Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  I’m beyond being helped by stimulants, not sure I’d feel caffeine except in my gut, which is empty and raw. Intermittently, I’m stabbed by nausea, then I’m hungry, then nothing at all, just the gauziness of sleeplessness and the persistent hint of a headache that seems more remembered than real. My eyes burn, and thoughts move thickly but push with force like a heavy surf pounding against the same unyielding questions and tasks to be done. I won’t wait for anyone, given a choice. I can’t wait. There is no choice. I will overstep boundaries if need be, and why shouldn’t I? Boundaries I’ve set have been stepped on right and left by others. I will do things myself, those things I know how to do. I am alone, more alone than I was because I’ve changed. Dover has changed me. I will do what is necessary, and it might not be what people want.

  It is half past seven, and I’ve been downstairs all this time because Anne and I took care of other cases after we finished with the Norton’s Woods man, whose name we are no closer to discovering, or if it is known, I’ve not been informed. I know intimate details about him that should be none of my business, but not the most important facts: who he is, what he was and hoped to become, his dreams, and what he loved and hated. I sit down at my desk and check the notes Anne made for me downstairs and add a few of my own, making sure I will remember later he had eaten something with poppy seeds and yellow cheese shortly before he died and the total amount of blood and clot in the left hemithorax was one thousand three hundred milliliters and the heart was disrupted into five irregular fragments that were still attached at the level of the valves.

  I will want to emphasize this to the prosecution, it occurs to me, because I’m thinking about court. For me it all ends there, at least on the civilian side of my life. I imagine the prosecutor using inflammatory language I can’t use, telling the jury that the man ate cheese and a poppy-seed bagel and took his rescued old dog for a walk, that his heart was blown to pieces, causing him to hemorrhage almost three units of blood or more than a third of all the blood in his body in a matter of minutes. The autopsy didn’t reveal the purpose of the man’s death, although provisionally at least the cause of it is simple, and I absently write it down as I continue to ponder and meditate and make plans.

  Atypical stab/puncture to the left back.

  A pathological diagnosis that seems trite after what I just saw, and one that would give me pause, were I to come across it somewhere. I’d find it cryptic, almost tongue-in-cheek and coy, like a bad joke if one knows the rest of it, the massive blastlike disruption of the organs and that the death is a vicious and calculated homicide. I envision the hem of the long, black coat quickly flapping past and what must have happened just seconds before when the person wearing it plunged a blade into the victim’s lower back. For an instant he felt the physical response, the shock and pain as he exclaimed “Hey… !” and clutched his chest, collapsing on his face on the slate path.

  I imagine the person in the black coat quickly bending over to snatch off the man’s black gloves and briskly walking away, perhaps tucking the blade up a sleeve or into a folded newspaper or I don’t know. But as I imagine it, I believe the person in the long, black coat is the killer and was covertly recorded by the dead man’s headphones, and it causes me to wonder again who was doing the spying. Did the killer plant micro-recording devices in the victim’s headphones so he could be followed? And I imagine a figure in a long, black coat walking swiftly through the shaded woods, coming up behind the victim, who couldn’t hear anything but the music in his headphones as he’s stabbed in the back, and he falls too fast to turn around. I wonder if he died not knowing who did this to him. And afterward? Is it what Lucy proposed? Did the person in the long, black coat view the video files and decide it wasn’t necessary to delete them from a webcam site somewhere, that in fact it was clever to leave them?

  There are reasons for all things, I tell myself what has always been true but never feels that way while I’m in the middle of the problem. There are answers, and I will find them, and while the physics of how the fatal injury was executed may seem difficult to divine, I assure myself there are tracks the killer left behind. I have captured footprints on blotting paper. I will follow them to who did this. You won’t get away with it, I think, as if I’m talking to the person in the long, black coat. I hope whoever you are, you have nothing to do with me, that you aren’t someone I taught to be meticulous and clever. I have decided that Jack Fielding is on the run or in custody. It even enters my mind that he might be dead. But I’m exhausted. I’m sleep-deprived. My thoughts aren’t as disciplined as they should be. He can’t be dead. Why would he be dead? I have seen the dead downstairs, and he wasn’t among them.

  My other patients of the morning were simple enough and asked little of me as I tended to them: a motor-vehicle fatality, and I could smell the booze and his bladder was full, as if he’d been drinking until the moment he left the bar and climbed behind the wheel in a snowstorm that careened him into a tree; a shooting in a run-down motel, and the needle tracks and prison tattoos of yet one more among us who died the way he lived; an asphyxia by a plastic dry-cleaning bag tied around an old widow’s neck with an old red satin ribbon, maybe left over from a holiday during better times, her stomach full of dissolved white tablets and next to the bed, an empty bottle of a benzodiazepine prescribed for sleeplessness and anxiety.

  I have no messages on my office and cell phones, no e-mails that matter to me at the moment and under the circumstances. When I checked Lucy’s lab, she wasn’t there, and when I checked with security, I discovered that even Ron has left, replaced by a guard I’ve never met, gangly and jug-eared like Ichabod Crane, someone named Phil who says Lucy’s car isn’t in the lot and the instructions are that the security guards aren’t to let anyone into the building, not through the lower level or the lobby, without clearing it with me. Not possible, I let Phil know. Employees should be showing up already, or they will be at any minute, and I can’t be the gatekeeper. Let anybody in who has a right to be here, I told him before I came upstairs. Except Dr. Fielding, and when I added that, I could tell it wasn’t necessary. The guard named Phil clearly was aware that Fielding can’t just show up or won’t or maybe isn’t able to, and besides, the FBI dominates my parking lot. I can see their SUVs clear as the bright, cold day on the video display on my desk.

  I swivel my chair around to the polished black-granite countertop behind me, to my arsenal of microscopes and what accompanies them. Pulling on a pair of examination gloves, I slit open one of the white envelopes I sealed with white paper tape right before I came upstairs, and I pull out a sheet of blotting paper that is stained with a generous smear of dried blood that came from the area of the left kidney where I saw a dense collection of metallic foreign bodies in the MRI. Turning on the lamp of my materials microscope, a Leica I have depended on for years, I carefully move the paper to the stage. I tilt the eyetubes to a viewing angle that won’t strain my neck and shoulders, and realize right away that the settings have been changed for someone much taller than me who is right-handed, someone who drinks coffee with cream and chews spearmint gum, I suspect. The ocular focus and interocular distance have been changed, too.

  Switching to left-hand operation and adjusting the height so it is better suited for me, I start with a magnification of 50X, manipulating the focus knob with one hand as I use the other to move the sheet of blotting paper on the stage, lining up the bloody smear until I find what I’m looking for, bright whitish-silver chips and flakes in a constellation of other particles so minute that when I bump the magnification up to 100X, I can’t make out their characteristics, only the rough edges and scratches and striations on the largest particles, what looks like unburned metal chips and filings that have been milled by a machine or a tool. Nothing I see reminds me of gunshot residue, doesn’t even remotely resemble the flakes, disks, or balls I associate with gunpowder or the ragged fragments or particulate of a projectile or its jacket.

  More curious is other debris mixed
with blood and its obvious elements, the colorful confetti of detritus that constitutes everyday dust tangled with red cells piled up like coins, and granular leukocytes reminiscent of amoeba that are caught as if frozen in time, swimming and cavorting with a louse and a flea that at a magnified size remind me why seventeenth-century London went into a panic when Robert Hooke published Micrographia and revealed the piercing mouthparts and claws of what infested cats and mattresses. I recognize fungi and spores that look like sponges and fruit, spiny pieces of insect legs and insect egg cases that look like the delicate shells of nuts or spherical boxes carved of porous wood. As I move the paper on the stage, I find more hairy appendages of long-dead monsters, such as midges and mites and the wide compound eyes of a decapitated ant, the feathery antenna of what may have been a mosquito, the overlapping scales of animal hair, maybe from a horse or a dog or a rat, and reddish-orange flecks that could be rust.

  I reach for the phone and call Benton. When he answers, I hear voices in the background and am subjected to a bad connection.

  “A knife sharpened or shaped on something like a lathe, possibly a rusty one in a workshop or basement, possibly an old root cellar where there are mold, bugs, decaying vegetables, probably damp carpet,” I say right off as I begin an Internet search on my computer, typing the keywords knife and exploding gases.

  “What was sharpened?” Benton asks, and then he says something to someone else, something like need the keys or need to keep. “I’m moving, not in a good place,” he gets back to me.

  “The weapon used to stab him. A lathe, a grinder, possibly old or not taken care of, with traces of rust, based on the metal shavings and very fine particulate I’m seeing. I think the blade was honed, perhaps to make it thinner and to sharpen the tip on both edges, to turn the tip into a spear, so whatever might have been used for sharpening and polishing, a rasp, a file.”

  “You’re talking about power tools that are old and rusty. A lot of rust?”

  “Metalworking tools of some type, not necessarily power tools; I’m not in a position to be that detailed. I’m not an expert in metalworking and I don’t know how much rust. Just that I found what looks like flakes of it.” Exploding intestines. How to clean your spark plugs. Common gases associated with metalworking and hand-forged knives, I silently read what is on my computer screen as I then say to Benton, “Not that I pretend to be a trace-evidence examiner, but microscopically it’s nothing I’ve not seen before, just never seen it blown into a body. But then I’ve never really looked. I’ve never had a reason to look for something like this, am unaccustomed to using blotting paper internally when someone has been stabbed. I suppose there could be all sorts of invisible fibers, debris, particulate, injected inside people who’ve been shot, stabbed, impaled, or God knows what.”

  I type injection knife into the search field because as I listen to myself, I’m reminded of remote delivery darts, of weapons powered by CO2 to fire what’s basically a long-range immobilization or tranquilizing missile with a small explosive charge and a hypodermic needle. Why couldn’t you do the same thing with a knife, as long as it had a way to be powered and a narrow channel bored through the blade with an outlet hole near the tip?

  “I’m walking outside to the car now,” Benton says. “Will be there in forty-five minutes to an hour if the traffic’s not too bad. The roads aren’t bad. One-twenty-eight isn’t too bad.”

  “Well, this wasn’t hard.” I’m disappointed. Nothing with so much potential for lethal damage should be this easy to find.

  “What isn’t hard?” Benton says as I look in amazement at an image of a steel combat knife with a gas outlet hole near the tip and a neoprene handle in a foam-lined plastic case.

  “A CO2 cartridge screws into the handle….” I skim out loud. “Thrust the five-inch stainless-steel blade into the target as you use your thumb to push the release button, which it appears is part of the guard hub….”

  “Kay? Who’s with you right now?”

  “Injects a freezing ball of gas the size of a basketball or more than forty cubic inches at eight hundred pounds of pressure per square inch,” I go on, looking at images on an elaborate website as I wonder how many people have such a weapon in their homes, their cars, their camping gear, or are walking around with it strapped to their sides. I have to admit it is ingenious, possibly one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. “Can drop a large mammal in a single stab…”

  “Kay, are you by yourself?”

  “Freezes wound tissue instantly, thus delaying bleeding and attracting other predators, so if you have to defend yourself against a great white shark, for example, it won’t begin bleeding into the water and attracting other sharks until you are well out of the way.” I skim and summarize and feel sickened. “It’s called a WASP. You can add it into your shopping cart for less than four hundred dollars.”

  “Let’s talk about it when I see you,” Benton says over the phone.

  “I’ve never heard of it.” I read more about a compressed gas injection knife I can order right now as long as I’m over eighteen years of age. “Advertised for Special Ops, SWAT, pilots who are stranded in open water, scuba divers. Apparently developed to kill large marine predators—as I said, sharks, mammals, maybe whales and those in wet suits….”

  “Kay?”

  “Or grizzly bears, for example, while you’re minding your own business on a friendly hike through the mountains.” I make no effort to keep the sarcasm out of my tone, to hide the anger I feel. “And, of course, military, but nothing I’ve seen in military casualties—”

  “I’m on a cell phone,” Benton interrupts me. “I’d rather you don’t mention this to anyone else. No one in your office, or have you already?”

  “I haven’t already.”

  “You’re by yourself?” he asks me again.

  Why wouldn’t I be? But I say, “Yes.”

  “And maybe you could delete it from your history, empty your cache, in case anybody decides to view your recent searches.”

  “I can’t stop Lucy from doing that.”

  “I don’t care if Lucy does it.”

  “She’s not here. I don’t know where she went.”

  “I know,” he says.

  “All right, then.” He’s not going to tell me where she is or where anybody is, it seems. “I’ll make evidence rounds, take care of as much as I can and meet you downstairs in back when you get here.” I hang up and try to reason through what just happened. I try not to feel hurt by him as I logically sort it out.

  Benton didn’t sound surprised or especially concerned. He didn’t seem alarmed by what I’ve discovered but by my discovering it and the possibility that I might have told someone else, and that probably means the same thing I’ve been sensing since I returned home from Dover. Maybe I’m not the one finding things out. Maybe I’m simply the last one to know and nobody wants me to find out anything. What an unexpected predicament to be in, if not an unprecedented one, I think, as I do what Benton asked and empty the cache and clear the history, making it problematic for anyone to see what I’ve been searching on the Internet. As I do this I wonder who really asked: My husband, or was it the FBI asking? Who was just talking to me and telling me what to do as if I don’t know better?

  It’s almost nine, and most of my staff is already here, those who aren’t using the snow as an excuse to stay home or to go somewhere else they’d rather be, such as skiing in Vermont. On the security monitor I’ve watched cars pull into the lot and seen some people coming through the back door but far more arriving by way of the civilized entrance on the ground floor, through the stone lobby with its formidable carvings and flags, avoiding the dreary domain of the dead on the lower level. The scientists rarely need to meet the patients whose body fluids and belongings and other evidence they test, and then I hear the sounds of my administrator, Bryce, unlocking the door in the hallway that opens onto his adjoining office.

  I reseal the blotting paper in a clean envelope and un
lock a drawer to gather other items I’ve been keeping safe as I try not to sink into a dark space, thinking dark thoughts about what I just looked at on a website and what it implies about human beings and their capacity to create imaginative ways to do harm to other creatures. In the name of survival, it crosses my mind, but then rarely is it really about staying alive; instead, it’s about making sure something else doesn’t, and the power people feel when they can overpower, maim, kill. How terrible, how awful, and I have no doubt about what happened to the man from Norton’s Woods, that someone came up behind him and stabbed him with an injection knife, blasting a ball of compressed gas into his vital organs, and if it was CO2, there is no test that will tell us. Carbon dioxide is ubiquitous, literally as present as the air we exhale, and I envision what I saw on CT, the dark pockets of air that had been blown into the chest and what that must have felt like and how I will answer the same question I’m always asked.

  Did he suffer?

  The truthful answer would be no one knows such a thing except the person who is dead, but I would say no, he didn’t suffer. I would say he felt it. He felt something catastrophic happening to him. He wasn’t conscious long enough to suffer during the agonal last moments of his life, but he would have felt a punch to his lower back accompanied by tremendous pressure in his chest as his organs ruptured, all of it happening at once. That would have been the last thing he felt except possibly a glimmer, a flash, of a panicked thought that he was about to die, and then I stop thinking about it because to obsess and imagine further would become useless and self-indulgent theorizing that is paralyzing and nonproductive. I can’t help him if I’m upset.

  I’m worthless to anyone if I feel what I feel, just as it was when I took care of my father and became an expert at pushing down emotions that climbed up inside me like some desperate creature trying to get out. “I worry what you have learned, my little Katie,” my father said to me when I was twelve and he was a skeleton in the back bedroom, where the air was always too warm and smelled like sickness and light seeped wanly through the slatted shades I kept closed most of the way his last months. “You have learned things you shouldn’t ever have to learn but especially at your age, my little Katie,” he said to me as I made the bed with him still in it, having learned to wash him religiously so he wasn’t overcome by pressure sores, to change his soiled sheets by moving his body, a body that seemed hollowed out and dead except for the heat of his fever.