Port Mortuary (23 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It isn’t just you anymore—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, I don’t believe it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I hope not.”

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

“I don’t make them for you.”

“That’s because there aren’t any.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It trickles down from Jack.”

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

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

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