Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  She clicks on play and turns up the volume, and I watch two attendants in winter coats pushing a stretcher bearing a black body bag along the lower level’s gray tile hallway.

  Wheels click as they park the stretcher in front of the cooler, and now I can see Janelle, stocky with short brunette hair, tough-looking with a surprising number of tattoos, as best I recall. Someone Fielding found and hired.

  Janelle opens the massive stainless-steel door, and I hear the rush of blowing air.

  “Put it…” She points, and I notice she is wearing her coat, a dark jacket with FORENSICS in large, bright-yellow letters on the back. She’s in scene clothes, including a CFC baseball cap, as if she’s going out in the cold or just came in.

  “That tray there?” an attendant asks as he and his partner lift the body bag off the stretcher. The bag bends freely as they carry it, the body inside it as flexible as in life. “Shit, he’s dripping. Dammit. He’d better not have AIDS or something. On my pants, my damn shoes.”

  “The lower one.” Janelle directs them to a tray inside the cooler, stepping out of the way and not interested that blood is dripping from the body bag and spotting the gray floor. She doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Janelle the magnificent,” Lucy comments as the video recording ends abruptly.

  “Do you have the MLI log?” I want to see what time the medicolegal investigator—in other words, Janelle—came and went yesterday. “Obviously, she was on call during the evening?”

  “She worked a double shift on Sunday, worker bee that she is,” Lucy says. “Filled in for Randy, who was scheduled for evenings over the weekend but called in sick. Meaning he stayed home to watch the Super Bowl.”

  “I hope not.”

  “And Dandy Randy’s not here now because of the weather. Supposedly on call at home. Must be nice to have a take-home SUV and get paid for staying home,” Lucy says, and I hear the contempt in her flinty tone and see it in the hardness of her face. “I guess you can tell you got your work cut out for you. Assuming you ever quit making excuses for people.”

  “I don’t make them for you.”

  “That’s because there aren’t any.”

  I look at the log Janelle kept yesterday, a template on my video display that has very few fields filled in.

  “I don’t mean to state what’s as plain as the nose on my face, but there’s not much you really know about what goes on,” Lucy says. “You don’t know the finer points of the day-to-day in this place. How could you?” She returns to her side of the desk and picks up her coffee, but she doesn’t sit back down. “You haven’t been here. You’ve sort of never been here since we opened for business.”

  “This is it? This is the entire log for yesterday?”

  “Yup. Janelle came in at four. If what she entered into the log is to be believed.” Lucy stands and drinks her coffee, eyeing me. “And she runs with quite a pack, by the way. Forensic fuck buddies. Most of them cops, a few of them data-entry and clerical. Whoever she can be a hero to. You know she’s on a dodgeball team? What kind of person plays dodgeball? Someone with finesse.”

  “If she came in at four, why is she dressed in scene clothes, including her jacket? As if she just came in from the cold?”

  “Like I said, if what she entered in the log is to be believed.”

  “And David was on before that and didn’t respond to anything, either?” I ask. “Jack could have sent him to Norton’s Woods. David was sitting right here, so why didn’t Jack tell him to go to the scene? It’s maybe fifteen minutes from here.”

  “And you don’t know that, either.” Lucy walks into the bathroom and rinses her mug. “You don’t know if David was sitting right here,” she says as she walks back out and hovers near my closed office door. “I don’t want to be the one to tell you….”

  “It would seem you are the only one to tell me. No one else is telling me a damn thing,” I reply. “What the hell is happening around here? People just show up when they feel like it?”

  “Pretty much. The other MEs, the MLIs, in and out, marching to their own drummer. It trickles down from the top.”

  “It trickles down from Jack.”

  “At least on your side of things. The labs are another story, because he’s not interested in them. Except firearms.” She leans against the closed door, slipping her hands into the pockets of her lab coat.

  “He’s supposed to be in charge in my absence. Jack’s the co-director of the entire CFC–Port Mortuary.” I can’t keep the protest out of my tone, the note of outrage.

  “Not interested in the labs, and scientists don’t pay any attention to him, anyway. Except firearms, like I said. You know Fielding and guns, knives, crossbows, hunting bows. Never met a weapon he didn’t love. So he messes with the firearms and tool-mark lab and has managed to fuck them up, too. Piss off Morrow until he’s on the verge of quitting. I do know he’s actively looking for another job, and there’s no good reason his lab didn’t finish with the Glock the dead guy had on him. The eradicated serial number. Shit. He bolted out of here this morning and didn’t bother.”

  “He bolted out of here?”

  “He was driving off when I was returning from Norton’s Woods. This was about ten-thirty.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. I don’t know, but I don’t understand why he didn’t make sure someone took care of the Glock. Using acid on a drilled-off serial number? How long does that take to at least try? He must have known it was important.”

  “He might not have,” I answer. “If the Cambridge detective is the only one who talked to him, why would he think the Glock was important? At that time, no one had a clue the man from Norton’s Woods is a homicide.”

  “Well, I guess that’s a relevant point. Morrow probably doesn’t even know we went to get you, that you’re back from Dover. Fielding vanished, too, when he knew damn well there was a major problem that most people with a brain in their head would decide was his fault. He’s the one who took the call about the guy in Norton’s Woods. He’s the one who didn’t go to the scene or make sure somebody did. The reason Janelle is dressed for the great outdoors, in my opinion? She didn’t get here at four, the time she entered into the log. She got here just in time to let in the attendants and sign in the body and then turned right around and left. I can find out. There will be an entry for when she disabled the alarm to enter the building. Depends on whether you want to make a federal case out of it.”

  “I’m surprised Marino hasn’t made sure I know the extent of the problems.” It’s all I can think to say. The inside of my head has gone dark.

  “Like the boy crying wolf,” Lucy says, and it’s true.

  Marino complains so much about so many people, I scarcely hear him. Now we’re back to my failures. I haven’t paid attention. I haven’t listened. Maybe I wouldn’t have listened no matter who told me.

  “I’ve got a few things to take care of. You know how to find me,” Lucy says, and she opens my door and leaves it open after she walks out.

  I pick up the phone and try Fielding’s numbers again. I don’t leave any messages this time, and it crosses my mind that his wife isn’t answering their home phone, either. She would see my office name and number on caller ID. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t pick up, because she knows it’s me. Or maybe his family has gone somewhere, is out of town. On a Monday night in the middle of a snowstorm, when he knows damn well I’ve rushed home from Dover to take care of an emergency case?

  I walk out and scan my thumb to unlock the door to the right of mine. I stand inside my deputy chief’s office and slowly scan it as if it is a crime scene.

  11

  I picked his office, insisting on one as nice as mine, generously large, with a private shower. He has a river and city view, although his shades are down, which I find unnerving. He must have closed them when it was still light out, and I don’t know why he would do that. Not for a good reason, I think. Whatever Jack Fiel
ding has done, it all bodes badly.

  I walk around and open each shade, and through expansive glass that is a reflective gray tint, I can make out the blurred lights of downtown Boston and billowing waves of freezing moisture, an icy snow that clicks and bites like teeth. The tops of high-rises, the Prudential and Hancock towers are obscured, and gusting wind moans in low tones around the dome over my head. Below, Memorial Drive is churned up by traffic, even at this hour, and the Charles is formless and black. I wonder how deep the snow is by now and how deep it will get before it moves off to the south. I wonder if Fielding will ever return to this room I designed and furnished for him, and somehow it feels that he won’t, even though there is no evidence he’s gone for good.

  The biggest difference between our work spaces is his is crowded with reminders of the occupant, his various degrees, certificates, and commendations, his collectibles on shelves, autographed baseballs and bats, tae kwon do trophies and plaques, and models of fighter planes and a piece from a real one that crashed. I go over to his desk and survey Civil War relics: a belt buckle, a mess kit, a powder horn, a few minié balls that I remember him collecting during our early days in Virginia. But there are no photo graphs, and that makes me sad. In some places I can see what’s gone in blank spaces of wall where he’s not bothered to fill in the tiny holes left from hanging hooks he removed.

  It stings that he no longer displays familiar pictures taken when he was my forensic pathology fellow, candid shots of us in the morgue or the two of us out at death scenes with Marino, the lead homicide detective for Richmond PD in the late eighties, the early nineties, when both Fielding and I were just getting started, although in completely different ways. He was the good-looking doctor beginning his career, while I was shifting mine into the private sector, transitioning into civilian life and the role of chief, doing my best not to look back. Maybe Fielding isn’t looking back, although I don’t know why. His old days were good days compared to mine. He didn’t help cover up a crime. He’s never had anything on par with that to hide from. Not that I know of, but I have to wonder. What do I know anymore?

  Not much, except I sense he’s gotten rid of me, maybe gotten rid of all of us. I sense he’s gotten rid of more than he ever has before. It is something I’m convinced of without knowing exactly why. Certainly his personal property is still here, his Gore-Tex rain suit on a hanger, and his neoprene hip waders, his dive bag of scuba gear and scene case stowed in a closet, and his collection of police patches and police and military challenge coins. I remember helping him move into this office. I even helped him arrange his furniture, both of us complaining and laughing and then griping some more as we moved the desk, then his conference table, then moved them again and again.

  “What is this, Laurel and Hardy?” he said. “You going to push a mule up the stairs next?”

  “You don’t have stairs.”

  “I’m thinking of getting a horse,” he said as we moved the same chairs we’d just moved earlier. “There’s a horse farm about a mile from the house. I could board the horse there, maybe ride it to work, to crime scenes.”

  “I’ll add that to the employee handbook. No horses.”

  We joked and teased each other, and he looked good that day—vital and optimistic, his muscles straining against the short sleeves of his scrubs. He was just incredibly built and healthy-looking then, his face still boyishly handsome, his dark blond hair messy, and he hadn’t shaved for several days. He was sexy and funny, and I remember the whispers and giggles of some of the female staff as they walked past his open door, finding excuses to stare at him. Fielding seemed so happy to be here and with me, and I remember both of us placing photographs and reminiscing about our early days together—photographs that now are gone.

  In their place are ones I don’t recall. The pictures are prominently arranged on his shelves and walls, formal poses of him with politicians and military brass, one with General Briggs and even Captain Avallone, perhaps from the tour Fielding gave her. He looks wooden and bored. In a photograph of him in tae kwon do white, mid-flight and kicking an imagined enemy, he looks angry. He looks red-faced and hateful. As I study recent family portraits, I decide he doesn’t look content in them, either, not even when he is holding his two little girls or has his arm around his wife, Laura, a delicate blonde whose prettiness is eroding, as if a trying existence is mapping its course on her physically, etching lines and furrows into a topography that once was graceful and smooth.

  She is number three for him, and I can trace his decline as I scan his captured moments in chronological order. When he married her, he looked energetic, with no sign of a rash, and he didn’t have any unseemly bald patches. I pause to admire how amazing he was, shirtless and as hard-bodied as stone in running shorts, washing his Mustang, a ’67, cherry red with Le Mans stripes down the center of the hood. Then as recently as this past fall, the thickening around his middle; the splotchy, flushed skin; the strands of hair combed back and held in place with gel to hide his alopecia. At a martial-arts competition not even a month ago, he doesn’t look as fit or as spiritually balanced in his grandmaster’s uniform and black belt. He doesn’t look like someone who finds joy in beautiful form or technique. He doesn’t look like someone who honors other people or has self-control or respect for anything. He looks dissipated. He looks slightly deranged. He looks perfectly miserable.

  Why? I silently ask that earlier photograph of him with his prized car, when he was stunning to behold and seemed carefree and vital, the sort of man it would be easy to fall in love with or to place in charge or to trust with your life. What changed? What made you so unhappy? What was it this time? He hates working for me. He hated it the last time, in Watertown, where he didn’t stay long, and now the CFC, and he hates that more, it’s obvious. This past late summer, when he started looking so bad, is when we finally opened our doors to criminal justice, taking cases. But I wasn’t even in Massachusetts then, just one weekend over Labor Day. It can’t be my fault. It’s always been my fault. I’ve always blamed myself for Fielding’s downfalls, and he’s had more of them than I care to count.

  I pick him up and he falls again, only harder each time. It gets uglier. It gets bloodier. Again and again. Like a child who can’t walk, and I won’t accept it until he’s injured beyond fixing. The drama that will always end predictably is the way Benton has described it. Fielding shouldn’t be a forensic pathologist, and it’s because of me that he is. He would have been better off if he’d never met me in the spring of 1988 when he wasn’t sure what he wanted in life and I said I know what you should do. Let me show you. Let me teach you. If he’d never come to Richmond, if he’d never run into me, he might have picked a way to spend his days that would have suited him. His career, his life, would have been about him and not about me.

  That really is the bottom line, that he does the best he can in an environment totally destructive to him and finally can’t take it any longer and decompensates, disintegrates, and remembers why he is what he is and who shaped him, and then I loom as huge in his wretched life as a billboard. His answer to these crises is always the same. He vanishes. One day he simply drops off the radar, and what I find in his wake is awful. Cases he mishandled or neglected. Memos that showed his lack of control and dangerous judgment. Hurtful voicemails he didn’t bother to delete because he wanted me to hear them. Damaging e-mails and other communications he hoped I’d find. I sit in his chair and start opening drawers. I don’t have to rummage long.

  The file folder isn’t labeled and contains four pages printed at eight-oh-three yesterday morning, February 8, a speech that based on other information in the header and news section is from the Royal United Services Institute’s website. A centuries old British think tank with satellite offices strategically located around the world, RUSI is dedicated to advanced innovations in national and international security, and I can’t imagine Fielding’s interest. I can’t fathom him caring about a keynote address given by Russell Brown, the s
hadow secretary of state for defense, on his views about the “defense debate.” I skim the conservative member of Parliament’s not-so-startling comments that it isn’t a given the UK will always act as part of an alliance and the economic impact of the war is catastrophic. He makes repeated allusions to misinformation methodically propagated, which is as close as the respectable MP is going to come to outright accusing the United States of orchestrating the invasion of Iraq and dragging the UK along for the ride.

  Unsurprisingly, the speech is political, as is almost everything right now in Britain, which holds its general election in three months. Six hundred and fifty seats are being contested, and a major campaign issue is the more than ten thousand British troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Fielding isn’t military, has never paid much attention to foreign affairs or elections, and I don’t know why he would have the slightest interest in what is happening in the UK. I don’t recall that he’s ever even been to the UK. He’s not the sort to be interested in a general election over there or RUSI or any think tank, and knowing him as well as I do, I suspect he intended for me to find this file. He wanted me to see it after he pulled another one of his vanishing stunts. What is it he wants me to know?

  Why is he interested in RUSI? And did he come across the speech himself on the Internet, or did someone send it to him? If it was sent to him, by whom? I consider asking Lucy to go into Fielding’s e-mail, but I’m not ready to be that heavy-handed, and I don’t want to be caught. I can lock the door, but my superuser deputy chief could still walk in, because I don’t have confidence that Ron or anyone else will keep Fielding in the security area if he shows up. I have no faith that Ron, who was unfriendly to me and seems to have little regard for me, will detain Fielding or try to get hold of me to ask for clearance. I don’t trust that my staff is loyal to me or feels safe with me or follows my orders, and Fielding could reappear at any moment.