Port Mortuary (2010)

by Patricia Cornwell

  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 talk
s. “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 a
nd 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.”