Port Mortuary (2010)

by Patricia Cornwell

  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 reach
ed 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?”