Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  “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.

  “He had any contact with you since then? That was what? About two years ago?” Benton asks. “Or maybe with some of your compatriots at Walter Reed or Dover?”

  “Not with me. I wouldn’t know about others, except no one involved with the armed forces is a fan of Dr. Saltz’s. He’s not considered patriotic, which really isn’t fair if you analyze what he’s actually saying.”

  “Problem is nobody seems to understand what anybody is saying anymore. People don’t listen. Saltz isn’t a communist. He’s not a terrorist. He hasn’t committed treason. He just doesn’t know how to curb his enthusiasm and muzzle his big mouth. But he’s not of interest to the government. Well, he wasn’t.”

  “Suddenly, he is.” I assume that’s what Benton will tell me next. “He wasn’t at Whitehall yesterday. Wasn’t even in London.” Benton waits until now to inform me of this as we pause before the locked double steel doors of the autopsy room. “I don’t guess you found that part on the Internet when you were trying to make heads or tails of Jack’s indented writing,” Benton adds in a tone that is shaded with other meanings. A hint of hostility, not directed at me but at Fielding.

  “How do you know where Liam Saltz was or wasn’t?” I ask at the same time I think about what Benton mentioned upstairs. He referred to the event at Norton’s Woods as a VIP wedding and mentioned a security presence. Undercover agents, Benton told me, although it was during an interval when I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have been.

  “Did his keynote address by satellite on a big video screen. Well attended by the audience at Whitehall,” Benton says as if he was there. “He had a complication, a family matter, and had to leave the country.”

  I think of the man beyond these closed steel doors. A man whose wristwatch when he died may have been set to UK time. A man with an old robot called MORT inside his apartment, the same robot that Liam Saltz and I testified against, persuading people in power to disallow its use.

  “Is that why Jack was looking him up, looking up RUSI or whatever he was looking at early yesterday morning?” I ask as I scan open the lock to the autopsy room.

  “I’m wondering how that happened, if he got a call and then looked him up or maybe knew he was in Cambridge for some reason,” Benton replies. “I’m wondering a lot of things that hopefully will get answered soon. What I do know is Dr. Saltz was here for the wedding. The daughter of his current wife, whose biological father was supposed to give her away, then got the swine flu.”

  “I text-messaged you,” Anne tells me, and she’s shrouded in blue as she works on a computer that is contained in a waterproof stainless-steel enclosure, the sealed keyboard mounted at a height suitable for typing while standing. Behind her on the autopsy table of station one, which is now shiny and clean, is the man from Norton’s Woods.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to her abstractedly as I think of Liam Saltz and worry what his connection might be to this dead man, beyond robots, particularly MORT. “My phone’s in my office, and I’ve not been in there,” I say to Anne, and then I ask Benton, “Does he have other children?”

  “He’s at the Charles Hotel,” Benton replies. “Someone’s on the way to talk to him. But to answer your question, yes, he does. He has a number of children and stepchildren from multiple marriages.”

  “I wanted to let you know I didn’t feel comfortable uploading his scans and e-mailing them,” Anne then says to me. “Don’t know what we’re dealing with and thought it was better to play it extra-safe. If you’re going to hang around, you need to cover up.” She directs this to Benton. “Got no clue what this one’s been exposed to, but he didn’t set off any alarms. At least he’s not radio active. Whatever he’s got in him isn’t, thank God.”

  “I assume all was quiet at the hospital. No incidents,” Benton says to her. “I’m not staying.”

  “Security escorted us in and out, and we didn’t see anyone else—no patients or staff, at any rate.”

  “You found something in him?” I ask her.

  “Trace amounts of metal.” Anne’s gloved hands move on the computer’s keyboard and click the mouse, both freshly overlaid with industrial silicone. Fielding’s sloppy presence is noticeably gone from the autopsy room, and I see water in the sink of station one—my station—and a big sponge, the surgical instruments bright and shiny and neatly arranged on the dissecting board. I spot a mop that wasn’t here earlier, and a whetstone on a counter-top.

  “I’m amazed,” I say to her as I look around.

  “Ollie,” she says, clicking the mouse. “I called him, and he drove back and spruced up the place.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s not that we haven’t tried while you were gone. Jack’s been using this work space, and we’ve learned to stay away.”

  “How can there be metal that didn’t show up on CT?” Benton watches her scroll through files she created at the neuroimaging lab, looking for the images she wants from the MRI.

  “If it’s really small,” I explain to him how it’s possible. “A threshold size of less than point-five millimeters and I wouldn’t expect it to be detected on CT. That’s why we wanted to rule out the possibility by using MR, and apparently it’s a good thing.”

  “Although maybe not if he was alive,” Anne says, clicking on a file. “You don’t want something ferromagnetic in a living person, because it’s going to torque. It’s going to move. Like metal shavings in the eyes of people involved in professions that expose them to something like that. They may not even know it until they get an MRI. Then they know it; boy, do they ever. Or if they have body piercings they don’t tell us about, and we’ve seen that enough times,” she says to Benton. “Or, God forbid, a pacemaker. Metal moves, and it heats up.”

  “Theories?” I ask her, because I can’t imagine an event or a weapon that could create what has just filled the video display.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” she answers as we study high-resolution images of the dead man’s internal damage, a dark distorted area of signal voids that starts just inside the buttonhole wound and becomes increasingly less pronounced the deeper the penetration inside the organs and soft tissue structures of the chest.

  “Because of the magnetic field, even with what must be particles incredibly minute, you’re going to get artifact. Right here,” I point out to Benton. “These very dark and distorted areas where there’s no signal penetration. You get this blooming artifact along the wound track, what’s left of the wound track, because the signal’s been blown out by metal. He’s got some sort of ferromagnetic foreign bodies inside him, all right.”

  “What could do that?” Benton asks.

  “I’m going to have to recover some of it, analyze it.” I think of what Lucy said about thermite. It would be ferromagnetic just as bullets are, both metal composites having iron oxide in common.

  “Point-five? The size of dust?” Benton’s eyes are distracted by other thoughts.

  “A little bigger,” Anne replies.

  “About the size of gunshot residue, grains of unburned powder,” I add.

  “A projectile like a bullet could be reduced to frag no bigger than grains of gunshot powder,” Benton considers, and I can tell he is connecting what I’m saying with something else, and I think of my niece and wonder exactly what she said to him while they were together in her lab this morning. I think of shark bang sticks and nanoexplosives, but there are no thermal injuries, no burns. It wouldn’t make sense.

  “No projectile I’ve ever seen,” Anne says, and I agree. “Do we know anything more about who he might be?” She means the body on the table. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.”

  “Hopefully soon,” Benton replies.

  “It sounds like you might have an i
dea,” Anne says to him.

  “Our first clue was he showed up at Norton’s Woods at the same time Dr. Saltz was inside the building, and that was something to check because of certain interests these two individuals would have in common.” He means robots, I suspect.

  “I don’t think I know who that is,” Anne says to him.

  “A scientist who won a Nobel Prize and is an expatriate,” Benton says, and as I observe him with Anne I’m reminded they are colleagues and friends, that he treats her with an easy familiarity, with trust that he doesn’t exhibit around most people. “And if he”—Benton indicates the dead man—“knew Dr. Saltz was coming to Cambridge, the question was how.”

  “Do we know if he knew that?” I ask.

  “Right now we don’t for a fact.”

  “So Dr. Saltz was at the wedding. But this one wasn’t dressed for a wedding.” Anne indicates the nude dead body on the table. “He had his dog with him. And a gun.”

  “What I know so far is the bride is a daughter from a different marriage,” Benton says as if this detail has been carefully checked. “The daughter’s father, who was supposed to give her away, got sick. So she asked her stepfather, Dr. Saltz, at the last minute, and he couldn’t physically be in two places at once. He flew into Boston on Saturday and made his appearance at Whitehall via satellite. A sacrifice on his part. The last thing he felt like doing, I’m sure, was to reenter the US and show up at Cambridge.”

  “The undercover agents?” I ask. “For him? If so, why? I know he has enemies, but why would the FBI be offering protection to a civilian scientist from the UK?”

  “That’s the irony,” Benton says. “The security at the event wasn’t about him, was about those attending the wedding, most of them from the UK because of the groom’s family. The groom is Russell Brown’s son, David. Both Liam Saltz’s stepdaughter Ruth and David attend Harvard Law, which is one reason the wedding was here.”

  Russell Brown. The shadow secretary of state for defense, whose speech I just read on the RUSI website.

  “He shows up at an event like that and is armed,” I say as I move closer to the steel table. “A gun with the serial number eradicated?”

  “Right. Why?” Benton asks. “To protect himself, or was he a potential assailant? Or to protect himself for a reason that’s unrelated to the wedding and the people I’ve just mentioned.”

  “Possibly top-secret technology he was involved in,” I offer. “Technology worth quite a lot of money,” I add. “Technology people might kill for.”

  “And maybe did kill for,” Anne says as she looks at the dead young man.

  “Hopefully, we’ll know soon,” Benton says.

  I look at the dead man rigidly on his back, his curled fingers and the position of his arms, his legs, his hands, his head, exactly as they were earlier, no matter how much he has been disturbed during transport and scans. Rigor mortis is complete, but he won’t resist me strenuously as I examine him, because he’s thin. He doesn’t have much muscle fiber for calcium ions to have gotten trapped in after his neurotransmitters quit. I can break him easily. I can bend him to my will.

  “I’ve got to go,” Benton says to me. “I know you want to get this taken care of. I’ll need your help with something by the time you’re ready to get away from here, and you’re not to get away on your own. Make sure she calls me,” he says to Anne as she labels test tubes and specimen containers. “Call me or call Marino,” he adds. “Give us an hour advance notice.”

  “Marino will be with you…?” I start to ask.

  “We’re working on something. He’s already there.”

  I no longer question what Benton is referring to when he says “we,” and he looks one more time at me, his eyes meeting mine with the intimacy of a lingering touch, and he leaves the autopsy room. I hear the receding sound of his brisk footsteps along the hard tile corridor, then his voice and another voice as he talks to someone, perhaps Ron. I can’t make out a word they are saying, but they sound serious and intense before silence returns abruptly. I imagine Benton has left the receiving area, and on a video display I’m startled by him. Picked up by security cameras, he walks through the bay as he zips up the shearling coat I gave him so long ago I don’t remember the year, only that it was in Aspen, where he used to have a place.

  I watch him on closed-circuit TV opening the side door that is next to the massive bay door, and then another camera picks him up outside my building as he walks past his green SUV parked in my spot. He gets into a different SUV, dark and big with bright headlights that the snow slashes through, the wipers sweeping side to side, and I can’t see who is driving. I watch the SUV in my snow-covered lot, backing up, moving forward, and pausing as the big gate opens, and finally out of sight in the bitter weather at the empty hour of four a.m., with my husband in the passenger’s seat, driven by someone, maybe his FBI friend Douglas, both of them headed to a destination that for some reason I’ve not been told about.

  14

  Inside the anteroom I prepare for battle the way I always do, suiting up in armor made of plastic and paper.

  I never feel like a doctor, not even a surgeon, as I get ready to conduct a postmortem examination, and I suspect only people who deal with the dead for a living can understand what I mean by that. During my medical-school residencies I was no different from other doctors, tending to the sick and injured on wards and in emergency rooms, and I assisted in surgical procedures in the OR. So I know what it is to incise warm bodies that have a blood pressure and something vital to lose. What I’m about to do couldn’t be more different from that, and the first time I inserted a scalpel blade into cold, unfeeling flesh, made my first Y-incision on my first dead patient, I gave up something I’ve never gotten back.

  I abandoned any notion that I might be godlike or heroic or gifted beyond other mortals. I rejected the fantasy that I could heal any creature, including myself. No doctor has the power to cause blood to clot or tissue or bone to regenerate or tumors to shrink. We don’t create, only prompt biological functions to work or not work properly on their own, and in that regard, doctors are more limited than a mechanic or an engineer who actually builds something out of nothing. My choice of a medical specialty, which my mother and sister still consider morbid and abnormal, probably has made me more honest than most physicians. I know that when I administer my healing touch to the dead they are unmoved by me or my bedside manner. They stay just as dead as they were before. They don’t say thank you or send holiday greetings or name their children after me. Of course I was cognizant of all this when I decided on pathology, but that’s like saying you know what combat is when you enlist in the marines and get deployed to the mountains of Afghanistan. People don’t really know what anything is really like until it really happens to them.

  I can never smell the acrid, oily, pungent odor of unbuffered formaldehyde without being reminded of how naïve I was to assume that the dissection of a cadaver donated to science for teaching purposes is anything like the autopsy of an unembalmed person whose cause of death is questioned. My first one took place in the Hopkins hospital morgue, which was a crude place compared to what is beyond this room where I am this minute folding my AFME field clothes and placing them on a bench, not bothering with the locker room or modesty at this hour. The woman whose name I still recall was only thirty-three and left behind two small children and a husband when she died of postoperative complications from an appendectomy.

  To this day I’m sorry she was my science project. I’m sorry she was ever put in a position to be any pathology resident’s project, and I remember thinking how absurd it was that such a healthy young human being had succumbed to an infection caused by the removal of a rather useless wormlike pouch from the large intestine. I wanted to make her better. As I worked on her, practiced on her, I wanted her to come to and climb off that scratched-up steel pedestal table in the center of the dingy floor inside that dreary subterranean room that smelled like death. I wanted her alive and
well and to feel I’d had something to do with it. I’m not a surgeon. What I do is excavate so I can make my case when I go to war with killers or, less dramatically but more typically, with lawyers.

  Anne was thoughtful enough to find a pair of freshly laundered scrubs, size medium and the institutional green I’m accustomed to, and I put them on, then over them a disposable gown, which I tie snugly in back before I pull shoe covers out of a dispenser and cover a pair of rubber medical clogs Anne dug up somewhere. Next are protective sleeves, a hair cover, a mask, and a face shield, and finally I double-glove.

  “Maybe you could scribe for me,” I say to her as I return to the autopsy room, a big, empty vista of gleaming white and bright steel. Only the three of us are here, if I include my patient on the first table. “In the event I don’t get to dictate my findings directly afterward, and it appears I may have to leave.”

  “Not by yourself,” she reminds me.

  “Benton took the car key,” I remind her.

  “Wouldn’t stop you, since we have vehicles, so don’t try to fool me. When it’s time, I’m calling him, and there won’t be an argument.” Anne can say almost anything and not sound disrespectful or rude.

  She takes photographs while I swab the entrance wound on the lower back. Then I swab orifices in the off chance this homicide might involve a sexual assault, although I don’t see how, based on what has been described.

  “Because we’re looking for a unicorn.” I seal anal and oral swabs in paper envelopes and label and initial them. “Not your everyday pony, and I’m not going to believe anything, anyway, since I didn’t go to the scene.”

  “Well, nobody did,” Anne says. “Which is a shame.”

  “Even if somebody had, I’d still be looking for a unicorn.”

  “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t trust what anybody says if I were you.”

  “If you were me.” I lock a new blade into a scalpel as she fills a labeled plastic jar with formalin.

  “Unless it’s me who’s talking,” she replies without looking at me. “I wouldn’t lie or cheat or help myself to things that aren’t mine. I would never treat this place as if it belongs to me. Never mind. I shouldn’t get into it.”