Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  I would gently rock my father to his side, holding him up on one side, then the other, leaning him against me because he could not get up in the end, couldn’t even sit up. He was too weak to help me move him during what his doctor called the blast phase of chronic myeloid leukemia, and at times he enters my mind and I feel the weight of him against me when I’m swathed in protective clothing, peering through protective glasses, at work at my hard steel table.

  I fill out lab analysis requests that will need to be signed by each scientist I receipt various items to so I can keep the chain of evidence intact. Then I get up from my desk.

  16

  Knocking once, I open the door that leads into Bryce’s office.

  Our shared entrance is directly across from the door to my private bath, which I’ve learned to keep open a crack. When both metal gray doors are shut I have had a tendency to get mixed up and walk in on Bryce when I’m interested in coffee or washing up or I find myself about to hand paperwork to a toilet and a sink. He is at his desk with his chair rolled back and has taken off his coat, which is draped over the back, but he still has on his big designer sunglasses that look ridiculously heavy, as if drawn on with a dark-brown crayon. He struggles with a pair of L.L.Bean snow boots that don’t go with his typically deliberate ensemble, which today is a navy cashmere blazer, tight black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a tooled leather belt with a big silver buckle shaped like a dragon.

  “I’ll be on the phone and can’t be disturbed,” I tell him as if I’ve been here every day for these past six months, as if I’ve never been gone. “Then I have to leave.”

  “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on around here? And welcome home, boss.” He looks up at me, his eyes masked by the big, dark glasses. “I don’t suppose the unmarked cars in the parking lot are a surprise party, because I know I’m not throwing one. Not that I wouldn’t and wasn’t intending to eventually, but whoever they are, they aren’t here because of me, and when I asked one of them to be so kind as to give me an explanation and please move his ass so I could park in my spot, he was shall we say testy?”

  “The case from yesterday morning,” I start to say.

  “Oh, is that why? Well, no wonder.” His face brightens as if what I just said is somehow good news. “I knew it was going to be important, I somehow knew it. But he didn’t really die here, please tell me it’s not true, that you didn’t find anything to suggest anything so outrageous or I guess I’ll just start looking for another job right this minute and tell Ethan we’re not about to buy that bungalow we’ve been looking at. I’m sure you’ve figured out what happened by now, knowing you. You probably figured it out in five minutes.”

  He pulls off the other boot, moving both of them to the side, and I notice he’s spiked his hair and has shaved off the mustache and beard he had when I saw him last. Compactly built, Bryce is slight but strong with a blond choirboy prettiness, to use a cliché, because it happens to be true. He doesn’t look like himself with facial hair, which is probably the point, to look like someone else, to be transformed into a formidable and virile character like James Brolin, or to be taken seriously like Wolf Blitzer, heroes of his. My top administrator and trusted right hand has many, a host of famous imagined friends he speaks of easily as if the act of tuning them into one of his big-screen TVs or saving them with TiVo makes them as real as next-door neighbors.

  Seriously good at what he does for me, with degrees in criminal justice and public administration, Bryce Clark at a glance seems misplaced, as if he wandered off the set of E!, and I have used this to my advantage over the few years he’s worked for me. Outsiders and even people who work here don’t always realize that my recovering Mormon compulsive-talking clotheshorse of a chief of staff is not to be trifled with. If nothing else, he’s voyeuristic and adores “filling me in,” as he puts it. He likes nothing better than to gather information like a magpie and carry it back to his nest. He is dangerous if he detests you. It’s unlikely you’ll know it. His banter and deliberate affect are a bunker that his more dangerous self hides behind, and in that way he reminds me of my former secretary, Rose. Those who made the mistake of treating her like a silly old woman one day found themselves missing a limb.

  “The FBI? Homeland Security? No one I’ve seen before.” Bryce is bent over in his chair as he unzips a nylon gym bag, his stocking feet planted on the floor.

  “Probably the FBI—” But he isn’t going to let me finish.

  “Well, the one who was so rude totally looked the part, all buff in a gray suit and camel-hair coat. I think the FBI fires people if they get fat. Well, good luck hiring in America. Drop-dead good-looking, I’ll give him that. Did you see him back there? Do we know his name and what field office he’s with? Not anyone I’ve met from Boston. Maybe he’s new.”

  “Who?” My thoughts run into a wall.

  “Lord, you are tired. The agent in that big, bad black Ford Expedition, the spitting image of the football player on Glee—oh, you probably don’t watch that, either, it’s only the best show on TV and I can’t imagine you don’t love Jane Lynch, unless you don’t know who she is, since you probably didn’t catch The L Word, but maybe Best in Show or Talladega Nights? My God, what a hoot. The Bureau boy in the black Ford looks exactly like Finn—”

  “Bryce…”

  “Anyway, I saw all the blood, how much the body from Norton’s Woods bled inside his pouch, and it was god-awful, and I thought to myself, This is it. The end of this place. Meanwhile, Marino’s huffing and puffing and about to blow the house down, pitching a fit as only Marino can about someone delivered alive and dying in the fridge. So I told Ethan we might have to tuck away our pennies because I might be unemployed. And the job market right now? Ten percent unemployment or some nightmare like that, and I seriously doubt Doctor G is going to hire me because every morgue worker on the planet wants to be on her show, but I would ask you to pick up the phone and recommend me to her, please, if this place goes down the toilet. Why can’t we do a reality show? I mean, really. You had your own show on CNN some years ago; why can’t we do something here?”

  “I need to talk to you about—” But there’s no point when he gets like this.

  “I’m glad you’re here, but sorry you had to come home for something so god-awful. I stayed awake all night wondering what I’m going to tell reporters. When I saw those SUVs behind the building, I thought it was the media, was fully expecting television trucks—”

  “Bryce, you need to calm down and maybe take your sunglasses off—”

  “But nothing in the news that I know of, and not one reporter has called me or left a message here or anything—”

  “I need to go over a few things, and you really need to shut up, please,” I interrupt him.

  “I know.” He takes off his sunglasses as he works his foot into a black high-top sneaker. “I’m just a little overwrought, Dr. Scarpetta. And you know how I get when I’m overwrought.”

  “Have you heard from Jack?”

  “Where’s the Mouth of Truth when you need it?” As he ties his sneakers. “Don’t ask me to pretend, and I would respectfully request that you inform him I don’t answer directly to him anymore. Now that you’re home, thank God.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because all he does is order me around as if I work in the drive-through window at Wendy’s. He barks and snaps as his hair falls out, and then I wonder if he’s going to kick someone, maybe me, or strangle me with his umpteen-degree black belt or whatever the fuck he has, excuse my French. And it’s gotten worse, and we weren’t supposed to bother you at Dover. I told everybody to leave you alone. Everybody’s told everybody to leave you alone or they’ll answer to me. I’m just realizing you’ve been up all night. You look awful.” His blue eyes look me up and down, studying the way I’m dressed, which is in the same khaki cargo pants and black polo shirt with the AFME crest that I put on at Dover.

  “I came straight here and don’t have anything
to change into.” I finally get a word in edgewise. “I don’t know why you bothered replacing your L.L.Beans with an old pair of Converse left over from basketball camp.”

  “I know you have a better eye than that, and I know you know I never went to basketball camp, because I always went to music camp every summer. Hugo Boss, half-price at Endless-dot-com, plus free shipping,” he adds, getting up from his chair. “I’m making coffee, and you want some. And no, I’ve not heard from Jack, and you don’t need to tell me there’s a problem and it might have to do with those agents in our parking lot, who obviously have a personality disorder. I don’t know why they can’t make an effort to be friendly. If I wore a big gun and could arrest people, I’d be Little Miss Sunshine to everyone, smile and be so nice. Why not?” Bryce brushes past me, walking into my office, disappearing into the bathroom. “I can run by your house and pick up a few things if you want. Just tell me. A business suit or something casual?”

  “If I get stuck here…” I start to say I might take him up on it.

  “We really do need to arrange some sort of closet for you, a little haute couture at HQ. Ohhhh, wardrobe?” his voice sings out as he makes coffee. “Now if we had our own show, we’d have wardrobe, hair, makeup, and you’d never find yourself in the same dirty clothes and odiferous of death, not that I’m saying you’re… Well, anyway. Best of all would be if you went home and straight to bed.” As hot water shoots loudly through a K-Cup. “Or I could run out and get you something to eat. I find when I’m tired and sleep-deprived…” He emerges from my bathroom with two coffees and says, “Fat. There’s a time and a place for everything. Dunkin’ Donuts, their croissant with sausage and egg, how ’bout it? You might need two. You actually look a little thin. Life in the military really doesn’t suit you, dear boss.”

  “Are you aware of a woman named Erica Donahue calling here?” I ask him as I return to my desk with a coffee I’m not sure I should drink. Opening a drawer, I search for Advil in hopes there really might be a bottle hiding somewhere.

  “She did. Several times.” Bryce carefully sips the hot coffee, leaning against the frame of the open doorway that connects us.

  When he offers nothing else, I ask, “When did she call?”

  “Starting after it was in the news about her son. That was a week ago, I think, when he confessed to killing Mark Bishop.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “Most recently, all I really did was direct her call to Jack again when she was looking for you.”

  “‘Again’?”

  “You should get his part from him. I don’t know his details,” Bryce says, and it’s not like him to be careful with me. He’s cautious suddenly.

  “But he talked to her.”

  “This was, let me see….” He has a habit of gazing up at the dome as if the answers to all things are there. It’s also a favorite delaying tactic of his. “Last Thursday.”

  “And you talked to her. Before you transferred her call to Jack.”

  “Mostly I listened.”

  “What was her demeanor, and what did she say?”

  “Very polite, sounded like the upper-class intelligent woman she is, based on what I hear. I mean, there’s a ton of stuff about the Donahue family and Johnny Hinckley Junior. He’s almost that notorious…. And when he saw what he had done, he holstered his trusty nail gun…. But you probably don’t read all this shit on these gore-sites like Morbidia Trivia, Wicked-whatever-pedia, Crypt-notes, or whatever, and I do have to follow them as part of my job, part of my being informed about what’s being said out there in sensational sin-loving cyberland.”

  He’s comfortable again. He’s uncomfortable only when I probe him about Fielding.

  “Mom was an almost famous concert pianist in a former life, played in a symphony orchestra. I think in San Francisco,” Bryce goes on. “I happened to notice some Twittering about her being taught by Yundi Li, but I seriously doubt Li gives lessons, and he’s only twenty-eight, so I don’t believe it for a second. Of course she’s in an uproar, can you imagine? They say her son is a savant, has these bizarre abilities, like knowing tire treads. The detective from Salem, Saint Hilaire, who is anything but, and you don’t know him yet, was talking about it. Apparently, Johnny Donahue can look at a tread pattern in a dirt parking lot and go, ‘That’s a Bridgestone Battle Wing front motorcycle tire.’ I just came up with that because Ethan has those on his BMW, which I wish he didn’t love so much, because to me they’re all donorcycles. Supposedly, Johnny can do math problems in his head, and I’m not talking if a banana costs eighty-nine cents how much is a bunch of six? More Einsteinian, like what is nine times a hundred and three to the square root of seven or something? But then you probably know all this. I’m sure you’ve been keeping up with the case.”

  “What exactly did she want to discuss with me? Did she tell you?” I know Bryce. He wouldn’t hand off someone like Erica Donahue without letting her talk until she ran out of words or patience. He’s too much of a snoop, his mind a chatterbox gossip mill.

  “Well, obviously he didn’t do it, and if someone would really look into the facts without having their mind made up, they’d see all the inconsistencies. The conflicts,” Bryce replies, blowing on his coffee, not looking at me.

  “What conflicts, exactly?”

  “She says she talked to him the day of the murder at around nine in the morning, before he headed off to that café in Cambridge that’s now become so famous right around the corner from you?” Bryce continues. “The Biscuit? Lines out the door because of all the publicity. Nothing like a murder. Anyway, he wasn’t feeling well that day, according to Mom. Has terrible allergies or something and was complaining his pills or shots or whatever weren’t working anymore, and he was dosing up big-time and felt punk is the word she used. So I guess if someone has itchy eyes and a runny nose, he’s not going to kill anyone. I didn’t want to tell her that a jury wouldn’t put much stock in a sneezy defense—”

  “I need to make a call and then make my rounds,” I cut him off before he digresses the rest of the day. “Can you check with Trace Evidence and see if Evelyn is in, and if so, please tell her I have a few things that are rather urgent. What I’ve got needs to start with her and then fingerprints, then DNA, then toxicology, then one item in particular will come back up here to Lucy’s lab. There was no one over there a while ago. What about Shane, are we expecting him, because I’m going to need an opinion about a document?”

  “It’s not like we’re a rugby team stranded in a blizzard in the Andes and are going to resort to cannibalism, for God’s sake.”

  “It was quite a storm all night.”

  “You’ve been down south too long. There’s what? Eight inches? A bit icy but nothing for around here,” Bryce says.

  “Actually, if you could ask Evelyn to come upstairs immediately and let her into Jack’s office.” I decide I’m not going to wait as I remember the lab coat folded up inside the trash-can liner.

  I explain to Bryce what’s in the pocket and that I want it checked right away on SEM and I also want a nondestructive chemical analysis.

  “Be very, very careful not to open the bag and touch anything,” I say to Bryce. “And tell Evelyn there are fingerprints on the plastic film. Meaning there will also be DNA.”

  With my administrator silently out of range on the other side of our shared shut door, I decide to hold off calling Erica Donahue until I have a chance to think about what I’m going to do. I need to think about everything.

  I want to reread her letter and make sure of my intentions, and as I ponder and remember what’s happened since I left Dover, as I look out at the bright-blue sky of a new day, I know I’m still hungover from the last mother I dealt with. I feel poisoned by the memory of Julia Gabriel on the phone as someone loitered outside my closed door at Port Mortuary. The names she called me and what she accused me of were bitter and vile, but I didn’t really let it get to me in a way that gave power to her words until I found what I
did in Fielding’s office. Since then a shadow that is chilled and dark like a sunless part of the moon is at the back of my thoughts and moods. I don’t know what is being said or decided about me or what has been resurrected like some cold-blooded thing that never died and now is stirring.

  What records have been found, and what has been gone through that I have secretly feared all these years and at the same time forgotten? Although the truth was always there, like something unseemly out of sight in a closet, something that I never look for but, if reminded, I know it’s not gone, because it was never thrown out or returned to its rightful owner, which should never have been me. But the ugly matter was handed over as if it was mine. And it was left hanging. As long as what was done in South Africa stayed hidden in my closet instead of where it belonged, I’d be fine was the message I got when I returned to Walter Reed after working those two deaths and was thanked for my service to the AFIP, to the air force, and was free to leave early. Debt paid in full. They had just the position for me in Virginia, where I would prosper as long as I remembered loyalty and took my dirty laundry with me.

  Has it happened again? Has Briggs done the same thing to me again and soon will send me packing? Where this time? Early retirement crosses my mind. It’s all coming out with more ugliness piled on, and that’s not survivable, I decide, because I don’t know what else to think. Briggs has told someone, and someone told Julia Gabriel, who has accused me of hatred, prejudice, callousness, dishonesty, and I must remember that this noxious miasma permeates any decisions I might make right now, that and fatigue. Be exceedingly careful. Use your head. Don’t give yourself up to emotions, and easy as pie drifts through my mind. What Lucy said about security recordings, and I pick up my phone and buzz Bryce.