Port Mortuary (43 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I bend over and untie one of my boots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, Colonel Pruitt.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

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

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

“I know what you think.”

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

T
he 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.”