Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  The man and the dog go down four flights of stairs in a poorly lit stairwell, and footsteps sound light and quick against uncarpeted wood, and the two of them emerge on a loud, busy street. The sun is low, and patches of snow are crusty on top with black dirt, reminding me of crushed Oreo cookies, and whenever the man glances down, I see wet pavers and asphalt, and the sand and salt from snow removal. Cars and people move jerkily and lurch as he turns his head, scanning as he walks, and music plays in the background, Annie Lennox on satellite radio, and I hear only what is audible outside the headphones, what is being picked up by the mike inside the top of the headband. The man must have the volume turned up high, and that’s not good, because he might not hear someone come up behind him. If he’s worried about his security, so worried that he double-locks his apartment door and carries a gun, why isn’t he worried about not hearing what is going on around him?

  But people are foolish these days. Even reasonably cautious people multitask ridiculously. They text-message and check e-mail while driving or operating other dangerous machinery or while crossing a busy street. They talk on their cell phones while riding bicycles and while Rollerblading, and even while flying. How often do I tell Lucy not to answer the helicopter phone; doesn’t matter that it’s Bluetooth-enabled and hands-free. I see what the man sees and recognize where he’s walking, on Concord Avenue, moving at a good clip with Sock, past redbrick apartment buildings and the Harvard Police Department, and the dark-red awning of the Sheraton Commander Hotel across the street from the Cambridge Common. He lives very near the Common, in an older apartment building that has at least four floors.

  I wonder why he doesn’t take Sock into the Common. It’s a popular park for dogs, but he and his greyhound continue past statues and cannons, lampposts, bare oak trees, benches, and cars parked at meters lining the street. A yellow Lab chases a fat squirrel, and Annie Lennox sings “No more I-love-yous… I used to have demons in my room at night… ” I am the man’s eyes and ears at the time the headphones are recording, and I have no reason to suspect he knows about the hidden camera and mike or that any such thing is on his mind at all.

  I don’t get the sense he has a dark plan or is spying as he walks his dog. Except that he has a Glock semiautomatic pistol and eighteen rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition under his green jacket. Why? Is he on his way to shoot someone, or is the gun for self-protection, and if so, what did he fear? Maybe it was a habit of his, a normal routine to walk around armed. There are people like that, too. People who don’t think twice about it. Why did he grind the serial number off the Glock, or did someone else do it? It enters my mind that the hidden recording devices built into his headphones might be an experiment of his or a research project. Certainly Cambridge and its surrounds are the mecca of technical innovations, which is one of the reasons the DoD, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Harvard, and MIT agreed to establish the CFC on the north bank of the Charles River in a biotech building on Memorial Drive. Maybe the man was a graduate student. Maybe he was a computer scientist or an engineer. I watch what is on the iPad’s display, abrupt, shaky images of Mather Court apartments, a playground, Garden Street, and the tilted, worn headstones of the Old Burying Ground.

  In Harvard Square, his attention fixes on the Crimson Corner newsstand, and he seems to think of walking in that direction, perhaps to buy a paper from the overstocked selection that Benton and I love. This is our neighborhood, where we prowl for coffee and ethnic food, and papers and books, ending up with take-out and armloads of wonderful things to read that we pile on the bed on weekends and holidays when I’m home. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal, and if one doesn’t mind news a day or two old, there are fat papers from London, Berlin, and Paris. Sometimes we find La Nazione and L’espresso, and I read to us about Florence and Rome, and we look at ads for villas to rent and fantasize about living like the locals, about exploring ruins and museums, the Italian countryside and the Amalfi Coast.

  The man pauses on the crowded sidewalk and seems to change his mind about something. He and Sock trot across the street, on Massachusetts Avenue now, and I know where they are headed, or I think I do. A left on Quincy Street, and they are walking more briskly, and the man has a plastic bag in his hand, as if Sock isn’t going to hold out much longer. Past the modern Lamont Library and the Georgian Revival brick Harvard Faculty Club and Fogg Museum, and the Gothic stone Church of the New Jerusalem, and they turn right on Kirkland Avenue. It is the three of us. I am with them, cutting over to Irving, turning left on it, minutes from Norton’s Woods, minutes from Benton’s and my house, listening to Five for Fighting on the satellite radio… “even heroes have the right to bleed… ”

  I feel a growing sense of urgency with each step as we move closer to the man dying and the dog being lost in the bitter cold, and I desperately don’t want it. I’m walking with them as if leading them into it because I know what’s ahead and they don’t, and I want to stop them and turn them back. Then the house is on our left, three-story, white with black shutters and a slate roof, Federal style, built in 1824 by a transcendentalist who knew Emerson, Thoreau, and the Norton of Norton’s Anthology and Norton’s Woods. Inside the house, Benton’s and my house, are original woodwork and molding, and plaster ceilings with exposed beams, and over the landings of the main staircase are magnificent French stained-glass windows with wildlife scenes that light up like jewels in the sun. A Porsche 911 is in the narrow brick driveway, exhaust fogging out of the chrome tailpipes.

  Benton is backing up his sports car, the taillights glowing like fiery eyes as he brakes for a man and his dog walking past, and the man has his headphones turned toward Benton, maybe admiring the Porsche, a black all-wheel-drive Turbo Cabriolet that he keeps as shiny as patent leather. I wonder if he will remember the young man in the bulky green coat and his black-and-white greyhound or if they really registered at the time, but I know Benton. He’ll become obsessed, maybe as obsessed with the man and his dog as I am, and I search my memory for what Benton did yesterday. Late afternoon he dropped by his office at McLean because he’d forgotten to bring home the case file of the patient he was to evaluate today. A few degrees of separation, a young man and his old dog, who are about to be parted forever, and my husband alone in his car heading to the hospital to pick up something he forgot. I’m watching it all unfold as if I’m God, and if this is what it’s like to be God, how awful that must be. I know what’s going to happen and can’t do a thing to stop it.

  3

  I realize the van has stopped and Marino and Lucy are getting out. We are parked in front of the John B. Wallace Civil Air Terminal, and I stay put. I continue to watch what is playing on the iPad as Lucy and Marino begin unloading my belongings.

  Cold air rushes in through the open tailgate while I puzzle over the man’s decision to walk Sock in Norton’s Woods, in what’s called Mid-Cambridge, almost in Somerville. Why here? Why not closer to where he lived? Was he meeting someone? A black iron gate fills the display, and it is partially opened and his hand opens it wide, and I realize he has put on thick black gloves, what look like motorcycle gloves. Are his hands cold, or is there another reason? Maybe he does have a sinister plan. Maybe he intends to use the gun. I imagine pulling back the slide of a nine-millimeter pistol and pressing the trigger while wearing bulky gloves, and it seems illogical.

  I hear him shake open the plastic bag, and then I see it as he looks down and I catch a glimpse of something else, what looks like a tiny wooden box. A stash box, I think. Some of them are made of cedar and even have a tiny hygrometer in them like a humidor, and I recall the amber glass smoking pipe on the desk inside the apartment. Maybe he likes to walk his dog in Norton’s Woods because it is remote and usually quite private, and of little interest to the police unless there is a VIP or high-level event that requires security. Maybe he enjoys coming here and smoking weed. He whistles at Sock, bends over, and slips the lead off him, and I can hear him
say, “Hey, boy, do you remember our spot? Show me our spot.” Then he says something that’s muffled. I can’t quite make it out. “And for you,” it sounds like he says, followed by, “Do you want to send one…?” Or “Do you send one…?” After playing it twice I still can’t understand what he is saying, and it may be that he is bent over and talking into his coat collar.

  Who is he talking to? I don’t see anyone nearby, just the dog and the gloved hands, and then the camera angle shifts up as the man straightens up and I see the park again, a vista of trees and benches, and off to one side a stone walkway near the building with the green metal roof. I catch glimpses of people and conclude by the way they are bundled up for the cold that they aren’t wedding guests but most likely are walking in the park just like the man is. Sock trots toward shrubs to leave his deposit, and his master moves deeper into the gracious wooded estate of ancient elms and green benches.

  He whistles and says, “Hey, boy, follow me.”

  In shaded areas around thick clumps of rhododendrons the snow is deep and churned up with dead leaves and stones and broken sticks that make me think morbidly of clandestine graves, of sloughed off skin and weathered bones that have been gnawed on and scattered. He is scanning, looking around, and the hidden camera pauses on the three-tier green metal roof of the glass-and-timber building I can see from the sunporch at Benton’s and my house. As the man turns his head, I see a door on the first floor that leads outside, and the camera pauses again on a woman with gray hair standing outside the door. She is dressed in a suit and a long brown leather coat and is talking on her phone.

  The man whistles and makes a gritty sound as he walks on the granite gravel path toward Sock, to pick up what the dog has left… “and this emptiness fills my heart… ” Peter Gabriel sings. I think of the young soldier with the same name who burned up in his Humvee, and I smell him as though his foul odors are still trapped deep inside my nose. I think of his mother and her grief and anger on the phone when she called me this morning. Forensic pathologists aren’t always thanked, and there are times when those left behind act as if I am the reason their loved one is dead, and I try to remember that. Don’t take it personally.

  The gloved hands shake out the rumpled plastic bag again, the type one gets at the market, and then something happens. The man’s gloved hand flies up at his head, and I hear the jostle of his hand hitting the headphones as if he’s swatting at something, and he exclaims, “What the…? Hey… !” in a breathy, startled way. Or maybe it is a cry of pain. But I don’t see anything or anyone, just the woods and distant figures in it. I don’t see his dog, and I don’t see him. I back up the recording and play it again. His black gloved hand suddenly enters the frame, and he blurts out, “What the…?” then, “Hey… !” I decide he sounds stunned and upset, as if something has knocked the wind out of him.

  I play it again, listening for anything else, and what I detect in his tone is protest and maybe fear, and, yes, pain, as if someone has elbowed him or bumped him hard on a busy sidewalk. Then the tops of bare trees rush up and around. Chipped bits of slate zoom in and get large as he thuds down on the path, and either he is on his back or the headphones have come off. The screen is fixed on an image of bare branches and gray sky, and then the hem of a long black coat swishes past, flapping as someone walks swiftly, and another loud jostling noise and the picture changes again. Bare branches and a gray sky but different branches showing through the slats of a green bench. It happens so fast, so unbelievably fast, and then the voices and the sounds of people get loud.

  “Someone call nine-one-one!”

  “I don’t think he’s breathing.”

  “I don’t have my phone. Call nine-one-one!”

  “Hello? There’s… uh, yeah, in Cambridge. Yes, Massachusetts. Je-sus! Hurry, hurry; they fucking have me on hold. Je-sus, hurry! I can’t believe this. Yes, yes, a man, he’s collapsed and doesn’t seem to be breathing… Norton’s Woods at the corner of Irving and Bryant… Yes, someone is trying CPR. I’ll stay on… I’m staying on. Yes, I mean, I don’t… She wants to know if he’s still not breathing. No, no, he’s not breathing! He’s not moving. He’s not breathing!… I didn’t really see it, just looked over and noticed he was on the ground, suddenly he was on the ground…”

  I press pause and get out of the van, and it is cold and very windy as I walk quickly into the terminal. It is small, with restrooms and a sitting area, and an old television is turned on. For a moment I watch Fox News and fast-forward the video on the iPad while Lucy leans against the front desk and pays the landing fee with a credit card. I continue to stare at images of bare branches showing between the slats of green-painted wood, certain now that the headphones ended up under a bench, the camera fixed straight up as the XM radio plays.… “Dark lady laughed and danced… ” The music is louder because the headphones aren’t pressed against the man’s head, and it seems absurdly incongruous to be listening to Cher.

  Voices off camera are urgent and excited, and I hear the sounds of feet and the distant wail of a siren as my niece chats with an older man, a retired fighter pilot now working at Dover part-time as a fixed base operator, he is happy to tell her.

  “… In ’Nam. So that would have been, what, an F-Four?” Lucy chats with him.

  “Oh, yeah, and the Tomcat. That was the last one I flew. But Phantoms were still around, you know, as late as the eighties. You build them right and they last like you wouldn’t believe. Look how long the C-Five’s been around. And still some Phantoms in Israel, I think. Maybe Iran. Nowadays those left in the US, we use them for unmanned targets, as drones. One hell of an aircraft. You ever seen one?”

  “In Belle Chasse, Louisiana, at the Naval Air Station. Took my helicopter down there to help with Katrina.”

  “They’ve been experimenting with hurricane-busting, using Phantoms to fly into the eye.” He nods.

  The screen on the iPad goes black. The headphones weren’t recording anymore, and I’m convinced that when the man fell to the ground they must have ended up some distance away under a bench. The motion sensor wasn’t detecting enough activity to prevent it from dozing, and that’s curious to me. How exactly did his headphones get knocked off and end up where they did? Maybe someone kicked them out of the way. It could have been accidental if that’s what happened, perhaps by a person trying to help him, or it could have been deliberate by a person who was covertly recording him, stalking him. I think of the hem of the black coat flapping by, and I fast-forward intermittently, looking for the next images, listening for sounds, but nothing until four-thirty-seven p.m., when the woods and the darkening sky swing wildly, and bare hands loom large and paper crackles as the headphones are placed inside a brown bag, and I hear a voice say, “… Colts all the way.” And another voice says, “Saints are gonna take it. They got…” Then murky darkness and muffled voices, and nothing.

  Finding the TV remote on the arm of a couch inside the terminal, I switch the channel to CNN and listen to the news and watch the crawl, but not a word about the man on the video clips. I need to ask about Sock again. Where is the dog? It’s not acceptable that no one seems to know. I fix on Marino as he enters the sitting area, pretending not to see me because he is sulking, or maybe he regrets what he’s done and is embarrassed. I refuse to ask him anything, and it feels as if the missing dog is somehow his fault, as if everything is Marino’s fault. I don’t want to forgive him for e-mailing the video clips to Briggs, for talking to him first. If I don’t forgive Marino for once, maybe he’ll learn a lesson for once, but the problem is I’m never quite able to convince myself of any case I make against him, against anyone I care about. Catholic guilt. I don’t know what it is, but already I am softening toward him, my resolve getting weaker. I feel it happening as I search channels on the television, looking for news that might damage the CFC, and he walks over to Lucy, keeping his back to me. I don’t want to fight with him. I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

  I walk away from the TV, convinc
ed at least for the moment that the media doesn’t know about the body waiting for me in my Cambridge morgue. Something as sensational as that would be a headline, I reason. Messages would be landing nonstop on my iPhone. Briggs would have heard about it and said something. Even Fielding would have alerted me. Except I’ve heard nothing from Fielding about anything at all, and I try to call him again. He doesn’t answer his cell phone, and he’s not in his office. Of course not. He never works this late, for God’s sake. I try him at his home in Concord and get voicemail again.

  “Jack? It’s Kay,” I leave another message. “We’re about to take off from Dover. Maybe you can text or e-mail me an update. Investigator Law hasn’t called back, I assume? We’re still waiting for photographs, and have you heard anything about a missing dog, a greyhound? The victim’s dog, named Sock, last seen in Norton’s Woods.” My voice has an edge. Fielding is ducking me, and it’s not the first time. He’s a master at disappearing acts, and he should be. He’s staged enough of them. “Well, I’ll try you again when we land. I assume you’ll meet us at the office, probably sometime between nine-thirty and ten. I’ve sent messages to Anne and Ollie, and maybe you can make sure they are there. We need to take care of this tonight. Maybe you could check with Cambridge PD about the dog? He might have a microchip.…”