“Nothing about you is low-class.” Benton watches me carefully, guardedly, and I see what is in his eyes. I’m scaring him.
But I can’t stop myself. “I’ve worked damn hard in life not to look low-class. You didn’t know me when I was getting started and had no idea what people are really like, people who have complete power over you, people you worship really, and what they’re capable of luring you into so that you never feel the same about yourself. And then you bury it like that beating heart under the floorboards in Edgar Allan Poe, but you always know it’s there. And you can’t tell anyone. Even when it keeps you awake at night. You can’t even tell the person you’re closest to that there’s this cold, dead heart under the floorboards and it’s your fault it’s under there.”
“Christ, Kay.”
“It’s odd that everything we love seems to be in close proximity to something hateful and dead,” enters my mind next. “Well, not everything.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Just stressed out, and who the hell wouldn’t be? Our house is across the street from Norton’s Woods, where someone was murdered yesterday, and he may have been at the Courtauld Gallery at the same time Lucy and I were the summer before Nine-Eleven, which she thinks was caused by us, by the way. Liam Saltz was there, too, at the Courtauld, one of the lecturers. I didn’t meet him then, but Lucy has him on CD. I can’t remember what he talked about.”
“I’m curious why you would bring him up.”
“A link on a website that Jack was looking at for some reason.”
Benton doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t take his eyes off me.
“You and I go in The Biscuit when I’m home on weekends, maybe we’ve been in there at the same time Johnny Donahue and his MIT friend were,” I go on and can’t keep up with my thoughts. “We love Salem and the oils and candles in the shops there, the same shops that sell iron spikes, devil’s bone. Our favorite getaway in Boston is next to where Wally Jamison’s body was found the morning after Halloween. Is someone watching us? Does someone know everything we do? What was Jack doing in Salem on Halloween?”
“Wally’s body got where it was by boat, not the wharf,” Benton replies, and I don’t know where he got the information.
“All these things in common. You’d think we live in a small town.”
“You don’t look good.”
“You’re sure it was a boat. I feel like I’m having a hot flash.” I touch my cheek, press my hand against it. “Lord. That will be next. So much to look forward to.”
“More relevant is the fact that someone deliberately dumped his body where the hundred-foot cutters are homeported with guardsmen on board.” Benton watches my every move. “And starting around daybreak, support staff and other personnel show up for work and the wharf is a parking lot. All these people getting out of their cars and seeing a mutilated body floating in the water. That’s brazen. Killing a little kid in his own backyard while his parents are inside the house is brazen. Killing someone on Super Bowl Sunday in Norton’s Woods while a VIP wedding is going on is brazen. Doing all this in our own neighborhoods is brazen. Yes.”
“First you know it’s a boat. Next you know it was a VIP wedding, not just a wedding but a VIP wedding.” I don’t ask but state. He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t know it. “Why was Jack in Salem? Doing what there? You can’t even get a hotel room in Salem on Halloween. You can’t even drive, there are so many people.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Do you think it’s personal?” I ask as I obsess about what a small world it is. “I come home and this is my welcome. To have all this ugliness and death and deceit and betrayal practically in my lap.”
“To some extent, yes,” Benton says.
“Well, thank you for that.”
“I said ‘to some extent.’ Not everything.”
“You said you think it’s personal. I want to know exactly how it is personal.”
“Try to calm down. Breathe slowly.” He reaches for my hand, and I won’t let him touch me. “Slowly, slowly, Kay.”
I pull away from him, and he returns his hand to his lap, to the iPhone in it that flashes red every other second as messages land. I don’t want him to touch me. It’s as if I have no skin.
“Is there anything to eat in this place? I can send out for something,” Benton says. “Maybe it’s low blood sugar. When did you eat last?”
“No. I couldn’t right now. I’ll be fine. Why do you say ‘VIP’?” I hear myself ask.
He looks at his phone again, the tiny red light flashing its alert. “Anne,” he says to me as he reads what just landed. “She’s on her way, should be here in a few minutes.”
“What else? I can download the scan in here, take a look.”
“She didn’t send it. She tried to call you. Obviously, you’re not at your desk. There were undercover agents at the wedding. Protecting a VIP, but obviously he wasn’t the one who needed it,” Benton says. “Nobody was looking for the one who needed protecting. We didn’t know he was going to be there.”
I take another deep breath, and I try to diagnose a heart attack, if I might be having one.
“Did the agents see what happened?” Mount Auburn would be the closest hospital. I don’t want to go to the hospital.
“Ones stationed by the outside doors weren’t looking at him and didn’t see it. They saw people rushing around him when he collapsed. There was no reason he was of interest, and the agents maintained their posts. They had to. In case it was some diversionary maneuver. You always maintain your post when you’re on a protective detail; with rare exception, you don’t divert.”
I focus on the discomfort in the center of my chest and my shortness of breath. I’m sweating and light-headed, but there’s no pain in my arms. No pain in my back. No pain in my jaw. No, radiating pain and heart attacks don’t cause altered thinking, and I look at my hands. I hold them in front of me as if I can see what’s on them.
“When you saw Jack last week, did he smell like menthol?” I ask, and then I say, “Where is he? What exactly has he done?”
“What about menthol?”
“Extra-strength Nuprin patches, Bengay patches, something like that.” I get up from Fielding’s desk. “If he’s wearing them all the time and reeks of eucalyptus, of menthol, it’s usually an indication he’s abusing himself physically, tearing the hell out of himself physically in the gym, in his tae kwon do tournaments, has chronic and acute muscle and joint pain. Steroids. When Jack’s on steroids, well… That’s always been the prelude to other things.”
“Based on what I saw last week, he’s on something.”
I’m already taking off Fielding’s lab coat. I fold it into a neat square and place it on top of his desk.
“Is there a place you can lie down?” Benton says. “I think you should lie down. The on-call room downstairs. There’s a bed. I can’t take you home. You can’t be there right now. I don’t want you going out of this building, not without me.”
“I don’t need to lie down. Lying down won’t help. It will make it worse.” I walk into Fielding’s bathroom and snatch a trash basket liner from a box under the sink.
Benton is on his feet, watching what I’m doing, keeping an eye on me as I tuck the folded lab coat inside the liner and return to the bathroom. I scrub my hands and face with soap and hot water. I wash any area of skin that might have come into contact with the plastic film I found in Fielding’s lab coat pocket.
“Drugs,” I announce when I sit back down.
Benton returns to his chair, tensely, as if he might spring up again.
“Something transdermal that certainly isn’t Nuprin or Motrin. Don’t know what, but I will find out,” I let him know.
“The piece of plastic you were touching.”
“Unless you poisoned my coffee.”
“Maybe a nicotine patch.”
“You wouldn’t poison me, would you? If you don’t want to be married a
nymore, there are simpler solutions.”
“I don’t see why he’d be on nicotine unless as a stimulant? I guess so. Something like that.”
“It’s not something like that. I used to live off nicotine patches and never felt like this, not even when I would light up while I still had a twenty-one-milligram patch on. A true addict. That’s me. But not drugs, not whatever this is. What has he done?”
Benton stares at his coffee mug, tracing the AFME crest on the black glazed ceramic. His silence confirms what I suspect. Whatever Fielding is involved in, it’s connected to everything else: to me, to Benton, to Briggs, to a dead football player, to a dead little boy, to the man from Norton’s Woods, to dead soldiers from Great Britain and Worcester. Like planes lit up at night, connected to a tower, connected in a pattern, at times seeming at a standstill in the dark air but having been somewhere and going somewhere, individual forces that are part of something bigger, something incomprehensibly huge.
“You need to trust me,” Benton says quietly.
“Has Briggs been in contact with you?”
“Some things have been going on for a while. Are you all right? I don’t want to go before I know you are.”
“This is what I’ve trained for, made so many sacrifices for.” I decide to accept it. Acceptance makes it easier for me to know what to do. “Six months of being away from you, of being away from everyone, of giving up everything so I could come home to something that’s been going on for a while. An agenda.”
I almost add just like in the beginning, when I was barely a forensic pathologist and was too naive to have a clue about what was happening. When I was quick to salute and respect authority, and worse, to trust it, and much worse, to respect it, and even worse than that, to admire it, and worst of all, to admire John Briggs so much I would do anything he wanted, absolutely anything. Somehow I’ve managed to land in the same spot. The same thing again. An agenda. Lies and more lies, and innocent people who are disposable. Crimes as coldly carried out as any I’ve ever seen. Joanne Rule and Noonie Pieste are graphically in my mind, as real as they’ve ever been.
I see them on dented gurneys with rust in their welded seams and wheels that stick, and I remember my feet sticking as I walked across an old white stone floor that would not stay clean. It was always bloody in the Cape Town morgue, with bodies parked everywhere, and the week I was there I saw cases as extreme in their grotesqueness as that continent is extreme in its magnificent beauty. People hit by trains and run over on the highway, and domestic and drug deaths in the shantytowns, and a shark attack in False Bay and a tourist who died from a fall on Table Mountain.
I have the irrational thought that if I go downstairs and walk into my cooler, the bodies of those two slain women will be waiting for me just as they were on that December morning after I’d flown nineteen hours in a small coach seat to get to them. Only they had already been looked at by the time I showed up, and that would have been true if I’d flown Mach II on the Concorde or been a block away from them when they were murdered. It wasn’t possible for me to get to them fast enough. Their bodies may as well have been on a movie set, they were so staged. Innocent young women murdered for the sake of a news story, for the sake of power and influence and votes, and I couldn’t put a stop to it.
I not only couldn’t stop it, I helped make it happen, because I made it possible for it to happen, and I replay what PFC Gabriel’s mother said about hate crimes and being rewarded for them. My office at Dover is right next to Briggs’s command suite. I remember someone walking past my closed door several times while I was talking to her. Whoever it was paused at least twice. It crossed my mind at the time that someone might be waiting to come in but could hear through the door that I was on the phone and was unwilling to interrupt. The more likely answer is that someone was listening. Briggs has started something, or someone allied with him has, and Benton’s right, it’s been going on for a while.
“Then these last six months have been nothing more than a political ploy. How sad. How tawdry. How disappointing.” My voice is steady, and I sound completely calm, the way I get before I do something.
“Are you okay? Because we should go downstairs if you’re okay. Anne is here. We should talk to her, and then I need to go.” Benton has gotten up and is near the door, waiting for me with his phone in hand.
“Let me guess. Briggs made sure I got this position so he could keep it open for whomever he really has in mind.” I go on and my heart has slowed and my nerves feel steadier, as if they’re firing normally again. “Wanted me to keep the seat warm. Or was I the excuse to get this place built, to get MIT, get Harvard, get everybody on board, to justify some thirty million in grants?”
Benton reads something else as messages drop out of the thin air, one after another.
“He could have saved himself a lot of trouble,” I say as I get up from the desk.
“You’re not going to quit,” Benton says, reading what someone has just sent to him. “Don’t give them that satisfaction.”
“‘Them.’ Then it’s more than one.”
He doesn’t answer as he types with his thumbs.
“Well, it’s always been more than one. Take your pick,” I say as we walk out together.
“If you quit, you give them exactly what they want.” As he reads and scrolls down on his phone.
“People like that don’t know what they want.” I shut Fielding’s door behind us, making sure it’s locked. “They just think they do.”
We begin our descent in my bullet-shaped building that on dark nights and gloomy days is the color of lead.
I’m explaining to Benton the indented writing on a pad of call sheets as we glide down in an elevator I researched and selected because it reduces energy consumption by fifty percent. It can’t be a coincidence that Fielding was interested in a keynote address Dr. Liam Saltz just gave at Whitehall, I say, while numbers change on a digital display, while we gently sink from floor to floor in the soft glow of LEDs in my environmentally friendly hoisting machine that no one who works here appreciates in the least, from what I’ve heard. Mostly there are complaints because it is slow.
“He’s one extreme, and DARPA’s certainly the other, neither of them always right, that’s for sure.” I describe Dr. Saltz as a computer scientist, an engineer, a philosopher, a theologian, whose sport, whose art, most assuredly isn’t war. He hates wars and those who make them.
“I know all about him and his art.” Benton doesn’t say it in a positive way as we stop gently and the steel door slides open with scarcely a sound. “I certainly remember from that time at CNN when you and I got into a spat because of him.”
“I don’t remember getting into a spat.” We are back in the receiving area, where Ron is sternly alert behind his glass partition, exactly as we left him long hours ago.
In split screens of video displays I see cars parked in the lot behind the building, SUVs that aren’t covered with snow and have their headlights on. Agents or undercover police, and I remember windows glowing in MIT buildings rising above the CFC fence, I remember noticing it at the time Benton drove us here, and now I know why. The CFC has been under surveillance, and the FBI, the police, aren’t making any effort to disguise their presence now. I feel as if the CFC is on lockdown.
Ever since I walked out of Port Mortuary at Dover, I have been accompanied or locked inside a secured building, and the reason isn’t what was presented, at least not the only reason. No one was trying to get me home as quickly as possible because of a body bleeding inside the cooler. That was a priority but certainly not the only one and maybe not even the top one. Certain people used that as an excuse to escort me, certain people, such as my niece, who was armed and playing bodyguard, and I can’t believe Benton wasn’t involved in that decision, no matter what he did or didn’t know at the time.
“Maybe you remember him hitting on you,” Benton is saying as we follow the gray corridor.
“You seem to think I’m having sex
with everyone.”
“Not with everyone,” he says.
I smile. I almost laugh.
“You’re feeling better,” he says, touching my arm tenderly as he walks with me.
Whatever got into me has passed, and I wish it wasn’t such a godforsaken hour of the morning. I wish someone was in the trace evidence lab so we could take a look at the plastic film I was exposed to, probably try the scanning electron microscope first, then Fourier transform infrared or whatever detectors it takes to figure out what is on Fielding’s pain-relieving patches. I’ve never taken anabolic steroids and don’t know firsthand how that would feel, but I can’t imagine it’s what I felt upstairs. Not that quickly.
Cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, LSD, whatever could get into my system instantly and transdermally, hopefully nothing like that, either, but what would I know about how that would feel? Not an opioid like fentanyl, which is the most common narcotic delivered by a patch. A strong pain reliever like fentanyl wouldn’t have caused me to react the way I did, but again, I’m not sure. I’ve never been on fentanyl. Everybody reacts differently to medications, and uncontrolled substances can be contaminated with impurities and have variable doses.
“Really. You seem like yourself.” Benton touches me again. “How are you feeling? You okay for sure?”
“Worn off, whatever it was. I wouldn’t do the case if it wasn’t, if I felt even remotely impaired,” I tell him. “I guess you’re coming to the autopsy room.” Since we’re headed there.
“A drink. Right.” He is back to Liam Saltz. “He bumps into you at CNN and asks you to have a drink with him at midnight. That’s not exactly normal.”
“I’m not sure how to take that. But I don’t feel flattered.”
“His reputation with women is on a par with certain politicians who will remain unnamed. What’s the buzzword these days? A sexual addiction.”
“Well, if you’re going to have one.”
We walk past the x-ray room, and the door is shut, the red light off because the scanner isn’t in use. The lower level is empty and silent, and I wonder where Marino is. Maybe he’s with Anne.
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