell of the wipes I used on Sock, who I suspect hadn’t had his ears cleaned in recent memory, maybe not ever, not the way I cleaned them. He didn’t like it at first, but I talked him into it with a soft voice and a sweet-potato treat that Lucy brought by when she gave me a container of the same wipes she uses on her bulldog. The miconazole-chlorhexidine is good for pachydermatis, I made the mistake of mentioning to my niece very early this morning when she stopped by to check on me.

Jet Ranger wouldn’t appreciate being called a pachyderm, Lucy retorted. He’s not an elephant or a hippopotamus, and there’s only so much one can do about his weight. She has him on a new diet for seniors, but he can’t exercise because of his bad hips, and the snow gives him a rash on his paws for some reason, and his legs are too short for snow this deep, so he can’t go on even the briefest walk this time of year, she went on and on, and I’d truly offended her. But that’s the way Lucy can get when she’s worried and scared, and most of all she’s upset she wasn’t here last night. She’s angry she wasn’t here to deal with Dawn Kincaid, but I’m not sorry in the least. I can’t say I’m proud of myself for giving someone a linear skull fracture and a concussion, but if Lucy had been in the garage instead of me, there would be one more person dead. My niece would have killed Dawn Kincaid for sure, probably shot her, and there are enough people dead.

It’s also possible that Lucy wouldn’t have survived the encounter, I don’t care what she says. It depends on two details that made the difference in my still being here and Dawn Kincaid being locked up on the forensic ward of an area hospital. I don’t think she was expecting me to walk into the garage. I think she was lurking on the other side of the gaping window, waiting for me to take Sock into the dark backyard. But I surprised her by entering the garage first to get what I’d left in the car, and by the time she slipped through the big space where the window was supposed to be, I’d already opened the box and slung the level-4-A tactical vest over my shoulder. When she stabbed at my back with the injection knife, it hit a nylon-covered ceramic-Kevlar plate, and the terrific jolt caused by that absolute stopping action caused her fingers to slide along the blade. She cut three fingers to the bone and severed the tip of her pinkie at the same time she was releasing the CO₂, and a mist of her blood sprayed all over me.

My point to Lucy was that unless she’d caused Dawn to lose the surprise element for the attack and unless Lucy also just happened to have on body armor or at least have it draped over her torso, she might not have been as fortunate as I was. So my niece should stop saying it’s a damn shame she wasn’t here last night, claiming that she sure as hell would have taken care of things, as if I didn’t, because I did, even though it was luck. I think I took care of things just fine and only hope I can take care of a far more important matter that hasn’t killed me yet but at times has certainly felt like it might.

“She’d told me there had been catcalls and ugly comments,” Mrs. Pieste is telling me over the phone as I go over her daughter’s case with her. “Calling her a Boer. Telling the Boers to go home, and as you know, that’s Afrikaans for farmer but really meant to disparage all white South Africans. And I kept telling the man from the Pentagon that I didn’t care about the reason, whether it was Noonie and Joanne being white or American or assumed to be South African. And, of course, they weren’t South African. I didn’t care why. I just didn’t want to believe the suffering he described.”

“Do you remember who that man from the Pentagon was?” I ask.

“A lawyer.”

“It wasn’t a colonel in the army,” I hope out loud.

“It was some young lawyer at the Pentagon who worked for the secretary of defense. I don’t remember his name.”

Then it wasn’t Briggs.

“A fast-talking one,” Mrs. Pieste adds disdainfully. “I remember I didn’t like him. But I wouldn’t have liked anybody who told me the things he did.”

“The only comfort I can offer out of all of this,” I repeat, “is Noonie and Joanne didn’t suffer the way you’ve been led to believe. I can’t say with absolute certainty that they weren’t aware of being smothered, but it is extremely likely they weren’t aware because they were drugged.”

“But that would have been tested for,” Mrs. Pieste’s voice says, and she has a Massachusetts accent, can’t pronounce R’s, and I didn’t realize she’s originally from Andover. After Noonie’s murder, the Piestes moved to New Hampshire, I just found out.

“Mrs. Pieste, I think you understand nothing was tested as it was supposed to be,” I reply.

“Why didn’t you?”

“The medical examiner in Cape Town—”

“But you signed the death certificate, Dr. Scarpetta. And the autopsy report. I have copies that lawyer from the Pentagon sent me.”

“I didn’t sign them.” I refused to sign documents that I knew were a lie, but knowing they were a lie made me guilty of it anyway. “I don’t have copies, as hard as that probably is for you to believe,” I then say. “They weren’t supplied to me. What I have are my own notes, my own records, which I mailed back to the US before I left South Africa because I worried my luggage would be gone through, and it was.”

“But you signed what I have.”

“I promise I didn’t,” I reply calmly but firmly. “My guess is certain people made certain my signature was forged on those falsified documents in the event I decided to do what I’m doing now.”

“If you decided to tell the truth.”

It’s so hard to hear it stated so bluntly. The truth. Implying what I’ve told or not told over the years makes me a liar.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her again. “You had a right to know the truth back then, at the time of your daughter’s death. And the death of her friend.”

“I can see why you didn’t say anything back then, though,” Mrs. Pieste says, and she sounds only slightly upset. Mostly she sounds interested and relieved to be talking about something that has dominated her life for most of it. “When people do things like this, no telling where they’ll stop. Well, there’s no limit. Other people would have gotten hurt. Including you.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted anybody else to get hurt,” I reply, and I feel worse if what she’s saying is that I was silent out of fear for my own safety. I was afraid of a lot of things and a host of people I couldn’t see. I was afraid of other people dying, of people being wrongly accused.

“I hope you understand that when I read the death certificate and autopsy report, not that I understand most of the medical terms, well, one would think the findings are yours,” Mrs. Pieste says.

“They absolutely weren’t, and they are false. There was no tissue response to the injuries. All of it was postmortem. In fact, hours after the deaths, Mrs. Pieste. What was done to Noonie and Joanne occurred many hours after they had died.”

“If there wasn’t a test for drugs, then how can you be sure they were given something?” her voice goes on, and I hear the sound of another phone being picked up.

“This is Edward Pieste,” a man’s voice says. “I’m on, too. I’m Noonie’s father.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss.” It sounds weak, perfectly insipid. “I wish I had exactly the right words to say to both of you. I’m sorry you were lied to and that I permitted it, and although I won’t make excuses…”

“We understand why you couldn’t say what happened,” the father replies. “The feelings back then, and our government secretly in collusion with those who wanted to keep Apartheid alive. That’s why Noonie was making that documentary. They wouldn’t let the film crew into South Africa. Each of them had to go in as if they were tourists. A big dirty secret what our government was doing to support the atrocities over there.”

“It wasn’t that big of a secret, Eddie.” Mrs. Pieste’s voice.

“Well, the White House put on the good face.”

“I’m sure they told you about the documentary Noonie was making? She had such a future,” Mrs. Pieste says to me as I look at a picture of her daughter that I wouldn’t want the Piestes to ever see.

“About the children of Apartheid,” I reply. “I did see it when it aired here.”

“The evils of white supremacy,” she says. “Of any supremacy, period.”

“I missed the first part of what the two of you have been talking about,” Mr. Pieste says. “Was out shoveling the driveway.”

“He doesn’t listen,” his wife says. “A man his age shoveling snow, but he’s the hard head.” She says it with sad affection. “Dr. Scarpetta was telling me Noonie and Joanne were drugged.”

“Really. Well, that’s something.” He says it with no energy in his tone.

“I got to the apartment several days after their deaths and did a retrospective. It was staged, of course; their crime scene was staged,” I explain. “But there were beer cans, plastic cups, and a wine bottle in the kitchen trash, a bottle of white wine from Stellenbosch, and I managed to get the cans, the bottle, and cups along with other items, and have them sent back to the States, where I had them tested. We found high levels of GHB in the wine bottle and two of the cups. Gamma hydroxybutyric acid, commonly known as a date-rape drug.”

“They did say there was rape,” Mr. Pieste says with the same empty affect.

“I don’t know for a fact that they were raped. There was no physical sign of it, no injuries except staged ones inflicted postmortem, and swabs I had tested privately here in the US were negative for sperm,” I reply, looking through photographs of the nude bodies bound to chairs I know the women weren’t sitting in when they were murdered. I look at close-ups showing a livor mortis pattern that told me the women were lying in bed on rumpled sheets for at least twelve hours after death.

I go through photographs I took with my own camera of hacking and cutting injuries that barely bled, and ligatures that scarcely left a mark on the skin because the brutes behind all this were too ignorant to know what the hell they were doing, someone hired or assigned by government or military operatives to spike a bottle of local wine and have drinks with the women, possibly a friend or they thought the person was friendly or safe, when, of course, he was anything but, and I tell them that serology tests I had done after I got home indicated the presence of a male. Later, when I had DNA testing done, I got the profile of a European or white male who remains unknown. I can’t say for a fact it is the profile of the killer, but it was someone drinking beer inside the apartment, I add.

As much as one can reconstruct anything, I tell the Piestes what I think happened, that after Noonie and Joanne were drugged and groggy or unconscious, their assailant helped them to bed and smothered them with a pillow, and I based this on pinpoint hemorrhages and other injuries, I explain. Then for some reason this person must have left. Maybe he wanted to come back later with others involved in the conspiracy, or it could be that he waited inside the apartment for his compatriots to arrive, I don’t know. But by the time the women were bound and cut and mutilated so savagely, they had been dead for a while, and it couldn’t have been more obvious to me when I finally saw them.

“Up here we got about four inches already,” Mr. Pieste says after a while, after he’s heard enough. “That on top of ice. Did you get the ice down there in Cambridge?”

“I guess we should complain about this to someone,” Mrs. Pieste says. “Does it matter how long it’s been?”

“It never matters how long it’s been when you’re talking about the truth,” I reply. “And there’s no statute of limitation on homicide.”

“I just hope they didn’t lock up someone who shouldn’t have been,” Mrs. Pieste then says.

“The cases have remained unsolved. Attributed to black gang members but no arrests,” I tell them.

“But it was probably someone white,” she says.

“Someone white was drinking beer inside the apartment, that much I can say with reasonable certainty.”

“Do you know who did it?” she asks.

“Because we would want them punished,” her husband says.

“I only know the type of people who likely did it. Cowardly people all about power and politics. And you should do what you feel, what’s in your heart.”

“Eddie, what do you think?”

“I’ll write a letter to Senator Chappel.”

“You know how much good that will do.”

“Then to Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. I’ll write everyone,” he says.

“What will anybody do about it now?” Mrs. Pieste says to her husband. “I don’t know that I can live through it again, Eddie.”

“Well, I need to go clear the walk again,” he says. “Got to stay on top of the snow, and it’s really coming down. Thank you for your time and trouble, ma’am,” he says to me. “And for going ahead and telling us. I know that wasn’t an easy decision, and I’m sure my daughter would appreciate it if she was here to tell you herself.”

After I hang up, I sit on the bed for a while, the paperwork and photographs back in the gray accordion file they’ve been in for more than two decades. I’ll return the file to the safe in the basement, I decide. But not now. I don’t feel like going down into the basement and into that safe right now, and I think someone has just pulled into our driveway. I hear snow crunching, and I’m not in a good state of mind to see whoever it is. I’ll stay up here for a little while longer. Maybe make a grocery list or contemplate errands or just pet Sock for a minute or two.

“I can’t take you for a walk,” I tell him.

He is curled up next to me, his head on my thigh, unperturbed by the sad conversation he just overheard and having no idea what it says about the world he lives in. But then he knows cruelty, maybe knows it better than the rest of us.

“No walks without a coat,” I go on, petting him, and he yawns and licks my hand, and I hear the beeping of the alarm being disarmed, then the front door shuts. “I think we’re going to try boots,” I tell Sock as Marino’s and Benton’s voices drift up from the entryway. “You probably aren’t going to like these little shoes they make for dogs and are likely to get quite annoyed with me, but I promise it’s a good thing. Well, we have company.” I recognize Marino’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. “You remember him from yesterday, in the big truck. The big man in yellow who gets on my nerves most of the time. But for future reference, you have no reason to be afraid of him. He’s not a bad person, and as you may be aware, people who have known each other for a very long time tend to be ruder to each other than they are to people they don’t like half as much.”

“Anybody home?” Marino’s big voice precedes him into the bedroom as the doorknob turns, and then he knocks as he opens the door. “Benton said you was decent. Who were you talking to? You on the phone?”

“He’s clairvoyant, then,” I reply from the bed, where I’m under the covers, nothing but pajamas on. “And I’m not on the phone and wasn’t talking to anyone.”

“How’s Sock? How ya doing, boy?” he then says before I can answer. “How come he smells funny? What did you put on him, flea medicine? This time of year? You look okay. How are you feeling?”

“I cleaned his ears.”

“So how are you doing, Doc?”

Marino looms over me, and his presence seems larger than usual because he’s in a heavy parka and a baseball cap and hiking boots while I’m in nothing but flannel, modestly tucked under a blanket and a duvet. He has a small black case in his hands that I recognize as Lucy’s iPad, unless he’s managed to get one of his own, which I doubt.

“I didn’t get hurt. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve just been staying in this morning, taking care of a few things,” I say to him. “I’m assuming Dawn Kincaid is fine. Last I heard, she was stable.”

“Stable? You’re joking, right?”

“I’m talking about her physical condition. The reattachment of her finger and the damage to the rest of them, the other three that were cut so severely. It’s probably a good thing for her it was so cold in the garage. And, of course, we thought to pack her hand and her severed finger in ice. I’m hoping that helped. Do you know? I haven’t heard a word. What’s her status? I’ve not heard any reports since she was admitted last night.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Marino’s eyes look at me, and they’re just as bloodshot as they were yesterday in Salem.

“I’m not kidding. Nobody’s told me a word. Benton said earlier he would check, but I don’t think he has.”

“He’s been on the phone with us all morning.”

“Maybe you’d be so kind as to call the hospital and check.”

“Like I give a flying fuck if she loses a finger or all of her damn fingers,” Marino says. “Why would you give a fuck? You afraid she’ll sue you? That must be it, and wouldn’t that figure? She probably will. Will sue you for maybe losing the use of her hand so she can’t build nanobots or whatever anymore, a psycho like that. I guess psychopaths are stable in the mental-illness sense of the word. Can you be crazy and a psychopath? And still be put together well enough to work at a place like Otwahl? Her case is going to be one big damn problem. If she gets out, well, can you imagine?”

“Why would she get out?”

“I’m just telling you the case is going to be a problem. You won’t be safe if she’s on the loose again. None of us will be.”

He helps himself to the foot of the bed, and the bed sinks and it feels like I’m suddenly sitting uphill as he makes himself comfortable, petting Sock and informing me that the police and the FBI found the “rat hole” Dawn Kincaid had rented, a one-bedroom apartment in Revere, just outside of Boston, where she stayed when she wasn’t with Eli Goldman or with her biological father, Jack Fielding, or whoever else she had entangled in her web at any point in time. Marino slips the iPad out of its case and turns it on as he lets me know that he and Lucy and quite a number of other investigators have been searching the rat-hole apartment for hours, going through Dawn’s computer and everything she has, including everything she’s stolen.

“What about her mother?” I ask. “Has anybody talked to her?”

“Dawn’s been in contact with her for a number of years, visiting her in prison down there in Georgia now and then. Reconnected with her and with Fielding on and off over the years. Latches on when she wants something, a first-class manipulator and user.”

“But does the mother know what’s happened up here?”

“Why do you care what a fucking child molester thinks?”

“Her relationship with Jack wasn’t that simple. It’s not as easily explained as you so eloquently just put it. I’d hate for her to hear about him on the news.”

“Who gives a shit.”

“I never want anybody to find out that way,” I reply. “I don’t care who it is. Her relationship with him wasn’t simple,” I repeat. “Relationships like that never are.”

“Plain and simple to me. Black and white.”

“If she hears it on the news,” I reply, and I realize I’m perseverating. “I always hate for that to happen. Such an inhumane way for people to find out terrible things like this. That’s my concern.”

“A klepto,” Marino then says, because his only interest is the case and what the investigators have been discovering at Dawn Kincaid’s apartment.

Apparently, she is a bona fide klepto, to quote Marino. Someone who seemed to have taken souvenirs from all sorts of people, he goes on, including items stolen from people we have no idea about. But some of what investigators have found so far has been identified as jewelry and rare coins from the Donahue house, and also several rare autographed musical manuscripts that Mrs. Donahue had no idea were missing from the family library.

Recovered from a locked chest in a closet in Dawn’s apartment were guns believed to have been removed from Fielding’s collection, and his wedding band. Also in this same trunk a martial-arts carry bag, I’m told, and inside it, a black satin sash, a white uniform, sparring gear, a lunch bag filled with rusty L-shaped flooring nails, and a hammer, and a pair of boys Adidas tae kwon do shoes believed to be the ones Mark Bishop was wearing while practicing kicks in his backyard the late afternoon he was killed. Although no one is quite certain how Dawn lured the boy into lying facedown and allowing her to play some gruesome game with him that included “pretending” to hammer nails into his head, or more specifically, the first nail.

“The one that went in right here,” Marino continues speculating, pointing to the space between the back of his neck and the base of his skull. “That would have killed him instantly, right?”

“If we must use that phrase,” I reply.

“I mean, she probably helped him in some of Fielding’s Tiny Tiger classes, maybe?” he continues to spin the story. “So the kid’s familiar with her, looks up to her, and she’s hot, I mean really good-looking. If it was me, I’d tell the kid I’m going to show him a new move or something and to lie down in the yard. And of course the kid’s going to do what an expert says, what someone teaching him says, and he lies down and it’s almost dark out and then boom! It’s over.”

“Someone like that can never get out,” I reply. “She’ll do more and do it worse next time, if that’s even possible.”

“Denying everything. She’s not talking, except to say Fielding did it all and she’s innocent.”

“He didn’t.”

“I’m with you.”

“She’s going to have a hard time explaining what’s in her apartment,” I point out, as I continue going through photographs. Marino must have taken hundreds.

“She’s good-looking and charming and smart as hell. And Fielding’s dead.”

“Incriminating.” I’ve said this several times as I look through the photographs on the iPad. “Should be very helpful to the prosecution. I’m not sure why you think the case will be a problem.”

“It’s going to be. The defense will pin it all on Fielding. The psycho bitch will get a dream team of big-shot lawyers, and they’ll make the jury believe Fielding did all of it.” Marino leans closer to me, and the slope of the bed changes again, and Sock is snoring quietly, not interested in his former owner or her rat hole, which has a dog bed in it, Marino shows me.

He leans close to me, clicking through several photographs of the dog’s plaid bed and several toys, and I indicate I’d rather look at the photographs myself. He and Sock are on top of me, and I’m feeling smothered.

“I just thought I’d show you, since I’m the one who took them,” Marino says.

“Thank you. I’ll manage. You did a very good job with the photographs.”

“Point is, it’s obvious the dog stayed here.” Marino means Sock stayed in Dawn Kincaid’s rat hole. “And also with Eli and with Fielding,” he adds. “To give her credit, I guess she liked her dog.”

“She left him in Jack’s house with no heat and all alone.” I click through photographs that are overwhelmingly incriminating.

“She doesn’t give a shit unless it suits her. When it doesn’t, she gets rid of it one way or another. So she cared about him when it suited her.”

“That’s the more likely story,” I agree.

I look at photographs of an unmade double bed, then other pictures of a tiny bedroom shockingly filled with junk, as if Dawn Kincaid is a hoarder.

“Plus, she had another reason to leave him,” Marino goes on. “If she leaves the dog at Fielding’s house, then maybe we think he’s the one who killed everyone, then killed himself. The dog is there. His red leash is there. The boat that was probably used to dump Wally Jamison’s body is there, and Wally’s clothes and the murder weapon are in Fielding’s basement. The Navigator with the missing front plate is there. You’re supposed to think Fielding was following you and Benton when you left Hanscom. Fielding’s deranged. He’s watching you. He’s following you, trying to intimidate you, or spying, or maybe he was going to kill you, too.”

“He was dead by the time we were followed. Although I can’t be exact about time of death, I’m calculating he’d been dead since Monday afternoon, probably was murdered not long after he got home to Salem after leaving the CFC with the Glock he’d removed from the lab. It was Dawn in the Navigator tailing us Monday night. She’s the one deranged. She rode our bumper to make sure we knew we were being followed, then disappeared, probably ducked out of sight in Otwahl’s parking lot. So eventually we’d think it was Jack, who in fact already had been murdered by her with a pistol she probably gave to her boyfriend, Eli, before she murdered him, too. But you’re right. It’s likely she’s tried to set things up so all of it got blamed on Jack, who isn’t around to defend himself. She set up Jack and made it look like he was setting up Johnny Donahue. It’s terrifying. “

“You got to make the jury buy it.”

“That’s always the challenge, no matter the case.”

“It’s bad the dog was at Fielding’s house,” Marino repeats. “It connects him to Eli’s murder. Hell, it’s on video clips that Eli was walking the dog when he was whacked.”

“The microchip,” I remind him. “It traces back to Dawn, not to Jack.”

“Doesn’t mean anything. He kills Eli and then takes the dog, and the dog would know Fielding, right?” Marino says, as if Sock isn’t inches away from him, sleeping with his head on my leg. “The dog would be familiar with Fielding because Dawn was staying over there in Salem, had the dog at Fielding’s house some of the time or whatever. So Fielding kills Eli, then takes the dog as he walks off, or this is what Dawn wants us to think.”

“It’s not what happened. Jack didn’t kill anyone,” as I conclude that Dawn’s apartment has the same brand of squalor that I observed at Fielding’s house in Salem.

Clutter and boxes everywhere. Clothes piled in mounds and strewn in odd places. Dishes piled in the sink. Trash overflowing. Mounds of newspapers, computer printouts, magazines, and on a dining-room table, a large number of items tagged and placed there by police, including a GPS-enabled sports watch that is the same model as one I gave Fielding for his birthday several years ago, and a Civil War military dissection set in a rosewood case that is identical to one I gave him when he worked for me in Richmond.

There is a close-up of a pair of black gloves, one of them with a small black box on the wrist, what Marino describes as lightweight flexible wireless data gloves with built-in accelerometers, thirty-six sensors, and an ultra-low-profile integrated transmitter-receiver, only I have to infer all this, sift it out of his mispronunciations and mangled descriptions. The gloves, which were closely examined by both Briggs and Lucy at the scene, are clearly intended for gesture-based robotic control—specifically, to control the flybot that Eli had with him when he was murdered by the woman who had given him the stolen signet ring he was wearing when his body came to the CFC.

“Then the flybot was in her apartment,” I presume. “And did Benton offer you any coffee?”

“I’m coffeed out. Some of us haven’t been to bed yet.”

“I’m in bed working. Doesn’t mean I’ve slept.”

“Must be nice. I’d like to stay home and work in bed.” He takes the iPad from me and searches through files.

“Maybe we could adjust your job description. You can stay home and work in bed a certain number of days each year, depending on your age and decrepitude, which we’ll have to evaluate. I suppose I’ll be the one to evaluate it.”

“Oh, yeah? Who’s gonna evaluate yours?” He finds a photograph he wants me to see.

“Mine doesn’t need evaluating. It’s obvious to one and all.”

He shows me a close-up of the flybot, only at a glance it’s hard to know what it is, just a shiny wiry object on a square of white paper on Dawn Kincaid’s dining-room table. The micromechanical device could be an earring, it occurs to me. A silver earring that was stepped on, which is exactly what is suspected, Marino tells me. Lucy thinks the flybot was stepped on while the EMTs were working on Eli, then later, Dawn found it when she returned to Norton’s Woods, possibly wearing the same long, black wool coat that she had on in my garage, a coat that I believe was Fielding’s. A witness claims to have observed a young man or woman, the person wasn’t sure which, in a big black coat walking around Norton’s Woods with a flashlight, several hours after Eli Goldman died there. The individual in the big coat was out there alone, and the person who saw him or her thought it was strange because he or she did not have a dog and seemed to be looking for something while making odd hand gestures.

“It must have been huge on her and practically dragged on the ground,” Marino says, getting up from the bed. “I’m not saying she was trying to look like a man, but with her short hair and the big coat, and a hat and glasses on or whatever? As long as you don’t see her rack. She’s got quite a rack. Has that in common with her dad, right?”

“I’ve never known Jack to have large breasts.”

“I mean both of them built.”

“So she returned when she assumed it was safe to do so, and even though the flybot was badly damaged, it responded to radio frequency signals sent by the data gloves?” I turn off the iPad and hand it to him.

“I think she just saw it on the ground, think it was shiny in the flashlight and she found it that way. Lucy says the bug is DOA. Squashed.”

“Do we know exactly what it does or was supposed to do?”

Marino shrugs, towering over me again, still in his parka, which he hasn’t bothered to unbutton, as if he didn’t intend to stay long. “This isn’t my area of expertise, you know. I didn’t understand half of what they were talking about, Lucy and the general. I just know the potential for whatever this thing is supposed to do is something to be concerned about, and DoD intends to do some sort of inspection of Otwahl to see what the hell is really going on over there. But I’m not sure we don’t already know exactly what the hell is going on over there.”

“Meaning what?”

He returns the iPad to its case and says, “Meaning I worry there’s R-and-D going on that the government damn well knows about but just doesn’t want anyone else to know, and then you get kids out of control and the shit hits the fan. I think you get my drift. When are you coming back to work?”

“Probably not today,” I tell him.

“Well, we got a shitload of things to do and undo,” he says.

“Thanks for the warning.”

“Buzz me if you need something. I’ll call the hospital and let you know how the psycho’s doing.”

“Thanks for stopping by.”

I wait until the sound of his heavy footsteps stops at the front door, and then the door shuts again, and then a pause, and Benton resets the alarm. I hear his footsteps, which are much lighter than Marino’s, as he walks past the stairs, toward the back of the house where he has his office.

“Come on, let’s get up,” I say to Sock, and he opens his eyes and looks at me and yawns. “Do you know what bye-bye means? I guess not. They didn’t teach you that at the prison. You just want to sleep, don’t you? Well, I’ve got things to do, so come on. You’re really quite lazy, you know. Are you sure you ever won a race or even ran in one? I don’t think I believe it.”

I move his head and put my feet on the floor, deciding there must be a pet shop around here that has everything a skinny, lazy old greyhound might need for this kind of weather.

“Let’s go for a ride.” I talk to Sock as I find my slippers and a robe. “Let’s see what Secret Agent Wesley is doing. He’s probably in his office on the phone again, what do you bet? I know, he’s always on the phone, and I agree, it’s quite annoying.

“Maybe he’ll take us shopping, and then I’m going to make a very nice pasta, homemade pappardelle with a hearty Bolognese sauce, ground veal, red wine, and lots of mushrooms and garlic.

“I need to explain up front that you only get canine cuisine; that’s the rule of the house. I’m thinking quinoa and cod for you today.” I continue talking as we go down the stairs. “That will be a nice change after all that chicken and rice from the Greek diner.”