Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  Cables snake over the diamond-steel floor and out the open metal doors, over the unpaved icy drive, and disappear through the front of the stone cottage, what must have been a charming, cozy outbuilding before Fielding turned it into a construction site of exposed foundation blocks, the ground frozen with ice that is gray. The area behind the sea captain’s house is an eyesore of spilled cement and toppled piles of lumber and bricks, and rusting tools, shingles, weather stripping, and nails everywhere. A wheelbarrow is covered loosely with a black tarp that flaps, the entire perimeter strung with yellow crime scene tape that shakes and jumps in the wind.

  “We got enough juice in this thing for lights and that’s it, got about a hundred and twenty minutes of run time left,” Marino says to me as he digs inside a built-in storage bin.

  What he’s referring to is the auxiliary power unit, the APU, which can keep the truck’s electrical system running while the engine is off and supplies a limited amount of emergency power externally.

  “Assuming the power doesn’t come back on, and maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ve heard it could anytime, the main problem being those poles knocked over by snapped-off trees you probably drove past on Derby Street on your way here. But even if we get the electricity back, it won’t help much in there.” He means in the stone outbuilding. “No heat in there. It’s cold as shit, and after a while it gets to you, I’m just telling you,” he says from inside the truck while Benton and I stand outside in the wind and I flip up the collar of my jacket. “Cold as our damn fridge at the morgue, if you can imagine working in there for hours.”

  As if I’ve never worked a scene in frigid weather and am unfamiliar with a morgue cooler.

  “Course, there are some advantages to that if the power goes out, which it’s going to do in these parts when you get storms, and he didn’t have a backup generator,” Marino continues.

  He means that Fielding didn’t.

  “And that’s a lot of money to lose if the freezer quits. Which is why plugging in a space heater and turning it on high was for the obvious reason of ruining the DNA so we’d never know who he’d taken the shit from. Do you think that’s possible?” he asks me.

  “I’m not sure which part of it—” I start to say.

  “That we won’t ID them. Possible we won’t?” Marino continues talking nonstop, as if he’s been drinking coffee since I saw him last. His eyes are bloodshot and glassy.

  “No,” I reply. “I don’t think it’s possible. I think we’ll find out.”

  “So you don’t think it’s as worthless as tapioca.”

  “Christ,” Benton says. “I could have done without that. Christ, I wish you’d stop with the fucking food analogies.”

  “Low copy number.” I remind Mario we can get a DNA profile from as little as three human cells. Unless virtually every cell is degraded, we’ll be okay, I assure him.

  “Well, it’s only fair we really try.” Marino talks to me as if Benton’s not here, directing his every comment to me as if he’s in charge and doesn’t want to be reminded of my FBI or former FBI husband. “I mean, what if it was your son?”

  “I agree we have to ID them and let their next of kin know,” I reply.

  “And get sued, now that I think of it,” Marino reconsiders. “Well, maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone. Seems to me we just need to know who it came from. Why tell the families and open a can of worms?”

  “Full disclosure,” Benton says ironically, as if he really knows what that is. He is looking at his iPhone, reading something on it, and he adds, “Because a lot of them probably already know. We’re assuming Fielding arranged with them up front to pay for the service he was offering. It’s not possible to hide anything.”

  “We’re not going to,” I answer. “We don’t hide things, period.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. I’m thinking we really should install cameras inside our cooler, not just outside in the hall and the bay and certain rooms but actually in there,” Marino says to me, as if it has always been his belief that we should have cameras inside the coolers, probably inside the freezer, too. In fact, he’s never mentioned the idea before now. “I wonder if cameras would work in a cooler….” he is saying.

  “They work outdoors. It gets colder in the winter around here than it is in the cooler,” Benton comments dully, barely listening to Marino, who is full of himself, enjoying his role in the drama that has unfolded, and he’s never liked Fielding. I can’t think of a bigger I told you so.

  “Well, we got to do it,” Marino says to me. “Cameras and no more of this shit, of people doing shit they think they can get away with.”

  I look behind us at boots and shoes lined up outside the opening that leads into the cottage. The Kill Cottage, the Semen’s Cottage. Some cops are calling it the Little Shop of Horrors.

  “Cameras,” I hear Marino as I stare at the stone cottage. “If we had them in the cooler, we’d have it all on tape. Well, hell, maybe it’s a good thing. Shit, imagine if something like that got leaked and ended up on YouTube. Fielding doing that to all these dead bodies. Jesus. I bet you have cameras like that at Dover, though.”

  He hands us folded bright-yellow suits like his.

  “Dover must have cameras in the coolers, right?” he goes on. “I’m sure DoD would spring for it, and nothing like the present to ask, right? In light of the circumstances, I don’t think anything’s off the table when it comes to beefing up security at our place….”

  I realize Marino is still talking to me, but I don’t answer because I’m worrying about what’s in the cab of the truck. I’m suddenly overwhelmed by pity as I stand outside in the cold and wind and glare, my level-A suit folded up and tucked under my arm while Benton is putting his on.

  And Marino goes on quite cheerfully, as if this is quite the carnival, “… Like I said, a good thing it’s cold. I can’t imagine working this on one of those ninety-degree days like we used to get in Richmond, where you can wring water out of the air and nothing’s stirring. I mean, what a fucking pig. Don’t even look at the toilet in there; probably the last time it was flushed was when they were still burning witches around here….”

  “They were hanged,” I hear myself say.

  Marino looks at me with a blank expression on his big face, and his nose and ears are red, the hard hat perched on top of his bald head like the bonnet of a yellow fireplug.

  “How’s he doing?” I indicate the cab of the truck and what’s inside it.

  “Anne’s a regular Dr. Dolittle. Did you know she wanted to be a vet before she decided to be Madam Curie?” He still says curry, like curry powder, no matter how many times I’ve told him it’s Cure-ee, like the element curium that’s named after Madame Cure-ee.

  “I tell you what, though,” he then says to me. “It’s a good thing the heat hadn’t been off in the house more than five, six hours before anybody got here. Dogs like that don’t have much more hair than I do. He’d dug himself under the covers in Fielding’s rat’s nest of a bed and was still shivering like he was having a seizure. Of course, he was scared shitless. All these cops, the FBI storming in with all their tactical gear, the whole nine yards. Not to mention I’ve heard that greyhounds don’t like to be left alone, have what do you call it, separation anxiety.”

  He opens another storage bin and hands me a pair of boots, knowing my size without asking.

  “How do you know it’s Jack’s bed?” I ask.

  “It’s his shit everywhere. Who else’s would it be?”

  “We need to be sure of everything.” I’m going to keep saying it. “He was out here in the middle of nowhere. No neighbors, no eyes or ears, the park deserted this time of year. How do you know for a fact he was alone out here? How can you be absolutely certain he didn’t have help?”

  “Who? Who the hell would help him do something like this?” Marino looks at me, and I can see it on his big face, what he thinks. I can’t be rational about Fielding. That’s exactly what Marino thinks, probably what everybody thin
ks.

  “We need to keep an open mind,” I reply, then I indicate the cab of the truck again and ask again about the dog.

  “He’s fine,” Marino says. “Anne got him something to eat, chicken and rice from that Greek diner in Belmont, made him a nice comfy bed, and the heat’s blasting, feels like an oven, probably sucking up more to keep his skinny ass warm than we’re using in the cellar. You want to meet him?”

  He hands us heavy black rubber gloves and disposable nitrile ones, and Benton blows on his hands to warm them as he continues text-messaging and reading whatever is landing on his phone. He doesn’t seem interested in anything Marino and I are saying.

  “Let me take care of things first,” I tell Marino, because I don’t have it in me at the moment to see an abandoned dog that was left alone in a pitch-dark house with no heat after his master was murdered by the person who stole him. Or so the theory goes.

  “Here’s the routine,” Marino then says, grabbing two bright-yellow hard hats and handing them to us. “Over there, where you’ll see plastic tubs for decon.” He points at an area of dirt near a sheet of plywood that serves as the cottage’s front door. “You don’t want to track anything beyond the perimeter. Suits and boots go on and off right over there.”

  Lined up next to three plastic tubs filled with water is a bottle of Dawn dish-washing detergent and rows of footwear, the boots and shoes of the people inside, including what I recognize as a pair of tan combat boots, men’s size. Based on what I’m seeing, there are at least eight investigators working the scene, including someone who might be army, someone who might be Briggs. Marino bends over to check the status display on the diamond steel–encased APU in the back of the truck, then thuds down the diamond-steel steps out into the glare and sparkle of ice that coats bare trees as if they have been dipped in glass. Hanging everywhere are long, sharp icicles that remind me of nails and spears.

  “So what you can do is put your gear on now,” Marino says for my benefit as Benton wanders off, busy with his phone, communicating with someone and not listening to us.

  Marino and I begin walking to the cottage, careful not to slip on ice that is frozen unevenly over rutted dirt and mud and debris that Fielding never cleaned up.

  “Leave your shoes here,” Marino tells me, “and if you need to use the facilities or go out for fresh air, just make sure you swish your boots off before you go back in. There’s a lot of shit in there you don’t want to be tracking everywhere. We don’t even know exactly what shit, could be shit we don’t know about, my point is. But what we do know isn’t something you want to be tracking all over, and I know they say the AIDS virus can’t live very long postmortem or whatever, but don’t ask me to find out.”

  “What’s been done?” I unfold my suit, and the wind almost blows it out of my hands.

  “Things you’re not going to want to do and shouldn’t be your problem.” Marino works his huge hands into a pair of purple gloves.

  “I’ll do anything that needs to be done,” I remind him.

  “You’re going to need your heavy rubber gloves if you start touching a lot of stuff in there.” Marino puts those on next.

  I feel like snapping at him that I’m not here to sightsee. Of course I’ll be touching things. But I don’t intend to stoop to saying I’ve shown up to work a crime scene as if I’m one of the troops reporting to Marino and will be saluting him next. It’s not that I don’t understand what Marino is doing, what Benton is doing, what everyone is doing. Nobody wants me guilty of the very thing Mrs. Donahue accused Fielding of, ironically. Not that I want to have a conflict, either, and I understand I shouldn’t be the one examining someone who worked for me and who, as rumor has it, I had sex with at some point in my life.

  What I don’t understand is why I’m not bothered more than I am. The only sadness I’m aware of right now is what I feel about a dog named Sock who is sleeping on towels in the cab of the CFC truck. If I see the dog I’m afraid I’ll break down, and every other thought is an anxious one about him. Where will he go? Not to an animal shelter. I won’t allow that. It would make sense if Liam Saltz took him, but he lives in England, and how would he get the dog back to the UK unless it is in the cargo area of a jet, and I won’t permit that, either. The pitiful creature has been through enough in this life.

  “Just be careful.” Marino continues his briefing as if I don’t know a damn thing about what is going on around here. “And just so you know, we got the van making runs back and forth like clockwork.”

  Yes, I know. I’m the one who set it up. I watch Benton wander back toward the truck, talking to someone on his phone, and I feel forgotten. I feel extraneous. I feel I’m not helpful or of interest to anything or anyone.

  “Pretty much nonstop, already thirty or forty DNA samples in the works, a lot of it not completely thawed, so maybe you’re right and we’ll be lucky. The van makes an evidence run and then turns around and comes right back, is on its way back here now even as we speak,” Marino says.

  I bend over and untie one of my boots.

  “Anne drives like a damn demon. I didn’t know that. I always figured she’d drive like an old lady, but she’s been sliding in and out of here like the damn thing’s on skis. It’s something,” Marino says, as if he likes her. “Anyway, everybody’s working like Santa’s helpers. The general says he can bring in backup scientists from Dover. You sure?”

  At the moment I don’t know what I want, except a chance to evaluate the situation for myself, and I’ve made that clear.

  “It’s not your decision,” I answer Marino, untying my other boot. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Seems like it would be helpful to have AFDIL.” Marino says it in a way that makes me suspicious, and I eye the tan combat boots by the decon tubs.

  It’s awkward enough that Briggs is here, and it enters my mind that he might not be the only one who’s shown up from Dover.

  “Who else?” I ask Marino as I lean against cinderblocks for balance. “Rockman or Pruitt?”

  “Well, Colonel Pruitt.”

  Another army man, Pruitt is the director of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, AFDIL.

  “He and the general flew in together,” Marino adds.

  I didn’t ask either of them to come, but they didn’t need me to ask, and besides, Marino asked, at least he admitted to inviting Briggs. Marino told me about it during the drive here, over the phone. He said by the way he hoped I didn’t mind that he took the liberty, especially since Briggs supposedly had been calling and I supposedly hadn’t been answering, so Briggs hunted down Marino. Briggs wanted to know about Eli, the man from Norton’s Woods, and Marino told him what was known about the case and then told him “everything else,” Marino informed me, and he hoped I didn’t mind.

  I replied that I did mind, but what’s done is done. I seem to be saying that a lot, and I said as much to Marino while I was on the phone with him during the car ride here. I said certain things were done because Marino had done them, and I can’t run an office like that, although what was implicit but not stated was that Briggs is here for that very reason. He’s here because I can’t run an office. Not like that. Not at all. If I could run the CFC as the government and MIT and Harvard and everyone expected, nobody would be working this crime scene, because it wouldn’t exist.

  My yellow suit is stiff and digs into my chin as I pull my green rubber boots on, and Marino moves the makeshift plyboard door out of the way. Behind it is a wide sheet of heavy translucent plastic nailed to the top of the door frame, hanging like a curtain.

  “Just so we’re clear, I’m maintaining the chain of custody,” I tell him the same thing I said earlier. “We’re doing this the way we always do it.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so.”

  I have a right to say so. Briggs isn’t above the law. He has to honor jurisdiction, and for better or for worse, this case is the jurisdiction of Massachusetts and the principalities where the crimes hav
e occurred.

  “I just think any help we can get…” Marino says.

  “I know what you think.”

  “Look, it’s not like there’s going to be a trial,” he then says. “Fielding saved the Commonwealth a lot of fucking money.”

  20

  The air is heavy with the smell of wood smoke, and I notice that the fireplace in the far wall is crammed with partially burned pieces of lumber topped by billowy clouds of whitish-gray ash, delicate, as if spun by a spider, but in layers. Something clean-burning, like cotton cloth, I think, or an expensive grade of paper that doesn’t have a high wood-pulp content.

  Whoever built the fire did so with the flue closed, and the assumption is that Fielding did, but no one seems quite sure why, unless he was out of his mind or hoping that eventually his Little Shop of Horrors would burn to the ground. But if that was his intention, he certainly didn’t go about it in the right way, and I make a mental note of a gas can in a corner and cans of paint thinner and rags and piles of lumber. Everywhere I look I see an opportunity for starting a conflagration easily, so the fireplace makes no sense unless he was too deranged in the end to think clearly or wasn’t trying to burn down the building but to get rid of something, perhaps to destroy evidence. Or someone was.

  I look around in the uneven, harsh illumination of temporary low-voltage extension lights hanging from hooks and mounted on poles, their bulbs enclosed in cages. Strewn over an old scarred paint-spattered workbench are hand tools, clamps, drill bits, paint-brushes, plastic buckets of L-shaped flooring nails and screws, and power tools, such as a drill with screwdriver attachments, a circular saw, a finishing sander, and a lathe on a metal stand. Metal shavings, some of them shiny, and sawdust are on the bench and the concrete floor, everything filthy and rusting, with nothing protecting Fielding’s investment in home improvement from the sea air and the weather but heavy plastic and more plyboard stapled and nailed over windows. Across the room is another doorway that is wide open, and I can hear voices and other sounds drifting up from stairs leading down into the cellar.